Posts by Tom Beard
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Just out of interest, the Westpac Stadium has a list of all the events they've hosted. Other than rugby, the events included:
- one-day cricket
- Aussie Rules
- football
- Edinburgh military tattoo
- Wellington Wheels Expo
- Capital Business Show
- Home & Garden Shows
- Celebrate Jesus 2000
- Dunkley's Great NZ Craft Show
- Capital Wine & Food Festival
- Robbie Williams
- NBR Stadium Spectacular
- Carols by Candlelight
- David Bowie
- Neil Diamond
- Crusty Demons
- 2Hot2 Handle Motor Show
- WWE Smackdown
- Rolling Stones
- The Lion Man Show - Out of Africa
- Year of the Veteran Military PageantWhile there's a whole lot there that I'd pay handsomely not to have to attend, we can safely say that stadia are not just for rugby. Many of those events used the internal concourse rather than the stadium itself, and for those sorts of events, the waterfront location of the Auckland stadium would be an attractive point of difference. While you certainly don't need a 60,000 seater stadium for those, they would be a way to keep the area in use year-round.
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It's clear that anyone who thinks the stadium looks like a "used" condom has never used one.
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Compie: yes, it looks like W&M are doing a great job of addressing that. Let's hope it doesn't get lost in the rush!
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I wonder whether Roger Kerr still follows her work?
Surely some kind of typo? ;-)
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he port isn't currently pedestrian-friendly
Hence my use of the phrase "could be".
The alternative for the waterfront stadium is not to create some new open-space design
Anyone who knows me will know I'm not exactly a fan of "open-space designs" either! Build the stadium, but make it more than the usual fortress-like block.
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A bloody port isn't easy to integrate with "urbanity". A stadium is even harder to integrate with "suburbanity", as Eden Park is, than with "urbanity".
I agree, which is why I've always thought that a CBD edge site is best for the stadium. But a stadium is not usually the best use for a waterfront, nor does it usually work well with a human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly quarter of the city, which is what that part of the waterfront could be if developed intelligently. That's why I've been saying all along: build it there, but make sure the edges aren't blank, and make sure the place is usable more than a dozen times a year.
Pseudo-intellectual nonsense aside
I'll ignore that.
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I think there is a larger cultural issue at work here: New Zealanders tend to have a problem with Bigness.
Nice insight, Raffe, though I'd tend to put it slightly differently: NZers have a problem with urbanity. With a few exceptions, NZ went from country towns to sprawling suburbia without long experience of living in real cities. NZers are happy with big cars, big mountains, big-box retail ("Big is Good!") and big motorways, but not with density, diversity and verticality. Some of that manifests itself as a fear of bigness, as when anything bigger than a two-storey house gets automatically labelled "a monstrosity".
Having said that, a stadium is not exactly easy to integrate with urbanity. It'll require great design skill and political will to ensure that the edges are active, and it will inevitably be a very long walk around the perimeter, since it won't provide the opportunity to switch routes as you're walking around it. But I still think it's much better there than at Eden Park or in the wilds of the North Shore.
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Russell, Rich:
<geekspeak>The LINZ data is in a form known as the "Bulk Data Extract": basically, it's just a dump from their relational database, rather in a GIS-ready form. That makes a lot of sense, in a way, since they can make it available relatively cheaply (yes, $270 isn't too bad) and it's the most general form. Some of the tables could be quite easily turned into something useable, but most layers would require a whole bunch of joins followed by some data-munging to create something viewable. See LINZ's BDE page for more details.</geekspeak>
The good news is that after you do that, you can pass it on as much as you like as long as you keep the copyright notice. You can even sell it for a profit, which is exactly what Eagle, Terralink etc do, and given the work required to do something useful with it, most users are happy to pay. To make it truly useful as a public resource, someone (a university? a bunch of public-spirited geo-geeks?) would have to buy it, do the conversions and host it. At 30GB it's too much to just upload as one big zip file, but with open-source tools like MapServer it should be possible to set it up as a web feature service. In other words, with the right XML query (defining the bounding box and layer that you're interested in) it would serve up the data you want in useable vector format (not just as a GIF).
Some people have already done some of this stuff. Ollivier & co hosts a bunch of free data together with some wry commentary on the availability thereof.
Since the data contains street addresses, this raises the possibility of rolling your own geocoder (i.e. converting 123 Thinggy street into a latitude & longitude). The lack of this and of fine-level postcodes has made it hard to do the sort of mashups you see in the US (such as mapping flats for rent by mashing up Google Maps and Craigslist). ZoomIn's API provides geocoding, but you can't use it for free very often. Google Maps has finally got around to having address searches for NZ, but I'm not sure how accurate they are.
The other limitation on mashups is the lack of local data in RSS format, or anything that doesn't require painful screen-scraping. For instance, talking of the weather (as someone was), the Greater Wellington council provides all sorts of near-real-time rainfall and other data. Unfortunately, it's all in pre-cooked graphs, so it's not (easily) machine-readable. On the other hand, GeoNet provides a very useful page that Matthew Walker was able to convert to an RSS feed of recent earthquakes. On the other hand, they do such a good job of mapping them themselves, it's hardly worth mashing.
What the government shouldn't be doing (as it's crap at it - see www.legislation.govt.nz) is actually hosting the content. Instead, they should leave it to other profit- and non-profit bodies to deal with that side.
I don't entirely agree. Perhaps they shouldn't be in the business of presenting it, but they should be able to host it in a raw, documented, machine readable form, and leave it up to the creativity of others to present it in exciting and informative ways.
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It's a nice thought about the Waka, but it really doesn't work for something like a stadium. Stadia are broad and roundish, while waka are long and thin, so you have to extend the prow a long way out into the water to make the proportions even vaguely right.
I'm not sure it would work given the constraints of the site, but otherwise the volcano idea is better. Stadia are sometimes compared to cauldrons, so let's make this one a caldera.
But I think there are plenty of ways to make it more dramatic and memorable without being too literal. Hmm, time for some doodling...
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There's a very gradual process of opening up one particular type of digital content: geographic data. In that case, there's generally not even any digitisation work required, since it's already in digital form, but the government gave the rights to SOEs and commercial companies so of course they want to wring some income from it.
A couple of good, but only partially useful, examples are:
- You can get get the bulk of LINZ's data (including contours, roads, and even property boundaries), and then pass it on whoever you like as long as you keep a copyright notice on it. The bad news is that it still costs over $200 for the disc, and it's in their proprietary format that you'd have to spend a couple of weeks hacking to get into a useable form.
- The meshblock data (finest level of census data, about the size of a city block) will be available for free when it's released next month. However, that's just the numerical data, and to get the geographic boundaries of those blocks so that you can map them, you still have to pay $3000 or so.
All of this is so frustrating because geodata is among the most mash-up-able. The amount of productivity and creativity that could be unleashed if it were freely available is astonishing (mashing it up with ZoomIn or Google Maps to
create your own demographic or social analyses, for example), and when you consider that the US has made their equivalent data freely available for years, it's a huge shame.What other publicly-funded data would you like to see made freely available?
Are there any other datasets that are being freed up?
Are there any local mashups (geographic or otherwise) that you want to pimp?