Monthly Archives: October 2006

Maximise value, not protection

My response to a post on eds blog about the worth of GeoDRM:

Here’s a quote I find better every day:

“We think the natural tendency is for producers to worry too much about protecting their intellectual property. The important thing is to maximise the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection. If you lose a little of your property when you sell it or rent it, that’s just a cost of doing business, along with depreciation, inventory losses, and obsolescence.”

– Information Rules, Carl Shaprio and Hal Varian, page 97.

Put another way, maximise the value not the protection. The value will of course merit some protection.

Complete UK Maps from 1950s online

npemap is a nuke-from-orbit-quality browser of out of copyright UK maps. They’ve bootstrapped postcode data from freethepostcode and you can submit postcode data using whizzy ajax click-on-map goodness. Map data comes from scans of Richards New Popular collection and the code (so far as I know) comes from the Charlbury based code ninjas – the UKs highest concentration of mappers. It’s very pretty, try finding the forest your house was built on top of.

OS Shows Off Open Spaces

That’s three OSs, count ’em. OS OS is their gmaps-like API. It’s in beta, non-commercial and is OSGB projected. Slippy map, markers, bubbles… it’s all there. Someone in the audience pointed out the data quality in the countryside is much better than what’s available now (eg, google). No link as yet.

First commercial OSM usage!

Mikel and I are at the OS in Southampton for a mashup event. Thanks to a lot of work from Mikel and Etienne in producing the tiles nestoria are now using openstreetmap data rendered by osmarender as a google maps layer! This means that when browsing properties you can choose to overlay our map data rather than googles. It’s not perfect but it is an awsome first step and a farsighted decision by nestoria. Check it out here and hit ‘OSM’ in the map type above the map.

This Isle of Wight data used stretches back to the mapping party we held there where 30 or 40 OSMers decended on the Isle to map it in a weekend. A large vote of thanks goes to those people and in particular David Groom for annotating all that data.

At the same time, we can announce mapstraction support for OSM. There’s a demo over here which consists of the same Isle of Wight data. As our data gets broader and in more areas more tiles will be available. Right now, is uses google with some hacks to make it go. The API will remain the same but google will probably be replaced with openlayers at some point. Mikel also got on the fly API switching going, check it out.

JOSM Birthday Release

A new release of JOSM is available today, called the “Birthday Release”. The Version number is 1.4, the subversion revision is 166. The main idea of this release is to give plugin writer a more stable environment to build on (please, mark your plugins in some way, if they work with this release).

What changed?

Many new stuff has been included since the century release. Improvements are mostly in the amount of features and the performance.

These are the main new features:

  • A Plugin system has been integrated to sandbox fragile and unstable code and to help other people writing addons.
  • Translations to german, french, romanian and british-english are provided by community members. They are available as plugins.
  • Some highly requested, special operations as “reverse segment”, “download incomplete ways”, “align nodes in a circle” and “select all segments in a straight” have been included.
  • GUI addons like a scaler or the annotation preset feature (to quickly select typical properties)
  • A Wiki-Help system hopefully improve usability for beginners (once the community start to help me filling it up 😉 )

Some performance gains since last release:

  • JOSM does not depend on the memory hungry JDOM Parser anymore but features MinML2, a very fast and tiny SAX-Parser.
  • Cleanups in the coordinate storing system result in ~20% less memory consumption.
  • Some time consuming processes have been put into a seperate thread.

Where to get it?

main site: http://josm.eigenheimstrasse.de/download
some mirrors: http://josm.eigenheimstrasse.de/wiki/Mirrors
complete log: http://josm.eigenheimstrasse.de/log/?rev=166&stop_rev=100&verbose=on
plugins: http://josm.eigenheimstrasse.de/download/plugins

Ciao, Imi.