Monthly Archives: January 2007

My Birthday Map

So my birthday is usually a total waste of time because it’s very close to Christmas Day. It means two-in-one presents that are a bit rubbish and everyone’s gone to somehwere better for the holiday, but this yeah I got an awsome present:

It’s a map of central London, approximately similar to this openstreetmap. I used to stare at it whenever I went past the antiques shop in central London (it was on my way home) it hung in. I even tried to buy it once but then thought I was a bit mad and didn’t as I could buy a low-end laptop for the price. It’s about a meter and a bit across by about half a meter down. It’s framed in gold leaf and is original, though I’m unsure exactly what that means in this context.

There are a few things I like about this. Firstly, it’s where I used to live on the western rim of Regents Park. The building is in the map (dated 1834), along with favourite haunts and most of my paper round(s). It also has where I (nominally) went to university and several other places I lived, pubs I’ve died in. So I know the area fairly well and it’s nice comparing it to what it looks like today.

I like the wave of development. If you look at Regents park and then east and west of it along a parallel, you can see a wave of development heading northward turning farmland in to London. A lot of rich people were made as these fields were built upon and their great-great-great (* some big number) grandsons still own vast chunks of it.

It’s slightly later than the periods of history that I like to read about but still very related map-wise. It reminds me of openstreetmap. OSM is incomplete and expanding to conquer everything that is un-mapped – you can see a freeze-frame of our map by just browsing it today. Similarly, the map shows a freeze-frame of those same streets being laid down in the first place as they swallowed up villages to build London.

I have no idea if or how it could be scanned in but I’m open to ideas. A lot of the map is vastly different (Paddington, Marylebone, Euston and Kings Cross stations arn’t there for example!) so I havn’t used it (much) for deriving street names. Interesting anyway.

So a big thank you to all who bought it for me 🙂

OSMonth Day 13

Lucky 13 begins

  • Told list maintainers that they can change the language of their list pages (result of yesterdays stuff)
  • Doing tile stuff (they’re getting out of date, time to fix them)
  • Various party organising things (we have a room for sheffield thanks to sheflug it looks like!)
  • Went out and did some mapping whilst waiting for some tiles to generate (see below). Accidentally deleted the trace off the GPS. d’oh!
  • Tile stuff done for today. There’s a new layer on the map, ‘Mapnik db’, which is todays planet dump. All the tiles come from a database and 3 CPUs are rendering every tile from zoom 0-18 as I type. Currently it’s good down to about zoom 11, we’ll see where it is tomorrow.

Done!

OSMonth Day 12.5

Spent this morning doing boring tax things, so a half day to come. Stuff done

  • (actually a couple of days ago) moved map page to point at almiens new osmarender home on the dev server.
  • Map parties! Theres one in in London on 27-28th January. Then in Bristol on 24th-25th Feb. The another in Sheffield on 24th-25th March
  • Trying to confirm a good venue for london meet
  • More initial page and FIXMEs for Bristol meet. Mailed a bunch of people in Bristol for help with venues etc
  • Contacted sheflug (mail to their list is pending moderator approval) about help with organising the Sheffield party. Venue recommendations etc.
  • Replied to a ton of mail. Fixed link on freethepostcode and in svn
  • added lots of languages (all of ’em) to lists.openstreetmap.org’s mailman, but I don’t see that it’s done any difference. (i18n on the info pages, not lots more lists).
  • Went out mapping for an hour, tagged it all up. I’m ashamed to say there is still stuff near me unmapped!