OSMonth Day 14.5

  • Spent the morning trying to build ruby bindings for mapnik, didn’t get anywhere, mailed mapnik-devel. update short debate on mailing list, looks easy if you know C++, mapnik, swig and python well enough but I don’t. Someone please make swig bindings for this and I’ll have your babies.
  • brought back stevecam. It was pointing out my window and I forgot about it sorry

OSMonth Day 14

What a morning! Spent it all organising various parties and the up coming conference. There’s now a party mailing list – if you want to help organise or run a mapping party please subscribe there. It’s a transitory list so feel free to just subscribe for the period of organising the party you are interested in! I’ve deprecated the old talk-london/midlands and iow lists. I’ve done some tile stuff too – they’re rendering now whilst I do other things.

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!

Good new year from Imi

Hi all,

to fall into line with Steve, I wish you all a good new year 2007.

Although nobody found me at the CCC this year (what a bummer.. but I didn’t prepared any cookies anyway ;-), I still did some coding on JOSM and also made a very small tutorial to demonstrate some of them. Not enough for a new version, but postponed is not abandoned! 😉

The tutorial is flash this time, so you can watch it online too (anyone knows a flash player for firefox/linux/AMD64?)

Get the tutorial at http://josm.eigenheimstrasse.de/download/tutorials/preferences_toolbar_reorder.html

GOOD NEW YEAR!

Imi.

Have a great 2007

It’s my birthday tomorrow so I’m looking forward to the annual ‘joint Christmas-Birthday’ presents and getting very drunk (if you’re in London let me know). Then very soon I’m off for family-type things and I haven’t done any shopping yet.

Thanks so much for a great 2006. I’m sure I’ll be here before 2007 but not significantly, so at least have a great Christmas or other winter solstice festival. It’s been an amazing time and we’ve a long way to go – but just think, one day open maps will be as passée as Wikipedia. It’s our job to get there.

OSMonth 11.5

Let’s-a-go

  • restarted gpx import
  • submitted an xtech proposal. And a mapping party tutorial proposal.
  • copying over a ton of tiles that RalfZ has rendered to the main map (in progress)
  • rm’d all the blank tiles with find -size 158c -exec rm ‘{}’ ;
  • Many updates on the applet due to Nick Burch, try it out!

done!