It’s becoming more and more widely accepted within OpenStreetMap that what we call ‘routes’ are best described with relations, instead of tagging the ways. It means that we can have two routes sharing the same stretch of road without any conflicts over numbering and so on. It’s become well established in cycle-tagging, but I’m interested to see if it works elsewhere in different contexts.

During the first May bank-holiday weekend Dave and I scratched an itch that had been bothering me for a while. There are a few long distance paths through London, and the two that I’ve frequently come across are the Capital Ring and the London Loop, but we’d made no effort to join up the bits we had spotted. We set off to find the route of the Capital Ring from Wimbledon Common to Wimbledon Park, and accidently ended up following it all the way to Woolwich on the other side of the city.

So combining both the relations contexts and the Capital Ring expedition led me to try to render them, to see if it works. And it pretty much does. Dave had been tagging some bus routes during the development of Potlatch’s relations handling code so I rendered them too. And lo and behold, other people have been doing the same here and there.

London overview (click the picture, then the all sizes link to see it in full):

Around Earlsfield:

Bus routes around Wandsworth:

And the title of the post? Well, it’s not only that I was practising my (currently abysmal) cycling skills, it’s also what I say when I’m experimenting without having thought things through beforehand. No prizes for spotting which map I ripped off for the style sheets! Currently I don’t have any plans for making this a full service like the cycle map, which is still my main focus.

Time for another glimpse behind the scenes in the Cycle Map development!

Elevation colouring! Hill Shading! How cool is that? (N.B. If you ever hear me asking, then the answer is one of ‘very’ and ‘awesome’. ‘Meh’ is a valid response, but don’t let me hear you saying it!)

Now for all the OSM types there’s a few caveats. The last time I posted a teaser (for contours) it took me six months to get things working properly. And there’s plenty of things need fixing before the hillshading will go live, like some resolution issues, tiling issues, a minor problem involving the ocean shapefiles and so on - never mind choosing some colours that are a bit more subtle. So be patient!

Wow, it’s been really busy for the last few weeks. And as ever, the busier I am and the more fun I’m having, the less you get to hear about it here.

I’ve been to see some good music over the past few weeks - drum and bass with Nia in Camden, good old pub basement bands with Linnie and Jude, and an eclectic mix of choral stuff this time starring Nia. The latter two, plus a barbeque in deepest surburbia with Joth and Em and a whole Sunday of doing absolutely nothing rounded out a nice weekend. And I went climbing last week too, nice to find I can still climb 6bs without much practise.

The cycling has tailed off a little, apart from mammoth weekend rides with Dave. Mammoth in timespan if not in average speed that is - a fifty-two mile ride takes all day when the first 30 miles involve following footpaths around London even if the last 20 miles takes less than an hour to ride directly home! Still, we’re hopefully moving offices at work next week so I’ll be back commuting via bike instead of sauntering across Putney bridge in the mornings so that’ll get the fitness up in time to enjoy the summer weather.

Anyway, busy busy busy as ever. My thoughts on the new mayor and all that jazz can wait for some other time (or you can read Nia’s thoughts on the matter and pretend I wrote them!)

So perhaps you have used a web-interface to create new subfolders on an IMAP server. The problem is that thunderbird doesn’t show them, and no amount of clicking on things seems to solve the problem or show these subfolders.

The answer is to click on the account in question (i.e. one level up from your Inbox), then click “Manage Folder Subscriptions”. From there on it should be obvious - find the folders, and tick the boxes. Job done.

It appears to be a popular pass-time to wander the streets of Kyiv, beer in hand, and admire the giant Soviet-era statues. Which suits me just fine.

Just look at those Russian abs. They knew how to make you, umm, feel impressed upon.

As usual, when the frequency of posts declines here, that just means there’s more interesting things going on in the real world! I’ve also been trying to avoid writing yet another OSM post, but hey-ho, here’s an update on the cycle map.

Lots more areas are now rendered since I blogged a month ago. Lyon, Vienna, Toronto, Vancouver, Antwerp, Almere, Neuss, Frankfurt, Furth, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Leuven, Bonn and Sydney have all been added along with overviews of some other countries. If there’s somewhere else that you reckon could do with some more zoom levels, just leave a comment or send me an email.

Shelters are now rendered as can be seen in the forests near Bonn, and bike parking has been changed so that small capacity cycle stands show up as blue dots and only larger capacity bike parking areas show quite so predominantly! Previously, it could get quite cluttered as you can see when Tom Chance mapped the cycle parking around the parliament buildings in London. The changes were only partially implemented (or more accurately, I messed up some of the mapnik rules ) so you’ll need to wait a couple of days to see them working properly.

Also fixed was a UTF8 bug in the relations-handling code that meant that some recently-added routes weren’t showing up properly at low zoom levels. We’ve also moved all the contours to the postgis database and stopped pre-rendering them - it turns out the IO hit of loading the transparent contour tiles from disk is greater than just re-rendering them for high zoom levels, and since most of the tiles are high zoom, that’s where the time matters most.