Last week, in amongst a bit of a hosting problem, hill colouring went live on the cycle map. And it looks awesome!

Having something more pleasing than a flat grey background really helps put flesh on the skeleton of the contour lines, but it means that some stuff needs tweaking to fit. You can see the lovely new forest and wood styles on the image below - my very own forest pattern symbol, with a subtle green tinge and a solid border. The same area before can be found (here).

But wait - there’s more! In city centres, cycle routes can get quite complicated, and in some places have to go down one-way roads. You then end up with links that are only supposed to be followed in one direction - if you go the other way you might end up facing a no-entry sign (that you’re not really supposed to blithely ignore, politicians too for that matter). So you might end up with a confusing array of cycle routes, such as in central London:

… but no longer. The swiss-army-knife-like ‘relations’ to the rescue, which can give pointers as to which way you’re supposed to go. That gives us …

(Click the pictures for more detailed lovelyness!)

But wait, that’s not all. Maybe your area doesn’t have any signed cycle routes and no cycle paths either. Or maybe you’ve got both, and also want cycle lanes marked. A nice little bit of blue casing on either side of the road shows which streets have cycle lanes.

And finally, the icon wizardry of Matt Amos has helped me out with showing more useful points of interest - we now have drinking water locations shown (here in Trento, Italy):

… which are probably a better idea than going to a pub. But what’s better than going to a pub for a nice refreshing beer? Well a pub with free wifi, of course!

And there’s been a million and one places added to the cycle map too, but far, far too many for me to list here. Enjoy!

Update: It’s back up now, and I’m resuming the update for this weeks tiles. Happy mapping!

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.

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!

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!)

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.

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

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.

If you are running Ubuntu linux 7.10 (also known as Gutsy Gibbon) and are trying to get the Wacom tablet functions of an HP 2710p tablet to work, then hopefully you won’t waste about 6 hours trying. Or if you’re lucky, you also spend 6 hours of your employer’s time trying to figure it out, and it won’t seem so bad. Ahem.

Alternatively, to get the digitizer working quickly, simply edit the xorg configuration by running “sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf”, scroll down to the bottom, and where it says “Uncomment if you have a Wacom tablet” simply remove the # signs from the next three lines. It’s really that easy. I would say annoyingly easy.

Maybe you followed all the other stuff and got as far as trying to run “wacdump -f c100 /dev/ttyS0″ or “wacdump -f c100 /dev/input/wacom” or “wacdump -f c100 /dev/event0″ but they are all wrong. Variations on the wacdump theme might get you “WacomOpenTablet: Connection timed out” but that’s a red herring too. It’s actually “wacdump -f tpc /dev/input/wacom”, and you don’t actually need to setserial or compile tc1100ts.c or anything else. Hopefully the Ubuntu guys will figure out how to detect that there’s a Wacom tablet and do the uncommenting automagically for Hardy or later, but if not perhaps this’ll help. I’ve no idea if this will help for Fedora or SuSE or anything else, but if it does, feel free to let everyone know in the comments.

Update: Hardy 8.04

For anyone who is trying on Hardy, it works fine too. At the time of writing you just have to copy some stuff into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart the X server. No recompilation or anything like that. Add three more input devices, and then add the activation within the section ServerLayout. So actually marginally more difficult than it was in Gutsy, since the code used to be there ready and waiting.

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “stylus”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “stylus”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “cursor”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “cursor”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”
InputDevice “Synaptics Touchpad”
InputDevice “stylus” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “cursor” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “eraser” “SendCoreEvents”
EndSection

Contours are something that people have repeatedly asked me about - it’s even the closing subject on my radio interview a couple of weeks ago. This weekend I finally knuckled down and got to the bottom of a few outstanding problems (with thanks, as ever to Dave), and from today the cycle map takes a great leap forwards with world-wide contour coverage - well, “world-wide” as in everywhere that’s rendered on the cycle map.

Some of the highlights:

• Southern Wales - National Cycle routes winding through nice and crinkly landscapes
• Mountain biking trails near Machynlleth
• Alpine routes near Bern, Switzerland
• Volcano spotting in the Philippines!

I’m really pleased with the way they’ve turned out, and I think this marks a step-change in functionality for cyclists planning their rides (or consoling themselves afterwards!). It does, however, take quite a lot of processing to generate these - it’s not for the faint-hearted or anyone without a quad-core machine overflowing with RAM and hard-disk space! The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice that all the roads have been tweaked and are more colourful now, but it’s still a cycling-focused map.

For those of you intrigued by the title - it comes from spending many years climbing up, down, and around mountains in Scotland - walking around the side of a mountain is known as “contouring” and gets pretty tiring after a while. Having adjustable legs would have been really helpful.