http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine Notes From A Strange Place Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:54:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's always nice to get some feedback on OpenCycleMap - especially when it's being put to unexpected use. I received this in an email: We are french Alpinist and we just want to thanks you for your job in open cycle map. We've just finish a traverse in cordillera darwin in chili ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/11/05/the-darwin-traverse/ At the end of September I took a half-day off from the day job and visited UCL. They were again running an Introduction to OpenStreetMap Mapping Workshop for their new masters students. I went along last year and created some great notes on usability for OSM newbies and did the ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/10/25/openstreetmap-usability-revisited/ Getting GDAL and Mapnik to play nice is a complete pain. Now that I've managed it, I'll give you the solution and explain some of the background. Mapnik has two plugins for reading image files and using them as background in maps. For OpenCycleMap I currently use the "raster" plugin which ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/08/09/dealing-with-gdal-and-mapnik/ I've been involved in a small amount of cycle campaigning over the last few years, and one theme comes up over and over. To coin a new phrase - there's too much "cycle complaining" and not enough "cycle campaigning". By "cycle complaining" I mean where well-intentioned people just draw attention ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/04/19/the-problem-of-cycle-complaining/ I recently added a new Transport layer to OpenCycleMap, which some of you will have spotted, and I hope you find interesting. The eagle-eyed among you may even have spotted it as one of the maps on Grant's curious OpenWhateverMap! I first visualised bus routes in 2008, and ran a few ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/04/11/transport-map/ Last weekend we held another Hack Weekend for OpenStreetMap, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. Especially the start, which involved sitting outside on a warm spring evening with a cold beer and unwinding! This was probably one of the largest Hack Weekends that we've ran so far - ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/04/06/openstreetmap-hack-weekend/ I've been mildly obsessed with the street-name comparison tool from ITO World over the last couple of weeks. It measures how many correctly named roads OpenStreetMap has in the UK by comparing it against the Ordnance Survey's OS Locator dataset. We also get to mark where corrections are needed in ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/02/02/the-london-streets-challenge/ Another round of updates to the OpenCycleMap cartography was released a week ago, after a few days of local testing, bug investigating and general "technical-debt" payments. The biggest fix is that I've finally tracked down what was causing all kinds of problems with riverbanks. The OpenCycleMap code dates back from long ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2011/01/31/tweak-a-little-here-fix-a-little-there/ Recently I've been working with MapQuest to rebuild the OpenStreetMap "Tiger Edited Map". It was publicly released last week (blog, link). The original map was created by Matt while he was at CloudMade, but it disappeared not long after we left at the end of last year. This is a from-scratch ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2010/10/27/398/ Last week I joined Ant and Deb from MapQuest in order to help out with the UCL mapping party. On the Wednesday I went out with some new Masters students and got soaked in the rain around Camden, but the main interest for me was the following day when we ... http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2010/10/04/quick-and-dirty-usability-testing-of-osm/