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.
This is the latest in my series of “I spent so long searching on google for this, trawling through out of date nonsense to eventually twig the right answer to this problem” blog posts.
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 “eraser”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “eraser”
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:
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.
Last night’s episode of “The Bike Show“, aired on London’s Resonance FM, featured an extended interview with your’s truly on the subject of OpenStreetMap and my OSM cycle map. The interview was recorded out and about around London a couple of weeks ago - and if you want to listen to it, it’s available on their website - “Reclaim the Street(maps)”.
Also on the programme was a short interview with George Coulouris and Jean Dollimore from the Camden Cycle campaign. We’ve been collaborating over their mapping website, maps.camdencyclists.org.uk, to use my cycle maps as the backdrop to their routes, and you can switch from Google to OSM using the drop-down in the top right corner of their maps.
So those of you paying attention to the interview will know who finished off the LCN 22 a couple of weeks ago!
No, thankfully not a direct reference to my week of snowboarding, but the “bleeding edge” is a techie term for being so close to development that things go wrong as often as they go right. Which is more or less how the cycle map has been over the last fortnight.
Dave has bought new bits and pieces for the infamous “beerwarmer”, the server that does all the work behind the cycle map, and written lots of clever code to take advantage of the quad core processor - to the point where 726,795 tiles takes only 1hr29m to render. But the biggest improvements have been in the mapnik rendering library, making great improvements to the text placement handling and semi-transparent layering options. I’ve no idea whether people will notice things like cycle shops and toucan crossings now showing above the route highlights (see Putney for example), or much better displaced-text (see Stockholm) but it’s the little things that improve the quality, and with the recent work we’ve been doing with the mapnik developers there’s now many more bits of polish that can be applied.
There’s yet more areas added to the cycle map, including Trondheim in Norway and Bern in Switzerland. As ever, if there’s anywhere else in the world that you want rendered, please let me know. I try to keep an eye on where national cycle routes are appearing, but I don’t always notice all of them.
And my snowboarding trip didn’t go unnoticed - a few worried people piped up on the mailing list to enquire what was going on with the lack of updates - no rest for the wicked!