Vaulting went well; no-one died. I got a little worried when cartwheels were mentioned but I actually managed to do one today. Hoorah!

Coverage of Shrewsbury is a little improved. I got done about half the area inside the loop of the river, for road coverage, at least. I've still got streetnames to do. Unfortunately my photos don't seem to be lining up with the GPS trace properly again. I could be here a while...

I spent Friday lunchtime driving around a new (to me) part of Armidale. I've had no reason to visit this part of town before - the north-east corner - it's not on a route to anywhere.

It's interesting to note the difference in the street layout in this newer part of town compared to older parts. The older parts of town are laid out in a traditional grid pattern - roads are straight and run parallel to one another. In the new parts of town the roads are curved and wavy, with lots of cul-de-sacs.

Just trying to get a handle on the system

Normally, I spent 30 to 90 minutes a day cycling, which results in another 30 to 90 minutes editing in JOSM. Yesterday, for the first time, I felt motivated to spend my whole day mapping. I cycled about 4 hours and spend another 4 hours in JOSM. Plus about 1 hour other mapping realted work, this is all I can do per day.

As some of you know (beacuse I tell this every time...) I use audio mapping which produces huge amounts of data that you can not see from the GPS track. I've done all the way from Wernigerode to Ilsenburg (white spot on the map till then), some streets there, and the way back via Drübeck and Darlingerode.

The OSM highscore list

When I now looked into the User statistics I read that this sums up to only 910 "edit points" (it does not say if it counts nodes or ways or tags...). Which gives me a "glorious" rank 43 for that single day. If I do this for the next 4 days, too, I might have a small chance to get into the top 60 mappers of the week, but wait a moment: There's a weekend in between!

Don't get me wrong, my main motivation for mapping is fun, then comes sport, then comes the need of a cycle map for this region, then the good feeling to share information, and then on rank 5 comes the "fame" to be in some list (which no one reads and which is gone tomorror). Other motivations to follow...

I understand that there are some users running automated cleanup bots or import scripts, but I guess there numver is finite. So how do they do this? To reach the score of, let's say "hogrod" I had to do audio mapping 37 hours per day :) And then this would get me on rank 14. Without the audio I would need about 60 hours to generate this amount of data.

Living streets / Lebende Straßen ;)

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I'm out vaulting again tomorrow. This time with my old team near Shrewsbury.

I've been making some effort to get something done each time I visit. Hopefully I'll have time to do some of the roads around the town centre. Just to join up a few things that are there already.

Just now I fixed up some roads by the railway station. It's a complicated junction made very difficult to work out from GPS because several railway tracks passing overhead. There's a tunnel right underneath one set, various other roads joining nearby. Only with my local knowledge was I able to get that in.

Next up is the railway lines themselves.

If anyone else could verify it looks reasonably correct, please do so and let me know your opinion.

1234 - Ein kleiner Test.

Updated http://www.routiki.com today. In addition to the new OSM layer, I also added uploads for 5 new data formats: Magellen tracks, TomTom ITN, GPX, KML, and KMZ.

I am working slowly on the coverage for Glossop.

Just saw this today about a new camera that GE will be selling soon.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0802/08020101gee1050.asp#specs

What looks interesting from an OSM point of view is that it includes a GPS unit that records where images where taken. It also sounds like it should have a reasonable zoom range and shouldn't be too expensive. No idea what the image quality or shutter lag will be like though. Shutter lag is bad for trying to catch road signs from moving cars! ;-)

For me, a camera that automatically geotags images would be great for mapping areas where roads have been drawn from aerial imagery, but not tagged with names and references. It would save having to carry round a GPS and a camera, and also removes the need for synching times.

Just thought i'd flad it up as others might be interested too.

Drew the coastline around Baltimore, MD. Cleaning up I-83 north of the city.

I dragged myself out into the freezing cold to do my 1st bit of mapping today. I got a few streets and pathways in Brentford, near South Ealing station.

I aim to get this general vicinity well mapped, including any Point of Interests.

Weehay! go OpenStreetMap!

For the next couple of weeks, I will be leaving OSM editing in Metro Manila
[osm.org/?lat=14.5947&lon=121.0324&zoom=12&layers=B0FT]
for a while. I believe there are a number of mappers who can continue this (11 mappers in Metro Manila already) [osm.org/user/maning].

I have posted last month in the OSM mailing list about public domain maps we can use for OSM. [http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-January/022545.html]

These out-of-copyright maps roughly showing major highways around the country circa 1940s-50s. [http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2125/2233868748_a3614bc358.jpg?v=0]

I now have most of the sheets around Mindanao Island rectified and can access them with JOSM. For the meantime, I will focus my effort towards "seeding" Mindanao,
[osm.org/?lat=7.78&lon=124.53&zoom=8&layers=B0FT]
then work northward to Visayas and then back to Luzon. My rectification is by no means "uber" accurate so manual editing maybe needed by local mappers in these areas. My goal is to provide a skeletal network for others to continue mapping.

cheers,

maning

Its too cold outside today, so I stayed at home.

To my surprise the Mapnik-Tiles were online soon after i made some changes, very nice, i like the apperance.

This week a have seen some high-voltage power lines, so I mapped them via extrapolation. With an other sight of these lines last week I had three points to extrapolate.
Today i wondered, were these power-lines come from, and to were they go, luckily the hi-res-Yahoo-Satellite-Images were avaliable in this region, and so I ended up spending half the day mapping power-lines with ca. 460 power-towers in the region around cologne. (there are a lot of un-mapped towers left, if anyone likes to continue...)

I just imagine, mapping those via physical presence and GPS, this would take very long, Even with some old-school trigonometry, this would take a long time, with the satellite it is a matter of seconds.
e.g.
sub_station in Sechtem lat=50.79556 lon=6.97661
Unfortunately the hi-res-yahoo-images are not available everywhere.

Just one thing about the JOSM-icon for power-towers: please clean that up. This fat white icon is much too present. Especially in low zoom levels i see fat white paths of high-voltage-lines around cologne. The icons e.g. for train station, suburbs, villages are tiny compared to this, and train-stations are unique while the power-towers come in a long periodic row.
I suggest a small and thin, mostly transparent icon.

One more ...
the emergency-telephone to call the police or fire-brigade
ColinMarquardt suggested to use amenity=telephone, access=emergency
(thanks)
I also started to map those telephones this way.
Furthermore i map public coin or card-telephones with access=public.

...

I've added some streets on right shore of Odra.

Well I've been spending time with JOSM and looking at the area where I live, and where I used to live.

I've been able to add some details regarding new roundabouts, and walk ways that were not included.

I've also started to use the validation that comes as part of JOSM, and am trying to clean some of the bits and bobs up in my local area's.

I just hope I'm not breaking any thing!

I've started mapping Neerpelt, in the northeastern corner of Belgium, still lots of road to cover though...

...

The Harz is said to be the largest continous wood in germany... some say it was the even the largest one in europe, but who knows.

At least it is big enough to screw up Tiles@Home rendering. T@H uses osmarender to render zoom level 12 Tiles and all subparts. If such a tile is in the middle of the Harz, and does not touch the Harz border, then T@H will not know that there should be some wood around. This way, you get huge white squares inside the Harz. There were about 20 or 30 of these.

I fixed this the quick and dirty way a month before. Someony called Nils has found a better solution, and I adapted this to the whole Harz now. At this moment I found enormous errors in the shape, which I corrected for the northern and eastern boundary. South and west still to be done some other day...

In the slippy map it should look nice, but if you load this area into JOSM you might notice that it's still a dirty hack.

Fixing the software would mean fixing the API at a very low level... to dangerous to fix a single wood. There are no other areas in germany that are big enough to cause this problem.

Due to a bug in JOSM I had to restart 10 times!

By the way, T@H worked well for level 11 and below... while Mapnik is the other way round, and the Harz is missing in all lower zoom levels. But this is another issue. I have no Idea what causes this.

It is 23.50 and I am going to sleep while planetosm-to-db.pl does its stuff.

At approximately 02.00, it will fail with another Perl or MySQL error of some sort.

At 08.00, I will wake up, see this, find the bug, fix it, and start the whole thing again.

At 12.30, I will cycle back from the office, find another error on the screen, fix the bug, restart it, etc. etc.

Maybe I'll have a populated database by this time tomorrow. And then, I can check whether or not the new Potlatch co-ordinate stuff is working; and after that, I can fix the incompatibilities with the revised amf_controller; and finally we'll have a properly working Potlatch again.

(And I know about Osmosis but I can't get Java 1.5 on this Mac, let alone 1.6.)

Done 1716096 nodes. Hey ho.