Which I managed even though I suck at RoR

But check it out on the dev server. I'd be especially interested in any practical applications of the georss tag. Do any RSS readers support this?

I moved from Reykjavík, Iceland to Germany on Sunday. I'll be in Gatow for the next 6 weeks but somewhere else after that.

Hopefully I can map Gatow better, and maybe meet up with some OSM-ers in Berlin.

A while ago there was a thread on talk-is (partially in English) about creating a party render with all the GPX tracks recorded in the Greater Reykjavík region in Iceland.

To that end I wrote a tool to download all the GPX tracks a given user has created by screen-scraping the OSM site, this can be used along with the Planet dump extracts to get (approximately) all the GPX tracks for every user that contributed to a given .osm file.

In the case of Iceland that resulted in 1.4 GB of GPX tracks, which were further extracted to create a party render of the capital region.

After writing this tool I'm mostly using it to make sure I've uploaded all my GPX traces to the OSM server, I keep my GPX traces in a Git repository and sometimes I've forgotten to upload them, but no more!:

$ perl get-osm-gpx-tracks-for-user --debug --download --out-dir=tmp "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason"

$ perl diff-gpx-directories ~/src/gps/gpx tmp/
== Files in `/home/avar/src/gps/script/tmp' not in `/home/avar/src/gps/gpx':
== Files in `/home/avar/src/gps/gpx' not in `/home/avar/src/gps/script/tmp':
2008-12-20-Protesting-at-Austurvollur-photomapping-at-laugarvegur-and-biking-down-saebraut.gpx
2009-01-25-Bus-to-Althingi-and-walking-about-in-Althingisgardurinn.gpx
2009-03-25-Walking-in-Ellidardalur.gpx
2009-04-09-2009-04-10-Driving-from-Akranes-to-Akureyri-via-Egillstadir.gpx


Well, almost.

I'm attending the 2009 Wikimedia developer meet-up where, amongst other things, there are people interested in getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Wikimedia-hosted wikis, hereafter referred to as Wikipedia, which is the most known incarnation of it.

Everyone in that group has been or is interested in working on making map data a first-class feature on Wikipedia, at the end of the day we had some notes about what we want to implement.

The stuff I want to work on is getting the required infrastructure in place to be able to display inline mapnik-rendered OSM maps in Wikipedia articles, once we have that working and our foot in the door it'll be very easy to add more mapping features, like finding nearby articles or doing custom renderings. But the results from today's talks (including with Brion Vibber) are to try to get the following operational:

1. Wikimedia's own updated Planet.osm mirror & importing of the Planet file into PostGIS


2. Tile rendering infrastructure, i.e. Mapnik rendering from aforementioned database


3. A program to stitch the tiles together into a single map image, something like MapOf (which appears to be t@h only) but for tiles in general (so we can stitch the mapnik tiles), maybe bigmap could be used? Maybe we could just render a custom image from Postgres itself using Mapnik like the OSM site does it instead.


4. An extension to display maps inline in MediaWiki, like Simple image extension and maybe the Slippy Map extension for JavaScript enabled browsers.

… See full entry

My patch to add fullscreen support to JOSM has been commited to trunk

There are some caveats with it as Java's setFullScreenWindow doesn't work properly on all platforms. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but in the meantime it works on Ubuntu 8.10 under Compiz at least.

I've made a set on flickr with edits by users in Iceland as rendered by itoworld's osm mapper

I gained access to the 2m aerial imagery of the Gaza Strip since I signed up for it.

The WMS that has the data is closed however, but it's in 2m/pixel resolution which gives us opportunity to map residential streets, alleys, buildings, fields, playgrounds and other features like that which we can identify.

Some of that stuff I have no idea what is though.

Sadly due to the contract in place to get the images I can't include any screenshots of editing it.

I surveyed Hlíðarfjall on Sunday and added the first aerialways mapped in Iceland in the process. Analyzing the GPX trace it turns out that my top speed was 78 km/h.

I managed to map a few places in London in the time that I was there, named a previously unnamed street, added the Mile End Climbing Wall, added the National Express bus stop at Stansted Airport, a taxiway and a few other things, mostly based on Yahoo Aerial imagery.

And of course I showed up for the Drayton Arms OSM pub meet-up, which was fun.

Which was pretty damn fun. Too bad it's not rendered yet.

After a discussion on talk-is I contacted Íslandspóstur and requested permission to use their postal code records under an OSM-compatible license.

They said yes, which means we just have to write an importer for their data and survey the rest of the streets in their database before Iceland has complete postal code coverage.

My Garmin map of Iceland is now routeable thanks to mkgmap. It still doesn't seem to do address finding however.

I was trying to search for a highway with ref:82 earlier, but of course JOSM's partial search also picked up ref:823, ref:282 and a multitude of other things.

So I implemented regex search support in JOSM for which I'd filed a bug 3 weeks ago.

Now I can just search for ^ref$:^82$ and only get exactly what I want.

I've finished mapping the road network in Breiðholt, not counting Seljahverfi.

The road network in the Greater Reyjavík Area is now complete north of Breiðholtsbraut and south of Elliðár. That only leaves Grafarvogur, Árbær and Úlfarsfell as the major road networks with holes in them left.

I tried setting up my own mapnik render of Iceland just now. It's currently rendering.

I've heard that mapnik was hard to set up, I don't know where that myth came from, aside from some slight fussing with postgres (because I wasn't used to its auth model) the instructions on the wiki were very easy to follow, setup took no more than an hour and all of the dependencies were already packaged in Ubuntu.

As there seemed to be some interest I've advertised a mapping party in Reykjavík, Iceland on Tuesday.

I just finished some satellite mapping of the Tristan da Cuncha archipelago. For reference I used a free map of the islands on Wikimedia Commons.

It would be pretty easy to map Edinburgh of the Seven Seas by bike, the hard part is getting someone there. Optimally we'd get the islanders involved.

I wrote about my plans to map Akranes, a practically unmapped town of around 7,000 people in my last diary entry. Things went better than planned and I arrived at around 16:00 on Saturday after managing to hitch a ride from Reykjavík; Arriving almost 1h30m earlier than I would have if I had taken the bus.

I proceeded to map until around 23:00, then I slept until 6:00 in -6C in what I later discovered was an abandoned backyard (I thought it belonged to a friend at the time, but he had apparently moved). Then I mapped some more from around 7:00 to 15:00 and then took the bus back to Reykjavík.

I've uploaded the traces I made (JOSM screenshot of them). All in all I cycled around 83 km over 8 hours (6 hours moving time) at a moving average of 12.3 km/h.

I've added most of the data I surveyed to OSM, although I still have to add some nodes based on photographs I took and some areas need further landuse tagging. The area is far from complete though. It needs footways, amenities, the outlying road network etc etc.

Update: I party-rendered the weekend.

I'm going to take city bus from Reykjavík to Akranes today to map the aforementioned neighboring town of Reykjavík.

I'll arrive at 17:22 and stay there until sunday evening. The town is almost completely unmapped but hopefully I'll be able to completely map its road network as well as adding the main POIs. A camera will help with the latter.

Went well, we should have a fairly fleshed out are later today, see osm.wiki/index.php/H%C3%B6fu%C3%B0borgarsv%C3%A6%C3%B0i%C3%B0/Party/2008-09-21