Couple of Potlatch issues have cropped up at the same time (different issues, same cause but I won't bore you with the details) which you may encounter. Should be fixed this evening, apologies for the hassle.

Following a discussion with jburgess and artem on IRC, I started fixing up Leipzig's trams where a single way has two railway and highway tags (instead of two ways reusing the same nodes). Apart from maintaing these ways (i.e., does a maxspeed tag also apply to the tram? Probably not!), it was also causing rendering issues in Mapnik (see https://trac.mapnik.org/ticket/66).

I started with all the secondary roads, and it seems to have worked well (I kept an original OSM file of the area just in case). The ways with highway=secondary retain all the other tags which might be on there, while the ways with the railway=tram tag have just this and possibly a bridge tag.

The procedure was taking the OSM file and treat it with some Emacs keyboard macros and search and replace etc. (to assign negative ids to the new ways), and with JOSMs search feature.

If the renderers are happy, I will repeat the process with the other highway types in the next few days.

Comments welcome.

The traces taken around Mullumbimby, and down through Rosebank, Goonengerry, Binna Burra, Federal and Eltham have been mapped. Some of the traces around Eureka and Federal were taken with my Edge 301 on the cycle trip north, and so are not as accurate as the rest. The roads really should be driven over again.

Most of the roads have only been driven one way, and only once, so more traces would be useful. That won't happen (by me) until next Christmas, but maybe Rosscoe can oblige :)

Finishing some tracked but yet unmaped roads. One nice part here.

Uploaded, 2008 England Peak district - test run of GlobalSat DG100.

Car has a hardwired (powered from the car stereo 12V - so it comes on when the car is running) GPS data logger based on the DGPS-XM4 Model GPS DataLogger ( http://homepages.tig.com.au/~robk/ ) fed from a Garmin Serial WAAS mouse embedded under the plastic trim of the dash, out of sight.

Another DGPS-XM4 attached to a handheld garmin marine GPS again with WAAS for walking, however enabling serial NMEA output cuts down the GPS battery life to 8 hours (not good for long walks or camping).

Answer, replace the DGPS-XM4 and serial cable with something smaller, lighter with its own batteries. So a test of the GlobalSat DG100. First results look good!

This week, I've embarked on a project in conjunction with OSM user PeterIto, in mapping the Longendale Valley.

I've started with the largest town in the area - Royston Vasey. Well, the real name is, of course, Hadfield, but the Derbyshire town's claim to fame was that it was the set for the BBC comedy series, the "League of Gentlemen".

It's mostly done after a couple of days mapping, apart from a bit in the North and East, and a couple of other bits to fill in here and there.

On my way back from getting some lunch today I tried out my new iPod Touch as a tool for quickly taking notes of roads that I passed (all of which had already been skeleton-mapped using the Yahoo imagery). The handy little Notes application allowed me to tap out the street names as I passed them so I could enter them onto the map when I got back home.

Benefits:
- Small and very portable
- Nice on-screen touch keyboard for taking quick notes

Constraints:
- Spell checker corrects things automatically, which doesn't work well for street names and abbreviations
- No direct access to OpenStreetMap for immediate editing
- Easy to walk into lamp posts or trip over broken paving stones
- Prime target for thieves

I think I'll stick to the traditional pen and paper for now, at least then I can draw little sketches to aid my memory as well as just taking notes of street names.

Added a lot of small streets in Old Town.
Added three parts of City Moat.

I'm working on a more basic version of this for OSM (first time I've ever done anything AJAXy - lawks). Am probably going to need some help from a hardcore OpenLayers junkie though...

Nine degree celsius in the middle of winter. Wow, that's what I call global warming. So I went out to map these 4 streets off Lakronstraße, a very nice neighbourhood here in Gerresheim. Old, large houses, well maintained and modernised. It is a bit uphill and downhill there, but 3/4h was enough to track it all. The street sign fotos are a bit dark but still readable. I am pretty sure I got this corner between Bender- Dreher- and Torfbruchstraße now complete --- except for one half street :-)

And why does this silly map down there change all the time while I type. Who invented this nonsens:-?

Found here http://www.dolphinpix.eu proof I really have driven 250,000 miles in the last 10 years.

Not bad, that covers most of the roads in the far north of Scotland. Some roads get 2 or 3 vehicles a week! And thats the postman!

Spending some time at home on development and maintainance
of some essential OSM-Tools.

Yes, my bike got some problems, light failed, the Sachs-3-Gear
failed and both tyres were in need of some additional air.
This is all fixed now, and i have put a spare ball-pen
in my bag after i have lost my only pencil somewhere
out there in the bush week
(I got a beer and a replacement in the next pub)

Today i have been working on the idea to print OSM-Maps using gnuplot.
This is an important tool because it generates high density maps,
e.g. perfect to check if POI are at the right position or missing
and to draw notes into it.

The old approach
is not functional anymore since OSM 0.5, but that is easily fixable.

I wrote a XSLT-stylesheet
osm2gnuplot.xsl
to extract way- or poi-data from an OSM-Data file,
and a messy script
osm2gnuplot.sh
to call the XSLT-processor.
This script will generate a bunch of files, one each for streets, rails and
different POI. These files are readable by gnuplot, e.g.
example to draw some parts of cologne

Note: this is not the fastest/most efficient approach.
Doing this with a well indexed database would be a matter of seconds,
doing this with my stylesheet and the gnome-xsltproc is a matter of hours
for the complete map of cologne (ca. 5MB) on a 400MHz PII-Box.
But its working fine
take a look at the north-east from cologne: osm-cologne-ne-20080127.ps.gz

oh well, I print my maps on A3 paper, like this:
pstops '1:[email protected](-2.9cm,-2.5cm)' myplot.ps myplot_A3.ps

We need more POI in OSM, 33 bus_stations and 40 pubs in cologne, thats pretty poor,
cheers!

Well, this is it! My first blog post ever! Let it better be a good one then ;)

I just uploaded all my gpx-files (about 7.5 megs) and was rather annoyed by the nonexisting possibility to upload multiple files at once and even more of the missing progress bar :/

Actually it seems like I'm a little iffy today anyway, because the only thing I feel like is complaining. So lets keep it up: I'm still not satisfied with the way JOSM is behaving on my Mac. For once there is no way to scroll in it, other than connecting a mouse with two buttons and sometimes things are just a little queer.
Maybe I will get the source one day and put my Java-skills to good use... All it really takes is adding a new button and a if-clause to change the shortcuts to the "Apple-Style" if OS X is the current operating system. Sounds like something I can manage :D
Other than that: A BIG HUG TO THE GUY's and GIRL's (hopefully ^^) WHO BROUGHT US THIS VERY EASY TO USE TOOL :)

I'm currently working on a virtual machine image of Tiles@Home, with my friend Brian "the Brain" Schimmel, so everyone can have a private Tiles@Home, without all the trouble needed to install it by hand...

Up to this day I have mapped some parts of Wernigerode (most of which was stolen, by someone who was daring enough to add street names, I will get you for this one you *#?%$"& ;) ) and all of my home town/village Berßel.
Actually I decided to map my old place of residence Osterwieck tomorrow.

...

OK spent an hour and a half cycling the last remaining bits of Cottenham this afternoon, mainly Smithy Fen. As far as I know that's all of the roads on the map now (once it updates). I also added 6 post boxes, one telephone, the fire station, the pharmacy, one shop, the war memorial, the fuel station and the recreation grounds with their various sections. I also covered a bit of Rampton, including the moat around Giant's Hill. I tagged it as waterway=moat, which isn't a standard tag but a proposed feature, and therefore presumably won't show on the standard renderers. I added a point in the centre historical=archaeological_site, name=Giant's Hill so at least that will appear.

What are still missing from Cottenham are the various footpaths and bridleways surrounding the village, and Cottenham Lode, which I think probably counts as waterway=stream even though it's clearly manmade - I guess the original course was similar but probably changed from year to year, and the banks were built to prevent flooding and enable agriculture on the surrounding land. That's a job for next weekend.

Today I thought to try recording comments about streets crossed and cycled with my mp3-player. It seemed to work well, but when I wanted to load the sound track on my computer the damned Trekstor vibez (what a name) started displaying 'starting player' and 'formatting ...' while the disk made unconvincing noises.

This thing is not a year old and not actually used a lot. What a poor quality.

Tracks4Africa contains a route marked "Dinokeng Mtb" and today I grabbed the opportunity to ride it.

I started by riding through the Buffelsdrift nature reserve, where it was most likely that I would encounter locked gates, which turned out not to be the case. The complete route consists of around 40km of gravel roads and 15km of busy tar road.

Yesterday I tried out the maximum capycity of my mobile phone. For GPS + audio mapping it is about 3.5 hours. I drove along the border between residential and forest areas, so I was finally able to put them into the map.

At first, I used landuse:residential and natural:wood as completely separated areas with some free space in between. If there was a road between them, I had three parallel ways, each one with its own nodes.

Afterwards, I merged the ways / nodes, so that residential and wood now "touch" each other at the road. This looks a lot nicer in the map, but the JOSM validator plugin now complains about overlapping ways. Am I doing things right?

As well, I now took care of the proper tagging of cycleways, footways and tracks, which are mostly distinguishable in our wood areas, were most ways are "Wanderwege" but commonly used by bikers. That means, as a guidway I used the questions "Does this feel like a cycleway? Would I recomend it to a biker? Would it be possible to drive a car right here?". I hope this meets the common sensus, too.

Same goes for rivers and streams. In the T@H map, rivers look too wide and streams too small, so what to take? I tried to make some compromise.

Added a few more lanes but, more importantly, I voluntarily gave myself squinty eyes and traced Dumaresq Creek from a blurry Landsat low-resolution image. Armidale now has its creek bisecting the town, flowing north-west to south-east. (Osmarender only at this stage).

I not sure how to tag the waterway, though. It's bigger than a waterway=stream, and not as grand as a waterway=river. In Australian parlance, it's a creek. It doesn't have permanent flow.

Anyway, for the time being, "stream" will be fine.