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) [@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 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:lat=50.79556 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag: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.

...

...

After some hassle with JOSM and generic understandings I have now started to work on it.

Yesterday, I noticed a new sign on what I knew as Carseview Drive. It proclaimed the road was "Carse View Drive". I thought I may as well change it to the new name, but perhaps this wasn't such a good idea.

The new sign was placed high on a pole, you can guess why.

I have ridden around and uploaded street names for Aranda, Ferntree Hill and Kaleen in northern Canberra. Does anyone know how to indicate a missing street sign? If I leave the name blank then there is no indication why it was missed. Any ideas?

Captured another bit of the N71 road in Ireland !

Now have Cork-Bandon-Clonakilty-Skibbereen-Bantry. And a return route
to Cork from Bantry via Gougane-Barra and Macroom....

Highway 30-330 interchange. Potlatch not loading streets at zoom 14. Will look again on another day.

Added top layer of parking in Galeria Dominikańska. Looks ugly?

The United Nations has a working group that addresses how to romanize place names written in another character system. This might be of interest for those adding to openstreetmap in a non-roman character system.

http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/

Just got back from Japan, and have been doing some mapping on the Tokyo area, as well as some railway lines further afield, including Kakunodate, Matsumoto, Nagano and Mito. (the joys of tourist rail passes!)

I think Tokyo is going to be extremely difficult to map without better aerial photos - my GPS was not a happy bunny with all those tall buildings around.

The other thing is that with so many multi-layered roads, it's really difficult to see how a 2D map is going to present enough information about what's going on! Perhaps we need some partial transparency rendering hint tags?!

Those Japanese characters are hard work too! I have a massive stash of photos of signs that I need to go through, filling out the tags with kanji and hiragana, at the moment many are just English! :(

I've started mapping the center of Bordeaux with potlach. It is quite a long work as streets have recently changed du to the tram work.

I don't know why my changes haven't been replicated on mapnik but just on osmarenderer.