Dad's managing to do some mapping. This is good news. As I was saying before, trying to teach dad to map was something which could go either way. But he's started emailing me with questions, so maybe he's got the bug. What's more, he might even be persuading my uncle to join in. OAP viral marketing!

I sketched in a bunch of rivers around the head of the Holme valley as part of our Holmfirth mapping over Christmas. As well as looking quite pretty, it seems these are useful for countryside footpath mapping, giving something to frame things, rather than just a blank slate.

Dad emailed me last night asking me to do the same thing for the next valley over, and more of the area around where my uncle lives. So I dived into Potlatch and did a bit of river sketching from the out-of-copyright NPE maps. Then I fired an email to dad with links to the live rendered map Osmotherly and the head of the Colne Valley. Minutely map updates are proving quite useful for coordination/explanation by email.

Of course sketching rivers from NPE is a task Steve8 was beavering away at quite spectacularly all along the west coast. Some information on this at WikiProject United Kingdom Waterways#Rivers.

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Last night's London random pub meet up was a late one. I had to take a night bus home, and I'm feeling a little worse for wear this morning. But as far as I recall, it was an enjoyable evening over in South Kensington at the Drayton Arms

Matt was inspired by (and felt a burning desire to compete with) randomjunk's building mapping, and so earlier in the day he knocked up a cheeky JOSM plugin Update: Now released as the "Terracer plugin". Basically it lets you do terraced houses like this in a jiffy:

And having put this particular patch of buildings in, just to the north of last night's pub, we did a quick ten minute mapping session on the way to the pub to gather some house numbers along these streets. We still need to input that data. (house numbering tagging description on the wiki is codenamed the 'Karlsruhe Schema')

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Matt and I went on a mission last night to boost the POI completeness and generally check the area over around Holborn in central London.

We were specifically aiming to get this done and inputted in time for the weekly Wednesday night mapnik re-render. It's funny. I've never really paid much attention to this in the past, in relation to my own mapping. I think it does annoy/confuse newbies (and maybe a quite a few experienced mappers too) that you don't get to see your work appear on the main homepage map until after the weekly re-render. Of course I should mention that we now have the awesome nearly live tiles map.

But for my own purposes I'm happy to just slap in the data and forget about it. "If you've got time to worry about how your map looks, then go out and survey some more!" is my philosophy.

Not last night though. We were on a mission to see some map improvements sharpish. But I was also on a pub mission, and I ended up leaving my inputting to the last minute. I had to head back to the office to get my data entered at about midnight! Happily it looks like I got it in there on time, and Holborn is now looking...

osm.org/?lat=51.51765&lon=-0.11572&zoom=17

...POItastic!

Last night's random pub meet-up at the Mad Hatter was pretty well attended. I expected fewer people to make their way to the South Bank, but there was about twelve of us.

This time the dreaded camera came out. Behold my photographic masterpieces:

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I was just testing out something about the way the Yahoo imagery support works in the new WMS plugin and as the imagery appeared, I couldn't resist sketching in some details to help the Ciaro map again. Lots more time consuming road sketching need to happen, so rather than just getting lost in some little detail of Cairo, I thought I'd zoom out a little, and add some landuse=residential areas to try and delineate how much of that kind of work there is.

But even slapping in big areas takes quite a long time. In the imagery, and also from experience of being there, I know that tall apartment blocks suddenly give way to little strips of farm land. This is good in a way, because it leaves me in no doubt (or less doubt) about where the landuse=residential goes up to, but it meant that there's lots of jagged edges to trace around, and I feel compelled to zoom in and do a thorough job of it. The other problem is, the extents of the city are completely out-of-date in the yahoo imagery of course. But I guess it's worth sticking to the data we have to go on, until some Egyptians get involved real mapping to correct it.

After an hour or so, I'm looking at how much I've done, and... well I've only been looking at on one tiny bit of the city's edge on the South West side of Giza. It's one of those things where I feel obliged to do a few more hour long sessions and chip away at the task. But it eats up a lot of time.

Yesterday the missus wanted to go shopping (always bad) but I managed to trick her into going to Turnpike Lane, and I managed to trick her into taking a few little diversions. Unfortunately it was seriously unpleasantly cold, so she didn't put up with it for long, but I got a few street names.

That's probably the closest pocket of unnamed streets to my house, so I need to go back there.

Last night we had the first London meet-up of 2009 at The Rocket pub in Euston. This pub seems to draw the crowds for some reason. We had 15 people along last night, a turn-out matched only by the previous meet-up in the Rocket.

Gregory was there and telling us about his Durham mapping progress. Jenny was showing us her hyper-organised paper-based mapping log book. She's mapping East of Stratford which used to be a big pocket of unnamed streets.

I'm back in London after a good Christmas holiday. I managed to progress the Holmfirth map a little bit, but perhaps more importantly I managed to teach my Dad to edit the map... maybe. It feels a little bit touch and go whether he will manage to master the technicalities of it after I've gone. It does look as though he will have the enthusiasm to go out and gather some more traces some time soon, so then hopefully he will be forced to remind himself how to edit some time in the near future. So the hope is that it will turn out like the "Teach a man to fish" proverb, except it's "teach a dad to map". This has also given me some ideas for things to explain differently in the Beginners Guide, and also some little things which could be more newbie friendly in JOSM.

I did a quick bit of mapping in Leeds, adding some bits to the little suburb of Chapel Allerton. Why is it that yahoo has no aerial imagary of this the UK's 5th biggest city? If anyone's experimenting with rocket/kite/balloon photography, this would be a good place to do it. In the meantime the Leeds community is doing an admirable job of mapping the city centre without it. Likewise in sheffield. I was able to just use the map while I was visiting there, which is always nice.

So back in London now, and it's the first London meet-up of 2009 on Wednesday.

I'm back in Homfirth West Yorkshire over Christmas. Haven't been back "home" in a year now, and it's been looking annoyingly incomplete all this time. So I guess it's my responsibility to do something about that. Someone else has taken care of Meltham, over in the next valley.

Couple of problems with this. In general I'm still only used to mapping based on Yahoo imagery. Without this, it seems to be necessary to be far more focused and thorough about the quality of the traces you're gathering, e.g. follow an approach like 80n's "keep turning left" rule to get a trace along the length of every little residential road. Haven't tended to be quite so thorough with my mapping in the past.

NPEmaps are not available as a WMS feed into JOSM at the moment. Is that right? Don't seem to be working for me.

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spot of mapping while on holiday in Egypt. Little bits around the souq of Luxor and also scratching at the surface of Cairo.

Cairo is another mondohumungous chaotically semi-developed mega-city which feels like it could benefit massively from having a good free map. So far the OSM coverage is semi-developed also. Like with Sao Paulo, the streets appear with glistening sun-baked clarity on the yahoo imagery, but even just quick-sketching all the streets will be a lot of work. On the plus side many of the streets of Cairo seem to be without names anyway, so maybe a sketched map will be an almost complete map! How can we organise many hands to make light work of this?

I did do some proper GPS photo mapping to record some details on the ground, as seen from our tour coach window. Here's an interesting https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural=cliff in the middle of the city.

Hmmm I see now that GPS fun is in breach of Egyptian law (WikiProject Egypt) Oopse!

I've been engaging in a massive long debate with User:Chriscf about the wiki tag documenting process. Sometimes it feels like we're making progress. ...sometimes not.

Added a few POIs and street stubs from a short walk through Northampton at the weekend.

I still haven't done much mapping outside of yahoo covered areas. It's difficult. Much more guesswork involved. I guess uploading tracks and comparing with other user's tracks is much more important.

...and what's the tag for a bingo hall?

Just Shaun and Stephen in the pub last night, but we had a good chat about various OSM ideas. I'm trying to remember them all. Ideas seem to come thick and fast after a few pints, and then I forget to follow them up.

Stephen was showing us his trackmyjourney.co.uk stuff. Today I notice that this is not mentioned on the wiki at all, and barely mentioned on the site anywhere. Stephen's hiding his light under a bushel. It's a nifty little J2ME app which he has been busily adding features to. It does GPS stats, hence the name, but also shows OSM maps, lists nearby POIs, and allows you to record waypoints with annotations suitable for later inputting into OSM.

...but what would it take to have a mobile editor submitting changes directly? Authentication seems to be the main hurdle. A simple interim solution might be for OSM to provide a basic web interface for editing/creating a node (and setting tags on it). The app could then launch a mobile web browser pointing at the URL (login and cookie session done as normal) The app already launches a browser to view read-only node data.

He was also explaining about how he had to code graphics routines to break up areas into triangles, and position lettering for road names. There's quite a few mobile apps like this which have a lot of logic which might be described as "rendering" logic. How difficult would it be to rip this out, and have it available as a standalone desktop rendering system? It'd be fun to see lots more alternatives listed on the rendering page. Apps for creating one-off map images or tile sets. Java based renderer could done as a JOSM plugin.

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Spent the weekend at the cloudmade office for the 2nd International OSM Hack Weekend. People were quietly concentrating on getting on with the big tasks related to API 0.6. Seems they were making some good progress towards this, or a least towards some database re-organisation which needs to happen beforehand.

For my part, I kept my head down and got stuck into learning some ruby on rails. I'm pleasantly surprised by the installation process. I got the basic rails port code up and running on windows reasonably easily. Not very easy, but not as difficult as I had always imagined it would be. And I didn't even have to learn any ruby to understand the OSM rails 'views' enough to make some (silly little) contributions. Good fun!

Puzzling over openlayers javascript with a hangover yesterday was less fun.

I've made some progress JOSM'ing my heap of GPS/photo files gathered in southern France. There's good yahoo imagery coverage in this area of wine growing countryside. Maybe there were some yahoo executives holidaying there, who insisted on it.

...although I did encounter a small cloud hanging over the village of Assas.

My article about mapping Stratford has finally been published on page 9 of issue 2 of the Stratford Grapevine (PDF 2.5 MB) Hmmm something tells me this won't attract hordes of new contributors. Still it was an interesting exercise in trying to explain OpenStreetMap to a non-technical audience.

Dealing with the TFL publishers was also a challenge. They wanted me to get everyone in this photo to sign a release form. Bit too difficult to organise in a few days before the deadline (and way too much hassle). And when they said they'd like me to send them the map image in vector format, I somehow knew that they wouldn't manage to get it printing correctly. Sure enough it's missing all the street names. Ah well.

Apparently they are giving out copies for free at Stratford station.

I just had a week long holiday in South France near Montpellier. Visiting Montpellier I saw this building which has a very ornate looking outline (wiki "featured image" from a few weeks back). Rather disappointingly it is just a modern shopping precinct! I wonder who added that mapping detail. A local, or another holiday visitor?

I took my laptop with me so that I could offload photos and GPS traces on a regular basis, so was able to do a lot of photo mapping (much to the girlfriend's annoyance) of the various vineyard dirt tracks and little medieval towns we visited. I also experimented with offline mapping. No internet in our villa, so I took a few .osm files with me, and tried to make some edits offline in JOSM. This worked, but I found myself missing YWMS, so I didn't do much of this. So now I have a lot of photos and traces to work through.

While I was away a wikipedian messaged me to point out their use of OSM maps to create an image of Delhi bombings.

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I'm a keen fiddler with the OSM wiki. It's almost become my "role" within the project. Certainly it's the area where I've made myself most useful. Over time this has given me a bit of a birds-eye view of project goings-on. But it's a slightly skewed view because actually, active though it is, the wiki is not the primary communication channel of OSM. That would be the dreaded mailing list (dev and talk)

I don't follow the mailing list at all. Gave up trying. It's too high traffic. If I want high traffic, I look at Recent Changes. I should probably call in on nabble every now and then, just to look for interesting subjects. But I kind of decided that however you slice it, the mailing list will be too much of drain on my time. But this means that I (and people like me) end up missing out on any of the juicy announcements, which don't surface so quickly via other channels.

Which is why OSM community really badly needs a mailing list weekly digest again! I have just put forward this suggestion via a wiki edit (of course!). I suppose posting to the mailing list would be more sensible... but I'm not on the mailing list :-)

I was boring my cousin with talk of OpenStreetMap as I went to visit her in Plymouth again last weekend. It does kind of come up in conversation when you're sat in the passenger seat taking hundreds of uninteresting photos out of the car window.

I wasn't actually planning to go into the city itself. We ended up spending some time walking around "the Hoe" (grassy peninsula parkland place with views out to sea) and "the Barbican" old town around the harbour. These are pretty much the main tourist areas to visit in Plymouth (here), so while I there, I was thinking there was a good chance that this was all on the map already.

But it turns out not. I took a look last night, and saw the whole area in nice clear Yahoo imagery coverage, but very little mapping progress. I couldn't resist settling down for a hour or so of sketching in parks and road layouts. It seems like time well spent, because now we at least have more of the tourist areas of this city roughly in place, ready for somebody local or a visiting tourist to go survey properly.

I haven't done yahoo sketching for a while. The tag https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=road got voted in, which seems to have some baring on how we are supposed to go about doing it, but to my mind it's a clumsy solution, since it involves adding this tag everywhere, and then removing and replacing again later. Too many key presses. Sketching should be quick. But at least this, along with things like the OSM fieldwork have pointed a spotlight on the potential of yahoo sketching.

But I think if it was made more clear that we are allowed/encouraged to do yahoo sketching, then we wouldn't have any yahoo covered cities which are still missing their major tourist centres.

I was up in Aberdeen for a friend's wedding this weekend. I should've dedicated more time to eating a hearty breakfast, making sure my shirt was properly ironed, and also just chilling out in preparation for a long night of ceilidh dancing...

...but with all those unnamed streets, I couldn't resist a morning mapping expedition.

Data from that, and data from the Borough (but actually Bermondsey) mapping evening to be input some time soon.