Over the last few months I've been rendering out my own specialised tiles for a site I've been working on. I'm pre-rendering static tiles because I'm using a shared server and it's a lot quicker this way. The process looks a little like this:

1. Apply daily diff to osm file
2. Extract the area I'm interested in with osmosis
3. Import into PostgreSQL
4. Render with Mapnik using generate_tiles.py
5. Optimise with pngcrush and do some other things before diffing them and sending them to my live server.

This works fine, and there's really nothing wrong with the setup per se, except for the following two things:

1. It's slow.
2. I'm having quite a few street names get cut off at the edge of a tile and not carry over to the next one.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows of a better way of doing this.

It's my understanding that tilecache might work better, but I haven't found any indication that it will work how I want it to. So I'm wondering if anyone here has had any experience with rendering out static tiles, and what has worked out best. :)

Currently uploading GPS traces is too hard, and I've pretty much stopped doing it. D:

I used to have a system that automatically tagged and uploaded everything in a directory based on filename. That was before the 0.6 API, so now it doesn't work. My workflow also no longer lets me rename files so I can't easily tag them in the field.

I would *love* a tool that could calculate an average speed for a GPS file and tag it motorcar/bicycle/foot automatically, although I'm presuming this doesn't exist.

Failing that, what's everybody using to upload their files? I'd love to be able to set a cron job to upload & delete everything in a directory at 4 AM or something. Please advise. :)

I've had a backlog of GPS traces for a few weeks. The last few days I finally got through them.

I added a bunch of stuff from around my local area, as well as the nonames from my bike trip the other day (missed a few streets off the end of this one because my phone glitched and didn't save the waypoints. No biggie I guess.)

I also went and added some of the data from my trip out to Bribie Island with Matt (which I can't link because I didn't write about it.) We were going to follow the cycleway, but it doesn't really exist for most of the way, it's just road cycling and fast cars. But there's a few bike paths I got traces of, so it wasn't completely for nothing.

Looking at the Moreton Bay Cycleway signs, it looks like the cycleway might end up detouring out through Beachmere before heading to Bribie, so it may be more complete via that route. I'll have to check it out another day.

I've also been using the NearMap PhotoMaps to augment the OSM data in areas I've been but not traced. I've been especially focusing in Redcliffe/Deception Bay where I know the cycleway runs but I've never actually had the chance to trace. I've been focusing on cycleways because I'm hoping to use the data for a local project I'm working on. It's somewhat hush hush at the moment but if you ask me real nice I'll probably tell you what my plans are anyway. :P

I also took a while this afternoon to trace a bunch of new estate in Warner, out the back of Bracken Ridge. Holy MOLEY that area has exploded. It used to be an unfashionable backwater behind the industrial estate with not even a streetlight to its name, but in the last ten years it's become massive (without, I note with a hint of irritation, any hint of mass transit.) Keep an eye on the area for when Mapnik starts updating again, because I'm anticipating a whoooole bunch of new streets to pop into life shortly.

Yesterday I headed out to Virginia and the surrounding area to get some street names and get some exercise.

It was a pleasing run despite the hills. From Banyo I essentially headed out through the Downfall Creek Cycleway then along Ellison Road, up to Zillmere Road, and did some dithering before heading back to Banyo via Virginia.

Having lost my stupid laptop late last month I don't have Bluetooth to download my files off my phone any more. I also can't find my USB cable, so laziness has prevented me downloading the last few weeks worth of traces. I made a couple of edits from memory, but all of my waypoints are stuck in my phone for the time being.

It's an immensely frustrating position to be in, but I've been keeping busy OSMing from the inordinately brilliant NearMap PhotoMap aerial photography. You can see a bunch of stuff I've worked on recently in my home area, namely involving building outlines and the schools/universities in the area.

Having not woken up with the expected hangover and not knowing what else to do, I fitted the bike rack onto the back of the car, and drove myself to the new area north of North Pine River where I knew there were a bunch of un-traced streets.

I'm going to digress early on in the piece to exclaim how ridiculous it is that there's no pedestrian or cycle transport over that river. It's a major thoroughfare, the exact boundary between two councils, and an absolute arse to traverse via public transport. Something needs to be done.

There, with that out of the way I can continue unfettered.

I pulled in to the new shopping centre along Dohles Rocks Road, and parked my car in the far corner. It was a Saturday, so the likelihood of the car park filling up and my being a nuisance was slim. I prepared my bits and pieces, adjusted my doo-dads, and donned my helmet before taking a quick calibratory lap around the car park. I was pleased to find not one but two cycleways along the main road so I was absolutely spoiled for choice.

The area was all very familiar to me, since I'd previously surveyed it all not six months ago. Due to a catastrophic GPS failure which lost all my data, I'd never gotten the chance to update it, and due to the complete lack of access to the area by bike I'd never bothered to go back.

It was good the second time around though, because I got a lot more detail than I did in the car. I actually spent a good third of the time tracing footpaths and walkways which I'd obviously never bother with on four wheels. I even discovered a recently opened retirement village which I dutifully cycled around to get street traces.

By the time I'd finished the “Northquarter” estate, I wasn't quite ready to head back. Instead I pottered around the shopping centre at the top of the hill before deciding I wasn't particularly hungry, and headed further out into the older but nonamed Castle Hill estate.

I only got a few names here, because I was more interested in the little network of footpaths that enclosed the lake. Engrossed in mapping, I didn't realise that the sun had gone down, and being in somewhat of a valley and under exceptional foliage cover made it excruciatingly dark and spiderific. I'm terrified of anything with more than four legs, so I usually would have headed back, but it was an equal distance both ways so I powered through and managed to finish what I started.

The result is a somewhat unspectacular but impressive-sounding 157 edited ways. Since this was the first significant thing I'd done for a while, I did up an animated gif showing the changes in Mapnik.

The Redcliffe OSM meetup was all right. It wasn't overly notable, but we had a nice lunch across the road.

The area ended up with some pretty sweet coverage, which I think was mostly done by John Smith and James Livingston. To be honest, I didn't do all that much in the area. Having cycled to Clontarf, I really didn't feel like doing cake slices. Instead, I nicked off up the cycleway because very little of it had actually been surveyed.

The result was about twenty kilometres (this is a figure I made up) of cycleways and cycle lanes through Redcliffe, Scarborough, through to Kallangur where previously there were none. I'm waiting for the cycle map to update, but I'm confident it'll look pretty good when it's done.

So I've been pretty lax on the OSM front lately. Haven't been riding, haven't been doing much at all. My grand plans to work my way up to Redcliffe on the bike have fallen flat.

Partially to blame: The broken bike. It's been in for repairs, and now it's fixed, but I haven't ridden it since. I'm planning on changing that today and heading out to Bracken Ridge to get some street names and landmarks that have been staring me in the face for the better part of six months.

I'm going to take the wetlands bike path out, because it's a cruisy ride north. Since I haven't been out for a while, I'll probably need to go at a pretty casual pace as well.

I'm trying to work out a decent route, but my inbuilt router can't work out whether I can traverse the train station + highway combination to get where I want to go. It looks like I can from the map, but maybe I ought to check it out in real life and do some micromapping of the railway station on the way.

In any case, the bikeway will deliver me almost the entire way to where I want to go. It may take me through a wetland and might be quicker to just go by road, but whoever (me) said that the cycleways in Brisbane (me) don't go anywhere? (It was me, by the way.)

I haven't been writing much at all for the last week, so I figured I'd kick off a day of smooth keyboard fingers with a write-up on the latest Sunshine Coast mapping party.

Both David and I were going to carpool with one James Livingston, who called at the last minute to say he'd just been in an accident and couldn't make it. I don't know if it counts as a contender for the glorious Mapping Accidents page, but it was certainly unfortunate.

I had access to a Getz to I nicked down to David's place and then we headed north to meet the team at Nambour.

It was a good ride. I may have been speeding at one point, but I'll vehemently deny it was deliberate. We made good time as a result, and arrived just before the designated meet-up time.

I had a chicken burger and the training girl behind the counter gave me two fries by mistake. I left them on the table for everyone to eat, and they went cold.

From there we divvied up the Walking Papers into impromptu cake slices, loaded up some of our geocaching attendants with data for them to do their thing, demonstrated Potlatch for Jeff Price and his Venturer Scout, and watched a lonely bag of fries go cold on the table. Awesome meetup.

After about half an hour we paired off and went our own separate ways. BillnCyndi the geocachers didn't seem too keen on the mapping aspect of the day, but John accompanied them around on a small practical demonstration run.

David and I drove out to what I imagine must have been the hilliest part of Nambour (quite aptly named Highworth.) It was amusing watching an exasperated David tapping frantically on his WinCE rig trying to get waypoints in real time as we drove past. Eventually he gave up, so we stopped to do some mapping on foot.

It was productive, although heading out at the peak of the sun's potency was pretty crazy. In my haste to get going I took the “slip, slop, slap” mantra a little loosely, applying a thin and patchy layer of sunscreen to my face and shoulders. Thankfully the short days and mountainous backdrop of the area meant the sun went down early and combined with my jeans (in the filthy heat) and t-shirt (in the fiiilllttthy heat!) helped protect me from most of the sun's damning rays.

David, John and myself met up in the Quota Memorial Park at around four. The other had left earlier, although I hear Jeff and his Venturer whose name I don't recall stuck around the area until about three. (Note: maybe 3 hours mapping is a bit much for a gathering like this. 1 + 3 or 2 + 2 could be a better combination to allow beginners to get a handle on things in the first session?)

In any case, we stuck around for a while, but headed off as the the last light of the day finally siphoned out and over the mountains.

I'm finally getting around to updating OSM with all the minutia I collected on my trip up north.

I've already updated with the majority of the fleshy edits I took; I've updated Gracemere itself with all of the new estates and a number of roads and the like outside of the Yahoo coverage area. I'm finding Landsat is priceless for getting the gist of roads I didn't bother to trace, and even pricelesser for tracing in the little creeks.

That's right, the pet project on this trip was collecting creek names. I must have taken the name and location of about a hundred different creeks and rivers that intersect the highways and roads on my travels, and now I'm landsat-tracing the ones I can make out. I think it really adds to the map.

I'm also adding in other incidental details. I took a number of fuel stations and phone boxes along the way. It's quite painful editing such a large area in JOSM because not only does it slow down some, but I also have to download each area I want to edit manually.

One of the interesting things I came across in my travels was this shared foot/bikeway which really puts the discussion on the distinction between footway/cycleway/path/track on the OSM-AU mailing list into perspective for me. We're spoiled with our cycle network in Brisbane, even though it's still completely impractical to commute on.

I've linked to Gracemere, which is so almost complete it's painful to see the few little areas I missed on the Geofabrik comparison tool. I'm now going for a second pass through all my collected data to see if there's any more details which I missed the first time around.

A twist of fate sees me heading to Rockhampton later this morning. It's a great opportunity to get some nonames and beef up the surrounding data. It's only got very rudimentary coverage so far, and there's a lot of towns & roads missing.

I would have loved to take my bike with me and survey that way, but it turns out my sister borrowed the bike rack for some reason, and never got around to returning it. I'm disappointed, but not mad.

Anyhow, I've got myself a few Walking Papers of the area I'm staying and the CBD, so hopefully combined with a little set of binoculars I inherited, the vast distances I'd otherwise have to cover will be reduced to a level 14 zoom level.

Anyway, I've got to run. There's a 9 hour drive ahead, and I want to get some standing up in my system before I leave.

Went for a data collection adventure today with a pal of mine who lives in Burpengary. We covered some extraordinary amount of distance, and now the main urban area of Burpengary is looking a lot more complete.

Most of the day consisted of collecting nonames, but on my way home, I took a detour and found a couple of previously un-traced estates. I'm getting pretty good at zooming around streets on my bike, so I'm getting pretty quick with this kind of real-world tracing.

The Osmarender hasn't caught up yet, so I can't tell how complete the road names are, but I imagine there's probably only one or two stragglers I've left behind. There's a few gaps in the landuse coverage, but I'm not too concerned about that.

It's not like I'm anywhere near finished though. There's a few areas to the south-west which still need some serious love, including at least one brand new estate that requires manually tracing.

I'm not sure I could be bothered trekking out so far any more though. There's still so much to do in my own area, and it's a lot cheaper being within cycling distance. I'm sure I'll probably still end up attempting to finish the area, but it's such an open-ended project, and I don't think It'll ever actually feel finished.

Anyway, I'm ruined after the workout today. Excuse any rambling. I'm going to go grab some sleep.

Just quickly, if anyone else is in need of combined maplint + map tiles, I wrote a quick PHP script to download, combine the two, and serve them. Supports rudimentary caching, as well.

I've been missing the noname maps since they stopped updating minutely, and now they're almost completely useless. So I'm using these tiles on my phone instead, which show the maplint layer on top of the Mapnik. It's ugly, but at least I've got recent nonames data.

Query string format is http://foo/foo.php?a=x&b=y&c=z

I went out on the bike and did Carseldine, Fitzgibbon, and a bit of Geebung. I think I've finished everything in the newer development areas around there where the satellite imagery starts to flake out. It's starting to look pretty too.

There's a few nonames and a fair few parks and things that might be better to do with walking papers, but other than that the area's looking pretty complete road-wise. It's been fun. :)

The issue that's concerning me today is to do with pedestrian routing. I've traditionally placed parks and commons a small distance away from the road, mostly because it just seems to be the done thing.

I'm wondering now if they should be "touching" in cases like this, at least in one point at either side. At the moment, it would take a seriously advanced algorithm to plan a pedestrian route through a park like this (and I doubt such a thing exists.) It would make perfect sense to walk through the park to get to the train station for instance, whereas walking around the road would take significantly longer.

The down side is you'd need an advanced editor like JOSM to successfully unglue and modify the ways if the time ever came. I'm loathe to stick things together like this (and I've only been doing so with landuse designations and the like, because it makes more sense to do so.)

So essentially I'm wondering what your thoughts on this issue are. How should we tag areas like this for pedestrian routing?

I'll never know, but I'm really sick of missing streets when I'm editing, then packing away my traces & waypoints never to be seen again.

I keep looking back at areas I've "finished" only to find street names missing, and in one case I've literally surveyed the area four times and still somehow managed to still miss tagging a street name.

There's not a bug that'll drop some changes when uploading at all, is there? I just can't believe I'm that careless, and months on I just couldn't be bothered sorting through my logs to correct the errors. Lamelame.

I'm fairly interested in railway stations and the associated micromapping that comes with them.

One particular thing that I'm interested in is getting platforms to render nicely on the main layer. It's not one of those crucial things, and obviously nobody's been interested enough to push it through to date, but once you start mapping at a higher level of detail, you'll get odd gaps in your map where platforms should be.

I noticed that some of the platforms around Brisbane started rendering sometime after the new API was released, and thought that maybe something had changed. Upon further observation I found that someone had simply added the tag "building=platform" so it would render as a building. This is wrong whichever way you look at it.

Then it occurred to me that because platforms are routable (area=yes,) and always allow pedestrian access (except I presume in some fringe cases,) so why not add the tag highway=footway and render it as a general purpose pedestrian area?

I implemented this on my local railway station, and it now renders rather sportingly as a light grey area on the Mapnik layer. I then went and applied it to the other station with the broken building tag, but it's yet to update.

I know what you're thinking, "Don't tag for the rendered!" and you're right, but I'd argue that this isn't necessarily a hack. I'd argue that it makes routing easier because it can direct pedestrian traffic along a platform (where appropriate) instead of having to know whether railway=platform can be traversed. I'd also put forward that if the Mapnik stylesheet ever were to be updated to reflect platforms they should render like this anyway because it's a neutral colour, keeps with the existing colour scheme, and is perfectly clear as to what it is.

So there's my justification, what's your opinion? Hack or neat trick? Should we work on the Mapnik stylesheet to implement this the “right” way, or would you consider this an appropriate measure?

Yesterday when I was out mapping, I collected enough street numbers mapping one smaller estate, that I was able to interpolate the majority of the numbers in the estate myself.

It's got me thinking; previously when I've been collecting house numbers and address information, I run around with my phone camera and geotag photos of people's letterboxes, but this is a really mundane and repetitive process, especially importing everything into JOSM.

Instead, it might be more worth my while making a note of the house number on either side of the street, only at crucial areas, like corners. This is what I did yesterday, and I was able to use the Yahoo imagery to work out roughly where the rest of the house numbers were supposed to go. I got about sixty addresses out of nine waypoints (with two addresses per waypoint, one for each side of the road.)

Because I don't have to swap from GPS mode to geotag mode on my phone, I can collect addresses at the same time I'm doing a general survey of the area. This makes it a lot more practical to get more comprehensive data for urban areas.

You can check out the area I'm talking about (it's linked to this entry.) I'm always interested in feedback, so let me know if/how you collect this kind of data.

Lost a two-hour edit session tonight.

I'm really not impressed with myself, having done it all in one big lump, and finding out someone else had edited underneath. Unfortunately JOSM was unable to reconcile the differences.

To add insult to injury, some of the edits that messed me up were the same as the ones I'd spent several hours earlier collecting. It's really, really disappointing, and now it's twenty past midnight and I've got sweet little anything to show for my work.

Things I lost include:

• Updates to Chermside shopping centre, including car park and landuse designations, a duplication of two-lane ways, and a tidy-up of the traffic lights.
• The majority of the Downfall Creek bikeway, including water taps, notable buildings, connecting trails, road crossings, updated waterway designations, bridges, tunnels, and several new estates adjacent.
• Numerous incidental edits between Chermside and Taigum, including postboxes, names, node cleanup, and alignment.
• Three new estates, including previously untraced stuff, parks, common areas, landuse designations and about a hundred Karlsruhe Schema addresses interpolated from painstaking satellite examination.

And right now the only thing I feel like is cvffvat and ovgpuvat about how bad-off I am. You can un-rot13 the previous sentence if you feel the need to read the low-level expletives I thought the OSM diary pages could do without.

I know it's my own fault for doing it all in one big blob, but who edits in Brisbane, anyway?

I had a dream about OpenStreetMap last night.

I had a dream that a fellow mapper in the area had micromapped some random town down to the nth degree. It was brilliant, and it made me realise we need some lovin' on the mapnik layer.

For the longest time it's been my opinion that there needs to be some kind of grid system to line up points and ways, because as it stands it's very difficult to get an accurate satellite trace turn out as an aesthetically pleasing map. The orthogonalise feature in JOSM is nice, but more often than not it will skew things differently, so you've got nice even buildings that are all out of line with each other.

With a lower resolution grid in the editor, you could sacrifice accuracy by a tiny margin but make everything look aligned and oh so much nicer. Imagine a street-front that's not all wonky! (My own case in point., it's just too difficult to line everything up.)

It's also my opinion that we need some nicer icons. This is something I can at least help with; if there's sufficient community support I can come up with a new scheme. I quite admire the CloudMade rendering, with the little tile-like images although perhaps if we were to come up with an unified OSM colour scheme, we could do even better.

I'm not sure if any of this is viable. Is there enough interest for a new icon scheme? Would a snap-to-grid feature in JOSM be all that useful? I don't know, discuss. :)

I was told I had to come up with an amusing blog post chronicling my adventures this afternoon, so this is it I guess.

Disclaimer: The following content may indeed not be amusing. Continue reading at your peril.

I mounted my bicycle this afternoon in the aim of cleaning up some more nonames and getting some footpaths I knew existed out of the way.

I loaded my phone up with maps, and headed off from my place and down the Boondall Wetlands bikeway. It took me through to the back of the entertainment centre, and the fun started from there.

I surveyed a few different bits (and quite a lot more than I'd intended to,) starting with the little grassed parkland at the edge of the wetlands. I continued through to take a trace of a long and seemingly completely useless footpath through the entertainment centre, and then went on a contorted journey around the streets of Boondall, collecting street names all the while.

It was really quite good, and nothing like the last time I tried to cycle-map. This time the area was (relatively) flat, and I presume the exercise I've been getting recently has given me more endurance. The only time I actually felt tired in the three hours of cycling was when I was powering down St Vincents Road on my way home, going a little faster than 30 km/hour.

I'd like to be able to say that after of all that, I've finally completed the area. There's still a bunch of dumb aisle roads through the car park in the entertainment centre though, as well as a dumb tertiary road through the southern-most estate that has three different names, of which I've only got two. Other than that the area's looking pretty good, and could probably be declared complete (to the right of Sandgate Road, at least,) after a little perfectionist landuse tweaking.

I've also been experimenting with multipolygon relations to punch holes in some of the larger areas, but judging by the render at the moment, I think I may have messed it up.

Just got home from the Brisbane OSM meet-up crossed with the local Twitterers' meetup, and thought I'd do the sensible thing and post a slightly drunken diary entry on OpenStreetMap. That's a logical thing to do, right?

It was a good night, in any case. David Dean organised pizzas early so by the time I arrived (and spent five or so minutes looking for everybody) the pizzas were already ready.

It was a pretty massive turnout by Brisbane OSM standards, there were seven people who actually turned up. I'm not sure if the others got lost (like I did) or just failed to show up, but though it was slightly less that I expected, it was still a great turn-out.

David did a JOSM demonstration, and there was some discussion of metadata and top secret projects.

After the place closed (at half past 8 PM) we went out and did a brief mapping expedition around the University campus before catching the ferry out to the other event.