Steve Hill's diary
Recent diary entries:
Oops, distractions :)I got a bit carried away today - I had intended to map a short section of road in Pantlasau and then go up near Clydach to fill in some missing roads and names. But I ended up finding an interesting looking footpath and curiosity got the better of me; so I spent the afternoon investigating that path and some tracks leading off it.
In the end I found myself at the *enormous* 275KV Swansea North electricity substation. And it was pretty loud too - you can hear the 50Hz buzz from the transformers a good couple of kilometres away from it. On the way back home I discovered a rather useful footpath crossing some fields to the North of the housing estate, so I can make use of that when I *actually* go up to Clydach to fix up these roads. :)
Posted by Steve Hill at Sat May 10 21:56:29 +0100 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
Damn! :(
It looks like there's something screwey with the tracks I'm recording while driving around. I have a computer in my car which runs Kismet. I plug my eTrex Venture GPS into it, letting Kismet record a track from the NMEA stream (via gpsd) and then process Kismet's GPS logs into GPX files. But I just compared one of the Kismet data sets with a track downloaded directly from the eTrex with gpsbabel and the tracks are consistently offset from each other by about 100 metres or so. So now I've got to work out where on earth the error is being introduced. The GPS is set to WGS84 and I presume Kismet is too dumb to try and do any kind of datum conversion on the coordinates so I'm a bit stumped.
Posted by Steve Hill at Sun May 04 19:19:01 +0100 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
More roads around Ynstawe
I've now mapped almost all the roads in the patch I have been working on, having done a stack more roads around the Ynstawe area. My Sunday afternoon stroll around the estate became unexpectedly long when I discovered the very pleasant footpath along the Clydach river and followed it all the way up to the Cwm Clydach nature reserve.
There are still quite a few little footpaths to do, but I probably won't do those at the moment - I think mapping the roads is a more productive use of time for now. However, I must walk along the Swansea Canal tow path at some point and map it. I've noticed that Google Maps gets it *completely* wrong, showing the canal joining the Clydach river - in reality the canal crosses the river as an aquaduct and continues a for few hundred metres South, whilst the river joins the Tawe just on the South-East side of the aquaduct.
I haven't quite worked out the best way to tag aquaducts though - setting waterway=aquaduct seems a bit silly since it doesn't let you specify the sort of waterway being carried (i.e. canal), so for now I have settled on bridge=yes instead.
Coordinates:Posted by Steve Hill at Mon Apr 21 11:03:01 +0100 2008
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Climbing routes
Summer has arrived (although still rather cold around here :) and it's time to get outdoors and do some rock climbing.
But I discovered that there seems to be no way to tag crags, routes, etc (well, there's the sport=climbing tag, but how to use it is rather ambiguous). So I've started putting together a set of tags:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Climbing
Representing vertical features is quite a difficult problem - at the moment I have opted to just mark the start of each route with a single node. However, I'm not sure how to show the difference between a path leading to the start of the route and one leading to the end - maybe the solution is to allow the use of ways to show the route, even though the start and end will often be practically on top of each other.
Posted by Steve Hill at Fri Apr 18 09:59:07 +0100 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
Gower coastline
I've been spending some time fixing up bits of the Gower coastline by tracing the (rather fuzzy) yahoo photos. For the most part, leaving the existing natural=coastline way where it is (which should be roughly the high tide line... ish) and filling in each beach as two areas - one inside the coastline and one outside the coastline with a water=tidal tag. I've been using surface=sand/rocky/etc. to describe the type of ground.
At the moment they are also tagged with natural=beach but I favour deprecating this tag since it is rather ambiguous and the surface tag should give enough information about how to render it.
I've drawn the tidal bits of beach down to the water line shown in the yahoo photos, which seems to be a lowish tide for most of the area. But Swansea Bay seems to be photographed at high tide, so this will be harder (I'm not wading through that knee-deep mud at low tide with a GPS! :)
Posted by Steve Hill at Tue Apr 15 15:14:44 +0100 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
Lifeboat stations
After some digging, it seems there is no documented way of tagging lifeboat stations and lifeboats. Tagwatch also didn't turn up anything especially obvious, so I've created a tagging proposal:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Lifeboat
I've tagged the Horton lifeboat station in accordance with this proposal. I may contact the RNLI to see if they will provide a copyright-free list of lifeboat stations and their locations (although I suspect they won't have the lat/lon for them all :( ).
Coordinates:Posted by Steve Hill at Sat Apr 12 20:17:39 +0100 2008
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Swansea wiki page
I've created a wiki page for Swansea:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Swansea
Hopefully this might generate a bit more interest in mapping the area, as well as allowing the mappers to jot notes on their progress and which areas they are mapping.
Posted by Steve Hill at Mon Apr 07 22:29:21 +0100 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
Home hiding
I noticed amillar's diary entry about hiding your home on GPS tracks so thought I'd mention a script I wrote to process GPX files:
http://public.subversion.nexusuk.org/projects/kismet-tools/trunk/gpx_trim.py
This lets you specify bounding boxes - any track segments starting or ending in the bounding boxes will be trimmed to remove the bits contained in the box. If the track just goes through the bounding box instead of starting/ending in it, it is left as-is.
Posted by Steve Hill at Thu Apr 03 12:33:15 +0100 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
New OpenPisteMap data
Yesterday's planet.osm has now been imported into OpenPisteMap - things will be a bit slow since the tile cache has been purged.
It looks like quite a lot of new piste map data is in there, some of the resorts are looking fairly complete.
Posted by Steve Hill at Thu Mar 27 09:31:21 +0000 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 3 comments
Contours in OpenPisteMap
I've now got contours rendering on http://openpistemap.org thanks to the very helpful Contours wiki page created by Gravitystorm (of cycle map fame) (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Contours).
I've taken a slightly different approach, which I think is a bit neater - instead of leaving the contours data as shapefiles I have imported it into PostGIS. I've updated the Contours wiki page with this alternative method.
The piste map is now rendering the whole planet data set rather than just one resort (but it won't update regularly yet), and it will render contours for most of the European ski resorts. I need to work out which bits of other continents I should be including contour data for (let me know if there's anywhere I've missed).
Posted by Steve Hill at Thu Mar 13 10:11:09 +0000 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments
OpenPisteMap
I've got http://openpistemap.org in a vaguely working state, but it still needs a *lot* of work. At the moment it is only rendering data in the Verbier - Zermatt region and won't automatically render new data.
I've had a go at setting up a contour map on it as well, but so far haven't had much success... generate_tiles.py chucks up lots of "proj_init_error:failed to initialize projection with:+proj=latlong" after working through most of
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Contours_on_the_Cycle_Map, so that's something to continue fiddling with tomorrow.
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More Mapnik fiddling
So anyway, I've got Mapnik working and I'm starting to play with setting up contour data (and wow, that needs serious amounts of disk space!)
One thing that's bugging me though, is how to get OpenLayers to use degrees for the permalink? OSM itself seems to do it, but my code (and the OSM cycle map) don't... I tried swiping the "new OpenLayers.Map()" usage from OSM but it's still not happening...
Posted by Steve Hill at Sat Mar 08 14:32:31 +0000 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 3 comments
Setting up Mapnik
I've been trying to set up Mapnik, but I've hit a problem...
Trying to import the coastlines with shp2pgsql gives me errors:
INSERT INTO "shoreline_a" ("error","tile_x","tile_y",way) VALUES ('0','17','286','SRID=900913;0106000000010000000103000000010000000200000000000060307C71C1522159370A6F604100000060307C71C1522159370A6F6041');
ERROR: geometry requires more points
Followed by lots of:
ERROR: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block
This is running under CentOS 5.1 with postgis-1.3.2-1.el5.rf - can't see any useful references to this error in Google though. :(
Posted by Steve Hill at Tue Mar 04 10:19:37 +0000 2008Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 1 comment
Switzerland's 4 Vallées
Just got back from a week of skiing in Verbier. Snow conditions weren't great so most of the time was spent on the upper slopes. My GPS (eTrex Venture) will only store 2048 points, so I had it set to record a point "least often" - I didn't take a computer with me to download the points to, so I got about 2.5 days' worth of data for the end of the week.
I've mapped the tracks I've got - lots of the upper lifts and pistes, including the black mogul run from Mont Fort (which I ended up doing in white-out conditions (!). I'll try and get tracks from one of the snowboarders in the group who was downloading the contents of his GPS every day, which should cover much more of the Verbier pistes, right down to the bottom of the Medran lift.
Sadly, Mapnik and Osma don't render pistes, although the chairlifts, gondolas and cablecars are rendered (is anyone rendering the pistes on another server? Maybe I should set one up...). I've tagged the tracks as proposed by http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Piste_Maps so drag lifts are marked as piste:lift rather than arielway.
Coordinates:Posted by Steve Hill at Mon Mar 03 12:07:16 +0000 2008
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