Can't you just upgrade your Java installation? What operating system are you running?

And do you mean Potlatch won't take your GPX track which is exclusively waypoints with no track data?

I'm afraid not. JOSM keeps its data in memory. Sometimes it's possible on systems like Linux which support this to take a dump of memory right after this happens, I've managed to save e.g. browser forms this way. But for complex Java datastructures that JOSM uses it's going to take a lot more work than 3 hours of work to piece that together from a raw memory dump.

Did you note why JOSM crashed? Did it display a backtrace? If so (and in the future) you should file things like these in its bugtracker so that they won't happen in the future.

JOSM also has really good support for multiple changesets now and other things that make it easy to keep uploading data to the server without compromising the quality of your changesets or edit summaries. I rarely edit with JOSM for more than 10 minutes without uploading to the server now.

For what it's worth some of those blog postings are probably from countries where major highways still need to be mapped. Some people just aren't interested in mapping big things with little relevance to their personal lives and prefer to map things closer to them.

You can duplicate anything in the selection list. So just select the relation by going to the relation dialog and clicking the "Set the current relation to the list of selected relations" in the lower-right corner and then do Ctrl+D.

You could also use the search engine to find it & select it, e.g. by searching for "type:relation modified".

Did the aerial photo you used have appropriate licensing for use with OpenStreetMap? If so you should upload it to Wikimedia Commons.

Is the source for your script available? I have a similar database I haven't processed for Iceland. It might be interesting to render it like that.

It only has street names / postal codes though. Not house numbers.

That's very neat but also very resource intensive. After running it for 20 minutes on my laptop it was taking up 500 MB of resident memory along with a steady 25% of CPU, spiking up to 60% or so (presumably when it did updates.

That's on a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of physical memory.

The program is now (after a long while) in SVN and on the wiki.

The warning about it being easy to move large ways in JOSM doesn't apply anymore. JOSM will display a confirmation dialog if you move a way with more than 20 nodes now.

You can turn it off permanently of course if that sort of thing bothers you.

Hello Kevin. Good to hear that you're interested.

Other people can and will help you. The best way to get help is probably to sign up for our mailing lists. E.g. the general talk mailing lists or the newbies mailing list.

People can only help you if you have any specific inquiries, is there anything in particular you need help with?

With regards to getting mapping done there's some help other people can give you but (and especially for Africa) if you want something done you're basically going to have to do it yourself. And recruit other people to help you.

The first thing you should do is get in contact with other mappers in Sierra Leone. Look at the data for Freetown and see who's been making the most edits to it. Currently the top contributor for Freetown is Dave Stanley followed by Waldrunner.

Best of luck.

Perhaps you should request a SVN account and add your projects(s) to the OSM svn?

You can email Tom Hughes to request access.

Tordanik: Sorry about that. I just used slideshare because it was the first website that came to mind when sharing my slides. If someone can point out a website that sucks less please do. I couldn't upload them to WM Commons because it contains some imagery I haven't properly attributed (some things from random Google image searches).

You can also download them here (PDF and ODF) but I won't host things at that location forever.

My talk was recorded and will (probably) be here once it's uploaded tomorrow.

dankarran: I think they are, although the room I'm in isn't being streamed live at the streaming website I think.

Did you read this bit on the wiki about Geonames not being a usable datasource for OpenStreetMap?

Zaŝa: You can zoom in, but sometimes you'll get a blank screen so you'll have to wait a bit before that area gets rendered.

My crappy thrown-together tilebrowser doesn't have the "More OSM Coming soon" 404 tile so it's not as friendly.

A reply of mine to the mailing list should answer the three above comments.

To summarize: Neat-o, want to work on it ? :)

You can also take screenshots of the device itself over USB. QLandkarte supports this and Garmin also has some proprietary utility for this if you're running Windows.

smsm1: Yeah, we tried the Potlatch emulation mode briefly too.

It works just fine here in Opera 9.64, and the feature hasn't been there for weeks, just a few days. Previously you could only look at the area that contained the relation, but now you can have it drawn on the map.

The same goes for nodes & ways.