Does anyone know what is going on? I can't get to various pages, including 'GPS Traces', and 'My traces'. The error is '403 Forbidden'.

I have uploaded my Limerick talk, 'CartoType & OpenStreetMap' to SlideShare, under that name, with obvious tags including SOTM and OpenStreetMap.

I gave a talk at the State of the Map conference at Limerick and some people were interested in CartoType's CTM1 data format, mainly because it is very compact (UK data = 37Mb; Germany = 50Mb). I have documented it and made it freely available with an attribution license: see http://www.cartotype.com/cartotype_map_data_format_type_1.html.

I walked round the lanes near Kensworth this morning, stopping off at Yogi Patel's newsagent (which I shall mark on the map) to get my Telegraph. The Garmin Forerunner 305 I use for my running seems to work very well, collecting a trackpoint every few seconds.

I've finally got the CartoType demo program for Windows Mobile 5 on-line: see www.cartotype.com for details. It's a 16MB download that contains the complete OSM map of the UK in compressed form.

It's not a polished app but shows that CartoType can render high-quality maps on demand on small devices.

I've hacked up a viewer program that runs on Windows Mobile using CartoType, my map rendering library (www.cartotype.com). The UK OSM data compresses down to about 27MB. The style sheet gives a display that looks very similar to Mapnik's rendering; the viewer renders on the fly and the map can be zoomed out to show the whole of the UK, or right in to street level. By this evening I should have the program, data file, and style sheet up on the CartoType web site for free download; and also the data conversion tool, so that anyone who wants can make new CartoType map data files (CTM1 files) from OSM data.

I'll also make the Windows XP version available. It uses the same data file.

Well, I compiled the UK data into CartoType format and this was the result:

06/04/2008 00:06 26,632,558 uk-080123.ctm1
26/01/2008 18:45 696,113,272 uk-080123.osm

That is, the CartoType CTM1 file is under 27MB for the whole of Britain. It seems to work fine using the Windows viewer. Tomorrow if I have time I'll load it on to the Windows Mobile viewer and see if it works acceptably fast.

I've had a long session today of improving CartoType's conversion of OSM data to its own format (CTM1 = CartoType Map format type 1) and writing a new style sheet to display OSM data more as it should look, and after quite a struggle I've met with some success. To recap, CartoType is a map rendering library that runs on mobile OSs like Symbian and Windows Mobile as well as on Windows (and Linux, Mac, etc.) It is not open source, but I shall make CartoType map viewer programs freely available, as well as the data conversion tool, style sheets, etc., so that people can look at the whole of the UK on their mobile phone without having to go online. The OSM data for the UK should fit into about 35MB in CTM1 form, so that's quite manageable.

I supply a map rendering and route-finding library called CartoType. I've now written a tool to convert OSM data to CartoType's native data format, which is very compact (the whole of Greater London fits in 6MB). This means that using map viewing programs that I shall put up on the CartoType web site (www.cartotype.com) anybody will be able to use OSM-derived maps on Windows Mobile devices without the need to be on line to the OSM server.

CartoType runs on ordinary Windows (XP etc.) Windows Mobile, Symbian OS and Palm OS.