Blog of Richard Fairhurst: editor, http://cycle.travel; cartographer, writer, developer and canal person.
We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history. It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes…
The consultation for Oxford’s latest traffic plan closes today (13th October). The plan envisages six ANPR-enforced traffic filters across the city, but with so many exemptions (including vans and HGVs, plus private cars up to 100 days per year per resident) that the result is expected to be only a 20% cut in traffic, or 35% in the very centre. Cycling groups have largely lined up behind it. The…
Optimise your Postgres setup, they said. It’ll make your rendering faster, they said. So I did. Over months. I followed every guide I could find. I now have more indexes than the Yellow Pages printing contract. I have set work_mem to somewhere in the region of 27 petabytes. And yet my rendering was still dog-slow. Generating tiles while watching the query log, I noticed that tile generation would…
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes. What fascinates me is how the comparison is implicitly phrased. Apple Maps is fighting on Google Maps’ turf, and Justin O’Beirne never…
I’ve recently purchased an LG 360 Cam , a cute little 360° camera that fits in your pocket and takes serviceable spherical panoramas. I’m hoping to use it for occasional OpenStreetView surveying, cycle.travel photography, and a couple of other projects. This post is a placeholder for notes and observations. Using the LG 360 Cam with an iPhone 5C In a display of WTFery that will only be a surprise…
Vector tiles are the breakthrough technology for OpenStreetMap right now – enabling in-device rendering, fast style prototyping, full interactivity, and really awesome tech demos . The manifesto was set out compellingly by Michal Migurski in 2013 , who wrote of “the liberty of postgreslessness”: “Data is one of OpenStreetMap’s biggest pain points. The latest planet file is 27GB, and getting OSM…
The licence will stay as ODbL. Moving to a different licence requires a two-thirds majority of active OSM contributors. Active OSM contributors do not want to change the licence. Even a cursory reading of any comments section shows this. To achieve change, you need skin in the game. For 10 years the “geo industry” has been telling OSM that what it does is impossible/misguided/wrong. For 10 years…
I've been involved in OpenStreetMap for almost ten years now. 22nd November is my OSM birthday . Message 000111. Right now talk@ is up to 71235, never mind the other lists. I should have a birthday (mapping) party with cake and we can all go to the Rose & Crown, get drunk, come back and write intemperate mailing list postings. Maybe not. OSM has changed my life, and my outlook, in several ways.…
We cycled the Swiss part of the Rhine Cycleway last week, with our folding bikes neatly stowed in suitcases for the flight. A combination of cycle.travel (natch), the Cicerone guide, and the excellent MapOut app guided us safely along the way: a very modern combination of mapping styles. Wandering around Zürich, waiting for our flight home, I was intrigued by this cycle map in the window of a…
One of the most interesting questions posed by a talk at today’s State of the Map EU was “Is OpenStreetMap a world map or a set of regional maps?” Regional (and sub-regional) differences in tagging are one of the challenges I’ve faced while building out cycle.travel ’s coverage to Western Europe. As a simple example, highway=track (on its own) on the European mainland generally means somewhere you…