In Leicester this weekend. Finished the Leicester suburban villages of Scraptoft, Thurnby, and Bushby, and did some more of Evington. Found all sorts of twiddly bits in Thurnby that we didn't know existed. Annoyingly 2036,1341 seems to be stuck in queue, although 2035,1341 - with far more stuff on it - has updated fine.

Also did a footpath, that I remember from my childhood, over fields between Evington and Thurnby. I always wondered where exactly it went. Well, I know now. Quite a short walk, and my lift had arrived at the other end only barely before I arrived (having gone the long way round).

Tagged various random county boundaries as well - Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire/South Yorkshire variously. This is traced from the NPE. Have been careful around Sheffield, since this has changed since the 1950s there - probably needs someone to survey this on the ground if possible. There is a variance around Finningley, also. Eventual aim with these boundaries is to allow the namefinder to know about them, so "pubs in Rutland" will do what you expect (without needing is_in tags filled in).

With a few free hours, I headed over the Snake Pass to Sheffield this morning. Temporary traffic lights, Nissan Micras seemingly unable to take corners above 25mph and a slightly later set off than I was hoping for meant I arrived in Sheffield pretty late. Luckily, I just caught the other mappers on their way out of the Mappin Building (quite an apt name for the project!).

Up until now, I've either used other people's public GPS traces, or the Yahoo imagery to do my mapping. Today was the first with the GPS in hand. With a quick run-through of the GPS functions, it was onto the streets.

In the morning session, I think I'd covered almost 10 km on foot, but barely covered even a quarter of the land area inside the inner-ring road. Hopefully it should be reasonably complete - apart from a couple of roads where the street name-plate looks to have been stolen for the scrap metal value.

The afternoon session seemed to have been abandoned perhaps due to poorer than expected turnouts - and the possibility of an April re-meet in Sheffield.

Anyway, good to meet a couple of other OSMers. Maybe I'll be tempted to go to the Liverpool meet in mid-November.

...more of the NCN today: Swinbrook to Asthall Leigh on Regional Route 47 (Oxfordshire). A very pleasant two miles, though, not least because the Swan in Swinbrook has Westons Organic Vintage behind the bar.

And it still makes me laugh that though OSM has become a massive world-dominating project with users from at least eight continents ("and remember - there are only seven!" [1]), I can still upload my GPS track and find it's three places in front of someone else's track captured about six miles from Charlbury.

If the weather holds, I'll get another chunk of the NCN next Saturday.

[1] sorry, obscure Monty Python reference

Das Wetter war toll, und das habt ihr nun davon: Der Wilseder Berg ist erfasst, außerdem etwas mehr von Undeloh. Aber die Gegend bietet noch sehr viel Platz für Mapper....

I've been cleaning up some bits of Stuttgart this evening using Potlatch and the Yahoo! aerial imagery. It's amazing how much of my old data based on GPS tracks was inaccurate.

Working my way through Aiguelongue. 'Zone 2' today. Also cycled out to Jacou along tramway ligne 2. Will upload tracks for that.

Doing around where I live.

I just got pointed (Thanks, TomH!) To Ackman's diary entry complaining about the MassGIS import blowing away data. This is a very bad thing :/ The MassGIS import was never meant to make someone else's mapping efforts go away. Before starting the import, we had explored any part of the state that seemed to have existing data, and (due to timing, it looks like) missed some new efforts in the past couple weeks.

For the record, we have full records of all the uploads, and each upload has a specific tag that will allow us to remove all elements uploaded by a specific upload. All you have to do is send the town IDs from:

http://www.mass.gov/mgis/townlis.htm

to me (crschmidt@crschmidt.net) and we'll either pull it off the list of things to be uploaded, or we'll remove it if it's already imported and causing problems.

Again, apologies to Ackman for making his mapping efforts more difficult: hopefully he sees either the private message or this and lets me know how I can help clean up the area he's working in so it's easy to work in again.

Arbeite derzeit am Nordwesten Wiens.
Wer pos. und neg. Kritik hat bitte melden.

I'm very angry this morning. Someone went over my maps and put the MASSGIS crap over what i did. What gives?

this is my first contact to open street map project and i just played with my laptop and my gps mouse....

Ich bastele gerade an Haar, meiner Heimatstadt. Bin noch neu, Prüfung meiner Arbeit und Kritik sind deshalb sehr willkommen!

Phil

Just joined the project today and emailed my 2 closest neighbours. Lets see where we go from here :-)

I've been continuing to work on the East Riding of Yorkshire, with plenty still to do. The new API has speeded up the uploads and downloads - I guess segments nearly doubled the data. Rendering is clearly now struggling. Blue tiles and blank tiles are appearing and renders are sometimes taking a few minutes and sometimes a couple of DAYS. I don't have the resources to run tiles@home so it's hard for me to complain, but it is off-putting to see your work disappear under a blank or blue tile, or to wait days to see what mistakes you've made, even though the data is safe.

On the upside, more villages are complete and Hull has a little more detail, and I'm enjoying the experience.

Interesting article on Linux.com about how hard the import is proving. Seems it still has about a year to run.

http://www.linux.com/feature/119493

Bizarrely this article is dated tomorrow and several others have future dates.

I named some streets in vienne. In mapnic my changes are still visible. With osmarenderer my changes aren't visible anymore.

What happens there?

Started tracing Rivett and Chapman, Done most of the street names in Rivett

Put the date for next year's State of the Map conference in your diaries: July 12th-13th, 2008.

The location? Well, that's where you can help.

We have not yet settled on a location. It doesn't have to be in the UK again - but it could be. It doesn't have to be 'terra incognita' for OSM (not much mapping was done at Manchester) - but, again, it could be.

But here's what it does need to have:

• Enthusiastic local OSMers who can help organise it, and who have good contacts with potential venue. Manchester worked so well because there were people on the ground prepared to put the hours in.
  
• Good transport links. We want to encourage at least as good a turn-out as this year, hopefully better.
  
• A site equally suitable for learning, discussing and socialising.
  
• A technology-aware venue - obviously, we need projectors, Internet connectivity, etc.
  

Like everything else in OSM, this is a call for volunteers - but the OpenStreetMap Foundation will, of course, pay reasonable expenses involved in arranging the venue. If you're prepared to help OSM by putting the time in, you won't be out of pocket.

SOTM 2007 was a huge success. Let's make 2008 better still.

(Please feel free to circulate this to your national mailing list if you'd like to host SOTM in your country.)

Richard
on behalf of the OpenStreetMap Foundation

I've spent some time this evening improving the friends feature here on openstreetmap.org, so you will soon be able to add and remove friends (they'll get a notification by email when you add them) and view that list of friends from your profile page. Hopefully soon we'll be able to do some more things like filtering diary entries by your friends, etc.

Segments are no more!

I've been waiting for this change for a while. Ever since I started trying to do stuff with the data. Segments always seemed like an extra hoop to jump through. So in theory I should be able to get on with some of the things I've been wanting to do for a while. I shall see...

Just trying out the segmentless JOSM. There's a few residential streets I mapped once but never properly tagged. It was the mass of cul-de-sacs that got me. Having failed to photograph the time from my GPS for the purposes of syncing with the camera, I couldn't work out what any particular road was meant to me. I've now gone back to it and by trial and error have got most of it done properly.

I expect I'll have to check this area when I go out that way again. For now, though, the longer single roads towards the city centre seem a little more appealing.