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Anders Lund's Diary

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Driving around, traceing

Posted by Anders Lund on 4 January 2009 in English.

Got a notice about an error nearby where I live, so when I had to go for a ride, I started my GPS to record a track. You can see it here:
osm.org/user/Anders%20Lund/traces/287044

To cover the three roads I wanted to, I had to drive three times, one time getting on to the highway. My Nokia N95 performed way better than I would have hoped and it was 'fun' to do.

Other than that, I have translated some more Wiki and fixing some errors reported at OpenStreetBug:
http://openstreetbugs.appspot.com/

Going into details

Posted by Anders Lund on 1 January 2009 in English.

Doing nothing on the first day of the year, I thought I would create some GPS traces for the nearby shopping mall's parking lot. It took me about 40 minutes to drive all the roads.

When I came home, I started adding the road information for the parking lot to OSM. I note about the parking lot, is that it have been renewed a year ago, so the Yahoo images where of limited use.

But how many details should one add? I mean - it's a parking lot! But then again, its a big one (for danish standards).

One thing I learned, was that I should have made some more small traces instead of the one big one i did. Some places, there are two levels of parking, just covering each other a little. Here it would have been nice, if I could turn the trace layers on and of in the editor.

Location: Den gule By, Høje Taastrup, Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup Municipality, Capital Region of Denmark, 2630, Denmark

Translating

Posted by Anders Lund on 30 December 2008 in English.

Wow ... I think I have broken all my other records, regarding contributing to online projects. Well, I have multiple years of CPU time donated to various distributed projects, but not where I (me, myself) have spent so much time on making a project better.

Tonight I have helped translating some portions of the Wiki to Danish. This is my first translation job, so I hope that my fellow danes will accept my work. Otherwise, they can do it them self.

I have also spent some time reading on how to get better at map editing and tried installing Merkaartor a nice program, when you get to now its way to work. :)

Tiles@Home

Posted by Anders Lund on 30 December 2008 in English.

Tried to view some of the corrections I made some days ago, I could not see them. Switching to the editor showed that the changes where there, but not on the "real" map.

After a brief search I found this FAQ:
osm.wiki/FAQ#I_have_just_made_some_changes_to_the_map._How_do_I_get_to_see_my_changes.3F
It opened my eyes to the next page:
osm.wiki/Tiles%40home

What? They have a distributed client, that is used to render the maps - or tiles as it's called. Cool! I saw that there where a nice Windows installer ... that failed. In the discussion, I saw that others had the same problem as I had. So I tried installing it manually, only to fail. Then I saw that there is a virtualbox download, where everying is (almost, you need to do one tiny thing to get it completely installed) installed:
osm.wiki/Virtual_Tiles%40Home

I downloaded the Ubuntu version, as it is the most current. Fast download via BitTorrent, quick setup with VirtualBox (that I have never used before). It got up and running real fast.

The way it works is like most other distributed projects:
- Client running at a users computer
- Server on insternet has job for client
- client download job from server
- client process the job (creating new tiles)
- client uploads result to server
- client waits for next job

I love distributed computing, but don't want to run it all the time. I'm on a notebook, that can get very noisy when it has to work 100% all the time. This is where tiles@home is great. I start it when I want to, let it run for some time and then shut it down. The work unites are quickly processed, so you will see the results quick.

Location: Den gule By, Høje Taastrup, Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup Municipality, Capital Region of Denmark, 2630, Denmark

Using N95 as a tracker

Posted by Anders Lund on 25 December 2008 in English.

I'm new here as an tracker, but created an account here about a year ago.
Recently moved and invested in a Tomtom GPS unit with Map Share, that lets you edit details about the map and upload it to Tomtom. Now I wanted to make some of these changes available to the OpenStreetMap project.

For the tracking purpose I use my Nokia N95 and the Nokia Sports Tracker application, that have GPX export functionality. This works great.

After tracking some small uncharted roads around my apartment, I started editing the OSM map. Some of the editing I have done evolve creating new roads, deleting some (on map, but no longer in reality) roads, changing one-way streets and types of roads, I now have a good sense of how it works.

Now I just need to find a navigation application for my N95, that uses OpenStreetMap. :-)

Location: Den gule By, Høje Taastrup, Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup Municipality, Capital Region of Denmark, 2630, Denmark