Last night a 8.8-magnitude earthquake hit the central regions of Chile.

The most damaged area is located between the Regions of Maule and Biobio, specially in big cities like Concepción, Talca, Curico and Chillan (the city jail, after 200 prisoners escaped http://img162.yfrog.com/i/ua9a.jpg/), but also in smaller towns like Cauquenes (near the epicentre), Chanco and others, and in coastal towns and cities like Constitución, Dichato, and this afternoon Talcahuano. Also the Robinson Crusoe Island in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago was razed by the sea: http://twitpic.com/15qhe2 http://twitpic.com/15qfpg http://twitpic.com/15qg40

The quake hit hard even 850 kilometres north of the epicentre in La Serena osm.org/go/MbM0xA--. I live in Santiago osm.org/go/MaKekN-- 400 kilometres north of the epicentre and the movement was terrible, the walls from my apartment cracked (not structural compromise as far as I see, but a clear reminder of how much the building moved). The church in front of my apartment http://www.flickr.com/photos/julio_costa/4392508348/.

My mother was near Dichato about 60 Kilometres south of the epicentre and when we finally talked this morning she depicted a nightmarish sight. Houses floating in the small bay and boats in the middle of the town. The town was razed by the sea as the houses from the resort where she was staying (she was at a higher level apartment, so leaving aside the structural risks from the terrible movement she was safe).

Right now the news channels are showing the devastation in the small coastal towns from the Maule Region. It looks pretty much like the Southeastern Asia tsunami from 2004.

You can see some photos and read a New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/americas/28chile.html?hp

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Yesterday morning Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile, announced a new line for the Metro de Santiago (Santiagos Subway service). The new "Línea 6" (L6) will be finished by 2014, but the presentation video and the press announcement explained pretty well the route of it, and the combinations with trains and other subway lines, so I decided to map it now and tagged it with construction=yes in the line and the stations, also putting a note to the station names with something that reads like "(to be opened in 2014)".

It is really nice to see the location of the stations and the proporcion of the line in a more realistic scale (OSM Vs Metro de Santiago Maps).

The Press Release (in Spanish): http://www.metrosantiago.cl/metro_ciudad_detalle.php?c=8757150decbd89b0f5442ca3db4d0e0e

The Video presentation for the new line:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx5mXeE4qT8

Thank you very much for responding so fast to my translation request (osm.org/user/Zambelli%20Limitada/diary/8587).

All the credit for this work goes to "Mac do" from Dortmund (osm.wiki/User:Mac_do).

osm.wiki/DE:Genova%26OSMit2010

If someone wants to translate the PDF for this bid (osm.wiki/DE:Genova%26OSMit2010#Bewerbung) that would be great too.

Thanks again.

A German translation for Genoas SoTM2010 bid sounds like a good idea

osm.wiki/State_Of_The_Map_2010/Bid/Genova%26OSMit2010

Now that the bid is in English and Spanish (Wiki and PDF proposal), the natural thing to do is to translate it to German (most OSM mappers native language) and of course to Italian (the bidding city local language).

Thank you very much for any translation effort.

P.S. Some photos from the southern coast of the Liguria (mostly in a one hour train trip radius from Genoa), this were taken during the Autumn of 2007 (imagine the place during the summer) in Portofino (osm.org/go/xX2ApLYK--), Santa Margherita Ligure (osm.org/go/xX2A8zYx--), Sestri Levante (osm.org/go/xXzdvHlC--) and the Cinque Terre National Park (osm.org/go/xXz4I20):

http://bit.ly/LMC0i
http://bit.ly/aX5la
http://bit.ly/21xl4F
http://bit.ly/25NImD
http://bit.ly/1szDmd
http://bit.ly/3nvr9p
http://bit.ly/4qFwVz
http://bit.ly/3BjVki

Yesterday we had our first mapping party and it was great. We talked about walking-papers, navit, gosmore, data loggers and much more.

I wrote about it (in spanish) at the OpenStreetMap Chile Blog:

http://blog.openstreetmap.cl/

It seams like the CloudMade Tiles (Regular and Style Editor Customs) are being rendered up to date right now.

Thank you for that

I have notice some changes in the Mapnik render of this week.

Some of them were necessary (new icons for Restaurants, Fuel Stations, Bus Stops, Banks, ATMs, Hotels, Coffee Shops, Airports, etc.).

Some are neutral (New icons for Parking and Churches).

But other things do not look that nice (from the most annoying to the "it does not look good"):

-Everything is in a lighter color.
-Primaries, Secondaries, and Trunks without borders (at some zoom levels) or with very thin borders (at higher zoom levels) (CloudMade style).
-The train station icon is a small square instead of the regular red dot.

What do you thing of this changes? Are they permanent?

As I wrote a few days ago, the Eastern Island coastline is not rendering right, the same problem with part of the New Jersey Coast line was solved during last night render. I don't know why but Cayman Island is also having the same issue.

It would be really nice if one of the more skilled editors can take a look at it. Thanks in advance.

In my last post I forgot to say that an aparently similar coastline problem is present in New Jersey and Staten Island. Starting by the north in the Hudson River coast just in front of Yonkers, ending around Long Branch, NJ in the Atlantic coast by the south.

I just checked Eastern Island (Rapa Nui), and find out that it is pretty much traced. But it isn't rendering right. I compared the coastline trace with some of the well rendered islands in the caribean and they look the same.

Does anybody know whats wrong with it?

I have been working (technically and conceptually) for some time to implement a local website for the OpenStreetMap project. The rest of the local contributors seam to be very interested in the idea of a local site (in our language) that helps to make the project well known and understood among the rest of the community.

The initial idea is to put in place an front page wish is a full page map, with a header containing some buttons to get to a Blog and OpenStreetMap.org, and a footer explaining the (cc) License that covers the map data, and giving credit to all the parts involved.

Most of the front page work is done, but I just can not figure out how to lower the navigation tools and the button to access the layer selection. I am not a javascript expert so I guessed the people that work with the OpenStreetMap.org Openlayer interface could help me with this.

I almost send this post without the URL for the site :)

http://www.openstreetmap.cl/

Thank you very much for your comments and help.

Cheers,

Julio Costa

Dear Admins,

I do not know if it is possible to develop a "period of time/traces upload limit" (by file weight, since the number of points is not determined till later, and the numbers of traces is not a reliable way of measuring it, with the software that I am using to track with my BB I hardly make a file with more than 700 points). I have been checking why there are so many queued files today (with a queue of more than 7 hours), and checking the list found that the user Romania Tracks uploaded tens (if not hundreds) of traces ranging from 4.000 to 12.000 points each, obviously delaying the queue. I seriously doubt that he or she is going to use all those points (We are talking of at least a couple of hundred thousands) in the short term, so I really do not see any use in uploading all of them at once, delaying all the rest of the users work.

Thank you very much for reading this

I have been mapping my hometown (Viña del Mar, Chile) for the last couple of weeks. It is a medium size metropolitan area with about eight hundred thousand people living on it, and I am the first one mapping the city in OSM!!!

Until today I did it with a GPS/Bluetooth gadget and my laptop running Navit (with logging configured in the configuration xml file) over Ubuntu 7.10 (It was a real PITS since the resulting gpx files didn't had the right sintax for OSM so I had to worked them to add a time tag, also I was limited to the laptop battery life), but today I found a really nice piece of free software for my Blackberry 8100. It is called bbTracker (http://www.bbtracker.org/). Once it is installed in your smartphone you have to configure it to connect to your Bluetooth GPS (It is not included with your BB but it's quite cheap, probably less than 50 dollars), and you start making tracks (showing you the advances in the screen of the BB), and export those tracks in a gpx file, fully compatible with OSM :) You can configure it to save the files in a folder of your SD card (I am saving it in the Video folder and works flawlessly) and then you can extract all your tracks with your preferred BB management software or a card reader (I just connect the BB with a USB cable and see it as an external drive).

Conclusion, no more laptops in the car (bulky, with the risk of being robed, with the risk of damaging the HD with the jumps, battery life limits, etc.), just my BlackBerry and the GPS/Bluetooth gadget that is even smaller than the smartphone.

Cheers