In my last post I wrote about the Brazilian community's project B250C that have as a goal to connect the most important cities in Brazil together, like the americans did with their TIGRE 250 Cities project. Somebody asked me about why not route between capitals and I got two ideas. I have started to twiddle with the scripts and stuff, now I need to get home (so I have internet connection) and talk to the hosts of my website to get them to accept that the Ruby scripts run monthly.
I look into making 3 distance tables, one with the 79 municipals of Espírito Santo state, one with all the capital cities of mainland South America (no point in getting distances to Stanley, Falkland Islands and Grytviken, SGSSI), and one for cities along the Pan American Highway. When these distance tables are in place with regular updates, than I will link to them from the respective WikiProject pages, so that anybody working on the various projects might see the status of their jobs.
These scripts are my first hacks on Ruby (I have no clue why I waited this long before looking at that), and will try to see what I can do with that. Maybe I can get some of my other programming projects going again based on Ruby? Ruby seems like a simple, robust, intelligent, powerfull, lightweight, highlevel, lowlevel, object oriented, scripting, programming language, just what I have been looking for.
While browsing through the list of cities for the Pan American Highway I ended up browsing my web-browser to the Panama Canal, opening it in Potlatch with Yahoo, and actually doing some edits on the canal itself. I noticed that the canal was interupted at the locks, that have been fixed. I also noticed that the semi-legal/physical size restrictions was not tagged on the canal. I do not think that anybody who are in the vicinity of these limits actually use OSM for planning passages through the canal, but it is a nice knowto, to see PANAMAX tagged on the canal. I didn't tag it with PANAMAX, but with maxlength, maxwidth, maxdraft, and maxairdraft with metric values. PANAMAX is a clear definition, with descriptions in both imperial and metric. The limits are noted in feet and inches and as well in meters and decimals. Now I should have tagged the two bridges with maxheight:marine or something so that they can be rendered with the corresponding free height symbol on OpenSeaMap or other maritime derived maps on OSM data.