I figured id write it in here, in case anyone can chime in.

I am working on the outline map, and using xapi to grab the large amount of data. .. as an OSM file, these files are big, however, when i convert them to IMG files. .there smaller. Considerably smaller, in that its possible to have all OSM data for Canada in a complete Canada mapset.
What im doing is creating a set defines tile area, in which the boundaries don't get messed up with too much overlap of data. .. trying to make it so that full city areas are all in the same tile region, and so its only a few road segments which might get duplicated.

Cloudemade: I see that it hasn't yet been organized, as a few downloads for IMG tiles. .. thats probably because of the sheer scale of it.
So when small isolated towns in the north (for example) yet OSM'd then it takes a whole lot of power to get all that data and converted again.

What would be wild is this:

Using Marble Desktop, to be able to grad the area your looking at, and save it as an OSM file. .. or better yet. with a extra couple mouse clicks, to have it automatically run mkgmap program in DOS, as the file just needs to be saved as data.osm, and it automatically gets saved as the same #'d tile. .. so ....
What would be cool would be to have a program where it automatically asks me to save that .img file SaveAs then i would change the name.

Is there an international standard for tile numbering? .. for GeoBase it seems pretty good, as I'm using 72 as the prefix as it corresponds to 'G' 'B' and then 2 3 digit tile areas. .. if the planet is divided into squares from the equator to the poles. .. cant we have a '1' for possitive and a '0' for negative ..
so then when describing the tile, its 10490123 .. meaning positive 049N and negative 123W .... so then we can have 1 degree tiles available all over the planet. with 1 mouse click to grab the osm data and convert it to IMG.

Enough random thoughts. .. Just got excited when i downloaded Marble Desktop. .. kept the mice turning :)