most of the time clicking on the edit mode (saved or immediate) has no effect, but finally I was able to click "saved" and got a cursor that looks like an ancient pen tip. I can't do anything with it, clicking does nothing.

i know, most of my "diary" posts have been grouching about something or another, but i'm finally seeing good results in my local area. thanks to everyone at OSM for a great job. using the 'search' box for 'pubs near columbus' actually brings up only the two i mapped, including my shebeen! and there are umpteen other towns in the US named Columbus, including a rather large city in Ohio, but i guess nobody has mapped them yet...

There's a stretch of a few city blocks in El Paso, Texas, on North Mesa just East of I-10, that isn't rendering in Mapnik. It's fine in OSMArender. Any ideas?

Just finished tracing Airport Road, "way" #5055285, finishing the 70-plus mile route between Columbus, NM and El Paso, Texas. Yeah! Time for a beer.

i've carried
I-10 across your threshold, hope you and Phoenix can take it from there... that missing stretch might reappear as mysteriously as it disappeared, or someone (maybe i) may need to add it back...

I-10 between Deming and Las Cruces is starting to show up at some levels of zoom, including the default level! And I see somebody in Tucson has been mapping stuff there, so I'll just finish from Lordsburg to Tucson and hand off to them... progress!

just entered Interstate 10 from Las Cruces, NM to El Paso, TX for about the 5th time, tracing the Yahoo satellite imagery. sure hope it doesn't disappear this time...

I-10 data seems to have disappeared between Deming and El Paso. It's already rendered on tiles@home at level 12, but it no longer shows up in Potlatch nor in JOSM. Database crash or something I guess. It's getting tiresome -- that's the third time I traced out that road on the satellite images only to have it disappear.

i meant "motorway", under which classification most the US interstate system falls...

digging deeper into OpenLayers and some of the other technologies, this mapping business can get a little mind-boggling. i'm thinking of starting mapping with something flat, like the Mandelbrot set, before getting into complicated geometry like the Mercator projection...

We've got both the TIGER database and Yahoo! imagery to use, let's get cracking! You gonna let these Brits, French, German, Norwegian, etc. run circles around us?

I lost about 100 miles of tracing I-10 through New Mexico and Texas (from the Yahoo! satellite images), once due to hitting the escape button, and once because my computer froze. Damn. And now I'm getting a lot of packet loss, so it's slow going. But because "roadways" show up at all magnification levels, it's rewarding to plot interstates, you see real results every Thursday.

I really don't know how useful the TIGER data is going to be, at least for the streets. It's way more inaccurate than tracing the Yahoo! satellite images. Maybe good for the street names in an unfamiliar area.

My nodes, segments, and ways uploaded with JOSM show up in the edit (Potlatch) program, but still don't show up in either the Mapnik nor the Osmarender maps. Supposedly Mapnik updates weekly on Wednesday, and it's already Thursday GMT.

Good news is that the placename search was only broken for 2 days or so.

Guess I have to figure out how to write my own tiling program and mirror OSM on my own server. Then I can stop bitching and do the work myself.

the placename search is broken:

Application error

Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html

and I can't login to trac using my OSM username/password.

my highway 11 tracks made it in after the changes reported in my blog, and another OSMer deleted my tainted tracks. now I'm working on a way of extracting a certain bounding box from the TIGER data, and also getting better at using the Potlatch online editor. things are looking good! maybe I can do the whole state of New Mexico single-handed... maybe not.

OK, so I write a script to extract single roads (as a 'way') out of the TIGER data extracted by the tiger-to-osm script. Then, since the osm database files can't be uploaded (that I know of) directly to OSM, I had to run it through JOSM. JOSM loses the 'way' data on import, so I have to add it back. No biggie. Then on upload, it barfs. See my blog for the whole sordid story.

Yes, I know it's a work in progress but it sure can be frustrating at times. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, otherwise OSM wouldn't have anything accomplished at all.

It says "GPS Trace processing broken" next to "Platform Status" under "Meta info" on the main Wiki page. Just found that.

I've been thinking it over, and it's almost certain that what I'm doing with Google Maps will threaten the OSM project. I'll cease and desist. There are other ways for me to go about it.

Is the importing of user data automated? If so, it seems to be stuck at a point 4 days ago

Guess I'll find out pretty quickly if HTML is supported in these diary entries...

Can anybody comment on the legality of using Google Maps to get approximate lat/lon points, formatting those points into a GPX file, and uploading to OSM? I just want to know if I can be open about it, or if I have to be sneaky. It's inaccurate enough that nobody could tell, by looking at the data, how it was sourced... but if this is really a Bad Idea, I'll just have to come up with another method, or save up for a GPS unit.