Planet SoC

For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:
Will Google play nice and make the crowd-sourced data available for use in applications other than Google Maps and in some common format (hint hint, KML)? Who ultimately should own the data?

For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:
Will Google play nice and make the crowd-sourced data available for use in applications other than Google Maps and in some common format (hint hint, KML)? Who ultimately should own the data?

Update 1-7 : New evidence blows my best-case scenario out of the water, but no worries (see below)

For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:

Update 1-7 : New evidence blows my best-case scenario out of the water, but no worries (see below)
Update 1-7, on hour later : Or perhaps it does not, just keep the popcorn close
For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:

“The Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications”, says Google. Sounds like that could come in handy for my route altitude profile. The NASA SRTM dataset has 1.5 billion data points just for Australia and I have no idea how many people will use my application.
In the last couple of days, I’ve worked through the tutorial and some of the documentation and have taken the first steps (on a separate git branch) in making my application run on the App Engine.

I built a simple website that displays the altitude profile for four different example routes. But you can already get the altitude profile for any route in Australia through an XML-RPC request to:
http://bak.sprovoost.nl:8000/
And then call one of the following two functions:
altitude_profile(route) : returns an xml document

I built a simple website that displays the altitude profile for four different example routes. But you can already get the altitude profile for any route in Australia through an XML-RPC request to:
http://bak.sprovoost.nl:8000/
And then call one of the following two functions:
altitude_profile(route) : returns an xml document

This is the second time that I am living in another country for a while and once again I have stumbled into a huge problem that I believe is massively under appreciated by many. I need the internet, but it’s not as ubiquitous as you’d think.
Has anyone seen the South Park episode about this? The entire United States flees to refugee camps on the west coast where there is still a bit of Internet. People wait in a cue all day for only 40 seconds of Internet. Does that sound a bit ridiculous? Well if you are a homeless person without a laptop (and except Japan probably, most homeless people do not have one) and want to use the Internet, you’ll have to cue up at the State Library in Melbourne for 15 minutes of Internet (it takes about 1 minute to load gmail, so do the math…). And that is the best deal in town as far as I know.

The first official week of my ’summer’ of code was a succes. I managed to import the NASA SRTM3 data into Postgres. That is, the import is running at about 1 tile per minute while I am writing this. The result is available through Subversion and Git.
I think I am getting the hang of Test Driven Development. It would be great if someone can point me to a Postgres Python test tool. For now, I created a test database and wrote my own functions to populate it with test data for each test and clean up afterwards. In a month I will attend the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference in Melbourne (an OpenSpace event).

All these days i was continuously working setting up the infrastructure ready, doing custom setups and testing things for the i18n of openstreetmap, more precisely setting up internationalization in rails which will comprise a major chunk of my gsoc project.