Published by breki on 09 Feb 2010
These are my new delicious links for February 8th:
Published by breki on 08 Feb 2010
These are my new delicious links for February 8th:
Published by breki on 05 Feb 2010
31.01.
- indicate the command prompt has focus
- added detection of changed OSM files
- implemented get-info command
- started working on the error reporting func.
02.02.
- implemented MailService
- implemented AppDiagnostics
- added error reporting form, but it still needs to be beautified
- support for polygons/polylines consolidated from relations
04.02.
- solved the problem: why is footway drawn ABOVE residential road?
- it's because the footway feature is defined AFTER the residential road
- fixed: bug with form disposing
- if a way is used in a relation, it should be ignored elsewhere
-written tests for this
05.02.
- TODO: the rules and features should be specified in the reverse order
- from the most important to the least important
- TODO: how to solve layering problem?
- TODO: beautify error reporting dialog
- TODO: find an icon for Maperitive
- TODO: implement multipolygon polyline rendering
- TODO: write tests for multipolygon rendering
This is an excerpt from Maperitive’s Todo.txt file. I use it as a log of the stuff I did for the current day and also as a “database” of the tasks I still have do. On various projects during the years I used Trac, Bugzilla, on Kosmos I used ToDoList for a while, but nothing beats the simplicity of a text file.
The history log is a recent “invention”: since Maperitive is a pet-project, the time allocated to it is very unevenly distributed – sometimes I do a lot of work in a single day (usually on weekends without find weather or hangovers), but then I have to leave it untouched for several days. So often it happens that I forget what I was working on – and this history log helps me to quickly refresh the memory. Also, it’s a good psychological tool: I take a look and the log entries and see that some work has actually been done and I’m (slowly) progressing towards the first release.
The added benefit is that I can copy&paste these log entries into SVN commit comments. And of course, Todo.txt is kept under the source control like the rest of the code.
Published by breki on 31 Jan 2010
These are my new delicious links for January 31st:
Published by breki on 29 Jan 2010
I’ve been twitting about it for a few weeks: I’ve decided to give a new name to the upcoming Kosmos v3.
First to explain my reasons for the renaming. Let me go back to end of 2007 (huh, was it so long ago?) when I started working on a new pet project: a desktop mapping application. Back then I noticed most of the cool stuff related to OpenStreetMap had to contain “osm” in its name, so I searched for words containing “osm” on the net. I’m not mentioning other candidates, but I settled on more exotic version of “cosmos”, to improve searchability.
Well, it turns out some other people thought the same, so now we have all sorts of stuff also called Kosmos: Russian rockets, some new-age journal, a Greek car rental agency, an oil company and I don’t know what else. So when you want to find Kosmos on Google, it typically turns up on the bottom of the first results page. Which is kind of uncool 
The second reason for renaming is the fact that Kosmos name had not really have to do anything with the actual purpose of the application.
So a month ago I started toying with the renaming idea. Since I wasn’t too sure if it was a good idea at all, I decided I’d stay with the old name if I couldn’t find more catchy and unique one. I have to say it was a hard search: I have a few dozen name candidates listed in my private Wiki (I’m not revealing any of these to avoid causing distress to readers) – but most of these are either a) already used for other stuff or b) just plain ugly. (As a sidenote: my friend Boris (jokingly I hope) suggested a name that would put my blog squarely in the internet XXX territory. Let’s just say it related the mapping with some human private parts, I won’t go into details on this one).
OK, I won’t bore you to death: the name I chose is Maperitive. Let me retype this without any spelling errors: Maperitive. But what does it mean, you might ask? Well, it’s a pun: a map and an apéritif. So to paraphrase a Web dictionary: it’s stimulating the appetite for mapping.
I’m not sure you’ll like the name. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I like the name that much myself – but it’s better than the other candidates. It’s not revolutionary like iPad or MS Paint. But what I especially like about it is that at the time of me writing this post, it has an absolute zero search results on Google. So Maperitive it is. No going back.
Other than name-searching, I did a fair amount of work on the actual application, mostly on the parsing of rendering rules and the graphics. I’ll cover this in another post this weekend, but right now I’m finishing this post to go search for a good algorithm for calculating the area of a polygon on Earth surface. Next time I’ll tell you why…
Published by breki on 29 Jan 2010
These are my new delicious links for January 29th:
Published by breki on 26 Jan 2010
Published by breki on 23 Jan 2010
These are my new delicious links for January 22nd:
Published by breki on 22 Jan 2010
These are my new delicious links for January 22nd:
Published by breki on 21 Jan 2010
These are my new delicious links for January 21st:
The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena
Procedural Elements of Computer Graphics by David F. Rogers
Geospatial Analysis (2nd Edition) by Michael J de Smith, Michael F Goodchild, Paul A Longley
