igorbrejc.net

These are my new delicious links for March 28th:

• Checklist for Developing Message-Based Systems – Billy McCafferty – Devlicio.us – Just the Tasty Bits
  
• Message-Based Systems for Maintainable, Asynchronous Development – Billy McCafferty – Devlicio.us – Just the Tasty Bits
  
• AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts
  
• Coding Horror: The Opposite of Fitts’ Law
  
• 450 – The United States of Brooklyn, NH « Strange Maps
  
• Slashgeo | Google Releases Elevation Web Service
  unfortunately pretty much useless, since "… if you display elevation information to your users that you have obtained using this service, or any data that you have derived from it, you must also show a Google map that indicates the points, path, or route concerned."
• Slashdot News Story | Disputed Island Disappears Into Sea
  

These are my new delicious links for March 28th:

• The Simpsons Showcase the Disastrous Possibilities of GPS Navigation – TV – Gawker.TV
  
• Richardson Maturity Model: steps toward the glory of REST
  
• Collection: The Icarus Project – rharrison@hgf.com – REDIRECT from www.robertharrison.org
  
• Much Clearer Than “PC LOAD LETTER” — The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
  
• On Small Applications
  
• That No SQL Thing
  

I’ve created a simple starting page for Maperitive online documentation. It will contain the list of already written pages (and those still in writing): http://maperitive.net/docs/manual/Index.html

I’ve also added a new page about rulesets.

OK, Quiki has now been implemented to the point where I can begin to write some documentation for Maperitive. I chose to start with rendering rules, since this is probably the most complex and most interesting thing in Maperitive (for now at least). So here it is, a first draft of the Rendering Rules Introduction page:

http://maperitive.net/docs/manual/Rendering_Rules_Introduction.html

I also wrote a sample documentation page for one of the Maperitive commands:

http://maperitive.net/docs/manual/Commands/ApplyRuleset.html

Nothing much, but it will grow with time. I still have to implement templating in Quiki, so I can add “see also” sections, categories, tables of content etc. I’m also thinking about providing a single-HTML-page alternative view for the documentation, to be more printer-friendly.

These are my new delicious links for March 23rd:

• The Story of Bottled Water
  
• The 1940s Happened in Greyscale « Cartastrophe
  
• chat roulette on Vimeo
  
• Rational consumer: Snapping a good camera | The Economist
  
• Slashgeo | Ruin a Map: Put Logos on It
  "…that well could be the end of the map as we know it…" – use OpenStreetMap, suckers
• Searching for gold in Google Earth | Google Earth Blog
  

This is a first screenshot of a HTML page produced by my cool little project called Quiki. It is also a (not yet finished) example of how the documentation for Maperitive will look like. Some things are still missing (breadcrumbs, “see-also” section etc), but this more or less the way it will look like (I’ve made the CSS myself and I’m not a web designer, so don’t grumble too much).

So what can Quiki do? It will take your wikitext files, parse them and transform them into HTML code. You can customize the look and feel of the page by specifying a NVelocity template around it. Quiki project is open source and has a BSD license, so fell free to use it (once I get to finish it).

These are my new delicious links for March 22nd:

• Paying the Price of Success | Software by Rob
  long nights, yeah right
• SQL Injection License Plate Hopes to Foil Euro Traffic Cameras – License Plate – Gizmodo
  
• OSM Belarus Team on Google MapMaker Mapping Party Minsk
  
• Don’t just roll the dice: a usefully short guide to software product pricing
  
• 15 Desktop & Online Wireframing Tools | UX Booth
  
• Deleporter: Cross-Process Code Injection for ASP.NET « Steve Sanderson’s blog
  

I’ve been busy on Maperitive on several fronts:

1. Fixing bugs, polishing: several people reported new bugs or sent me a general feedback about Maperitive, thanks to you all. Keep writing, keep reporting bugs! Anyway, there is some web map stuff that needs to be fixed. There is also a bug in querying relations (basically you cannot query relation’s ways right now). And there is also a Mac problem: Maperitive breaks down right at the start, I don’t know why, but I suspect Mono isn’t as polished on Mac as it is on Linux and Windows.
2. Introducing new features: on Friday I added web maps (although, as mentioned, it’s still somewhat buggy). I plan to slowly introduce all of remaining features present in Kosmos but currently lacking in Maperitive (relief shadings, colorings, map scale, grid, printing etc). And this is not the end, it’s only the end of the beginning: there are a lot of cool ideas I plan to add later.
3. Documentation: I know, I know, right now there isn’t any. But that won’t be for long – this weekend I implemented a big chunk of functionality for my new side-project called Quiki. The basic idea: write documentation as wikitext files, keep them under source control, then let the tool convert them into static HTML pages which can then be published on a website and/or bundled into the release package. I’m working on adding support for some cool MediaWiki-like features (page categories, templates etc.) which will make writing the documentation much easier and make the final result more user-friendly. I hope I’ll be able to finish it by this weekend. After that, expect the Maperitive documentation to trickle in slowly, page by page.

These are my new delicious links for March 17th:

• YouTube – Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments
  via The Endeavour
• James Bach’s Blog » Blog Archive » Toyota Story Analysis
  
• HINT.FM: Web Seer
  
• SUCCEED Blog: balloon Missiles succeed
  
• Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q3 2009) – NOOP.NL
  via The Endeavour
• James Bach’s Blog » Blog Archive » Advice to Lawyers Suing Toyota
  
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Mosspuppet plays Chatroulette — caution this is NSFW
  
• Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide | Video on TED.com
  
• 8-Bit NYC
  
• Developer Guide – Protocol Buffers – Google Code
  

I received this request a long time ago and it was finally time to implement it:

So what’s so special with this map? Maperitive offers the export-bitmap command, which basically exports the currently visible map portion to a bitmap file. What’s new is that you can set a higher (> 1) scale for the export:

export-bitmap scale=3

which will produce a bitmap with higher resolution, but with the rendering rules applied to the original zoom level. This can be useful for printing maps in higher quality.

In future I plan to introduce a SVG export command, which will make map post-processing even easier.