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This morning I’ve made a an announcement on Twitter about Maperitive finally being released. You can download it from here.

I’d like to stress that work on Maperitive is far from finished. This release is just the first one I felt confident enough to send to the public, both in terms of stability and in terms of functionality it offers.
I’ll be posting more on how to use it, but let’s first take a look on what it currently provides and what it lacks.

The Good

OK, first some of the stuff I think you’ll find interesting:

• New rendering rules system: it’s more powerful, more flexible and (I think) easier to write.
• Linux, Mac: due to improvements in Mono and also due to the new code, Maperitive now seems to be working on Linux and Mac without any major problems.
• Scripting: everything Maperitive offers is available through scripting commands. This makes automating stuff much easier.
• Auto-updating: I’ve devoted a lot of effort on making Maperitive update itself automatically when a new version is available. There are some glitches on Mac, however.
• Querying: you can now use the same query “language” used in rendering rules to look for stuff on the maps.
• Relief contours: they’re back! Since I started working on Maperitive, I simply didn’t have any time to fix contours generation on Kosmos.

And last, but the most important: Maperitive right now is more of a framework than a finished product. What does this mean? The main reason I started rewriting Kosmos code was to make it easier to add new features. This has now been achieved, to a large extent. What comes next is actually adding these features.

The Bad

Now the bad parts:

• GUI: as you will see, it’s pretty vacant . A few months ago I decided not to spend too much effort on making Maperitive look like Kosmos. That would have taken me at least a couple of months of more work before I could actually release anything. But that doesn’t mean the user interface will not improve in the near future!
• Features: Maperitive does not offer everything Kosmos did. Again, the number one task for me right now is to add all Kosmos stuff to Maperitive.

The Ugly

Yes, it’s GUI again . Linux and Mac users will have to suffer a pretty ugly interface. I guess this is the price of cheap portability: Maperitive currently runs on different platforms with virtually the same code base (again, thanks to Mono guys). If you notice any big issues, please write (you can use send-feedback command in Maperitive to write to me directly).

Off to write some code.

I have just generated Garmin maps for Slovenia using GroundTruth. Here are some performance results (my machine is Intel E6400, 4 GB RAM):

• Source OSM data: 330 MB OSM file (non-compressed)
• Time to generate: 8 minutes
• Maximum RAM usage: 1.1 GB

This is for the hiking map which currently contains more rules than the driving map (driving map generation took “only” 3 minutes). The actual performance bottleneck is cgpsmapper, most of the time and memory consumption is caused by it. If you’re planning to generate even larger maps, I suggest splitting OSM files (using tools like osmosis) before giving them to GroundTruth. You can generate multiple IMG files by supplying several OSM files in a comma-separated list.

I decided to upgrade today my WordPress blog to the latest version, hopefully with no problems… And after that bringing back my blog to life with some new posts.

I’ll be upgrading my blog to the latest WordPress version this weekend, so there will probably be some glitches (the download site should work though). Sorry for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: the migration was easier than I expected – hopefully no hidden problems will appear later. If you encounter anything strange, please send me a note. Thanks!

I decided to take my time and study the literature on 3D rendering, especially on maths (vertices, matrices, transformations…), which I forgot all about since my student days. I can highly recommend the 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development book which (contrary to many math books for developers) covers not just mathematical equations and theory, but also tries to explain this in a way more familiar to developers.

I abandoned the approach of continuing working on the cannibalized code from Mini 3D Terrain Viewer simply because there were too many problems which I didn’t know how to solve easily. Anyway, I think the skipping over basic stuff like 3D maths and DirectX is not very wise – sooner or later the things you neglected come to haunt you.

I started posting current results of my effort on flickr – this will be a sort of a snapshot history of Kosmos WorldFlier from the day one, step by step. Not much to see yet – I managed to render all OSM ways as 3D lines, you can see the Isle of Wight there. This is just a temporary solution – road should be rendered as mashes, but that will come later. Right now I’m working on the camera navigation stuff.

I’m still using DirectX managed SDK for this. I decided to implement the inital version with this SDK simply because I already have some limited experience with it – I didn’t want to make this harder by introducing some other SDK which I haven’t worked with yet. Later, I’ll probably migrate the code to use some other library (there are several options: OpenTK, Irrlicht or something else).

UPDATE: I added migration steps for Pidgin client.

I installed my OS from scratch to a new disk after my old one crashed. Now I’m doing the reinstallation of various applications and migration of my user’s settings for them. I’ve collected a list of some applications and the procedure on how to migrate user settings (NOTE: I’m using Vista, so the paths to user profile are somewhat different from those on Windows XP).

Mozilla Firefox

Copy the contents of \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\ from the old location to the new one. This will copy all of your Firefox profiles, including plugins, preferences, even the last opened URLs.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Same here. Copy \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird from the old location to the new one and open the Thunderbird. You’ll get all of your e-mails, email accounts, filters etc. Congratulations on good products, Mozilla guys

Yahoo Messenger

Copy the contents of \Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles from the old location to the new one. This will copy some your user’s settings and data (message history, for example), but I didn’t manage to migrate my Yahoo Messenger preferences.

Windows Live Messenger

The situation is similar to the Yahoo Messenger. By copying the contents of \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MSN Messenger you can only migrate some of your settings, not all of them.

Skype

You should copy the subfolder of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Skype folder which bares the name of your profile.

FeedDemon

Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Local\FeedDemon\v1 directory. FeedDemon will still ask you to enter your account information the first time you start it, but after going through this wizard, all of your subscriptions, watches and view settings should be migrated.

µTorrent

Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent folder. This will include all of your settings and you will also be able to resume downloading of files from the last uTorrent session.

FileZilla Client

Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla folder to migrate your FileZilla settings (like the FTP site list).

Pidgin

Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming.purple folder.

I was planning to write yesterday about a new Kosmos version, but my home computer had other ideas. Basically, the system hard disk (IBM Hitachi 250 GB SATA, bought less than a year ago) started failing and Vista didn’t want to boot any more (or was booting veeery slowly). I tested the drive using the Drive Fitness Test and it reported "defective device" errors after running tests, so I guess the disk is going to the dogs.

Luckily I have my source code repositories backed up regularly to an external hard drive and I also started playing with Amazon S3 storage which I plan to use as a remote backup destination for SVN repositories. But what I didn’t do is to backup my system partition using an image backup software.

So before continuing my work on Kosmos, I have to reinstall the system, which will probably take a day or to of my spare time. But I hope this is my last OS reinstall for the foreseeable future, since I plan to use Acronis True Image to regularly backup the system drive. I read some good reviews of this software and hopefully it will satisfy my needs. Anyway, hard disk failures aren’t that rare, so I want to make my life a little bit easier when they do occur.