Published by breki on 10 Mar 2009 at 09:24 pm
Please Donate :)
Well, sooner or later it was bound to happen. I’ve decided to put the yellow “Donate” buttons on my blog.
Although I did consider it for quite a while, I never really got to doing it. I guess I was lazy or a little bit apprehensive about asking people to donate their money. But today I got a notification that my bandwidth monthly quota for the igorbrejc.net Web hosting has reached 80%, and it’s only 10th in the month. I guess all the software downloads lately have slowly eaten away my quota.
BTW I’m not paying anything for the hosting (except for the domain registration), since it was generously awarded to me by my friend Boris and he was even kind enough to extend my bandwidth quota several times. But I guess it’s time to give him something back for his help (a six pack at least).
So anyway, if you find the stuff I’m developing (Kosmos, GroundTruth, etc) useful, please consider making a small donation to my effort. The money will be put to a good use, buying:
- Books that will extend my knowledge
- Tools that will help me develop new (and hopefully better) stuff
- Extra bandwidth, if it is needed
- An occasional beer or two
And here’s the button (I will post it occasionally in blog posts):
All donations will be kept anonymous (unless you want it known). Thanks!
Status Update
As a side note: I’m currently in final stages of developing a new tool for generating relief contours based on a new Isohypse Binary File (IBF) format I’ve conceived. The main benefit of IBF (as opposed to holding the contours in OSM XML format) is the size – an experiment showed it used only 1% of the space compared to OSM XML. The data is split up into tiles, so a user can have a relatively large area covered with a single file and then pick and choose which tiles he/she needs. The IBF contours will be available both in Kosmos and GroundTruth in the short future.
Hannes on 11 Mar 2009 at 11:11 #
I am sure you could find someone to mirror the files on (or even at) OpenStreetMap.org (or maybe .de).
Kosmos is wonderful, thank you so much for it.
breki on 11 Mar 2009 at 20:40 #
@Hannes,
Perhaps, but this would only add additional dependency for me to rely on – and OSM servers have not proven really reliable lately. In fact I was considering copying all the GroundTruth and Kosmos documentation from the OSM wiki to my site, since the wiki was too slow or even unavailable lot of the times. I decided against it since I wanted the pages to be easily editable by other users, not just me (and because it would probably be illegal – I would have to exclude all the wiki contributions of other people, which would be a shame). Hopefully the donations collected by OSM last month will help solve the reliability problems.
Anyway, I’ll stick to my server until I find a more appropriate solution.