http://www.systemed.net/blog Church organ, maps, canals, cider. Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:12:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of the aims of Halcyon, the rendering engine behind Potlatch 2, is to provide a fully stylable map applet for web pages. Just drop in the SWF, give it a stylesheet (in MapCSS), and job done. The SWF will talk to an OpenStreetMap database server. In theory you could point ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=194 I've never been a satnav type of person. First of all, I like maps too much. I'm also probably conceited enough to figure I can work out a better route than a little black box. And then there's the number of fools I've followed down the A3400, bimbling along at ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=191 Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail! Inspired by this frankly hair-raising ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=188 Today, oh happy day, Ordnance Survey released a bunch of map data for free. It's an attribution-only licence, so you can do whatever you like with it as long as you say "data thanks to the nice guys at Ordnance Survey". You can make maps, write clever location-sensitive apps, all ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=182 What do people find difficult about cycling to work? Why don’t they do it? We could ask them. Actually, because we take an interest in these things - because we already go out and talk to people - we largely know. The roads are perceived as dangerous. Where there are safe ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=167 Dear old Illustrator does have its quirks, and one of them is that when you save a PDF, the bounding box of the PDF is the bounding box of your artwork - not anything sensible like the artboard or anything like that. I won't bore you with the many things ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=165 I've finally finished my response to the consultation on Ordnance Survey data. It's here (five-page PDF, 64k). The tl;dr* version: Generally good. Don't release 1:25k and 1:50k rasters, that's just gratuitous and we don't need them. Provide an aerial photography API for rights-free tracing. Use PD or a database rights-aware licence, not ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=161 Every month I spend beyond ridiculous amounts of time drawing maps for the WW cruising guides. Along the neatlines (sides) of each map are black and white bars. Each bar represents one mile. It looks like this. I do it like that because Old Charts do it like that too; because ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=156 The usual sources are going haywire about an impending Apple Tablet. I used to have a tablet computer. It was a beauty. It was A4 sized and had a full, moving-parts keyboard. The word-processor was speedy and yet powerful; but it was a proper computer, too. You could even program it. ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=150 How about that, then? Or as the Map Room succinctly put it, "Holy shit." Good news for: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. Free maps, and unlike the US, good-quality free maps which they can start using right out the box. Ordnance Survey. I wrote here previously that OS’s best chance of surviving was to open ... http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=145