Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
OpenStreetMap GPS Visualisation
I frequently get emails asking me about visualising collections of GPS traces as an animation. The OpenStreetMap community is way ahead of me on this one, and has a tool called Party Render to create animations of mapping activity.
Here's one that Mikel just pointed out from a recent mapping party in Mumbai:
The Personal Touch #2
In other Nice Customer Service news, I recently ordered a Holux GPS (the same one as Tom Coates) from Holux UK. Unfortunately they've had a few problems with one batch and had to recall them, but they were kind enough to send me an email to tell me about it. They offered me a choice: I could have a new one from the next batch in a few days, or they would open and test one of the dodgy batch and send it to me if it was OK. That's very good of them, I think, since they could have just sent me a possibly-dodgy one and crossed their fingers I didn't hear about the recall.
The X of Y
I'm playing with YouTube. I'm a bit confused as to why I have to write my own RSS feeds out for all my friends, but apart from that it's doing most things right and not getting in my way. Fun!
YouTube is the Flickr of video, or something. I discovered today that this lazy turn of phrase is known as a snowclone. Undeterred, I watch with anticipation as Steve takes steps towards making OpenStreetMap into the Flickr of GPS traces. (It's already the wikipedia of maps, of course.)
Processing hacks: GPX library
This week toxi and I went live with Processing hacks, a wiki for documenting some of the more tricky, technical things that can be done with Processing.
I hope to chip away at the draft table of contents with an article or two a week until it's done. My first new code for the site is a basic Processing library for manipulating GPS data from GPX files. There are bound to be bugs and niggles, if you have a GPX file you could try it out with I'd be really grateful.
Here's an example app showing a friend's recent travels. Excuse the file name, as you can see the data is quite noisy and it needs some cleaning up. Also note that the Arcball class isn't quite working right (it needs fixing up for newer Processing versions), but it helps give you an idea of what's going on.
Animated GPS Map
As part of the OpenStreetMap project, last month Steve Coast and I produced an A1 poster showing all the data we'd collected for London.
The biggest contributor to OpenStreetMap's UK data is an innovative courier firm called eCourier, and by way of thanks for their continuing commitment to the project I cooked up a movie of a sample of their data using Processing. Thankfully for me and my bandwidth, eCourier are kindly hosting it here for your enjoyment.
You can read more about our collaboration on their news page, and on the OpenStreetMap wiki.
Still wrestling with Feedwordpress here at Processing Blogs HQ. We're upgraded to 0.97, but something still strips links and images from Blogger feeds with mode="escaped" and I can't work out what it is. Much love and prizes to anyone who can spot the problem.
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