OMB

I haven’t posted for a while, but I am still here. I’m in the Isle of Man, visiting family, where I have been writing up some chapters of my dissertation, so not that much to report back on. It has given me a good chance to do some mapping for OSM, which I havent done much of before, living in central london. I may well be able to set an OSM record for the fastest legal land-speed GPX record, as the Isle of Man currently has no maximum speed limit. No worries about privacy here, living in the land of liberty.
If you are cool, get the OSM button: on your site.

It is 35 degrees in London and aorund 27 degrees in my department.  There are no lecturers or seemingly any other form of staff here today.  As the temperature gets hotter, the lecturers get sparser – there’s a definite correlation.  Anyone else noticed the same thing?

I’ve been getting a bit side-tracked recently, making FTP maps and generally not concentrating on OSM Mobile and Java development. So, today I’m going to understand Java threading and implement it in OSM Mobile. A likely problem with this is that I need to find a way to simulate the delivery of NMEA sentence to the Java.IO level, or through some form of serial emulation.

I’ve just got back from a short break in Spain, where I collected these traces for OSM. The roads look really good on the landsat images for the area, probably because of the dry environment and “washed out” colour of the vegetation. Hopefully more people will join in the fun in sunny Spain.

Today I have been thinking about what format data should be stored in on the mobile. Parsing NMEA sentences into an XML format should be within the possibilities of most S60 mobiles. So, the options seem to be:

• Store in .OSM XML format
• Store in GPX XML format
• Store as a CSV or a TXT

The aim of OSM Mobile is to assist exisitng users with the mapping they do for OpenStreetMap and to attract new users by combining a GPS with a mobile phone, allowing some basic notation of street names and POIs and above all, to make it all simple. Bearing this in mind I think a CSV or a GPX file is going to be the best bet. They are both ubiquitous file types that can be understood by a lot of people. GPX has the advantage of being able to be read directly into the OSM editors such as JOSM and already has fields like and that can be used to store information.

I’m also concious that as a contributor to an Open Source project, I’d like to produce something that others can build upon. I’m not going to be writing a portable GIS for OSM in the next few weeks, but I’m sure others will do eventually.

As usual any suggestions are most appreciated.

I’ve knocked up a quick graph that shows the density of Freethepostcode postcodes as of July 2006. The higher the bar, the denser the postcodes. London has been ommitted because it skews the data. See the Wiki page

Over the last couple of days I have been looking at some more Java. I’ve just found out about an excellent tutorial on GPS programming in Java at provided free of charge by IBM.

Only that the run the Java serial communications API you must have these files installed in the JDK folder:

comm.jar
win32comm.dll
javax.com.properties

But of course it isnt that simple. I’ve had a lot of problems getting javax.comm to work. I kept getting various errors involving “com.sun.comm.Win32Driver”. After following various peices of advice from forums, modifying the classpath etc etc I got hold of a copy of the javax.comm libraries from 1998 and it worked straight away. Pitty its now 5pm.
Save yourself the hassle of finding them and download them here.  Be sure to check out the readme.html file for full instructions.

Over the last few days I have been doing a bit of background reading about Mobile GIS, HCI and Data Collection. The full bibliography will be published here.

I’ve also been experimenting with LaTeX. I installed Kile, a KDE LaTeX front end onto my Ubuntu, system. The installation was straightforward and included the libraries needed to run KDE apps on GNOME. The only minor setup issue I had was setting the permissions correctly, which took all of 10 minutes to diagnose and fix. Now everything’s up and running and my documents are looking more beautiful than ever – I just need something to put in them now.

I’m having some problems with wordpress - stand by.