In order to avoid post duplicates I cleaned up geoblogger.eu and removed all feeds which are already aggregated by planet geospatial. So geoblogger.eu should now be a nice add-on to planet geospatial, for people interested in mainly non-english geoblogs.
a personal website slash blog
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
Today I slightly modified my Vienna Underground Map. Due to the big European Google Maps update of last week it became clear that some station-points were not where they should be. So I adjusted some of them. The points still represent only the station-”center”, not the exits. There are of course a lot more underground exits than points. Another thing a few people asked: the lines do not show the real underground tracks, it’s just a schema. The lines are direct connections between the stations, aimed to illustrate underground lines.
As default background map I’m now using the normal map, not the satellite imagery anymore. I think it fits better as base-map for this kind of overlay content. Of course the user still has the option to switch between all three types of background maps – normal, satellite or hybrid map. The base-map change made me modify some styles in order to ensure readability.
In my logfiles I noticed incoming links from some tourist sites. Apparently this little map provides some useful information for potential visitors and tourists. I have no plans to develop a full featured public transport information system, but in order to give some more information about subway, tram or bus in Vienna I added a link to the public transport timetable information and routing system.
Thanks to all people at flickr who let me know about new viennese underground photos!
During last months I started using a GPS device, a Garmin GPSmap 60C, more frequently. I started tracking my bike routes through Vienna (see my bike_trails), loaded them into ArcGIS and began to compile a customised Garmin map, a bike routes map for Vienna in particular.
Organising this years holiday trip to California I thought I’ll try to load some digital city maps of my destinations onto the GPS. I only needed maps for a few cities such as San Francisco, San José and surroundings. Surfing through the Garmin website I found out that I can either buy whole North America or nothing, the same in Europe. Talking to the shop assistant where I bought my Garmin brought the same result. So I should spend 200-300 EUR just to replace two or three city maps? Seems quite pricey, a city map I get for about 10 EUR and I doubt the benefit of the GPS map is 20-30 times higher compared to a conventional paper map. Sure, I’m getting whole North America or Europe for that price, but I only need 2 cities out of the bundle. Why shouldn’t it be possible? It’s all stored in databases, just select the area and make it available. I wouldn’t buy all paper maps of North American or European cities at once either.
Not willing to buy whole continents (btw why does Garmin split it’s products into continents while they could force customers to buy all cities of the whole world at once) I started a little research about other data sources and found MapCenter, a great place for user created free Garmin GPS maps. The area around San Francisco and San José is covered quite well and I downloaded a few street maps there.
After the big European Google Maps update last week, I came yesterday across this headline: Google Maps on your mobile phone (via heise, german). This mobile application comes very close to what I was looking for, to have a searchable and easy to use city map in my pocket. Even better on my mobile phone because I don’t have to bother about carrying the GPS device with me. I guess mainly because of privacy concerns Google doesn’t locate you automatically, even if it would be possible in some urbanized areas. Frankly, I would like to have the option to enable this feature, to be located while connecting to Google Maps Mobile and have the map centered on my current location immediately.
However, I think I’ll get some paper city maps too. They still have some major advantages over digital maps, even without a search bar: drawing and marking individual spots, no loading, no bothering with zoom and pan…
For an iPhoto plugin I couldn’t live without is now an update available: FlickrExport Beta 1.3.4 (via TUAW)
Statistic lectures should always begin by explaining the importance of homogeneous region codes. I spent days of my life cleaning up individually invented region codes which are supposed to match other regional data sets. Even in some EU administration departments they prefer customising instead of using official NUTS or ISO codes.
I should consult more often ESRI’s support forums, user to user help is working well there. This morning I found a workaround for an annoying ArcPublisher bug: opening a folder with a .pmf in it froze my explorer, almost every time. Here is the workaround. ESRI please fix it, this bug is known and documented longer than 1 1/2 years now!
The Google Maps update in Europe came just in time to sell some location aware advertising during FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany. Address finder and address based routing are not working yet (at least I wasn’t able to find a single address in Vienna), but AdSense already does quite a good job while searching Google Local.
As you may have noticed, or not, there is a new top level domain available: .eu.
I got caught by the landrush two weeks ago and registered 2 new domains too.
If I didn’t mess up with my redirects you should see the first one above in your browser’s URL bar: spanring.eu. It’ll be my new main domain name for this site. During Easter holidays I found the time to change my server configurations and update DNS, etc. If you have any bookmark or subscription please change the URL to spanring.eu. Well, the old one, spanring.name, still works and will do so for at least another year. Probably even longer, because there is a good chance that I’ll keep this domain too.
The second domain I bought was geoblogger.eu:
geoblogger.eu is an aggregation of GIS, cartography or “neogeography” weblogs based in Europe or in any other way Europe related. The aim is not to exclude the rest of the world but to focus on the European scene and to give a general overview about people, organisations or topics of interest in this region. [more]
The main idea behind geoblogger.eu was quite simple: publish and share geo related parts of my reading list. Maybe somebody else finds this site and links useful or, even better, has some recommendations on further weblogs to include. If so, feel free to send an email to ask[at]geoblogger.eu.
I’m well aware about geobloggers.com, the former Flickr Google maps geotagging mashup, but geoblogger.eu just says in one word what this site should be about. If there is any problem in terms of registered name or something, please let me know.
The newsfeed on geoblogger.eu isn’t working properly. I’ll try to fix it within the next few days.
Google updated their maps API v1 to make use of the same enhanced imagery as v2. Since most of Europe isn’t covered with geocoding or hybrid maps, services like Platial rely on detailed imagery in order to attract more users here.
Even more exciting about Yahoo!’s latest satellite map update is the fact, that they’re now offering hybrid maps outside the US with their API! Nothing compared to the accuracy you get in the US, but it’s a beginning.