Dear Diary,

With the new year of 2017 comes new changes. After the general elections, NLD Government comes into force since 2016 April. The government changes the country step by little step, for a better and prosper future. The government of Yangon region announced the end of the old bus system namely MaHtaTha (မထသ) in early January and the new bus system monitored by YRTA (Yangon Region Transport Authority) will be in place by 16th January 2017. All existing MaHtaTha (မထသ), Than Myan Thu (သန်မြန်သူ), Ah Di Pa Ti (အဓိပတိ), YBPC’s BRT, etc… will come to a halt and all the buses will have to operate on new routes under the name of YBS (Yangon Bus Service). Before this, there were over 300 bus routes in Yangon with each routes overlapping one another and the buses would compete with one another in order to get passengers. Tensions rises with competition and traffic is also a factor. For the safety of passengers, YRTA was formed.

300 routes were reduced to 70 (Actual 69, as 13 was omitted) to this date (2017/1/23). At initial announcement, there were 60 routes and later changed to 61 before (2017/1/16) when it comes to action. But after the actual launch, due to the necessity and feedback from customers, another 9 routes were added making a total of 70 Bus Numbers. As soon as the government releases the data, I started adding stops and routes in OpenStreetMap. There aren’t many mappers who seems to be interested in this for Yangon Region, so the progress seems slow. YBS consists of 5 colours. Blue, Red, Purple, Green and Brown. Each representing Northern Based Lines, Eastern Based Lines, Southern Based Lines, Feeder Lines to Main Roads and Circular Lines through the Central Business District.

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1. There May be Troubles Ahead
2. Errors whilst Compiling using Ant
3. Creating Eclipse Project
4. Eclipse Debugging Routines
5. wORD cASE bLINDNESS
6. Importing the Project Bugs
7. Have you Tried Restarting Your Program, Sir?
8. Show Your Bugs, Damn You!
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
10. Installing NetBeans

I’m having stunning problems being able to debug terracer from within Eclipse and, after much investment of my time & attention, I am greatly concerned that it may prove impossible. I’ve asked for help in my bugreport & have received zilch. There has been small responses here (many thanks) but those have not helped either. One possible option is to use a different IDE. So, here is yet another attempt to prevent others from having to go through as much pain as me just to get the NetBeans IDE installed (help from NetBeans here + youtube here):

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In Order

1. I 5: Completed
2. I 10: Completed
3. I 20: Completed
4. I 27: Completed

Stay tuned for more updates. If you know of anymore interstates that need splitting let me know in the comments.

Update 1

1. I 29: Completed
2. I 30: Completed
3. I 40: Completed
4. I 70: Completed

Project Completed 01-24-2017

8226 E 1st ave mesa az usa 85208

From this year on, the interviews will be published on the new website of the Belgian OSM Community.

I also decided to publish them all under the title “Mapper of the Month” and drop the “Mapper in the spotlight” name.

I will continue to post links here to the interviews. The first interview that is published on osm.be is one with Steve All from California,USA.

You can still find the list of all interviews on the osm wiki

I hope you will continue reading the interviews on the new website.

deleted

Task http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/2311 is done for a while, but it’s not really validated so I’m using my spare time to work on it.

In my quest to understand the growth of OSM, I had a little fun today.

I took the 1/1/2017 full history dump for Brussels and I extracted a shapefile with all the versions of all the highway=* that ever existed.

Then I wanted to visualize it to see if there was a pattern in how the roads get mapped: “first real roads, then paths” or “everything all the time”. So I styled the paths clear green, the roads thin black and used a gray background for the current highways. Then I rendered a slide for every month.

link

It looks really cool, because it doesn’t just show the chaos of our growth. As the black roads are drawn slightly transparent and the monthly slide shows every version of the road in that month, “active areas” show up in heavy black. I think it’s really pretty.

On the occasion that it was a featured image in the Weekly OSM, I made a new version without a gray background and with a more logical image size.

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I became involved in OpenStreetMap because as a volunteer visiting projects in rural Tanzania I became aware of the lack of maps of this area which greatly hampers navigation and development. With Egle, who I met at Mozfest, I set up a volunteer crowdmapping project to seek to address this called Crowd2Map Tanzania. This recruits volunteer mappers to map rural Tanzania, starting with the area in Serengeti where girls are at risk of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation). There are details of this project here http://bit.ly/FGMSOTM

I became aware of and was greatly helped and guided by many people at HOTOSM and Missing Maps. I regularly attend Missing Maps events in London and have spoken about Crowd2Map at SOTM, Mozfest and talks for Britain Tanzania Society.

OpenStreetMap is an amazing initiative that seeks to put the worlds’ most vulnerable people on the map, and I want to support it in any way I can. I became a HOTOSM voting member in 2017 and I help promote HOT and OSM wherever I can, and ensure it is as inclusive as possible, particularly in less well represented areas such as rural Tanzania. Crowd2Map’s greatest challenge is access to funding so that it can support mapping initiatives in areas in rural Tanzania and so telling stories about the difference mapping makes, such as in Serengeti, shown by this 2 minute video. https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/873491619459013/ is extremely helpful.

Goodness, but the folks in Gedling love their stick-men ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5]). The lady of the house told me that her grand-dad had made this one (unfortunately I had to use extreme digital zoom to get a decent view of it sat above the lintel of the front-door):

1. There May be Troubles Ahead
2. Errors whilst Compiling using Ant
3. Creating Eclipse Project
4. Eclipse Debugging Routines
5. wORD cASE bLINDNESS
6. Importing the Project Bugs
7. Have you Tried Restarting Your Program, Sir?
8. Show Your Bugs, Damn You!
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
10. Installing NetBeans

Sure enough, after working my way up Besecar Avenue I reached Phoenix Avenue and Boom! as I tried to create a new semi-detached house on the corner of Besecar & Phoenix terracer throws an exception. I did not mind that, but Eclipse carried on as if nothing had happened. Now, that is truly mean!

In my earlier Diary (7) Eclipse was accurately debugging on JOSM exceptions thrown by JOSM core. How do I launch JOSM from Eclipse so that Eclipse will react to exceptions thrown by JOSM plugins?

Gaah!

I’m not really complaining here, at least - since I haven’t stumbled across this problem for several years of being a mapper, but from the point of view of having a better tagging system it worth mentioning. And it is not a proposal. So, it’s just an example. Please, be wise and treat it accordingly.

Man-made structures are super-common landscape features, even far away from the populated areas. And we have numerous tags to indicate such features. However, there is the whole class of man-made objects, barely represented in the OSM: various cables.

We have at least three tags for very specific cable structures: barriers made of poles and a cable, intercontinental communication cables, aerial power lines. At the same time, there is no way to indicate that there is a cable hanging somewhere without knowing it’s a power cable or a barrier. Obviously, there are cases, when these tags are used to map for a renderer because someone wanted to indicate that there is a cable no matter what.

Somehow, we’ve managed to get a decent tag for a pipeline. It doesn’t involve any implications about its purpose or any other property - it’s just a pipeline, nothing more. So, if I don’t know what kind of pipeline is this, it is totally acceptable to tag it using man_made=pipeline and location=overground - that’s what I see.

But there is no way to map a cable, hanging between the poles along the street since, without any special knowledge, you can’t tell, if it’s a temporary power cable, communication fiber-optic cable, analog CCTV cable or something else. Sometimes, it is impossible to tell even if you know a lot about this topic. And it usually doesn’t really matter, what does this particular cable serve for. That’s because this kind of data will always be very fragmentary (unless it’s not imported) and outdated due to lack of public interest.

… See full entry

Gah! The Bing overlay is acting up again. On specific ways, the bing maps does not load that way into the overlay maker thing… and I believe the specific ways change every time I load the iD OSM editor. How can I fix it? Is it something with my network (CCS Schools/TWC?) or is it with OSM itself?

Kurzen the Writer (the new name for Yoshinion)

P.S.: I can’t change the “home” location… I have moved, and I can’t change my “home” location from my old house to my new one. I moved in the beginning of September and I still cannot change the “home” location. Is this a problem that I can fix?

1. There May be Troubles Ahead
2. Errors whilst Compiling using Ant
3. Creating Eclipse Project
4. Eclipse Debugging Routines
5. wORD cASE bLINDNESS
6. Importing the Project Bugs
7. Have you Tried Restarting Your Program, Sir?
8. Show Your Bugs, Damn You!
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
10. Installing NetBeans

This is so annoying. I’ve got JOSM up and running in Debug mode from Eclipse (see the previous entries 1 ⇒ 7, but only if you have a great deal of time & patience). As per usual I’ve loaded Bing aerial imagery. You can tell that that is also in Debug mode as it has a vast listing printed over the top of the map down the left-hand edge, showing Cache stats, current zoom, etc., etc.. I wish I knew how to get rid of those, because it is very distracting.

My last survey began at Cantley Avenue (8 days ago!) so that is where I started adding houses in JOSM. A couple of nips ‘n’ tucks for the street, a bit of street furniture + some garages + surface-parking at the top of the street. That used terracer, but not in any way that should cause an exception. Next would be a semi-detached house, and that should definitely cause an exception if I put a tick in “create an associatedStreet relation”. So, I saved everything added up to this point.

‘B’ to switch on Building Tools + draw over the top of the house & select it, then ‘Shift-T’ to bring up the terracer dialog. Enter all the values & then do the thing that I haven’t dared to do for 6 months:– put the tick in to create the street relation + press ‘OK’ (then dive under the desk to avoid the shrapnel).

GODDAMMIT! It creates the semi-detached house + relation without a whisper of complaint. Oh really, that is simply too much. The first was 1+3 so next I do 5+7. Still no exception, but it does forget to add the street-name now into the house (it adds the add:street key/value into the house if associatedStreet for that street is empty, but not if there is any value in it). That’s a bug, so I start to feel a little better.

… See full entry

1. There May be Troubles Ahead
2. Errors whilst Compiling using Ant
3. Creating Eclipse Project
4. Eclipse Debugging Routines
5. wORD cASE bLINDNESS
6. Importing the Project Bugs
7. Have you Tried Restarting Your Program, Sir?
8. Show Your Bugs, Damn You!
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
10. Installing NetBeans

tl;dr: It seems that you simply need to be pig-headed & ignore all errors, clean the Build & restart & do it again (below is what I had to go through to discover this).

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I just made a few edits with changeset comments “misspelled tages” (sic).

I’m doing a test right now in the Orewa region to see if I can better make walking mode better for app that use it.

made it into the qishqn forest park.

very nice. bettercthan gushan

See TL08/T16 - Egleton.

I went out today to compare my Garmin eTrex 10’s idea of the location of this Triangulation Pillar with the Ordnance Survey National Grid reference of 486466.32,306589.94 .

I am pleased to report that the Garmin read 52N39.0111 0W43.399 (WGS84 decimal minutes), the closest representation of the Ordnance Survey data. I converted the National Grid reference at Coordinate transformation tool to give 52N39.010738 0W43.399301, note that not all online co-ordinate conversion tools agree!

This pillar has a flush bracket with the number S6767.

I have added this as a point, in changeset 45201297.

I do not know that it is in the perfectly correct place as I do not know that Bing’s idea of the absolute position of points on the earth’s surface is the same as mine. OK, the location of my new point is 52.6501638, -0.723312, and it should be 52.6501790, -0.723322. Do I need to fix this, and if so, how?