Thursday 26 June 2008

Get the needle

With rain threatening I though we could add a bit more of the east side of Beverley Road in Hull. We found a few new residential roads, including a couple that were far from complete. Unusually, they had street names up even though the building work was still under way. Needlers used to make sweets, now the factory site is being made into a small housing estate, called Needlers Way.

Towards the end of our short session, we went past the Endeavour High School, just the kids were leaving. We wanted a photo of the sign, but a woman took our registration number - I think for taking a photo near a school. That needled me no end.

Yesterday I checked out the tiles I'd requested to re-render in Osmarender. I noticed that a cycle route (NCN 66) rendered as a red splodge over the roads at zoom 17. That doesn't make any sense - there is a lovely cycle map to show them. Names in the map were screwed up for example St. Mary's instead of St. Mary's. And then the areas of schools have an automatically inserted school symbol placed near the middle of the area. I have carefully drawn the areas, as best I can, and tried to place a school node where the building is. Now, suddenly, there are two icons, one for my node and one for the area. Now this lot really gave me the needle. Today the route splodge and the name nonsense are fixed, but not the school area.


I think Osmarender is quickly becoming the debug map, with Mapnik being the default 'official' render, so maybe these changes are to be expected, but as far as I can see these are unannounced, not discussed and just applied by someone. Most of the changes are good: quarries now render for example, but these changes suck.

2 comments:

- said...

>I think Osmarender is quickly becoming the debug map, with Mapnik being the default 'official' render.

Always has been imo.

> so maybe these changes are to be expected, but as far as I can see these are unannounced, not discussed and just applied by someone.

This is also what happens with mapnik, but admittedly the chair of the British Society of Cartographers does do the mapnik styles and essentially has the control over them.

> Most of the changes are good: quarries now render for example, but these changes suck.

I've not yet seen the osmarender route relation handling, I'd be interested. The guy who did it is often on IRC.

Anonymous said...

Shame about the schools & taking photos thing. When I'm passing a school and realise it is break time (kids in the playground) or leaving time, I don't bother with my camera and so may miss the school's name.

I actually walked round a residential road that looped round the back of some houses where a school is. Someone (the caretaker?) walked past and asked what I was doing (I had no camera, just my GPS/PDA). I explained and in a friendly way he basically told me that I shouldn't hang around as it can look like I'm a perv (not so many words).
About 6 months later and they've finally put up signs with the name of the school and painted 'private school road' on the ground. You could have easily walked into the school without noticing.