Mapping Hacks

Last summer at the Open Source Geospatial conference in Minneapolis, Dirk Willem van Gulik gave a closing keynote talk in which he talked about his experience of establishing the Apache Software Foundation, a pioneering example of open source governance and meta-organisation. Dirk Willem’s message partially was: “don’t do what we did.”
At the time Sean Gillies […]

Tyler Mitchell, the author of O’Reilly’s Web Mapping Illustrated, an excellent practical guide to building your own open source web mapping applications with the Mapserver package, has started a new blog at spatialguru.com.
In these intense times of governance, licensing and access policy discussions, Tyler’s essays into geek humour provide welcome light relief. And he promises […]

Public Geodata published an Open Letter regarding the INSPIRE Directive to the Members of the ENVI committee in the European Parliament this morning. I got to sleep after dawn after hitting ’send’ - collaborating with people in Europe from an East Coast base means a lot of very late nights or very early mornings.
When i […]

Chris Tengi sent me a blog post on Google Talk Maps Short version: work towards knowing where the people with whom you are in conversation are in the Big Room (you know, that place where the ceiling is really really high, and sometimes the fire sprinklers go off, but you can’t actually seem them?)

Someone sent me a GPX file of track logs, and I discovered a ‘need’ to know how far each point was from the one before…so I wrote a little bit of code that you are free to use.
gpx_distance.pl uses
GPS Babel to convert a GPX file to CSV, then uses a dodgy bit of perl to […]

I was talking with Marc about a mutual friend who had moved from Bernal Heights in San Francisco, to Jamaica Plain near Boston. I remarked how much JP had reminded me of Bernal when i visited there. He said, “JP is one of those connecting neighbourhoods for Bernal Heights… Hackney is one too, i think”. […]

Recently there has been a new level of licensing discussion for open geodata. Daniel Faivre has been socialising the Public Geodata License, a draft of which he worked on years ago and which is being picked up by a group in Canada, in particular. The PGL is very strongly modelled on GPL v2.
Richard Fairhurst wrote […]

Anselm Hook wrote several hacks for both Mapping Hacks and
Google Maps Hacks. He just got an email of note:

Dear Sirs,

I am one of the translators of Google Maps Hacks by Gibson & Erie
(O’Reilly) and now translating Credits into Japanese.

Would you please help me by telling how I should interpret “reformed
game developer” and […]

I’m always thrilled to see mainstream coverage of open geodata issues, and yesterday’s article in the Guardian, Give us back our crown jewels, is a good read. It talks a lot about the Ordnance Survey’s holdings of geographic data being held back from the public via the archaic mechanism of Crown Copyright.
The article quotes a […]

While we were working on Mapping Hacks I had the opportunity to chat with MapQuest
about what developers would like to be able to create their own applications. None
of us were thinking ‘Mash ups’ at the time, just maps for people’s pages. The challenge seemed to be how they would be able to offer […]