Mapping Hacks

In spite of the enormous press, and the pretty pictures, Google Earth represents the pre-infancy of user oriented spatial tools.
I hate to be ‘just’ a freaking whiner…so I have been actively trying to use the darn thing as part of my attempts to collect and manage the raw data from my experiences.
Sadly every time […]

Sunday morning a gasoline tanker tipped over and caught on fire.   Unfortunately this caused a connector road which is mega-important to bay area traffic to collapse.
I got a call Sunday from Matt Petty at sfgate.com with a Google Earth question.  With a tiny bit of help from me they created a cool animation showing where […]

In Mapping Hacks, the book, Schuyler wrote a program to convert a track log in a text file into a Shapefile.  We mentioned, perhaps optimistically, that a version to convert a gpx (a GPS XML exchange format) track lot to a shapefile would be on the web site.
Optimism while writing is a good, and a […]

Harry Beck’s schematic map of London’s Tube network is constantly cited as a design classic and a cartographic inspiration. I am one of many people who’ve made a “spatially accurate” version of the Tube map for kicks.
ChrisDodo pointed us at an interesting spin on the idea - a schematic map of the UK motorway network. […]

I’ve been running around saying ‘when is the next where’ for a bit now.     I sort of assumed it was an established meme that I was jumping on the back of, looking for uh, seconds…but a glance at Google finds zero hits for “when is the next where,” and a grep of the […]

Our friend Mike Liebhold is on this http://buildwebsites.net/blogs/michigan-web-design/8590/
It is an interesting podcast in which fun things are said…read the link, listen, have fun.

We wrote about http://www.weatherbonk.com in _Google Maps Hacks_. At the time it was sort of primitive-weather on a map. Now it is much cooler with version 2.

In _Google Maps Hacks_ we included hack 37 by Tom Carden and Steve Coast that included code to plot waypoints and track logs from a GPX file onto a Google Map.
Tilman Hampl cleaned it up a bit, and got it working on his own server. So you can “plot your data on his server.
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I spoke at the SF Apple store to the Database and special interests SIG of the Mac Users Group about Google Maps Hacks, and mapping in general. These are the slides which I used They are HTML, and include various links and extra information.

I hear from Tracey P. Lauriault of the launch of the Civic Access project. This is a Canadian effort whose full title is Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data. I like the pragmatic nature of their mission:
Encourage institutions to share data, start a working group to build technologies that make data accessible, […]