Relevant links

• or/js demo page
• or/js svn: (XML, JS, enhanced load XML)

Well, very very long time since my last post. What I would like to showcase this time is a little project of mine I’ve been working on in the last weeks, with great and unvaluable guidance from the author of or/p, Frederik Ramm.

It’s still work in progress, but to me looks very promising: it’s a JavaScript porting of or/p, the perl porting from the original Osmarender XSLT. It obviously performs slower than the Perl code (about 3 times slower), but it hopefully can get faster thanks to the future Firefox integration with Tracemonkey. Furthermore, if I can get to integrate it with SQLite Firefox engine, it’ll probably gain more and more speed. Downloading locally from the SVN, giving it permissions and using the enhanced load XML, it’ll even loads local files (with a common file browsing window) or downloads the XML OSM data file from the API giving it a permalink from OpenStreetMap’s slippy map. This is something that, in the future, will be done also when serving the script online, using a signed script or making it a Firefox extension. I hope to integrate it, before or then, with Osmarender Frontend, to give it a pretty real WYSIWYG feeling!

Enjoy!

Relevant links

• MyTaH Mozilla addon page
• MyTaH 0.2 Firefox extension download (8.1 Kb)
• MyTaH Wiki page (also for bug reporting and improvement suggestions)
  
• MyTaH SVN

If you like my little MyTaH Firefox extension, and if you want to keep it updated from Mozilla Addon site like any other Firefox extension, please take some time to write a little review. It’s needed by Mozilla policies before publishing it in their repository.

You can help in two ways:

• Write a review in MyTaH Mozilla addon page. As it’s classified as “experimental” you need to subscribe Mozilla addon page
• Write a review in your blog and let me know about it commenting this post, or add a link in the Reviews section in MyTaH wiki page.

Why should you be concerned? Have a look at planned improvements.. and obviously add your opinion if you feel like!

Relevant links

• MyTaH 0.2 Firefox extension download (8.1 Kb)
• MyTaH Wiki page (also for bug reporting and improvement suggestions)
  
• MyTaH SVN

Fast post just to let you know I’ve updated MyTaH Firefox extension.

Release notes

• Now monitoring also:
  • Number of tiles uploaded
  • Number of KB uploaded
  • Idle Time
  • Tiles remaining to gain a better rank
• All the monitors are shown as a tooltip when the mouse is over the MyTaH extension
• In the Preferences dialog you can select which monitor you want to see in the status bar

• New option in the menu to update the data immediately

• Now my account is no longer the default one. If no user account is requested in the preferences dialog a “No name” warning will appear in the status bar

Furthermore, I’ve taken an account at Mozilla Addon and submitted my extension. Now it’s in the sandbox waiting for review… I hope (after any eventual fix they’ll ask me) to have it published before or then

Relevant links

• Update: Version 0.2 blog post
• MyTaH 0.1 Firefox extension download (6.8 Kb)
• MyTaH Wiki page (also for bug reporting and improvement suggestions)
  
• MyTaH SVN

As I’ve told some weeks ago, I was starting to develop a little Firefox extension to monitor my own Tiles@Home ranking from this page. I was totally new on Firefox extension developing, but I’ve managed to do something working and useful in a few time anyway

As you can see in this post’s image, MyTaH will sit in your Firefox’s status bar, displaying your current ranking (by number of tiles). Clicking with the right mouse button, you can view “Preferences” or “About” dialog (which you can see in the post’s image as well). In the Preferences dialog window you can write your username or your user id, and how often (in minutes) you want your ranking be fetched and updated. Please be aware that, by default, you’ll see my actual ranking. Not perfect, but… release early release often

Enjoy!

Relevant links:

• OpenStreetMap Code Swarm in high quality (800×600, 4:24, mpeg4, 28.2Mb)
• OpenStreetMap Code Swarm in high quality with sound (36.1Mb)
• OpenStreetMap Code Swarm in medium quality (800×600, 4:24, mpeg4, 25.8 Mb)
• OpenStreetMap Code Swarm in medium quality with sound (33.7 Mb)
• OpenStreetMap Code Swarm in low quality (800×600, 4:24, xvid, 7.9 Mb)
• OpenStreetMap Code Swarm in low quality with sound (15.8 Mb)

This is my little surprise to all OSM devs!

After three days of try and error with the great Michael Ogawa’s code swarm, mencoder, subtitle editor, audacity and following some guides like this one, after 7 hours of frames rendering and countless hours of video compressing… here it is!

Unfortunately I’m not so into OSM history to insert sensible subtitles about “commit bursts” and I’m not sure about all the dates of API changes… if you want to help please contact me or comment!

How you can help:

• Tell me about relevant OSM dates that explains commit bursts
• Every circle represent a file, and all files in the SVN corresponding to some regex can be coloured differently (so we can, for example, have different colors for osmarender commits, tiles@home, core API, etc…; or, if wanted, different colors for ruby sources, js, html, etc..). I’m going to produce them for future videos, but obviously Regexs are appreciated
• I’m a real newbie on video compressing, so you can give me mencoder strings to encode the video in different or more attractive codec/quality. Consider that code_swarm outputs all frames in png, then I use raw output to merge them, insert the logo, insert the subtitles. After that I compress the raw file (here your help is needed!!!) and then I merge the file with the background music.

Background music is taken from “First Flight” by SkinMechanix (CC-by-SA license)

My videos are also released as CC-by-SA.

If you want to learn more about what code swarm is, then check out Michael Ogawa code swarm’s home page

Enjoy!

It’s been a long time since the last post. After successfully passed my exam I took a little holiday trip camping around Europe with my girlfriend Claudia (thanks to Frederik Ramm who took us around for a morning in Karlsruhe ) and then I was a little buried in everyday stuff and everyday work. Now I’ve managed to have more spare time to return back working on Osmarender Frontend!

I was not totally outside OSM however, when I had a little time I’ve managed to remain in touch with the community and doing some little works:

• I’ve given a talk @ Linux Day 2008 in Rome about OpenStreetMap on October 25th (thanks to LS-Lug for hosting, Simone Cortesi for slides and Martin Koppenhoefer, his girlfriend and their friend for coming there! )
• I’ve started to get in touch a little bit with OSMTracker devs because of lack of compatibility with my Samsung Omnia i900. I spent an evening with Rubke and Ldp in chat talking about Marco Polci’s cool work (Pollicino), which already had some compatibility with WM internal GPSes. Now, however, an Intermediate driver for internal GPSes has been developed independently and OSMTracker is fully compatible with my cell phone. Furthermore, I’ve subscribed OSMTracker mailing list.
• Learnt to use a really great software to use in sync with OSMTracker for mapping, called JTileDownloader
• Thanks to Virtual Tiles@Home, I’ve managed to get Tiles@Home working on my old Windows box and begun helping actively. However now it’s not working anymore, hope to find a solution when I’ll have more time As I’ve seen one mail talking about Osmarender Frontend, I’ve subscribed TaH mailing list to not miss possible future mails.
• In the meantime I was starting to study for developing a little Firefox extension to monitor user’s Tiles@Home activity. I’ve already written some lines of code, but stay tuned for updates
• I’ve changed Osmarender wiki to link to my Osmarender Frontend wiki page
• I’ve subscribed the Openstreetmap Italy Facebook group
• Replied to Jiri Klement (hope to reply again soon) about his new Osmarender rules file format proposal
• Last but not least… managed to read thousands of emails coming from OSM mailing lists

Yesterday I’ve done some commits to keep Osmarender Frontend in sync with bobkare’s work on Osmarender’s SVN reorganization. I need however to work to get Osmarender Frontend fully compatible with the new SVN layout, and that means:

• Using always the latest Osmarender XSLT and latest rule files.
• Keep dojotoolkit outside the svn (no more svn:externals, so I need other solutions to link to the library) and write some shell scripts to download it (and jsdoctoolkit, and jsunit for developing).
• Let Osmarender Frontend be fully compatible again with symbols, that are now again outside the rule file.

Before starting to code Osmarender Frontend again, however, today I’m working on a little, very beautiful (to me) surprise for all devs that I’m planning to release tomorrow… Stay tuned!

Just a little post to let you all folks know, as most of you already know, that Osmarender Frontend has not come to an end with the end of Google Summer of Code 2008. I’ve a need for a little stop for a University exam on September 18th. These are however my plans for the next future

• Refactor the blog, for a smooth transition from Summer of Code to “normal project life” announcements (weekly report and gsoc feeds are not meaningful anymore, as the GSoC category).
• Refactor CMYK rule model as soon as possible to obtain the full power of reading/writing rules
• Change the wiki to describe better the architecture of Osmarender Frontend, CMYK library and JUICE widget.
• Dig further in the upcoming 1.2 release of Dojotoolkit. There are some interesting new features that I was looking for in the past for Osmarender Frontend, like the CheckableMenuItem (that is, a checkable item in drop-down menus). Furthermore, I think that the new dojox.data.JsonRestStore will be very useful for xAPI communication. Some other facilities like dojox.lang.observable, dojox.lang.aspect, dojox.json.schema and dojox.secure.sandbox are very interesting to me, too, and I wanna explore them further to see if they can be really useful to me for better coding.
• If I’ll manage to get it work (I didn’t during GSoC) and is satisfying to me, I would like to change my unit tests to DOH (if it’s likely to be powerful as JSUnit), to reduce the dependence of Osmarender Frontend from other projects. The new doh.robot thingie seems to be very very interesting for UI testing too, need to compare its power with Selenium IDE’s.

Osmarender frontend story continues…

No, it’s not a duplicate post! For all talk-it folks, I’ve just released the italian version of the manual. There are also some changes in the English version. So, here the links:

Italian version (20080901)

ODT or PDF format

English version (20080901)

ODT or PDF format (there is also an ODT with all revisions till 20080901… basically yesterday’s version for the moment).

Following some requests in OSM’s talk-it list, I’ve just released a manual for Osmarender Frontend 0.2 version (sorry folks, only English for the moment, hope to translate it soon!). The manual (24 pages long) is available in ODT or PDF format and released under CC-by-SA license. Hope you’ll find it useful!

After a question in the talk-de list (thanks to Martin for the announcement… and for having replied in German for me ), and after fixing the reported bug (even if it’s not a completely clean solution atm), replying to AndreR in the wiki, I’ve thought about opening a component in Openstreetmap’s trac.

Thanks to TomH, now everyone can submit a bug report or an enhancement suggestion for Osmarender Frontend in OSM’s trac! (you need to use your OSM account to submit a new ticket).