On this partly-cloudy day of April, I’ve thrown myself at Wikipedia seeking mercy upon my insatiable need to know more about diverse subjects such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.  But, as with any visit to Wikipedia, I ended up reading about even more diverse subjects such as the Mortgage word (from Law French), the Arabic loanword Orange and the Merovingian dynasty.

This was all great to read upon (thanks Wikipedians!).  But I’d like an easy way to find my way back to the original piece.  I’d like a nice Firefox extension to draw for me the threads of articles I’ve read.  Each time I’d open a new tab it would create a new branch from this article.  When an article links to an already open tab, it should be identified with a dashed line.

I’ve drawn an example of what it could look like (click for more details):

So please, tell me someone already wrote that piece of software? (It took me quite too long to draw this funny diagram).

Regards,

Pierre-Luc

NB: An attentive reader will realize that I like reading on History, Languages and History of Languages.

Despite all the criticism the Vancouver Organizing Committee received after the opening ceremonies, little changed in the closing one.  Yes, the VANOC’s CEO made an effort to speak in French but that’s about the only change you could see.  That and the fact that Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium added a live translator on French TV so that the less “fortunate” can understand the ceremonies in their own country.

Would have it been too much to ask for one of the monologues to have been in French? After all, I am sure there are Francophones outside Québec ready to do such a creed for Canada.  They probably just didn’t try to find one but I personally believe finding one could also have been a hard job, considering that doing such a creed, even if it’s a caricature, could mean professional suicide for a Québec comedian in Québec’s French market (where such creeds on any side isn’t popular these days).

In short, we still exist.  What you have witnessed is a sad image for a country with 2 official languages.  It is reminiscent of old English-French frictions which we all would like to believe were long gone.  As it has been pointed out on this blog (a post worth reading) and in the professional press (in French!), denying French Canadians such visibility has done more for the sovereignty movement of Québec than the current leaders of the movement themselves. And that’s quite a job, considering the health of the movement at the moment (the leading party not being the ruling government for 7 years now).

This is also reminiscent of West-East frictions.  The (mostly English) West feels bilingualism is being wrongly imposed on them. They feel too much power is given to the central provinces (where 60 % of the population lives).  They probably also feel (rightfully) they are paying for our social wealth services considering the thriving west economy of tar sands and, I have to admit, their just efficient administrations.  Those frictions may never disappear, after all British Colombia was almost part of the United States of America if it were not of the Canadian rails built in 1870s.  My point of view on the subject is that parts of Canada and United States are being unnecessarily separated on political reasons.  Vancouver’s economy is probably more active with Seattle’s than the rest of Canada.  The same applies with the province of Québec and state of New York.  Politically enforcing an horizontal relationship where the natural flow of business is vertical.  This argument has been mentioned in the latest High Speed Trains plans of Québec–Windsor and Montréal–New York.  I am going to stop here but this could lead to interesting debates on history and politics.

In conclusion, just don’t forget we still exist.  We have a thriving musical culture (among other) as you can see here, here, here and here (my personal favourite local artists these years).  Its absence from the Olympics is an anecdotal abnormality.

]]> http://blog.pierlux.com/2010/03/02/the-rumors-of-our-extinction-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/en/feed/en/ http://blog.pierlux.com/2010/02/03/my-upcoming-talks-at-confooca/en/ http://blog.pierlux.com/2010/02/03/my-upcoming-talks-at-confooca/en/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:01:21 +0000 Pierre-Luc Beaudoin http://blog.pierlux.com/?p=1400 After touring FOSS events all around the world, I decided to see what’s happening on the local software scene.  I met with the guys from Montreal-Python, the Ubuntu Québec local team guys (after all Montréal is the home of Canonical’s Global Support Services) and the local start-ups at DemoCamp.

They convinced me I should give a talk at Confoo.ca.  In fact I decided to submit 2 talks and both were accepted.  Confoo.ca is a new conference building on the famous PhpQuébec conferences but gathering much more communities together: .Net, Python, Ruby and Web developers. The conference will cover technical topics as well as project management, marketing and social medias.

Based on my personal knowledge and the experiments I’ve been doing lately with Web + Desktop apps combinations, I’ve submitted the following talks.

Django + RESTful APIs as an application server

Application servers are the central part of data applications. They are responsible for mission critical activities of businesses and yet have to be cost effective. Django offers a lot of flexibility by providing rapid application development. Django-piston makes it easy to add RESTful APIs to existing Django apps. Web servers are very common and rather cheap to rent or host in house.

Once your application has a RESTful API, nothing is keeping desktop applications to access your web services. For example, using librest on the desktop, Emerillon accesses on-line databases such as Geonames. Librest simplifies accessing RESTful web services and makes parsing XML fun again (that’s a Robert Bradford quote if I am not mistaken).

Introduction to OpenStreetMap and how to use it

When thinking of online maps, Google Maps is often mentioned as a reference. But you can’t use their data in all the exciting ways you could ever imagine. Enters OpenStreetMap: community built openly licensed map data. You are virtually free to do anything with the data, short of not giving proper attribution of its origins.

With this gained freedom, you can explore and create unique maps adjusted to your needs. You can also simply reuse the default one available on OpenStreetMap.org, in some locations it is way more complete than any other maps anyway.

Come and attend Confoo.ca!

First, a quick update to MapBuddy:

• Translations (French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Polish, Slovak)
• A “Add to addressbook” button on merchant’s window (with the help of Jonathon Jongsma)
• A precision circle is drawn around your position
• Kinetic scrolling is turned on

Then, a bigger update for libchamplain 0.4.4:

• API clean up (with API backward compatibility): champlain_view_set_size should have never existed
• Fix to make Python bindings work out of the tarballs!
• Use shared paths by all tiles consumers on Maemo devices to store tiles (saves bandwidth)
• Load tiles in a spiral manner from the centre (thanks to Jason Woofenden)
• Optimizations resulting in
  • Faster start-up
  • Smoother scrolling
  • Energy savings (by doing less computations)

Then, a huge update for libchamplain 0.5:

• First development release with new APIs:
  • Local map rendering (Google Summer of Code of Simon Wenner)
  • New Map Source mechanism à la Pipe and Filter (Jiří Techet)

The Snakes and Ladders game of 2008 (the ladder is 20 cm long)

But 2009 was special. I was going to host the party. I was going to be the one to build a game for this occasion. My mother is creative and resourceful when comes the time to use whatever materials are at hand, but I am not. I decided to build a computer game instead! Noël de fortune was born.

Splash screen of the game

After consulting with my co-host, we elaborated the basic rules of the game: a turn-based game where players have to guess an expression. They would be able to give letters that would then be revealed. If the letter is not in the expression, the player loses one point and it is then to the next player to play. The players can try to solve but if they fail it costs them 5 points. Each player have their own expression to find. When he finds his expression, he wins a gift. There should be 3 rounds. To help the players, during the first round the whole alphabet is displayed with the letters he already said highlighted. During the second round, only the given letters are displayed, and nothing during the last round. It makes it harder The player who finds his expression with the less tries wins an extra gift at the end of the game. These rules probably remind you of The Wheel of Fortune without the wheel, or of Hangman.

During the game

We built a list of 400 possible expressions for the game so that we could also play with everyone. There were 3 themes, one per round: Christmas, Things to do and Famous People. Not unexpectedly, the first theme was quite easy to guess, but the 2 others were more challenging.

To create the game, I decided to go with Python as I wanted to have a language with rich built-in types such as lists, sets and dictionaries. They came handy in the implementation. A game has to be exciting to the eye and considering I already had a fair amount of experience with Clutter, it was an obvious choice. The graphics are simple: everything is an image (except text!) and is animated using Clutter. When the player says a letter, all the cards bounce as if something passed under to read them and they turn around if the letter matches. A nice magic sound is played out. There are error dialogs (the letter was previously given or the letter is not found) and solution dialogs too! When the turn is over, the score is displayed using vertical bars that show up one by one (adding a little stress hehe).

The solution dialog

The bad solution dialog

The score screen (not actual game scores ;-)

It took quite over 80 hours to create the game. Overall, it was a great success Our guests liked it and fun lasted for hours!

Gabriel explaining the rules. You can see all the gifts surrounding the LCD screen.

I will not be releasing the game. Quite honestly, the code is a mess: it was my first game, my first Python application from scratch and in the end I was just fixing bugs without fixing core issues. But hey it works: I am sure there are worst proprietary apps out there

Some of the graphics are composed of images available under Creative Common such as the background. Unfortunately, I did a lazy job keeping track of my sources and I lost the link/name of the author of the nice graphics I used. If you find it, I’ll link it!

Oh by the way, since my mom got her hands free of creating a game, she invested herself in the packaging of the gifts. Has anyone of your ever received a gift wrapped like a Bûche de Noël or a drummer boy’s drum?

My gift was wrapped like a Bûche de Noël. I won this gift by finding the word "meat ball stew".

If you know how to edit maps, maybe you can land a hand! CrisisCommon also has other resources.

Follow-up: Mikel Maron has before and after images along with more info.

To solve this, I created Map Buddy: a map application specifically designed for Maemo 5.  It is quite simple to use and works out of the box (no configuration or selection of plug-ins required!).  It also has something other apps don’t: it uses web-services to provide business search capabilities.

Here’s the use case I built Map Buddy upon: you just arrived in Montréal and want to find a sushi restaurant.

1. You start Map Buddy, it will be centred on the place you closed Map Buddy on.  You can click on the “Center on me” icon on the bottom left, and it will centre the map on Montréal ‒ remember you are in Montréal for this example! By the way, your position is marked by a blue dot. Later version will display the precision too.
2. To search for businesses, you have to switch in business search mode, tap on the magnifying glass to do so.
3. Enter sushi in the search bar and press enter! The map will be populated with markers representing the places tagged with sushi (powered by Praized Media, a Montréal start-up).
4. To get the name of the place, tap once on the marker.
5. To get the complete details about a place, tap once on the name: a new window will be opened with the business’ address, phone number and web site if available.  Map Buddy even provides a call button!
6. To clear the search results, tap on the trash can in the search bar or do a new search.

It’s that simple!

Map Buddy includes a place search so that if you are looking for Pizza in New York, you don’t have to scroll from San Francisco to New York to get there.  Select the Place search mode, enter New York in the search field and press enter.  A picker dialog will be opened to let you select the correct New York.

To switch to other maps, click on the layer icon, it will bring up the list of possible maps to display.

I hope you like it!  Try it today! WARNING: Installing Map Buddy in this early stage requires adding the extras-devel repository which might install unstable software on your device.  Try it at your own risk or if you are a professional

NB: Praized Media only has strong data sets for Canada and United States.  They plan to sign business partnerships to get data for Europe in 2010.  In the mean time, you can directly add businesses using this form.

NB: Help is appreciated to translate it!

Yes! Libchamplain now has a scale! It was long overdue. In fact, I first started to work on it way before libchamplain 0.2.2 was even released (1.25 year ago). It got impeded by more important features and bug fixes. Two or three months ago Tollef Fog Heen took over the branch and added the magic required maths to compute the scale. I then took over his work (as he was quite busy and I wanted this too) to provide the final result.

Since all the changes are backward compatible, I’ll soon release a libchamplain 0.4.3 with the scale disabled by default (to ensure the same visual behaviour as before upgrade). To display a scale, an application just has to change the show-scale property to TRUE.

#if CHAMPLAIN_CHECK_VERSION (0, 4, 3)
g_object_set (champlain_view, "show-scale", TRUE, NULL);
#endif


The scale also supports other exotic units than the SI/metric ones. It can display miles and feet, if you’re into that. By the way, the scale will automatically switch from kilometres to metres when it makes more sense. That was quite more complex to do with miles and feet as they are not simply a power of 10. Set the scale-unit property to CHAMPLAIN_UNIT_MILES to get miles.

You can limit the width (in pixels) of the scale with the max-scale-width property.  If you watch closely, the scale will adjust itself right away when you move the map.

It currently has 1 plug-in.  This plugin is one that will be useful to Montréalers: it displays the status of the Bixi network.  Bixi is Montréal’s self-serve public bike system.  Apparently its design is so good — the bike system, not the plug-in — that it’ll be implemented in both London (UK) and Boston (USA) very soon.

So the plug-in is quite simple: you have a drop down list where you select to see available bikes in stations near you or available docking stations.  The map is updated instantly to display the new values.  The markers on the map change in size depending on the available bikes/docks.  The information is automatically updated every 5 minutes.

After all the legal verifications, this plug-in is now free for everyone to share.  It should serve as a good example of what you can do with Emerillon and libchamplain.  It is the first piece of code (that I am aware of) to demonstrate ChamplainMarker sub-classing to implement unique look & feel.

Disclaimer: This plug-in has been independently developed by Novopia Solutions and is not in anyway related to or endorsed by Bixi, the operator of Montréal’s public bike system.  Bixi is a trade mark of Société de vélo en libre-service.

I have a friend who’s looking for a free software application to draw pipeline networks using the Piping and Instrumentation Diagram Standard Notation such as this example:

He didn’t find any and resorted to draw each possible elements in svgs he later intend to import as symbols in Dia.  Does such a thing already exist? or is there another specialized tool that comes with such symbols?

Answer in comments to this post. Thanks!

First of all, the learning curve is high.  That’s to be expected, after all GnuCash is a complete accounting application. While the UI is quite simple and lean, there’s terminology and procedures to learn. That where the documentation comes handy.

The documentation covers many topics: terminology, accounting principles and howtos for many specific uses.  In about 2 hours, I was setup: I had setup my accounts (based on their very well localized presets: it even included Québec’s taxes and perceptions accounts), I had imported transactions from my bank account and credit cards.  Now if only Desjardins also provided retirement savings (RRSP) details in a computer readable format beside their brochure PDFs… I’ll have to wait ’till I get my detailed printed report (once every 3 months) before I can manually enter the data in GnuCash.

All in all, I’d like to kudo the GnuCash contributors.  Somehow I didn’t expect so much polish on a 12 years old application (and don’t get me wrong, but sometimes apps get stuck in time).  The ledger view comes with handy keyboard shortcuts designed to speed up data entry and I like it. Custom reports? that even more awesome.

I’ll submit some localization bugs (or request a fr_CA version) because somehow it looks like French and Québécois accountants didn’t agree on all the words (ie. conciliation).

Mandatory Greyhound rant

With a 3 hour delay on departure (making a total of 5 hours of wait in Boston’s 10 ℃ station), we managed to arrive 5 hours late in Montréal, due to a defective heater in the bus.  Add moving everyone at 5 AM from that defective ’70s bus to a freezing ’90s bus with actually less seats than the previous one, and the fact that there was enough people to fill 3 buses in Boston, but only 54 managed to leave on the first one and you’ve got a complete picture of the fiasco.

I am not going to run in too much details but all this could have been so easily avoided.  The delays were due to the fact that the bus that was supposed to bring us had been delayed at the US border.  Fine, shit happens.  What is not fine is that they waited until our expected departure time to get a replacement driver (since he had busted his legal driving time).  See, it takes about 5 hours from the border to Boston.  Knowing he was going to be late (and therefore busting his hours), the driver should have called his manager, which should have prepared a replacement driver for the next departure in 10 hours! But none of that happened.  And, to top it all, there were no Greyhound dispatcher to be called by the Boston station employees to inform them of a missing departure bus.  Complete utter fail.

Emerillon 0.1.0 release

Now for the fun part.  With all that time on hands, I created 2 new plugins for Emerillon (Copy a link of the current view to online maps, and display map position in statusbar) and cooked a release including all the 5 submitted translations.  Woot! Grab the release here.  This is a preview release with no guaranty on plugin API stability.  See the complete announce email.

Before anyone asks, I am using the gnome-colors Shiki-Wize theme.

For those who missed the original announcement: Emerillon is a map viewer. Aiming at simple user interface, Emerillon is a powerful, extensible application. It features OpenStreetMap based
maps. Use it to browse maps, search the map for places, placemark places for later quick access and more!

There are even packages of this release for Ubuntu Hardy from Mathieu Trudel.  See his blog of the install instructions.

At least the hotel we are staying at this year is in a more lively part of the city See you tomorrow!

Why another map application do you say? Simply because none of them is free AND targeted at the Gnome desktop AND has ease of use in its (visible) goals.  This project should be easy to use for anyone, not only for mapping geeks.

Emerillon is an application designed to be extended.  There is a number of small specialized map applications that were created in the last year, I have hope this one will be the catalyst of the development efforts.  Out of the box, Emerillon comes with 2 plugins: a search and a placemark plugin.  There are numerous plugins ideas : a GPX viewer, GPS integration, Telepathy integration (both to share the app and to display your friends location), a plugin to display the position under the mouse cursor, a plugin to display personal markers and I have two special ideas that I want to keep for myself to implement Other ideas are welcomed too!

Emerillon is a project originally started by Marco Barisione in October 2008.  Due to various reasons, it remained dormant for almost a year, until I decided to take over and push it forward.   Turns out, Marco had laid out very good UI base on which I built upon.

Visit http://www.novopia.com/emerillon/ for more screenshots and details.

Kudos to be given

Emerillon is built of code inspired by other projects and very cool libraries.  Early on, Marco borrowed Evince’s sidebar.  This sidebar is so nice and clean that it should be part of Gtk+! The problem is that this code is GPL but Gtk+ is not.

Another quite common widget in Gnome apps is Epiphany’s spinning throbber.  Again, it is GPL’d and the code has to be copied from apps to apps.

I am not going to kudo libchamplain Lets say I have found API omissions that will need to be addressed for Emerillon to work perfectly. Who needs a “selected” signal after all? Still, libchamplain was quite necessary to build this app.

Emerillon’s plugin system was faster to implement than I expected when I got this idea.  But thanks to Ethos, it was a simpler task.  Ethos is a complete (Gedit/EOG alike) plugin architecture in a library.  It even provides UI widgets to manage the plugins.

Emerillon’s search plugin uses librest to fetch its data from geonames.org.  Rob Bradford was right: it is now fun again to parse XML.  I mean really.  This library makes fetching web service data an easy task.

Fetch Emerillon from Gnome’s git today and give it a try!

While this is a field where there are plenty of FOSS solutions, the primary focus in the upcoming weeks will be on improving the geolocation solutions in GNOME.  Commercial support for libchamplain is of course on the list.

More to be announced later.

This will be my first Ubuntu event and my first local conf.  After all, I realized I know more FOSS contributors in Europe than in Montréal.  And that’s not because there aren’t, I’ve just been more often to international conferences.  Time to make a shift.  To mark the start, I’ll be giving a tutorial on Saturday October 3rd around 14:00 about how to contribute to OpenStreetMap from an Ubuntu desktop ‒ for what matters, any GNU/Linux distro would be fine too :-).

See you there.

Stockholm, Sweden

Swedish Meat Balls, (cc) CurryPuffy

• Meat balls

As server onboard Viking Line boats or at that very good restaurant Daf, Gabriel, Alban and I visited in Gamla Stan.

Sankt-Peterburg, Russia

Boeuf Stogranoff pour souper, (cc) pierlux.com

• Beef Strogonoff

Istanbul, Turkey

Marché égyptien, (cc) pierlux.com

• Curry sauce chicken
• Lamb dishes

Why curry sauce in Turkey? There was a very good curry sauce rice and chicken plate served at the University’s cafeteria during GUADEC 2008.

Berlin, Germany

Basil, Spinach & Pesto Spaghetti with Pine nuts, (cc) gordonflood.com

• Pine Nut and Pesto Pastas
• Pomodoro Fresco Pastas

Why pastas in Berlin, the answer is simple: Va Piano. It is a nice restaurant chain where you can see you pastas getting prepared for you. I liked so much my first visit (on Postdamer Platz) that I quickly found another one closer to my hotel and ate not less than 3 times in the 5 days I was in Berlin at these restaurants.

Oh I did try the curry würst on my first trip to Berlin, but not my favourite

Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain

Papas arrugadas con mojo, (cc) Fer..

Nouriture végétarienne, (cc) pierlux.com

• Tapas style potatoes with Mojo sauce
• Rice Burgers

The rice burgers are from the very good Naturalis vegetarian restaurant close to the conference center.

Cambridge, UK

Penne speck e rucola, (cc) paPisc

• Champignon and Speck pastas

Why pastas in Cambridge, that would be because of Marco Barisione. He was my host and he cooked delicious Italian style pastas for me. He clearly introduced me to the fact that you don’t need to buy pre-prepared pasta sauce.

Helsinki, Finland

good pizza, (cc) tonx

• Blue Cheese, Chicken and Peach Pizza
• Crème Fraiche and Champignon pastas
• Stews
• Mango Lassi

Barisione is this inspiration combined with Alban Crequy love for crème fraîche that explains the pastas for Helsinki. We also weekly made a nice stew. After 14 weeks, I think I got to master them hehe

The rest of the meals come from a well known cafeteria down in Ruoholahti I admit I wasn’t very fond of all the meals, but some I quite liked!

Generally, while travelling I got in touch with vegetarians. I hadn’t met many before leaving Québec. Discussing with people at SOTM 09, we identified that vegetarianisms is quite uncommon in French speaking nations. I am not quite convinced by the ethical “don’t eat animals”, but I can understand the health and environmental reasons. Therefore I now try to eat 25% of my meals vegetarian. That’s better than none at all!

I hope I didn’t open your appetite too much.

About a month after its 1 year birthday, libchamplain hit the 0.4 mark - the first stable release of this new version.  It’s a Clutter based ClutterActor and Gtk+ widget to display street maps, cycle maps or other maps.  It comes with eye candy.

Special thanks to all contributors to this release (in chronological order of first contribution):
Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, Jonathon Jongsma, Lorenzo Masini, Packz Enoch, Thomas Van Machelen, Anders M-Pedersen, Stephane Delcroix, Denk Padje, Mike Sheldon, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Emmanuele Bassi, Lionel Dricot, Simon Wenner, Kritarth Upadhyay, Debarshi Ray, Paulo Cabido, Sjoerd Simons, Victor Godoy Poluceno, Javier Jardón, Patryk Zawadzki, Sebastian Reichel, Tim Horton, Frederic Peters, Cosimo Cecchi, Vincent Untz, Felix Riemann

Libchamplain in action in Eye of Gnome,
displaying a picture of Lübeck, Germany.

New in this release (since 0.2.10)

• Support for custom map sources: embedding apps can define their own map sources and provide tiles for libchamplain to display.  This includes a way to list available map sources.
• Zoom on double click is now configurable.
• View keeps centred when you resized the view.
• A way to convert screen coordinates to map coordinates: lets you interact with the map and its markers.
• Cache tiles: downloaded tiles are cached.  The cache is intelligently validated against the server every 7 days for now.
• Revamped marker API: Default markers now have a nicer look with rounded corners, nicer colors and a shadow.  The API allows easy image and label markers to be created.
• Limit visible zoom levels: you can now limit what the user can view.
• Feedback during loading: ChamplainView will emit a state change when loading resources from network providing better feedback possibilities to the user.
• Line and polygon drawing API: You can now easily draw lines and polygon over the map.  This is useful for indicating routes or highlighting areas.
• User Agent: libchamplain now identifies itself in HTTP requests
• Marker selection support: libchamplain provides a helpful API when you want to let user select a bunch of markers (or only one).  This API has been designed with Gtk+’s selection API in mind.
• Ported to Clutter 1.0: libchamplain now depends and use Clutter 1.0.  It allowed us to add the very nice in and out for markers.
• Bindings: the API is now bindable.  Only the Python bindings works for now but that’s not because the Perl binder didn’t try hard to get some too, try having a baby close to a release! :)  C# bindings and C++ have been worked on but didn’t make it on time for the release.
• Many bug fixes.

Plans for the future

Now that 0.4 is behind us, we already have a huge list of nice to have in 0.6 (due in same time as Gnome 2.30 or Gnome 3.0):

• Smooth zooming and animation;
• Rotation of the map;
• Display cached tiles while downloading new ones;
• Add a clustering layer: a layer where markers very close on a map will be merged into one marker;
• An MVC API for layers: use ClutterModel and support GtkTreeModel as sources of Marker data;
• Limit the visible area on the map;
• Have the map wrap horizontally;
• Have a nice dragging mode for markers;
• Add a map scale;
• Provide better accessibility;
• Better cache policies;
• Better animations;

And most importantly: local rendering of maps. This project is well on its way with the recent conclusion of the Google Summer of Code 2009.  Simon Wenner, which you probably read the progress on planet.gnome.org, did a marvellous job on this.  His work should be included in the first development release of libchamplain 0.5.

First of all, what is Walking papers. It’s a simple web site where you can print a map of an area. You go walk around and note the missing information. When you come back, you scan the page and upload it back. From Walking papers you can edit the map using your scanned page as the background to the online Potlatch editor.

Since I am not a big fan of Potlatch (and that I gave away my scanner, not having used it for years), I used the paper as a reminder of what’s on the land when editing with Josm.

Before SOTM, I never though about the high value of extra data (other than ways). Now I highly value all the small details, such as mail boxes, restaurants and addresses. The last one is pretty boring to do by the way. It requires a lot of note taking and a lot of nodes to create and edit. But addressing will be the ultimate step to make precise routing possible with OpenStreetMap data.

So here is what I did (with a friend for Saint-Laurent and Prince-Arthur streets) over the week-end. This represents about 4 hour person walking on site and 4 hour person putting all the data back in the computer. I included a screenshot of Google Map’s Tele Atlas data just as an example to show how far they are from having complete data.

Note: The before screenshot dates after the first pass on Prince-Arthur.  I didn’t do the streets north of Prince-Arthur street yet, that’s why OpenStreetMap is missing a park. I’ll add it when I see it with my eyes (we should never copy from other map sources).

I am really happy with how the Square Saint-Louis renders.  Unfortunately, the square’s page is only available in French on Wikipedia.  The square is bordered with Victorian style houses from the 1880s.  The square itself dates from the same years and has never lost its charm.  In its first years, it was where the upper French Canadian class settled.  Avenue Laval is bordered by georgious victorian houses.  I hope I could buy one some day, those houses are just very nice and we should protect them.

Taking opportunity of the new introduced animations in Clutter, I added new marker animations in libchamplain:

If you are viewing through a planet, or a non HTML5 capable browser, here’s the file.

Since porting to Clutter 1.0 was the only condition set by the Gnome release team for libchamplain’s inclusion in Gnome 2.28, we can consider it a done deal!

See the complete announcement.

In other news, libchamplain 0.3.5 was also released last Saturday. It is the last release to use Clutter 0.8, but it also has very good Perl and Python bindings. Since Clutter 1.0’s bindings are not ready yet, libchamplain 0.3.5 is the last release to have bindings until Clutter gets some!