ChristianK

Excel becomes LibreOffice-Calc at OAM

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Many people might ask themselves: “Why Excel for an OSM map project?
Well, with OAM there is a stock of around 270 maps to manage with the most diverse settings.

For example, map symbols for petrol stations and drinking water sources in urban areas appear only at much higher zoom levels than in Scandinavia – for this, there is also the ELEMENTS theme by Tobias, which takes this into account. This means that different tag mappings have to be created and assigned to individual maps.
But also such trivial things as map centres, languages, fineness of elevation data, allocation to render queues (load balancing) have to be managed. Corresponding start-up programmes for each individual production step such as conversion of file formats, creation of boundary polys, elevation data, sea areas, inheritance of bike/MTB/hike routes etc,etc. – belong to !automated! production.

Last but not least, the web pages must be regenerated after each update.

This is impossible to do manually, so far Excel-VBA programmes in combination with PERL scripts have done most of the hard work.

 

For about 10 days now, I have been sitting in front of the computer every free minute and porting VBA to Starbasic. Porting means cleaning up 9 years of organically grown programmes and simply rewriting them, leaving out my beloved PERL for pure administration jobs.
In addition, a flexible folder structure was implemented to allow porting to other machines and effective load balancing/caching.

 

With the switch to a free office package and the cleaning up of the programmes, it is now much easier for my co-authors to familiarise themselves with map production in OpenAndroMaps. 

 

The first maps rolled out today from the LibreCalc generated start scripts, the automated creation of the download pages will be addressed next week.

 

New rendering machine: Thank you very much for your donations – most of the parts for the PC have arrived and are awaiting assembly, which will be started after the next map update if there are no unexpected problems with the software port.
For me this is a great reassurance as it means that the test computer will go to @Michael and thus 10 years of accumulated knowledge about vector maps will be preserved.

 

There will be more detailed information about the new render machine.
Here in a nutshell: AMD Ryzen 5600G, 128GB RAM, ASUS MB, 2TB 970evo Plus as standard drive, 1TB Toshiba SSD for the planet extracts and height data, NOCTUA fans, new semi-passive power supply, as well as various used parts from the spare and new fans for the old case.
Should my time run out, this computer will also go to @Michael.

best wishes and stay healthy
Christian

 

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ChristianK

The summer is here = Traveling time for Admins

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Dear OAM community,

In a nutshell:
I had been struggling with health problems for quite a while this year. I would like to say  THANK’s to my comrades-in-arms Tobias and Michael who have kept up the support here.

I am now looking forward to a long overdue holiday trip which I will start next week and which will – hopefully – take me to the far north.

Which means that the next map update, any bug fixes and improvements will continue in August (at the moment the computer is runnig full speed and every map rendered until Friday will be uploaded). I hope for your understanding.

BTW:
Looking back on the first half of the year, a lot of improvements have been made to the maps – and Sonny has been busy adding the LIDAR elevation contours.
The Scandinavia_North map will be replaced by a Scandinavia_NorthEast map. From now on the maps Scandinavia_SouthWest + Scandinavia_NorthEast cover Scandinavia completely.

Until autumn, stay healthy and
(again) nice tours with the OAM
Christian

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ChristianK

[resolved] Europe/Germany POIs actually broken

Unfortunately, I made a tiny mistake in the structure of the POI categories which leads to the fact that the POI databases for both Orux and Locus are broken in the February update.

I will be re-uploading the map files with the POI databases in a couple of days.

Until then, please download the POI files from January here:
http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/misc/openstreetmap/openandromaps/pois/

Sorry, this shouldn’t happen…..

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ChristianK

Yet another bussy year is drawing to a close…

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Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,

Another year is drawing to a close, already the 9th year for OAM !
Nine years are a long time in an era in which continous and accelerating change is the only constant.

Without my ally Tobias and Michal and the Members of the OAM Developer-Community OpenAndroMaps wouldn’t be what it is today – probably the best vector maps for all outdoor fanatics and travellers.

I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.

A short summary of the innovations that have been incorporated into the OAM in 2020:

  • offline POIs for Locus
  • 10m contourlines for most maps
  • better representation and resolving of country and state borders
  • name-labels adapted to curved ways, an essential inovation
  • the overview/general maps by Michael have been completely reworked, he also created the new map coverage pictures in the download area
  • webservers moved to a cloud-server at Hetzner.de

Investments were also made in the equipment of the rendering machine:

  • The system SSD was changed after 9 years
    At the beginning of the year 2 SSD’s were purchased just for file caching,
    1* Samsung 970PRO 1TB PCI,
    1* Samsung 850PRO 500GB
  • An own graphics card to free another 2GB of RAM for rendering

 

Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.

The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!
Tobias, Michael, Christian

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ChristianK

Back to the old Forum-Plugin

The new version of the forum plugin
= BBPress 2.6.5 unfortunately sufferes from some problems.

Posts not created by moderators were set to “Hold” if they contained several links or even (oh well, imagine!!) media. WITHOUT message to the moderators.
Furthermore BBPress is not able to set the date/time stamp of the last post in the forum overview correctly since 5 months.

Thanks to Frank from the Netherlands for his endless patience in detecting errors!

So back to BBPress Version 2.5.14

As far as I can see, everything is working fine – if you have any problems with the downgrade please let me know.
If you can’t do otherwise, please leave a comment here.

By the way, the update of _all_ the maps is in progress with further improved LoPoI’s which are now also directly included in the map_zip.

 

Best regards
Christian

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ChristianK

Forum – User Registration repaired

Sorry, the user registration in the forum did not work for 24h – now it’s repaired.
The sending of mails needed a new authorization type – this issue is resolved.

Again my request: If you register in the forum please use email addresses that are NOT preferred by spammers – not yahoo and their relatives. I have to raise the obstacle for spammers every year because the amount of scam/spam exceeds every reasonable level.

The website is now running – especially in the forum area – much faster than before, I spent one more CPU to the new cloud server and activated the CDN again. The site is now above 93% in all rankings at GtMetric, ensuring a pleasant user-experience for you.

So there’s nothing to stop the regular big update of _all_ maps at mid-year.
The POIs for Locus have now also reached a level of maturity that is significantly better than BETA.

Greetings,
Your team from OpenAndroMaps

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ChristianK

Welcome on the new WebServer of OAM

The new server is running!

The domains are transferred and provided with certificates.
Everything still runs without optimizations, that will come.

Which means that you can download maps and Pois again.

Support and updates should be available at the end of May.
There is still a lot of work left till everything is up as bevor.

Greetings, Christian

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ChristianK

Spring cleaning of the OAM website

Dear OAM community,

The website of the OpenAndroMaps will be dusted a little bit in the next days (it’s raining ;-) ).
A tedious and time-consuming work, but, especially with WordPress, it is inevitable from time to time.

Why:

We have now PHP +7 / MySql 5.7 on the server side and not every WordPress plugin can do that.
Which means that old plugins that have not been maintained for years have to be eliminated or replaced.
Only when this is done WP and the theme itself are able to be updated.
Unfortunately, the plugin that generates the dynamic download tables is also one of these deliverables – finding a replacement here will be a challenge.
If someone has experience with the FOO-Tables under WP+5 (doesn’t work or what has to be done) I would be grateful for any help.

For now, the SocialMedia plugin (Shariff) has been eliminated and replaced by the function that is now integrated into the Enfold theme. There is _no_ communication with FB/Twitter/Instgramm/etc – only a “stupid” link is set. This corresponds to my idea of a clean website.

Another, very practical plugin, is/was the CrayonSyntaxHighlighter for source codes that are formatted very nicely and readably. Unfortunately this plugin has not been updated for 4 years and there is no adequate replacement that would be worth the program overhead. So these elements (program snippets in the majority) are now displayed as PRE-formatted text.

And so on, the list is quite long…

What does this mean for you:

I have to replace some elements on all pages and then check ALL pages and posts for consistency. Furthermore all caches+CDN have to be switched off from time to time.
Which means that the website will be (sometimes) very, very slow – this can’t be avoided because the WordPress Backend (Admin) consumes a lot of resources.
So if you see a “Gateway Error No [something]” please understand a webmaster who is trying to keep his inner center while restarting the server.

Best regards
Christian

In the meantime you can download Michael’s maps to your smartphone, they have reached a level of perfection that will amaze you:

World Maps
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ChristianK

Yet another year is drawing to a close…

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Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,

another year is drawing to a close, already the sixth year for OAM.

Time to say “thanks” to all the people contibuting new, better Data for OAM like
@Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
@MaxBe who found a way to sort mountain peaks by “importance” so we could render the important ones in lower zoom-levels – an improvement that is included in the december map update.

I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.

Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.

The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!

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ChristianK

Was have happened at OAM till Nov 2017?

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Yes, I know..

Kommunikation from my side to the OpenAndroMaps community could – and should – be better (by far) ;-)

A lot of improvements happened during 2017  – OAM is’nt on idle at all, we are working hard to improve, add new Features, include external Data, aso..

Here a small overview about improvements so far in 2017:

Maps:

  • Abbreviations for Street / Place names in many languages for more reliable rendering (eg Street / Strasse > St.)
  • Better rendering of cycletracks and lanes along roads
  • Put_in / regress / portage_ways for paddlers included in map_data
  • @Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
  • @Tobias constantly improves the Elevate / Elements rendertheme.
  • Constant evolution of the multilanguage maps > now (eg) PidginChines works reliable
  • Better redering of access rights and road surfaces
  • Difficult scale (sac_scale) for mountain paths without restrictions
  • Names for Islands / Archipelagos now render much better and at lower zoom levels – appearence is driven by calculated size of area covered
  • @Michael works for a better set of GeneralMaps
  • …

Website:

  • Server moved to new, more reliable provider with up to date infrastructure
  • Protokoll moved to HTTPS
  • New version of WordPress theme with much better apperance and faster rendering on mobile devices
  • aso..

 

However the best of all is about to come.
December update will bring a real great improvement for hikers and alpinists.

 

Best regards
Team of OAM

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