Victorian Mapping on Android
Juan Lucas has recently blogged that he's got his unofficial version gvSIG Mobile (practically) running on Android.
Juan Lucas has put a video on YouTube showing the Android version of the application displaying Ordnance Survey mapping of Glasgow, 1857:
The mapping is impressive enough in its own right and is provided by the National Library of Scotland; there's more details in the April 2009 edition of the Society of Cartographers' newsletter and you can view it all without an Android phone here.
I guess I'm going to have to get an Android powered phone, or two.
Egyptian Archaeology
I, like most educated folks, used to think that Egyptian Archaeology was all a bit dull; "History of Art derived time lines of Kings and other rich people" I might once have called it. But then I went...
Type 3 Squareback. Gorgeous.
Mk1 two door Passat. Rare as rocking horse teeth.
Mk1 Polo. I really want one.
Mk1 Jetta. Not really doing it for me.
There was also a lot of nice Beetles, although I didn't take any pictures. There was one I would have photo'd, it looked mint, but it drove past. A lot of Mk2 Golfs, one in particular looked lovely on G60 steelies, but I couldn't get a picture (it was on the otherside of the motorway Cairo suburban street), and an awful lot of Bay Window buses in Giza. Shame nobody there thought to buy a nice VW bus ;-)
Only saw a couple of Mk1 Golfs, one nice looking cabriolet (if such a thing exists), although it was driving away from us; in the end I didn't get any pictures of any.
All in all, a successful piece of archaeological fieldwork.
Free bus travel, or "how not to deal with onsite mobile communications"
Note: As ever the contents of this blog reflect my own opinions, not those of my employer. In no way do I condone or promote any activity that may be even vaguely illegal.
The Oxford Bus Company's Airline service is a wonderful example of how not to deal with online transactions for two important reasons - it's bad for customers and presents an easily exploited security flaw that can result in free bus travel for anyone who wants it. At a wider level, the Oxford Bus Company demonstrates that a half-hearted approach to online commerce, and a failure to deal with modern mobile technology, can be much more detrimental to your business than simply not engaging with online commerce at all.
Discovering the flaw, or "how to upset paying customers"
I recently purchased a return bus ticket online to travel from Oxford to Heathrow and back. It cost me £25. The ticket arrives as an email, which you're asked to bring along with you when you board the bus. How you "bring the email" with you is open to debate; on the website you're told you need to print it, on the email itself you're told to simply "bring it with you". All my emails end up on my mobile phone, so I planned to bring the email with me by simply taking my phone. I also took my passport with me - I'd need it at Heathrow and was told that I would need to show photo ID to the bus driver. Boarding the bus I was told that I did not have enough to complete the journey - I had the email, in electronic form, and I had photo ID, but I needed to have a paper copy of the ticket, as such I would need to spend another £25 on a ticket from the bus driver.
I also had an electronic plane ticket that had been emailed to me and that I had also not printed. This was liked to my passport number, so all I needed to do was hand my passport in at the check-in desk at the airport and they could retrieve my details. Similarly, I have previously booked airport car parking online and have been sent a confirmation number that I have not printed, just remembered, and provided to staff at the car park to enable me to leave my car. Other companies, it seems, that allow you to pay for things online, don't need a printed email, or any email, to identify the buyer.
Other companies not only provide you with a reference number when you pay for something, but more importantly, they also provide their customer facing staff with access to the data behind this reference number. The Oxford Bus Company do not do this, they only require you turn up with a printed email and photo ID. This is two factor authentication - something I have and someone I am - but it's very unfortunate that the something I have is produced by myself, rather than by the bus company; as such a genuine looking piece of paper can be used to exploit the system.
Exploiting the system, or "give the man what he wants"
Exploiting the hole in the Oxford Bus Company's awful system is easy; print a genuine looking email that contains the details of any bus journey you want to take. The bus driver only wants to see an email and your ID, they have no access to any passenger lists; should anyone with a passenger list board the bus (some kind of ticket inspector, I guess), you can remind them that the customer is always right; furthermore, act mortified at the fact that they blame a failing of the booking processing system to register your journey as some sort of criminal action on your behalf.
Fixing the system, or "use what you've already got"
Fixing this bus ticket problem would be very simple - the Oxford Bus Company just needs to generate a unique ID number that it includes in emails to customers and to provide drivers with access to a passenger database. Buses are already fitted with Internet connections to be used by passengers on the journey, so all that needs to be provided is a very simple device to the driver.
A passenger boards the bus, hands over their ID and says "my number is 546672", the driver taps this into the machine and replies "ah yes, hello Mr Reeves, I'll let you know when we're at Heathrow Central bus terminal".
At present, the Oxford Bus Company uses the Internet to take your money, but have taken no steps to use the technology to improve either the customer experience or their own SOP. This half-hearted approach only serves to annoy those customers who have had previous dealings with such systems and to introduce opportunities for abuse. The system demonstrates a lack of technical understanding within the Oxford Bus Company and reveals remarkably poor work by either the in-house IT technicians or contracted company employed to produce this service.
IT specialists are specialists, just like bus drivers
This all goes to show that if you're considering implementing IT within your company or organisation, you need to consult a competent IT specialist for the job. I wouldn't tell the bus driver how to drive to Heathrow, or how to park once we got there, but I'd like to think that anyone with even the slightest familiarity with mobile Internet applications could have helped with this one.
Mobile aerial photograph analysis
Juan Lucas Domínguez Rubio has a great entry on his blog that serves as a practical demonstration of using gvSIG Mobile for Openmoko as a tool for archaeological analysis and, perhaps more interestingly, explanation and dissemination:
Juan Lucas has displayed a pair of shape files that trace the outline of a cathedral and Roman amphitheatre in modern day Cartagena, southern Spain; these lines are displayed over aerial mapping from the 1930's, 1950's and the modern day. The first two examples are served up via WMS, the third, I think, comes from Yahoo!'s aerial photography service. You see the Cathedral in good condition, with the amphitheatre covered by recent developments; later you'll see the Cathedral roof bombed and the building abandoned whilst the amphitheatre is later discovered and restored.
It starts to get very interesting when you remember that this is running on a GPS enabled mobile phone; people could walk around, choosing the layers they wanted to be displayed, watching history unfold around them. The potentials for dissemination or community involvement are enormous.
gvSIG Mobile 0.1.3 released; ESRI and Microsoft join the mapfest
Juan Lucas sent me a link to the latest gvSIG Mobile for Openmoko / Maemo. I've packaged up the Openmoko version and uploaded it here and to opkg.org.
Juan Lucas provides some screens of two new features here; support for Microsoft's Live maps and data provided by ESRI's ArcIMS protocol. Is there any other mobile GIS application that provides support for as many different data sources?
There's also some slight GUI changes and extra languages:
Norwegian; provided by Herdis Hølleland
French; provided by Michaël Douchin
Russian & Hewbrew; provided by Evgeny
That brings us to a total of 9 languages. Big thanks to everyone who has kindly supplied a translation for us; if anyone else wants to help please download this short file, translate it into your language of choice and send it to Juan Lucas or myself.
I'm flying to Cairo on Thursday morning for a very ill prepared holiday, Juan Lucas was kind enough to ensure that gvSIG Mobile would fit my needs ;-)
This goes to show how easy it is to edit these fields to suit your requirements. If you're collecting OpenStreetMap data, for example, you could easily create a database on your phone that met your recording needs. I'll type up a guide about that later, probably after 0.1.4 is released as that may feature extra functionality in this area.
Download, enjoy, be happy!
UN FAO to donate African spatial data to OpenStreetMap
I've just seen Robert Soden's recent post to the OSM Mailing list:
Over the last few months, I've been in contact with FAO's Africover program: http://www.africover.org/ . Africover maintains shapefiles containing rivers, roads, towns, and admin boundaries for a number of countries that we would like add to the OSM dataset. While they normally do not release data under an OSM-acceptable license, they have granted us permission to add their data to Open Street Map.Over the next few weeks, we will be working on importing data for Tanzania, DR Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda. We'll be working slowly in order to ensure accuracy and integrity of the OSM dataset. Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in learning more about our progress, but we will also be posting status reports on the project wiki pages.
Africover also maintains datasets for Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan. We may work on these over the longer-term, and would be happy to collaborate with other folks on this.
Francesco de Virgilio wonderfully describes this as the great news it is.
Robert Soden has previously blogged comparing the state of mapping in various African capitals; such a data import will provide impressive improvements for large areas. It's much better news than the details of Google's Kenyan Map Maker downloads.
I'm a massive fan of OSM and am increasingly wanting to become involved in projects that provide free mapping data for Africa. The potentials for this data are enormous and its value immense; congratulations to Robert and the FAO for agreeing to begin pulling this into OSM.
OpenRace
I got a couple of good responses to my last post on the subject of racing myself; Marcus Bauer suggested a new screen for the FreeRunner, which sounds like a very good idea. We could also try and fit another battery or two in the presumably enlarged case to aid outdoor performance; so yes, I'm officially interested in that one. Pete Reed provided a link to his additional suggestions on the subject. And Chris, I'd be more worried about giving it some beans in one of these ;) but anyway, I digress...
Fleshing out my application idea then:
The application displays OpenStreetMap or WMS tiles depending on the level of complexity required. OSM would probably be enough for most, although custom WMS tiles of a racetrack, for example, would be quite nice.
The application would support either starting a new race, or loading a previous race produced by either yourself or a third party. Starting a new race would begin recording your trip to a standard gpx file; you ride around with the map centred on your current position. Once you've finished the gpx file is saved and you can return to the starting point.
At the starting point you select load and select either the gpx file you just produced or one that you've saved for some time, downloaded, been given by a mate, etc. You start riding your bike and the previous gpx file is played back on the map along with your current position. I've mocked it up quickly below:
The red dot shows your current location and speed. In green is displayed the location and speed you achieved at this point in the race last time you ran it. Also in green is displayed your last attempt's speed at the point you're currently at (although I'm not too sure about this feature - testing would be required to see if it was any help).
The display map could automatically zoom in and out (within predetermined limits) to give you an easily read graphical representation of the scale of your defeat / victory. The map would centre halfway between your current and previois position. The red/green dots could swap colours to indicate your position in the race. The TangoGPS friends feature could display other users, perhaps even with a smiley/sad face to depict their race status.
Lets say in this example you've been riding for 30 minutes (don't ride on footpaths, by the way, but do go up The Garth, bonus points if you can ride down the brutal steps without a dab/serious injury); when you rode this last week you'd climbed to the top of the hill after thirty minutes and were zipping along nicely. This time, however, you're not doing too good; you're still climbing and at a slower pace than you did it last time.
Most of the code required for this is, I think, already completed; it all just needs to be wrapped up and packaged as something new. Drop me an email if you want to pay me big money to hear my ideas code this up. If anyone wanted to pay for this, we could provide it through OA Digital
Post-Easter round-up
[edit - I remembered some stuff...]
Recent events:
OA Digital at the IfA conference
Last Thursday I spoke at the IfA conference in wet and wild Torquay. The session was titled "'I'm on a train!' New technologies and the historic environment" and was organised by John Schofield of English Heritage. I spoke about the development of our on-site digital recording tools and briefly about some mobile GIS.
The session was very enjoyable; very well organised and attended. Mobile applications within the heritage industry are rapidly gaining importance, as evidenced by the fantastic contributions to the session.
My slides are available in a big pdf here.
Oxford Archaeology at OpenExpo
It didn't get mis-read, then corrected on Slashdot like other stories from Sean Moss-Pultz's OpenExpo talk, but Oxford Archaeology were there. On page 8 in fact. Big thanks to Sean for emailing me about the Expo, including our work in his talk and for letting me know where the slides were hosted.
gvSIG Mobile: More devices and languages
Juan Lucas has created debs and a maemo.org page for gvSIG Mobile on Openmoko Nokia NX00 devices:
http://gvsigmobileonopenmoko.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/maemo-deb-installer-for-nokia-n8x0-devices/
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/gvsigmobile
He's also used the holiday period to demonstrate the multi-lingual capabilities of the application:
http://gvsigmobileonopenmoko.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/moses-fantasy-an-exodus-enabled-free-phone/
Evgeny Ginzburg provided Russian and Hewbrew translations of the application. If anyone would like to translate the application into their language, the file to look at is here. Off the top of my head we have; Spanish, English, French, German, Romanian, Norwegian, Russian and Hebrew. Thanks to all the translators who have contributed so far.
I'm sure there was more to report...
But I can't remember it at the moment; I'll have to blog about it later if it comes back to me.
Racing myself: A feature request
I'm due a proper update soon, but here's an idea I just had.
Feature request for any Openmoko GPS application: Record a journey and race against it at a later date. Peter Reed describes the application on his GPS here. TangoGPS would seem to be a good candidate for this. Or...
How about forking gvSIG into a dedicated cycle computer application? Find some nice maps; produce something a bit like this, but with more a feel of this.
gvSIG Mobile 0.1.2 released
We're very pleased to announce release 0.1.2 of gvSIG for Openmoko Linux handhelds.
Support for Nokia Maemo devices
The photo's a bit blurry, but you can see that it's working:
I'll create a .deb for it soon, unless someone beats me to it ;) otherwise, download the source and extract everything to the relevant locations yourself. Juan Lucas provides comprehensive instructions here.
Additional spatial reference systems and WMS data providers
We have increased the both the number of spatial reference systems we support and have included additional WMS providers. This allows us to display data that won't get anywhere else, such as complete TIGER mapping for the US (looks very nice), or a map of current worldwide wild fires. If you'd like your local spatial reference system included, or your favourite WMS server, let us know.
Points and attribute support via SQLite
The application now supports writing and reading points and attribute data to and from an SQLite database. Note; we has previously stated that the jamvm dependency was (sort of) optional - cacao would work in it's place, for example - now, however, you must use jamvm if you want to deal with points and attributes as cacao has issues with SQLite.
Language support
The GUI can now be displayed in Spanish, English, Italian (thanks to Luca Bianconi), Romanian (thanks Lucian Pricop), or German (thanks Benjamin Ducke). Further translations would be appreciated! Please download this short file, translate it into your language of choice and send it to Juan Lucas or myself.
Testing Jalimo binaries
The good people at Jalimo have helped a great deal with various elements of gvSIG Mobile on Openmoko; they've released some testing binaries that are recommended for use with this release. Download / install from:
http://jalimo.evolvis.org/repository/test-binaries/
You will probably have to -force-depends, this is normal. Also remember that if your distribution doesn't include the Jalimo binaries in its repo (such as SHR), you'll need to manually add their repo to your phone.
Landscape display on the FreeRunner
Inspired by Juan Lucas' picture above, I wanted my FreeRunner to display a landscape version of gvSIG with the buttons down the side. Use your favourite screen rotating application to enter landscape mode; I did export DISPLAY=:0.0 && xrandr -o 1 then alter /usr/bin/gvsig to read "no" rather than "fr" (both without the quotes) where you see it. The layers screen doesn't quite fit, but it works fine.
gvSIG Mobile on FreeRunner, running in landscape mode, displaying (part of) a WMS layer of wild fires detected within the last 24 hours:
Getting used to all this new stuff!
I'd suggest reading through Juan Lucas' excellent user manual; it contains a good overview of every feature.
Application log files
Are now no longer written to /usr/share/gv-om/ keeping that directory clean and for installed files only.
Sharing map tiles between applications
A lot of people have asked about sharing OSM tiles between gvSIG and TangoGPS; this is easily done in a number of ways. You can edit /usr/bin/gvsig to change the cache location to wherever TangoGPS saves its files; likewise you can do the same via the TangoGPS options screen; finally you can symlink the two together if you've got a half decent file system on your uSD card.
A note on version numbering
Despite being quite a relatively large release, we've given it just a small number boost; the official version of gvSIG Mobile is currently at 0.2 and probably won't be changing for a while - it was decided that we didn't want to conflict too much with this numbering scheme, so we'll stay at 0.1.x for now and see how we get along.
Wildfire WMS layer and Google's Kenyan shape file data:
Downloads and further details
Are available on Juan Lucas' blog or on opkg.org.
opkg install http://downloads.thehumanjourney.net/gvsigmobile_0.1.2_armv4t.ipk
Loggan's 1663 map of Oxford, georectified and served via WMS:
Note: All my screenshots are very black and white; there's plenty of colourful options, I promise ;) Check out opkg.org for more.
Google Map Maker data download - Kenya
Mikel Maron has a look at Google's "Map Maker Data Download":
http://brainoff.com/weblog/2009/04/01/1391
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/mapmakerdatadownload/
If you work for a not-for-profit, which as it happens, I do, you're allowed to download Google's Kenya data in shp or kml format. Mikel's entry above discusses some of the restrictions in place on the data and compares with OSM mapping. Related is a previous post on OpenGeoData about the state of OSM in Africa:
http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=377
gvSIG Mobile 0.11 released & Call for Debian help
0.11
I've just released gvSIG for Openmoko version 0.11; a very small update over yesterday's first release. The only change is to the script that launches the application: the operating system is now presumed to be controlling GPSD, so we don't touch it, and the shell has been changed from bash to sh to make it run properly on SHR.
If you installed via the opkg.org repository you can simply opkg update && opkg upgrade. Otherwise the new ipk file is located here:
http://downloads.thehumanjourney.net/gvsigmobile_0.11_armv4t.ipk
Thanks to Al Johnson for diagnosing the error and Francesco de Virgilio for testing. Francesco was also the first person to get gvSIG Mobile working on SHR; here's an image I stole from his Flickr stream. Always good to see some more archaeology and Open Source!:
Debian packaging
I've created a .deb package for gvSIG Mobile (that's the easy bit), but was met with dependency hell when trying to install it. At the moment we rely upon jamvm (although other java implementations could be used), libswt3.4-gtk-java, gpsd, classpath-gtk and classpath-awt.
In short, we'd be very grateful if somebody was able to help turn Juan Lucas' original zip file into something that worked on Debian. Please get in contact if you have any luck, or would be keen to collaborate.
gvSIG Mobile for Openmoko released
I'm very pleased to announce that gvSIG Mobile has been released for Openmoko:
This release represents a lot of talented work by Juan Lucas Domínguez Rubio to port gvSIG Mobile gvSIG Mobile to the Openmoko platform; the first such porting of the software.
Install by running:
opkg install http://downloads.thehumanjourney.net/gvsigmobile_0.1_armv4t.ipk
If your distribution of choice doesn't include the dependencies within it's repositories (you'll know if it doesn't because installation will fail) you will need to add the Jalimo repository to your configuration. It's very easy to do.
Juan Lucas has provided extensive information on his website:
http://gvsigmobileonopenmoko.wordpress.com/
And of course, the package has been added to the opkg.org repository:
http://www.opkg.org/package_162.html
Install and enjoy! We're very keen to hear what you have to say about it.
Coming soon to a field near you:
"Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice"
Don't take my word for it though, them's the words of Steve Ballmer, head of convicted monopolist, Microsoft. It seems that Microsoft realise they can't make a phone people want to buy, so they're urging Apple to play fair and open the iPhone.
It's like the school bully getting beaten up by some bigger boys and crying about it. Boo ruddy hoo.
What amuses me the most is that Microsoft are likely to keep going towards the Open direction (frankly they have to) whilst the die-hards will keep telling me that Open-anything doesn't work. I don't even know how I managed to type this blog post from my open source browser in an open source OS, to an open source blog server running on an open source server OS. What is the world coming to?