… or at least reduce the risk of errors while creating things.

Ah, KML, otherwise known as a Google Earth (Network) Layer thing, previously Keyhole Markup Language thing and now edging towards a useful format for transporting geodata around thing as the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) nudge KML closer to standards and out of the Evil propriety clutches of Google.

Propriety being Evil here, not Google of course.

Anyway, freshly released is Google’s libkml, a handy library that you can use to create KML (and then zip up for KMZ). You can read far more about it over at High Earth Orbit. Like Andrew …

“Unfortunately since my laptop hard drive died last week, I don’t have a development machine to build and play with this yet. But I expect to use this library in a number of projects.”

… I’ve not had a chance to play with it yet. Not so much because my laptop is broken, because it isn’t (and boy I wish it was so I could get the IT department to get me a new one), but because as anyone who knows me knows, I moan bitterly about having to type anything like build, make or in this case scons into a console. As much as I love Macs I’m no doubt still scarred from when I tried to compile PHP with some graphics libs in, anyway I digress.

Why am I happy about this, well, mainly because it’s another indicator of the progress towards KML being a standard and less Google’s thing. Which means that I don’t have to make quite so many arguments for why we should support it, being a Yahoo house and all (not that I’ve ever had to have made those arguments, but you know). Having a library means I can say “But look, we have a library”. Simple I know but never underestimate the power of a library.

Anyway, I’m rambling, basically because High Earth Orbit has it all covered in detail, so stop reading this and read that instead.

Filed under: tools by Reverend Dan Catt

… at least we can when it comes to graphics, videos and posters :)

(obviously we need Open Street Map to actually find our way around many real places).

This post was supposed to be all about Reverse Geocoding, but seeing as I seem to have writers block about that (cue long lack of posts), I thought I’d break it with this…

introversion the team behind uplink, Darwinia and defcon, three games I couldn’t actually get into myself, are working on Subversion (the game, not the open-source revision control system). I came across it just now while searching for procedural landscape generators, because you know, that’s how I roll.

Anyway, yes, Subversion uses cool algorithms to procedural create cities, buildings, rooms and, I think, the arrangement of furniture. The landscape itself isn’t procedurally generated ironically enough considering my search terms, but rather more suggested with the computer filling in the blanks (as far as I can make out).

Moving swiftly along because a picture’s worth a thousand words, even more if you’re talking about my style of writing, videos and pictures.

US Style:

UK Style:

These are the 9 topic posts about Subversion so far, I’ve emboldened the ones with the pretty pictures in that appeal to mappers like myself.

• It’s all in your head, Part 1
• It’s all in your head, Part 2
• It’s all in your head, Part 3 (pics and videos)
• It’s all in your head, Part 4
• It’s all in your head, Part 5
• It’s all in your head, Part 6 (pics and videos)
• It’s all in your head, Part 7 (pics and videos)
• It’s all in your head, Part 8 (pics)
• It’s all in your head, Part 9

(divx) videos: roadgen-all.avi (2.7mb), video2.avi (32mb, but worth it!).

You’ll need the divx codec, but if you’re into digital maps and you watch Dr Who, you probably already have them.

So next time you consider getting one of those fancy posters from Open Street Map, created by hundreds of dedicated GPS wielding wonders, over many months of trekking down half abandoned country roads and endless culdesacs, maybe generating a few in Subversion a matter of minutes is the warmer option ;)

Update: YouTube video of that second large avi, although I still suggest watching the high resolution video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zluTvROHXA]

Filed under: general, maps by Reverend Dan Catt