-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello everyone. I'm new to this mailing list but have been reading the archives. I've some Saturday afternoon thoughts to share.
Firstly, I've noticed questions about OSM come up several times over the past few months. I recently posted to the xastir-dev list with a patch to support tiled WMS servers (WMS-C). I'm using this to view OpenStreetMap and OpenArearialMap data with Xastir. http://lists.xastir.org/pipermail/xastir-dev/2008-September/002881.html Probably it needs some changes or cleanup before it might be suitable for inclusion in Xastir, but I would appreciate feedback about how that might best be done and whether the way that I have implemented it makes sense. Also someone posted a question about the shapefiles from Eric Germann that they were having trouble getting the text to display. I had to edit the .dbfawk files to change the zoom levels at which to display them to work better with my setup. I also had to create a .dbfawk file for the M2 shapes (I just copied the M2.dbfawk and again edited the display_level and text_level). On strategies for Xastir-NG, I heartily agree that a good low- level APRS library would be a very good thing to have. Written in C with bindings for other languages like Python and Perl. I don't want to get into a detailed GPL vs. BSD discussion if it can be avoided, but I would like to point out that (L)GPL does not prevent commercial use. It just means that you have to distribute the source code so one's business has to be something other than selling binaries. The earlier discussion of data distribution with torrents is a great idea. I am aware of an ESA initiative that is working on doing just that and also developing a cataloguing web interface driven by geo-django and OpenLayers. Mind that generating torrents on the fly is not very helpful since for one-off data packages you might as well just use FTP since there's no benefit to seeding. Should Xastir have direct support for such a thing? I'm not so sure. It seems like a generally useful but distinct component that would be good for Xastir and good for lots of other things that use large geographical datasets. On mapping in Xastir-NG, I've been thinking about how modern tools like OpenLayers and GoogleEarth work. I know the KML support in OpenLayers isn't entirely fleshed out, but suppose that will get fixed so that it is eventually as complete as GoogleEarth. Now what about making so there was a program which would (1) use the low-level aprs interface and (2) expose that via a REST-ful HTTP API (there are some services that do this already, but this might run on the local host). (3) The output could be KML with all the appropriate Refresh/Add/Change/Delete glue. That way the client, GE or OpenLayers, could do the complicated rendering and presentation, and the APRS specific parts could be exposed with very small web pages (such as might be shown in a bubble dialog obtained by clicking on a placemark/station). The ability to operate off-line is crucial, however I think that that could be accomplished by having local datastores that serve the maps (using tools like mapserver, mapnik, tilecache et. al). Apologies for the long, rambling, scattershot email... 73s de VE2WSW - -- William Waites VE2WSW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.irl.styx.org/ +49 30 8894 9942 CD70 0498 8AE4 36EA 1CD7 281C 427A 3F36 2130 E9F5 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAkjLwGQACgkQQno/NiEw6fVrQwCg1rgTQKOIPfCLRpTpvPCnKLy+ 0JgAoMA5iSx6Xr7bVTRjWj5JHnZ1A1+Q =4f5E -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list Xastir@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
