A short while ago I ordered some stuff from China. The site offered free delivery via DHL. Cool! I was later contacted by the seller to say that I lived in a ‘remote area’ – the DHL delivery cost would be double. What. The. Heck? I live within the municipal boundaries of a mainland city with about half a million inhabitants in Western Europe. Not Afghanistan. This week I heard the same story from a colleague trying to send me an urgent parcel from London via DHL. OK, that’s it, GIS project o-clock! Continue reading “DHL ‘Remote Areas’ – A GIS Project”
Category: Maps
GPS Vehicle Tracker With A Real GPS Receiver
This may sound strange to say that a GPS Vehicle Tracker would have a GPS receiver, but you’ll see from an earlier post that that’s a big assumption. After my disaster with the €13 ‘GPS’ Tracker, I thought I’d step up to the next offer from banggood, the €18 TK110 GPS Tracker. Really €5 makes all the difference here. Continue reading “GPS Vehicle Tracker With A Real GPS Receiver”
GPS Vehicle Tracker for €13?
I’ll admit that I’m an eBay and, latterly, a banggood.com addict. Bargains! One of the latest I saw was a ‘GPS Vehicle Tracker’ for €13 on banggood. It seemed too good to be true. Continue reading “GPS Vehicle Tracker for €13?”
Make Test GPS Tracks
Your project might need some random GPS tracks. You could get some GPS traces from OSM, but they might have a lot of off-road content, or not have the coverage in your area of interest. Here’s a very high-level recipe for making a whole load of GPS traces for pretty much anywhere in the world. Continue reading “Make Test GPS Tracks”
Plumbing With OpenStreetMap osmosis
The OpenStreetMap movement has a great trick up their sleeve for manipulating their data – osmosis. It’s the sort of tool that map, GIS and navigation companies probably have developed in-house, only I’m prepared to bet that this one’s more elegant than most of theirs. For straightforward tasks such as loading some OSM data into Postgres the documentation was clear to me. However, I have been scratching my head more than somewhat with the more subtle plumbing. Continue reading “Plumbing With OpenStreetMap osmosis”
Georeferenced Rich Content Management with Drupal 7
Introduction
If you want to manage a custom schema with a web interface with multiple users, multiple languages for UI and content, you could roll your own using something like CakePHP to provide a framework. Doing it that way, you’ll be re-inventing many wheels for user management, authentication, etc. I evaluated half a dozen ‘higher-level’ CMS and settled on Drupal since it has all of this infrastructure plus many mature add-ons (‘modules’) that mean that you can focus on implementing the specifics of your web application rather than writing lots of plumbing. Furthermore, it’s PHP so it’s easy to deploy on inexpensive hosted services on the internet (not something that you can say for Java-based CMS, for example). Continue reading “Georeferenced Rich Content Management with Drupal 7”
Use PostGIS to Transform Map Data Projection
Introduction
Not every map data set you come across is WGS84, unfortunately. For example, I just needed to mix some IGN Spain data (in ETRS89) with some OpenStreetMap data (which was in WGS84). Here’s a quick fix. Continue reading “Use PostGIS to Transform Map Data Projection”
Install PostgreSQL 9.1 and PostGIS 1.5.x on Ubuntu 11.10
Introduction
I’ve seen a few recipes on the web but none worked for me on Ubuntu Oneiric. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Install PostgreSQL 9.1 and PostGIS 1.5.x on Ubuntu 11.10”