Canadian Place Name Trivia

Some interesting Canadian place-name trivia. In all, we have a lot of pleasant places, but we’re not all that creative when it comes to lake names! (“hey – that lake looks pretty long, let’s call it Long Lake!”)

Source: http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/info/trivia_e.php

Most Common Place Names in Canada

Most Common Feature Names in Canada

Beer for Data Sharing in Afghanistan

The Taj in Jalalabad, Afghanistan is indeed an oddity. Not only is it the only bar in eastern Afghanistan, it is also the location where an ingenious “Beer for Data” program began. Put simply, if visitors to the bar have useful data (gps plots, imagery, technology white papers…) they can trade this information for a beer.

source: Human Technology Network

Palin’s foreign credentials tested

In response to Palin’s comments about her foreign policy experience based on being able to see Russia from Alaska, Michael Koswowsky has set up a special map using his “HeyWhatsThat” tools. Looks like there are only 4 very hard to reach spots where you can see Russia in Alaska.

GPX2SHP – Win32 with C# source code

I have been searching for some time for a simple GPX to SHP file converter. Both of these file formats are used extensively in geospatial applications, but for some reason no one has created a converter between these two files.

So, being a programmer, I decided to remedy this situation.

Download GPX2SHP Binary- for Win32

the binary version requires the .Net 2.0 framework to be installed on your computer. You can download the framework here.

Currently only waypoints are converted – tracks will be added in the future.

If you’re a programmer, you can download the Visual Studio .Net 2005 C# Source Code for this project here.

If this program works for you (or if it doesn’t), you can email me at jsuwala@gmail.com.

April 13 2009 update: the download links above are now working!

Google Earth layer of Myanmar cyclone data

The UN Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) has released a Google Earth layer showing the path of the cyclone and the extent of the flooding that recently hit Myanmar.

Click on this link: http://services.google.com/earth/kmz/nargis_n.kmz

(source: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/05/unosat-layer-of-myanmar-cyclone-data.html)

Here’s an interesting website:

This guy asks people to walk around places connected to a lie-detector and a GPS.

Out come maps of “locational physiological arousal”.

Maps are viewable in Google Earth.

http://biomapping.net/

OpenSource real-time trip-routing

Hi All:

For any of you that have played with the real-time trip-routing in Google Maps, there is now an OpenSource version available.

A demonstration is available here: http://boston.freemap.in/routing.html

This system utilizes the following parts:

1. UMN MapServer for WMS based map image generation;
2. TileCache for tiled WMS generation and caching;
3. PostGIS for data storage;
4. pgRouting for postGIS based route finding;
5. OpenLayers for the javascript based map viewer

The demonstration is a little bit clunky compared to Google’s (probably all because of server speed), but shows the power of what OpenSource can do!

Google says Lasqueti Island doesn’t exist

Do a search for “Lasqueti Island” on Google Maps (maps.google.ca), and you will see that Google says that this island, between Vancouver Island and Texada Island, doesn’t exist. Only when you turn on satellite or hybrid views will Lasqueti Island actually be shown.

I wonder what the 350 residents of this approximately 8 km wide and 22 km long island have to say about this!

GPS to PostGIS data import pipeline

I have found an interesting OpenSource based system that should allow you to import GPS track/route/waypoint information from your GPS into the OpenSource spatial database PostGIS. Here are the steps and tools:

1. Convert your GPS data to the GPX format using GPSBabel
2. Use the GPX2SHP program to create a SHP (ESRI Shape File)
3. Import the SHP file into PostGIS using shp2pgsql

With your GPS data in PostGIS, you should be able to do all sorts of cool things.

For PostGIS data import, the following tools are interesting:

• DXF -> PostGIS
• E00 -> PostGIS

Mapping with WMS

Some quick map links:

To add your own WMS (Web Mapping Server) to Google Maps, check out the javascript here: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDOC/Google+Maps. They talk about GeoServer (a Java Map engine), but the javascript doesn’t rely on any WMS server in-particular.

If you are using a standards compliant WMS, check out this SLD (Style Layer Discriptor) to style your maps like Google does (or very close).