Changes, They Are a Comin'

I'm going to try to start posting more here I think.  I'd like to get more into blogging (even podcasting).  This blog will keep its theme, just hopefully more content :)  I'm working on a long series of posts about using GIS tools and data since that's still near and dear to my heart.

I'm also going to keep posting other technical things of interest here as time permits.  I want to get into reviews and discussing technology as well.

Stay tuned!

Fun with OpenStreetMap and Open Source

So as part of my pushing OpenStreetMap to people, I made some sample screen shots for a friend of mine who is wanting to move away from paying Google for their maps.  Thought I'd share in case other people want to see what's possible using OpenStreetMap data for rendering.

For my setup, I have PostgreSQL/PostGIS running on a server here at home.  In it I've imported:

•  US Census Tiger 2011 data
• OSM data for the US, Canada, and Mexico
• Natural Earth data for the world
• USGS quadrangle names and GNIS
• Geonames
• Global Administrative Areas gadm2 data

On top of that, I'm also running the Geoserver 2.2 beta to provide all of the data as a WMS, WCS, and WFS OGC services.  The OSM data was imported using the excellent imposm tool.  I used the styles from OSMinaBox for WMS styling with some additions I made to the SLDs to make sure additional features were rendered.

The following screen shots are samples I've made using some of this data.  I threw them together for Doug so didn't really do any tweaking to label placements and the like. 

Screenshot 1 - OSM overview

In this screen shot, I used the US Tiger 2011 Counties data set for the background layer.  Plus it helped me to locate and zoom into my areas of interest.  The OSM* layers are all WMS renderings from my local Geoserver install using the above-mentioned SLDs.  OSM_Roads is actually a database view that imposm makes with all of the road layers merged together.

This second screenshot is zoomed in a level so that Geoserver does more labeling based on the SLD rules.

Screenshot 2 - Zoomed in example

On this third screenshot, I overlaid the USGS GNIS file with my own rendering rules inside QGIS.  I basically used SJJB icons under QGIS to make GNIS look a little nicer.  However, the bluish-green dots show I'm still not done with the style in QGIS and once it's done there I'll move it over to Geoserver to do the WMS rendering there as well.  

Screenshot 3 - GNIS overview

Here's my quick post for now.  Just wanted to do a quick showing of how you can make decent looking maps from completely free data.  I apologize in advance since I have no artistic skills whatsoever though :)

A Random Post: Am I on a 32- or 64-bit OS?

So in response to a question on IRC this morning (and it's early and I'm not fully awake), here's a quick program I wrote to show how to detect if you're on a 16-, 32-, or 64- bit OS by checking the size of an int* in C/C++:

#include <iostream>


int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
  int foo = sizeof(int*);
  
  switch (foo)
  {
  case 2:
    std::cout << "Size = 2: 16 bit OS" << std::endl;
    break;
  case 4:
    std::cout << "Size = 4: 32 bit OS" << std::endl;
    break;
  case 8:
    std::cout << "Size = 8: 64 bit OS" << std::endl;
    break;
  default:
    std::cout << "Size = " << foo << std::endl;
  }


  return(0);
}