I have recently got an Android phone so that I can write software for it without the irritating security issues you get with J2ME on 'normal' phones (boxes popping up saying 'do you want to let this program do this?' etc.).
I was very surprised that some things that most phones do 'out of the box' are a real pain in Android, that makes me think this is still a platform for gadget enthusiasts rather than end users.
These include:
* Sharing Contacts: All of the phones I have seen with bluetooth let you send contacts from one phone to another over bluetooth. Not Android - I ended up adding my contacts from my old phone to Google Mail manually. This made them appear on the Android one.
* Using the phone as a modem: My Sony Ericsson W890i just works - plug the phone into a computer and it appears as an ethernet card - dead easy (I think I had to select this as an option in the phone menu, but it was just a simple menu action. The nearest thing I have got with Android is a program called 'Proxoid' to run on the phone. You then have to use the ADB program that comes with the Android Developers SDK to forward packets to the phone, and set up your browser to use a proxy. A long way from an end user experience. I'll do a separate post on this so I can remember how to do it next time I am stranded in Spain and my T-Mobile broadband dongle won't work!
Sunday 25 April 2010
Saturday 3 April 2010
Reprojecting Ordnance Survey Raster Data
I have been looking at the Ordnance Survey StreetView data that was released to the public on 1st April.
This has got me thinking about a previous project that I failed to make work - I have some old maps of my home town and wanted to be able to display them on the web and switch between them so you can see what changes from year to year - I have maps from 1870 and 1914. I want to use OpenStreetMap as the recent data. Now StreetView is available I can use that too for comparison.
The problem is projecting them onto the same coordinate system - I failed miserably last time, but my two scanned old maps were on the same scale, so you can see them at (http://maps.webhop.net/oldmaps/openlayers.html).
The maps are in Ordnance Survey projection, which has the code EPSG:27700. The downloaded OS data has the origin specified in metres northings and eastings.
You can translate this into the same projection as OpenStreetMap (EPSG:900113) using:
This has got me thinking about a previous project that I failed to make work - I have some old maps of my home town and wanted to be able to display them on the web and switch between them so you can see what changes from year to year - I have maps from 1870 and 1914. I want to use OpenStreetMap as the recent data. Now StreetView is available I can use that too for comparison.
The problem is projecting them onto the same coordinate system - I failed miserably last time, but my two scanned old maps were on the same scale, so you can see them at (http://maps.webhop.net/oldmaps/openlayers.html).
The maps are in Ordnance Survey projection, which has the code EPSG:27700. The downloaded OS data has the origin specified in metres northings and eastings.
You can translate this into the same projection as OpenStreetMap (EPSG:900113) using:
gdalwarp -s_srs EPSG:27700 -t_srs EPSG:900913 *.TIF nz.tifCheck the projection information with
gdalinfo nz.tif | more
Thursday 1 April 2010
Ordnance Survey Data Released
Ordnance Survey have released quite a lot of data for free use (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/).
The most interesting sounding data (meridian) is a 2Gb shape file, so I chickened out of trying to do anything with that tonight.
Instead I downloaded the 50k Gazetteer and have put it into a postgresql database so it can be queried to look for things.
Work in progress is at http://www.maps2.webhop.net/openos.
It sort of works (just not very useful yet - you can do http://maps2.webhop.net/openos/gaz/www/doSearch.php, and it gives you a list of all of the items in the database containing the string 'hartlepool' - just need to transfer them back to the browser and plot them on a map now....
The most interesting sounding data (meridian) is a 2Gb shape file, so I chickened out of trying to do anything with that tonight.
Instead I downloaded the 50k Gazetteer and have put it into a postgresql database so it can be queried to look for things.
Work in progress is at http://www.maps2.webhop.net/openos.
It sort of works (just not very useful yet - you can do http://maps2.webhop.net/openos/gaz/www/doSearch.php, and it gives you a list of all of the items in the database containing the string 'hartlepool' - just need to transfer them back to the browser and plot them on a map now....
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