Yes, I remember you said that and you’re probably right. Previously some things have been discussed like using free external file hosting, but I didn’t like the conditions under which they provide hosting. So I’ve asked my sponsor to upgrade my server to at least 250Gb harddisk space (I now have ~100 Gb), I expect to hear from them in about 1-2 weeks (holiday in between). If they don’t agree then I might start moving faster to my last solution: the clientside map compiling and installing Java application. I’m steadily getting a clearer picture about the way I want to make it and this is probably where I want to move to eventually. There’s only so much server power and storage realisticly available.
I do get emails from people who would like to contribute some money for this service, but it’s feeling like a major hurdle for me to take (psycologically speaking). I also wonder if that will work out well because a dedicated server in the US with flat fee bandwidth is around $90/month and if I want to do the same in the Netherlands it would be more then Eur 100 for the traffic alone(!). I really don’t know what to expect from donations but I don’t see it covering the costs for hosting (could be wrong though, but I don’t have any experience with donations). So, as things stand now, I’d love to solve the growth problems within my current sponsoring conditions.
Lambertus, thanks a million for this wonderful service!
I requested the Tunisia Map on Friday last week (the website stated that the map of 10-02 would be used) and received an email this evening with the link to the map. The link “[…]garmin/routable/30-01-2011/[…]” still states the date of 30-01-2011 and the map also seems to be from that date because I do not see any of the changes that have been done to the map since.
Is this normal?? Thanks.
Kind regards from Tunisia
Yep, that is normal. You requested the map when 30-01-2011 was the latest version, so that version is used for your request. If it would switch to the newest version automatically then your map would be totally messed up because the tilenumbers are different between versions (or, when they are the same for the same region, that is pure luck). If you want a map using the data from the current version then you’ll have to request your map again. But, please, don’t do that on every update, the server is already busy enough…
Thanks for the quick reply! Makes totally sense. I can live with the normal “TN-Tunis” map on a daily basis. Only sometimes I need the entire Tunisia map. Thanks anyway for all the work!
We should encourage the people to download the tiles by themselves and compile them with mkgmap. It is very easy to do, I wrote a post in our local page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Argentina explaining the steps (It’s in Spanish)
Indeed, and lots of people do so already, but there are more people that don’t want to go through the trouble of trying to determine the tilesizes, splitting a country dump, rendering them with all the options and installing them in MapSource/BaseCamp/etc. For Argentina the process is reasonably straighforward but for countries that are more complex it is quite demanding.
If you download the tiles then you don’t have to do all those things. You cannot even do them. The only thing once downloaded is to put all tiles in one file. Sendmap20.exe will do in a glance. Mkgmap would be overkill for such a simple task.
That is a different story. I wonder how many people want that? Do you have statistics of your service downloads?
Certainly, but that only works for Windows and if Germany or the Netherlands are of your interest then we’re talking about clicking and downloading ~80-140 individual tiles.
But I notice that individual tiles also get downloaded a lot: 6237x in total.
The number of downloads would be higher, ofcourse, if the service would be able to process requests faster… Caching seems to be working fine as e.g. one gmapsupp.img is downloaded 110x.
Sorry, I messed up in Excel. Anyway it’s difficult to get what you want. For that I would have to parse the apache logs and match all the ip adresses, but I don’t have access to the logs, only awstats (which doesn’t list the IP addresses).
OpenStreetMap data from: 12-02-2011. Current queue: 1378 requests (delay: ~5.7 days).
And the summer still has to come…
Once the selected tiles are downloaded you only need sendmap20 to combine them to a gmapsupp.img file. Both for Windows and Linux there is a free sendmap executable: http://cgpsmapper.com/buy.htm For windows no installation required. Just unzip. (I did not test the Linux version).
For Netherlands and Germany you would provide a ready to download map. But for for the rest I fully agree with you. Download many tiles manually is not a pleasant task. That’s where a download program could come in handy. So I made one.
My suggestion is: You could advocate on your site that people who are only interested in a gmapsupp.img file to download the selected tiles and put them together themselves with sendmap20. If they need a download program (for windows) they could use mine (no installation required).
And thinking further ahead in case you’re interested: Then an extra button next to the selected tiles which brings to another page where all tiles are summarized and where the -tile url’s- selection could be easily copied to clipboard. Further some text and links to where to obtain sendmap and a/the downloader(s).
Right, back from a holiday and an email box full of complaints
Anyway, I looked at the queue handler once more and discovered a bug that allowed some requests to linger longer in the queue then others (i.e. the queue is not properly sorted on date of request). This is now fixed. Apologies to those who had to wait extra long, lucky you who got their map faster then others 8|
I also like the suggestion from one emailer (Steve from UK) who suggested that I provided a tracking number for each request and a webpage that allows to see the current status of the request. This is easy to do as all the components needed are already in place, so I expect to add that in the coming days after I’ve catched up with the online world.
Greencaps: I’ll think about your suggestions, but I’d like to keep it as simple as possible for people. But, as Windows users are probably the largest group, I might consider a NSIS installer that downloads the tiles and prepares the map on the users computer. That way I don’t have to write a complete application but only the installer script (e.g. NSIS has a download plugin) and it’s only a matter of running through a bunch of installer options which is fairly familiar for most people.
But what would be installed? Which program would concatenate the .img tiles to a gmapsupp.img file? And how would the installer know which tiles had to be downloaded?
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Features
"The NSIS distribution includes a set of plug-ins that allow you to download files from the internet, make internet connections, patch existing files and more.
Well, I primarily mulled this over during holiday without internet access, so I might not have a complete picture, but…The idea was that the NSIS installer contains only the script instead of the script AND the tiles. That would free-up much needed disk space.
Based upon the request of the user I can generate a NSIS script that includes the tilenames (URL) that NSIS should download. A quick search before packing learned that NSIS has a download plugin which seemed to be what I’d need, but I didn’t investigate further, it might not be what I expect it to be.
I initially did not intend the NSIS installer to create the gmapsupp.img as well, but perhaps the NSIS installer could also download and install Mkgmap… I don’t know about that yet. On the other hand, the gmapsupp.img.zip is also needed for people using Linux or OSX, so it doesn’t really help using NSIS for creating gmapsupp images to save server disk space.
Edit: What about this plugin?
Edit2: Ah, I see you’ve found an alternative
Edit3: There’s even an Java JRE installer and application launcher script for NSIS
But that is terrible complex and which user want to install NSIS, JAVA and mkgmap just to generate his own gmapsupp.img? Do you realise how many MB’s have to be installed for that? And not every Java will do as mkgmap wants a pretty new version.
You said “I’d like to keep it as simple as possible for people” but in this way you are not.
My idea:
-Most users who want to work with josm have to install java anyway
-nsis doesnt need to be installed by the user, it is only needed to convert a script into an exe file, the user only have to run this setup.exe
-mkgmap can be packed into this exe file and run by the installer without any complications, the only thing that is needed is that java is installed on the pc
-mkgmap will combine the (already downloaded?) tiles into one map (it creates an index which takes hardly a few minutes), the setup.exe installs this into the windows register
So to my opinion the best way to do it, is that the user goes to the osm site, clicks on the map and select the tiles he/she wants to download.
The tiles are downloaded as well as a small installer file which contains mkgmap. On the computer the user can choose to
a) compile a gmapsupp from the tiles with mkgmap (tiles will be deleted) - maybe this can be done with sendmap without mkgmap
b) install the tiles into mapsource with or without a gmapsupp,
c) the user can choose with or without a typ file and also a selection of typ files is possible (if provided)
For my maps this solution will make it also more convenient. I don’t have to create installers for the whole Benelux, a seperate gmapsupp and Germany (and maybe a few more countries) but simply
have to split the europe extract into a certain amount of tiles. The user can pick and choose the ones he is interested in. At the moment someone who wants a bike map of his region has to download and install the whole Benelux (500mb). For one version of the Benelux I have to use 1,5gb of disk space, instead one 500mb (gmap, windows and mac versions). So its a win win solution, and I think we can ask for the users also something in return (install java, thats all).
That’s why I initially said that NSIS isn’t a serious option for the gmapsupp.img, only for installing the MapSource version. No additional applications are needed for that, neither JAVA/mkgmap or Sendmap20. Besides the complexity, it doesn’t save CPU cycles or disk space on the server which this is all about. But -in theory- an NSIS installer could be an all-you-need option for Windows users.
But, on second thought, Sendmap20 would be better and easier to use for uploading to the GPS then Mkgmap. It could also be used as an extra step in the MapSource installer (Install the map in MapSource and/or send the map to the GPS).
My idea: Most people who ‘order’ a map will not be OSM contributers. And if they are will use potlatch.
Ok. But then this setup.exe has to be generated on Lambertus’ site and then downloaded. This has to be ‘ordered’ too. So again a possibility for a queue. And is it possible for NSIS on a Linux computer to generate an installer for Windows?
I would not pack mkgmap in that exe file. Only the urls where to download mkgmap. The exe would then download and install. The same for java. But what a hassle.
Now who is downloading the tiles??
mkgmap is overkill.
What I miss in this scenario is that if the ‘orderer’ comes back some months later to ‘order’ other tiles how that would go. All software is already on his computer. So only tiles have to be downloaded. Please explain.
But then you have to place all tiles on your server and provide an equal nice interface as Lambertus’ where the tiles can be manually selected on a map. But I agree except for needing java and mkgmap.
Greencaps, what makes you so negative about mkgmap? I don’t understand why there will be a queue just for downloading a 1,5mb programm?
The setup.exe can be a general one. It has to be compiled once but thats it. In the setup.exe there will be the latest mkgmap, a few or just one general typ file, and a bunch of instructions what to do with the downloaded img that the user himself will download from Lambertus site. With the selected tiles they are downloading, comes a small setup.exe file that will install those tiles into mapsource and / or make a gmapsupp.img. Ok, you can make this installer as sophisticated as you want, maybe let this installer downloads the tiles, but that seems to me far more complicated.
Sorry, dont have any knowledge about Linux.
Mkgmap is not overkill when it comes to making an index file for mapsource. I think it should be used because other programms like mapsettoolkit will fail to make a good index from the tiles.
And I think its better to include mkgmap because there are several versions of this and the tiles that Lambertus has generated must be in correspondence with the right mkgmap version.
If someone wants to order a map for free we can ask some effort for this service (=installing java). Better this than waiting for days for your free lunch.
When a user comes back later to add more maps, it is very likely that the tiles are not the same anymore. Thats a big issue for which I haven’t found yet a good solution, other
than uninstalling all the previously installed maps.
