On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 08:03:19AM -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
/me is about to buy the Google Maps Hacks[*] book to allow me to geocode my blog. I'll probably have more to say after reading that.
Is it even out yet? I thought it wasn't going to be out for another week or so.
Anyone near Boston can come by and grab one from the enormous box that turned up for Schuyler a couple of days ago, which is burning a hole in the cupboard right now. (crschmidt, if we see you tomorrow i can bring one with me.) ... or perhaps i could just sell them on ebay ...
/me struggles for words a little bit
O'Reilly didn't put the production quality energy or investment into Schuyler and Rich's "Google Maps Hacks" as they did into "Mapping Hacks"; it's black and white throughout - doesn't even have the two-colour corner insets, incidental graphics etc that the "Hacks" books used to have - and a lot of the images came out too dark. :(
Perhaps the steam is running out of the Hacks series; perhaps the version that gets to the shops will be slightly better. It's a shame, because the book *is* full of neat weird tips and tricks, things to do when you're trying to throw too much data at GMaps, a lot of writeups by the people who made some of the most intresting early GMaps hacks.
Shrug, i am so much more interested in trying to do better ourselves, from scratch, and not have the dependencies. Oh, but the Council of Europe has [[ further stressed the need to protect intellectual property rights held by public data providers. ]] in the upcoming european spatial data infrastructure legislation. So we won't be able to make our own maps without putting a lot more effort into openstreetmap.org or earning so much money on web 2.0 that we can actually afford the Ordnance Survey's data licensing terms.
As better explanatory docs about that last issue come together, the internet will start to sympathetically vibrate with me SHOUTING ABOUT IT EVERYWHERE and trying to get people to sign a petition that Benjamin Henrion of the FFII is working on getting online soon.
-jo