The trick that is working great for me particularly is mentioned here. I have a SonyErricson K790i with J2ME. So I installed mgmaps on it. Then came creating an offline cache so that it does not need to download each and every time as I move my GPS along the undocumented roads. To create cache I select zoom 0-17, use Openstreetmap (Maplink) renderer. After cache map is created using the creator tool, I download all the OSM tiles using the gMapMaker which can read and create full offline cache directory structure for mGMaps. Thats the homew0rk part of it.

Now as I go along GPS Tracing using my Holux m241, I keep checking ways on the already OSM tile on mgmaps. As long as I can’t find a way on screen, I going the right way!.  The target is to hunt unmapped way therefore have the marked ways with you and do the turns which are missing.

Later in the evening, I load the GPX file itself and then download the OSM data for that zoom level. Now I have partly marked ways partly just GPX lines. Which I convert to real ways and name them as much I can. The other problem of Gurgaon, HY, India is that we have not named our streets, therefore most often, the names are either guess work of just human readable rather than in sync with the policatal/official data.

The modes of transportis either a bycycle(almost like this model) or my classic Kinetic Honda (which is no longer manufactured) and m241 set of 1sec log autolog mode.

My bro is going around placed on every weekend. He and his big gang keep finding hills around and climb those across the day. So I thought, lets try the same model here. But gurgaon has no hills around. So I checked google maps with terrian maps and located, the closes hills to be around Alwar, Rajhasthan. Compare those heights with ours e ofis a bit silly cause Gurgaon is at an altitude of 220m and those hills are merely 600m. But for first time trekking, that is just a good warmup. Also by the time you real alwar, you are already at 300m altitude. The first trek I did was on June 20, 2005. The day I had climed my first mountain. I did not have any Holux of any GPS those days. I was with my cousin Ransingh enjoying my small 5 day holiday in Pune. (Then, my ex-girlfriend was getting married in Delhi the same day, so just wanted to run away). That day was monday and without any plan we attempted the hike cause we had loads of time. It was chilling at the top and the experiance was memorable!

So past week, me and my wife planned to take a hike ourselves. We attempted a survey session few weeks before in the same mountains and visited a old Fort on the hill top. That survey was totally on my car. Yesterday we did a real first hike. Loaded with Holux Logger, MGMaps and Trail Explorer waypoints we managed to reached our base. That was already about 350m and we both were dead tired. The timings were planned incorrectly since it was 1600Hrs and still climbing therefore, we agreed to abort the hike for the day. We walked back to the car about 2km far klept introducing ourselves across the village we walked by. The Experiance again was amazing!

We had to learn a lot of things. Like not carrying some enery drinks, some snaks. Carrying some bogus heavy luggage along and not starting the hike early enough. During our car survery, we reached the city about 3pm and the hilltop at about 4pm. This time we reached the city about 2pm and spend next two hours walking towards the base. The sunset time is about 1730 therefore, we could not keep climbing and had to retreat instead. The hill forest is not dense and any tekker will find it peanuts. But for first timers like us, the thorny bushes and lots of rocks kept bothering us a lot. There have been a lot of rains around the hills past few weeks therefore the green cover is very beautiful. But again, the hills are mostly made of sandrock therefore, plantations are very minimal small. We covered the entire hike in the GPX track and later mapped to my JOSM. The car ride to alwar takes about 3 hours from Gurgaon via the state toll highway and the distance is about 110 km. We will do the alwar trek again in the coming weeks, and this time actually reach the top.

If you are living around this place, you’d already that Gurgaon’s every single residential locality available for occupancy has to have garden, greenry, forest, valley and nature in its brand name. The obsession of green has been build up past 3e years and reached its peak since last year. Every advertisement has to have a green border and a 80% forest background. Every logo need to have a leaf in its logo. Every brands name needs to have something greenish about it. Those are the rules on how the residential locality scores in its goodness. The obsession cannot be alone of the builders since they all share the same ultimate motive, sales. Then we have to agree, the prospectives themselves need to be utterly submerged in this feeling or want to live around nature.

The new residences in Gurgaon, India (just like any other place) are mostly composed of tall buildings. Buildings here are between 25 to 30 floors high. We in India yet have not learned to build higher like the west. Reasons are many. A 50 floor building will suck the electricity from the nearest sub-station and we already know India has just about 50% electricity supply of its total demand. Every building that is currently build has a generator backup. They mostly have an entire floor just for deisel generators. Higher building would mean a building occupancy more than 5 times that of current levels. The weather in Gurgaon asks for air conditioning and culture asks for various other luxurious and power-full devices. Combine that with the fact that regular power comes in this town no more than half a day. oThis would only require a fantastic proper supply chain just for desiel on a daily basis! Are we really talking about a residence or a proper industrial plant? Power alone cannot be the only deterent. The water supply and the sevage systems in this town are not capable to hold very very high population at the same point. We get water for just 2 times in the day. Those two times would not be enough to satisfy the 500 people living in just one building! Parking facilities are still not able to match up with current demand. So in all, the current building sizes is at the optimal level based on supply realities.

Greenry and residence cannot be at the same place. In simple ways, humans destroy nature, not keep it beside them and live along. So how do they think otherwise if they get a house around the garden? They pay a Crore of rupees (US$ 250K) for just one flat with about 3 bedrooms on a floor of a building which itself is surrounded by concrete jungle. The only greens they do get see after paying so much is from their high balconies. The plans look so small that you’d never know they might as well be made of plastic. Don’t expect bird music live around concrete mess. Don’t worry about oxygen if you’all are buying the flat for that. You’d get it the same levels as without the tiny looking trees from your flats. There is one other very critical pattern of living in skyscrapers. The residents make up their whole worlds around the walls they own. Walking out of those walls means a long drive from the 20th floor to the ground floor passing through alleys, queues, lifts. Its natural that the residents hesitate to have a stroll outside these walls just as they feel. So in effect the only two times they do have the close encounter with the greenry they have paid for is while going and coming back from work. There is no enough land in this city for any builder to waste it on parks or grounds. So the greenry being shown everywhere is merely a couple of young trees planted around the concrete.That is all the forest people buy the house for. And still want to spend more money for more greenry that is presented to them.

So what do you do with a Holux GPSlim240 or a Holux M241 GPS Logger? Well, I bought them before I had a reason. Yes, thats exactly like me. First I bought the world’s smallest bluetooth receiver Holux GPSlim240. It reached without trouble in 7 days. I worked with it for a about 2 weeks. Used mGMaps on my K790i. Later also installed Nav4All. That was what I thought to be fully loaded until my bro vivek told about the M241.

The Holux M241 GPS Logger is high end system for those who know how to use it. For silly people it simply comes with a LCD to let you see the latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, time and total distance traveled. So yes, you don’t need a bluetooth receiver at all times. For utter crazy dude like me, it can log. That alone is the super duper system to be used in so many ways. Welcome to openstreetmaps project. The ride has just started boys!

OpenStreetMaps is a great project for its letting anybody map their locality. In the case of INDIA, Google or Yahoo both have very bad quality satellite images and that too more than 2 years old. The locality where I live is mostly empty lands on google earth while in reality there are like 5000 apartments around. I started OSM after 3 weeks back when I had bought my first GPS receiver, Holux GPSlim240. It worked great (almost). I installed loads of softwares on my K790i and started playing with it. First I installed mGMaps. Its a mapping tool to render maps or terrain from various sources. When I first found out about mgmaps it could even render GMap. Now it can render everything but gmap. Haha. The interesting thing is that it can even render OpenStreetMaps along with wikimapia. mgmaps is great software and u can actually use it to travel to ur destination as it can hook to a bluetooth GPS and show position in realtime! (DO NOT USE IT WHILE DRIVING!). You can add bookmarks and zoom or pan around the map just like it were a web browser. Finally, mgmaps also supports realtime upload of the position. Therefore, if my profile can be accessed, you could even track me in realtime. My phone with the GPRS will keep uploading the coordinates to the mgmaps server. mgmaps also supports a great new function of friends. It will getting coordinates of all of its friends and display them on my phone’s screen. Same way will display my position on my friend’s mobile screen. The next amazing software for realtime GPS navigation is Nav4All. Nav4All is also a J2ME application just like mgmaps and works perfect even for my indian roads. Certainly it does not have all the roads that we know but it is growing. I don’t think its using OSM or any known data sources. It comes with a big bunch of audio languages and has a clever UI. Supports Night mode display as well has Economy intelligence over it for saving the mobile battery. Nav4all also supports uploading the points to the server but I have not tested its realtime engine. Then I tried to use GPSed. Its a data logger software which will write the info into a file on ur phone after it gets points from the bluetooth GPS device. The problem with GPSed is that on my phone it is very CPU hungry. Most often it responds very slowly and secondly on my phone it rarely succeeds in writing data to the file. At the end of the session when I want to save all logs it has failed everytime. Im not sure that this is cause of the security settings or not but I could not use GPSed very nicely. Besides that, it does have fearures to upload the log to its server. That is when I needed the Holux m241 Data Logger, the thing needed for GPS Tracing.

Openstreetmaps has been contructed in many ways. One of the very common methods for mapping has been GPS tracing. Since no overlay map can show a locality better than you being their yourself, collecting the GPS traces will allow you to later map your path even without the need of any satellite imagery. For my case its the only solution since my locality is no where seen in the satellite maps. I collected lots of traces from the m241 and later converted them to GPX format. OSM accepts GPS traces ibn GPX format. The Holux download utility that comes with the driver CD allows changing the log type from TRL into KML, NMEA and GPX formats. That is what I upload to see my trace on the mapping toll (either Potlatch or JOSM).

I will continue this blog for next few days with lots and lots of links cause I did not get all those in one location.

The fight between the neighborhood and the road that pass through it is called speed breakers. They have been our friends since ages but lately the story is changing faces. Just yesterday I came across a loaded truck with a broken front wheels over a speed breaker. Such accidents are not new these days.

Speed breakers from the time I remember were occasional on the road and when they did come, were painted neatly, marked least 50 metres on approach. The design of such breakers were always below the clearance of any vehicle. Those days were of Fiats, Ambassadors and Marutis. The condition of roads was just average or below average. The repair work on roads in those times was done once in few years. Almost definitely on the eve of local elections. And what I’m talking about is the metropolitan cities. So the full situation is that accidents due to speed breakers meant you were drunk and driving. No sane eye will even drive past a danger speed on a weathered road to cause a damage due to the on coming speed breaker. That is like only 10 years back story.

Today the metros enjoy very good roads (if i compare them with the past). Vehicles have lots more of horse power. Shockers come in plenty. So drivers do speed and almost every time beyond the speed limit. The neighborhood which was occupied with local pedestrians is more or less still undisciplined. They still think they own the land even if its covered with tar. The locals will most definitely cross the road without properly checking the traffic or giving hand signals. They will at more times chat on the road while the traffic passes them by. So we see a fast traffic approaching a very careless street. Fatal accidents are definite. And who is to blame is not obvious. They answer on such conditions is just like old times. Speed breakers. But this time, its painful.

Locals ask for speed breakers or should I say force them. And due to political reasons the request is always granted. Their request in recent times has gone by far very high (in inches). Firstly, painting the speed breakers which locals themselves force to be constructed is rarely seen. The reason been, such breakers are not part of the official road map and therefore no contractor is asked to paint the breakers which don’t even exist in the records. Which comes to the second problem of warning signs. Since the breaker is not official, nobody even puts the warnings by the road side. If that was all we would sure be a little better than today. But these unofficial breakers have their own design. They are very steep. Very high and uneven all through the stretch as if the local himself constructed the breaker. The locations of such breakers is completely at will of the locals. And not just one, we might see more than 5 full length breakers on a small stretch of just 100 metres. Then the high spots are definitely higher than even the average car could handle. So when crossing they mostly crush the car at the bottom and this happens everyday. The crushing of the car at the bottom even happens when the car is at near zero speed. Actual vehicles which approach such breakers un-alarmed will face heavily damaged vehicle. So I come to the actual point of damaged trucks which loose their axles while approaching such high breakers un-alarmed. The damaged trucks stand on the middle of the road all night and day halting the whole traffic. The same neighborhood is careless. Such sudden breakers might as well give serious injuries to the driver or passengers of the truck or a bus. That part is not even thought of.

Road revolution on a highest populous democratic country is not going to be a easy ride. The country beside us can far easily use force to disipline the traffic and its people cause it has no political reasons to take care of. We, in INDIA don’t want to enjoy that government. I feel its better the way we are but we ought didipline ourselves and save lot of pain. I hope that the future times will be better in such regards too.

Would be a bit early though to pass my judgment on it but ill try to be careful. After we celebrated India’s 59th Republic Day on 26th January 2008, the entire stretch of the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway has been completed. The same time the Toll Gate also became operational. There is one at the border of Delhi and Gurgaon. There is one also at the other end of entrance to Gurgaon. The later would not have as much heavy traffic and would not suffer peak surges during the hours of the day. What already hurts is Toll Plaza at the Delhi Gurgaon border. The plaza has least 18 checkpoints and all flooded with traffic at the morning and evening hours. The flood is so heavy and spreads a kilometre away from the gates. Added to the chaos is the ugly driving habits of this region. Lane driving was also a challenge to be taught to this region and now, that makes a mess in the entire span of the traffic jam. The authorities might have been in rush to start it in this manner it seems. They also would more likely been shocked that the traffic is to such a scale, beyond they can control. The expressway was the shine to travellers on this route for the past year. It was saving an amazing amount of time and had become a preference for most who could choose. As of now, it is a total disaster to plan a travel along this expressway. Nearly an hour just to cross the gates should be part of the travel plan itself. I do hope the authorities are not siting idle. They already did a fantastic job to construct it and now will find a solution to this problem too. This is INDIA. We have problems beyond imaginations. Just the thing I like.

14 Jan, 2008: This is all so very new to my eyes. The dense cloud cover been here for like years i’d say. Darkness that spans like eternity. And a strong belief that it stay that way for a longer time. And in one of those days, you see a ray of bright light escaping the clouds. Hold The Horses. I’ve been there already. So was not falling for the jokes any more. And then its seen, the winds taking the clouds away so very softly. Dude! Light does not come by accident! This is sure the sunlight breaking the day. The sun itself has yet to be seen. That I can only hope in the days to come.

31 Jan, 2008: We have a clear sky and the shining sun. The horizon seems like has grown so big that it may take a very long time even if any darkness plans to return. At mid-day height, the plans for a great day have started. I can’t believe it took years in the waiting for this bright day. My shadow has become an important part of me. And it will stay this way for eternity. Its not just a hope. Its beautiful. Two weeks and i’ll find myself celebrating with me and my shadow.

Oh yes, i’m there already!. The first ever 2008 Singapore Grand Prix. So what its in 28th September. This one could as well change all the favorites that people have with the Grand Prix de Monaco 2008 to be on 25th May. Monaco is the one to invent the flavour of city racing. That one track, that one long tunnel, those small turns. The only track I always remembered distinctly. So what is my start point. I start from the 2008 Malaysia Grand Prix that coming on 23rd March. We have the ticket details for Malaysia race but its a bit struggle to point where-is-what. Tickets start from around INR 3000 (EUR 40). So the bigger bet is the flight tickets. My travel plans for last year all got screwed up badly. Started with a bash in Singapore in Jan 2007 and ending the year, betting on a totally wrong team. So we start a fresh again. We don’t have the details for the Singapore track yet. Hope it will come online sooner. My best wishes to the Hero of the last season, Lewis Hamilton. The almost missed, would have become the first Champion of Formula1 at the Debut season.

I started tracking Formula1 from 2004 along with bro. Then the all time King of Formula1, Micheal Schumacher ruled the tracks. All of them. Then met Fernando Alonso. Never saw that last race of Japan. Also saw our home guy Narain Karthikeyan in 2005 races.

And as you can see, I am seriously involved in Wikipedia. So by habit, I wiki everything else too.

The hot news of the yesterday, December 19, 2007. The first Trident to ever pass a Acid2 test. Those headline came on the blog and everyone was surpised with the big bang. The blog being written so neatly, it got me all impressed. Finally, there comes the Sun. Then I started digging deep (i know, when its the question of the m$, we even have to doubt the sun). In the process I reached the layout engines wiki. So now I know, Trident is the code name of Microsoft Internet Explorer layout engine. Found Acid2 wiki and kept reading. STOP! As of December 19, 2007, the ACID2 test is broken and does not pass in any previously compliant browser. [2]The bug listing shows something we missed out! Today Acid2 is failing Safari, Opera and even Firefox3. Then how the hell did the internal binary of Internet Explorer 8 get around this? That is the way the day ends guys! There is something terribly wrong with Sun today. No doubt that it might as well be 2009 (i hope) before we see IE8 come in the stores but by that time, CSS3 would be everybody. Now we even got the HTML5 and XHTML2 fighting. For my purposes, the zen is a good enough test of all times.

January 14: The Acid2 test page has been seen working. This comment was made on windz Safari which has shown the face just as it should be. Firefox3 beta that I have also rendered it perfectly. Firefox2 has the usual problem in the picture. So we can most confidently bet that Internet Explorer 8 beta holders can’t be smiling.

January 24: Slashdot reports that IE8 could have more problems with not just Acid2 but even more with the in-progress Acid3. I keep hearing the OOXML blunder often and how we all are trying to find ways off the salvery And then we realize that IE8 will have a even new schema for proper rendering. Developers have died trying to get their pages look fine and the there is still a road left to walk upon.

The track by Puddle of Mudd from the album Come Clean (2001). The lyrics of this track are somewhat neat.

The music videos now getting hosted on youtube from the music companies themselves. The quality ain’t lovely but with the easy access on a regular bandwidth connections, the convinience factor plays a important role. Liking Park and a few others have a special official page hosted for all its past the forthcoming albums. Not sure which money changes which hands but it better be BIG(oogle as,). The bands which bycott exclusive music contracts with companies find this platform a better alternative. Recently was suggested that youtube is working on better quality video playback. It is taking time for various reaons. Primarily, mainting some kind of bandwidth balance. Secondly, amateur videos themselves are in not best of quality for a bigger screen and frame rate. My cam gives 15fps of a VGA resolution or eats space with a 640×480@30fps mode. A bigger resolution are a little harder to embed in blogs due to their size. But again, im sure they would keep the classic player intact as well. The nice thing is that a higher resolution player does not effect the upload time. We anyway have to upload in our raw formats now and even then.