[OSM-dev] Various OSM troubles

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi,

as a member of the osm talk list, I just subscribed to the devel list. I 
hope the following points are appropriate here; if not, please point me 
to a better location.

I started mapping in late summer of 2006 and have contributed the first 
set of data for Karlsruhe, my home town. Meanwhile we are three mapping 
people here and therefore we have been able to map huge portions of 
Karlsruhe.

Today I wanted to load the existing data as a map to my Garmin device 
using osmgarminmap contributed by User:Joto (also a cool piece of 
software BTW).

I encountered some inconveniences and I wasn't able to find the exact 
reason, but if those were bugs I hope we are able to locate and fix 
them one day ("real soon no (TM)" :) .


=== Getting a bigger area ===

I desired to have the complete area I mapped on my GPS device to refine 
it. I tried to get the data of this area using JOSM. The coordinates 
(lat,lon) are
48.28340621665376,7.588906762370101
to
49.77573536590515,8.915421561704648
JOSM needs some time, then I get an error:
Server returned HTTP response code: 500
According to w3.org, this is a server error. This problem occured for 
some time now, so it surely is not a temporary problem. I can solve it 
by reducing the size of the area, but as it is the area my bicycle can 
reach easily from my home I'd enjoy having the hole area on my device.
Is it an intentional error (preserving the server from denial of service 
attacks)? If so, was it possible to increase the default data size a 
bit?

=== Download of incomplete objects ===

I took a smaller area and converted it successfully for my garmin 
device. Unfortunately some weird red lines are crossing the map. I 
guessed those are caused by ways which haven't been downloaded 
completely, due to the bounding box specified. So I simply selected all 
downloaded data in JOSM and tried »Download incomplete objects«. The 
progress bar appeard to download 34 items, but neither it disappeared 
nor data got downloaded. After some time, I pressed cancel as it was 
obvious that it took to long.
I just tried it again with the village where I was born. Only two 
segments had to be downloaded, but it took several minutes.
I have no clue if it is a server or a client problem, but are there 
chances to speed this process up?

=== Slippy map search ===

Finally a minor issue. I used the slippy maps today to view the data of 
the Karlsruhe area and I was pretty impressed, so thanks to all 
involved. I found a minor issue. Above the map, there's a search line 
edit, so I entered »Karlsruhe« just for fun. Surprisingly, it returned 
two entries, the Rheinhafen Karlsruhe (which actually is a waterway) 
and the railway Karlsruhe-Rastatt. There's nothing wrong with that, but 
I missed the node tagged as
place=city
name=Karlsruhe
which also exists in the database.

Visitors of our web pages might use the line edit to search for their 
hometown first, so I think it would be cool to include nodes tagged 
with "place" in the search.

Thanks & best regards,

ce