[Talk-us] Update on highway shield rendering

[stevea]

+1 to Martijn's excitement:  I, too, find this a neat and appropriate 
front for the us-servers to be serving up specific tiles about.  Good 
luck getting postgres technical glitches ironed out!

While it sounds like Ian & Co. have your hands full, another "neat 
and appropriate front" which I believe was once discussed here for 
the us-servers were slightly altered versions of mapnik.  They might 
have experimental and new render rules (I believe we were talking 
about boundary=national_park and related matters a few months back). 
I'm not banging the door down about this, and I'm not quite sure how 
to word a specific request (maybe participate in a discussion about 
some possibilities, though, YES!).  More like "I'm still thinking 
about this" (funky mapnik renderers with cool new rules we agree 
would be neat to try).

So, after highway shield rendering is solved and up, maybe this can 
move from back burner to front burner.  Think about it, folks: 
experimental mapnik renderings to do cool stuff with park boundaries, 
perhaps admin_level boundaries...your imagination is the limit.  We 
might start with a few small changes and see how that goes.  Might be 
a way to propose world-wide changes (only if they are consensus-based 
improvements) into mapnik, if we even want to go to such a place.

If we do, starting a new thread ("Experimental mapnik rendering 
rules"?) seems appropriate.  If the us has servers (it appears we 
do), we just might have some interesting ideas to try out!

Just (re-) throwing it out there,

SteveA
California


>For those interested in highway shields:
>
>Phil, Ian and myself put some more time in on getting shields 
>working on the OSM-US server last week. We actually got things 
>mostly working but did run into a brick wall. Unfortunately postgres 
>8.4 doesn't support how the image data is being handled. The fix is 
>to upgrade to a newer version of postgres however that is a slightly 
>complicated matter. Ian is planning some hardware upgrades for the 
>server in the near future which will alleviate some of the issues. 
>So as of now we are waiting on the server changes/upgrades to happen 
>before we start rendering shields.
>
>But the good news is I actually got an instance up and running on a 
>VM I have been using here at home. So it is definitely possible!
>
>Toby