[Tilesathome] Lowzoom approaches. Feedback appreciated.

[spaetz]

The t at hngo server rollout happened yesterday and apart from a few
glitches (many of whom have been fixed since), I am quite happy with
it, especially performance-wise.

One area that seems to have proofed a bit immature is the automatic lowzoom
generation. My simple tools don't reach the quality of the perl
lowzoom tool yet. I would like to have your input on how I should
proceed:

1) Turn off automatic lowzooms. This is trivial and you will have to
upload the lowzoom 'tiles','captionless', and 'caption' tiles just as
before, with the only change that a lowzoom tileset spans z6-11. All
the existing tools will continue to work.

2) Live with the suboptimal lowzoom stitching until I have fixed up
things and found better ways to create nice looking low zoom tiles and
to combine them with the caption layer. This could easily take a week
or 2.

3) Somebody (not me) modifies the tah client to be able to process
lowzoom requests (integrating the existing lowzoom generation
tool). The server, knowing which lowzoom tiles need to be updated can
then simply issue lowzoom requests. These would be processed by the
clients and uploaded as rgular lowzoom tilesets. I actually favor this
solution, but don't vote for it, if you aren't prepared to code it :-).

Your pick. Feedback appreciated, especially by 80n who knows the
current lowzoom generation best, I think.

spaetz