Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Interesting ! :D Well, the thesis had exactly 100 pages in the end and printing it (in a local book & office supplies store) was indeed a bit costly - but hey, how often do you print a thesis anyway ? :)

So, the thesis was successfully printed & handed in on time but I the meantime I was a bit more busy than expected, so I have not yet been able to make some releasable modRana improvements.

However, I'm now preparing for my masters exams on the 25th of June ( wishes of good luck are welcome :) ) and I'm really looking forward to getting back to modRana after that. :)

BTW, thanks a lot for all the bugreports - I'm aware of them and they will by my main priority once I'm "back". :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Go break a leg! (NB. I hope you are aware of best-wishes traditions of British theatre....)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Go break a leg ! :o :o :o best wishes martink:)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Knocking on wood.
Best wishes.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Good luck, Martin!

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Yes it seems, though the client has to be registered.

On not requiring to log in: https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/auth#userless
Search API: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/search

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

So, what about this vector map renderer?
Best wishes.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Thanks a lot to everyone for your support! :)

I've successfully defended my thesis and also passed successfully the masters exam, finishing the Applied Informatics masters study program on the Faculty of Informatics of the Masaryk University in Brno. :)

BTW, my thesis is available if full from the official thesis page, but it is completely in Czech. :)

I made some quite extensive tables comparing most of the current mobile platforms for the thesis, so I'm thinking of putting those tables to some publicly editable wiki (like the Maemo one) and maintaining theme there. Also some articles based on material from the thesis might show up in the future. :)

tl;dr:
I now have a Mgr. title and can get back to modRana development. :)

I'll first go through the bugreports, add them to the Github issue tracker (BTW, the issue tracker on modrana.org is still fully functional, but quite PITA to use because of the antispam measures added due to TRAC targeting spambots) and start at fixing them. I'll also have to get local packaging for Harmattan set up - I've been using the MeeGo COBS for that, but you might have noticed that it got recently shut down.

I see that as the main big feature for this summer, like offline routing was last year. Certainly won't be easy, but preliminary research shows it should be doable. :)

The currently planed "design" looks like this:

• OpenStreetMap data, preferably in PBF as that is very fast to parse, is converted to a format suitable for rendering
• this format would be basically like the current sqlite tile database, but instead of an image each tile would hold geometry covering the given tile
  Kothic already supports this, but without sqlite - just A LOT of plaintext files. :)
• the Kothic renderer will get geometry from the sqlite db and draw it to bitmap tiles
  Kothic draws the maps based on a MapCSS style sheet - so one OSM data set can be used to render different map layer styles (day/night/car or pedestrian optimized). Or the data can be filtered to suit a particular style, making the data set much smaller.
• these tiles would be displayed as usual and should work out of the box with both GTK and QML GUIs
  Or even making modRana act as a tileserver - but first things first, it will be a long road. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Congratulations!

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Congratulations Mgr. MartinK. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

To celebrate MartinK's mgr. "insurrection" :), I have feature request, that would bring ModRana into "another level of usability "™ and should be, in fact, quite easy/quick to code*

Okapi geocaching support!

*famous last words
---

I know that we have, already, few geocaching programs around. Still, they're outdated, unmaintained, and - most importantly - don't support OpenCaching, which is de facto standard for FOSS geocaching implementations.

Now, OpenCaching have nicely documented and freely (no surprise, as it's whole FOSS project) available API - the same, no matter which national opencaching.* site we're using. it's called Okapi:
http://opencaching.pl/okapi/introduction.html

Now, if they're true about what they've written on main page, it should be really, really trivial to implement API requests. All other things to do would be minor UI switch to make use of Okapi prefferences, and voila.

It would make life of geocachers *much* easier, not to mention making ModRana instant replacement for all geocaching programs out there (well, in fact, ModRana is so good, that I spend ages on manual POI input for geocaches, anyway...).

I hope you'll find a spare moment for looking into this,

Cheers,
/Estel

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I'm trying to install the GTK version of ModRana on my N9 so I can use routing but now that repo.pub.meego.com is down, I can't get the gtk and python-gtk packages. They aren't available on either rzr's backup or skeiron.org - see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=79229&page=4 for detail.

Is there any other place where these might be stored? Or perhaps there is a command line way of telling the Qt version of ModRana to load a .gpx route? Any help appreciated.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

MartinK - Your efforts with respect to Modrana and other projects while also answering questions here on Maemo.org and at the same time working towards and completing your masters is remarkable! When do you sleep? You are an impressive human being (or are you a machine? :D ).
- David

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I've put them (well, everything from the late home:MartinK:gtk COBS repository) on the modRana website:

http://modrana.org/misc/harmattan_gtk/

Weird that at least RzR does not have them - I'm pretty sure he spidered my COBS stuff.

Well, not yet. Actually, the Qt/QML GUI doesn't yet support showing any markers or vectors on the map. :D I hope to get to that soon - it will be a bit more difficult to do due due to how QML (or more precisely Qt Quick) works. In the GTK interface modRana just paints the route/tracklog on the screen on every screen redraw (modRana actually doesn't do any partial redraws at all in the GTK GUI).

On the other hand, the Qt GUI works with the concept elements living in the managed Qt Quick context. You just specify the given element (tile image/icon/text) and the context handles all the drawing quite efficiently. I guess I could just hack a screen covering element and have it redraw each time the map is moved, but something more efficient should be doable. :)

Well, I've been also working part-time in Red Hat on the Anaconda installer since March. :D So if you have any issues when installing Fedora or RHEL, let me know. :)

Thanks! Well, I've somehow managed, but it was quite a busy time alright. :D

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Sure, I'll check it out. I plan to rework the current POI search to use the concept of POI providers, so that more POI search services can be easily used (currently modRana uses just Google local search). Okapi could be implemented as one of those providers, at least initially.

BTW, I think you'll have to add quite a lot of stuff to support Geocaching correctly. Stuff like arrow to cache, multi stage caches, reading/leaving comments, those weird calculators, sorting by cache type, etc. But yeah, just showing the caches on the map should be a good start. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Any way to separate ModRana into different packages? So that a user could install only GTK-ui, , or only Qt-ui; choose whether he wants to have local vector-to-raster tile renderer, or 'simply' download tiles from external tile server; whether he wants to search a location in Google, Yahoo, or local vector data.
By the way, are there any plans to integrate osso-addressbook with ModRana? It's possible to change map-helper in gconf (/apps/osso-addressbook/map-helper?), but you need to have a script (/usr/lib/osso-addressbook/map-helpers/modrana?) which would read address from $VCARD_ADR_ and translate it into a location on the map.
Best wishes. Thank you.
_________________
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

While QML GUI and GTK GUI package separation is good idea, the other ones sounds terrible. I don't want to install xyz packages, if I want ModRana to use tiles for one purpose, and vectors for another. Or search by yahoo for a while, then switch too google or vector back again.

/Estel

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I think "redownload" would be a nice addition to the "Download" menu. I'm currently mapping one small town and Marble's auto-update works very unreliably in a short term. But deleting all cached tiles is not an option for me, I have huge territories cached for offline usage. Any suggestion of a workaround (how to hunt down specific tiles in cache or any other software)?

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Sure:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames

With particular attention to:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/S..._of_tile_names

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Why delete them? Just rename the tile cache folder while you are working on your map updates. When you are done, move back the old folder.

This way you have always have current updates and won't lose your tile cache.

HTH,
Thomas

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I don't think of this as a priority at the moment, but it would be possible to do. I think something like would do:

• modrana core (all non-graphical stuff)
• modrana default theme (all the icons are what are what makes the modRana package big)
• GTK GUI
• QML GUI

This would enable for example to only install the core, without all the graphical elements if one wanted to only use the modRana CLI (well, there is not much at the moment, but still) - like Saera does, for example (even though some commands launch the GUI, so it's not that clear-cut). Installing one of the GUIs would pull in the core and theme.

Interesting, that could be a nice feature. I'll check it out. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

modRana 0.42.1 has been released ! :)

The main highlights of this release are support for batch tile redownload and update (thanks to int_ua for the idea!).

Batch redownload and update
http://modrana.org/images/modrana_gt...ighlighted.png

This features can be enabled from the Edit submenu, accessible from the batch download screen.
The redownload button has three states:
OFF (default) - download only tiles that are not locally available
ON - download all tiles, even if they are locally available
update - download only tiles, that are not locally available

Using update you can easily update only the tiles you have stored for a given area. I guess this should be quite handy. :)

NOTE: Looks like the autobuilder is broken at the moment, so either wait for the update or just grab current version tarball for the time being (it will use your profile as usual):
http://www.modrana.org/tarballs/modr..._0.42.1.tar.gz

Changelog:

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

This redownload feature reminds me of a bug I saw lately: For some reason modRana failed to download a few tiles while on the road, driving somewhere. On the way back, when we passed the same place again, the failed tiles were still missing, not redownloaded.

I would expect that if a failed tile comes back into view it would try to download it again?

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

One bug-vulnerability in Python-for-Maemo. When Python application decides that it wishes to use GPS, and Maemo knows that GPS was disabled by user, Python first asks user, with a system dialog, whether user wishes to "Enable positioning?", and then, irrespective of user's decision, force-enables GPS (blinking icon in status-bar; "Searching..." entry in status-menu), even though, according to user preferences, GPS is still disabled.
The only way to disable GPS is to either politely ask the benevolent application to not use GPS (because it apparently somehow disregards user preferences) or kill the malevolent (without an option to turn off GPS) application because it's apparently a loophole in Python-Maemo-GPS interaction (not stealthy, but still...)
Does anybody else have the same bug (Nokia N900, Fremantle, CSSU-Testing)?
Best wishes.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I get an error trying to search for anything in modrana:

('geocoding exception:\n', GBadKeyError('The api_key is either invalid or does not match the domain for which it was given.','))

Is there any hotfix I can apply locally to fix this? I was sent to Oslo for a week, and it'd help if I knew how to get to places :)

Similar thing happens when downloading tiles: the error message is then "the downloaded tile is not an image as per its magic number (it is probably an error response webpage returned by the server)"

Thanks!

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

If you mean address search, I've actually fixed this about two days ago, but haven't yet got to actually making a new package. But the code is already on Github, so you can just grab the latest source archive in you favorite format, such as:
https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana/archive/master.zip
or
https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana/a.../master.tar.gz
Unpack it somewhere and run modrana.py like this:
ModRana should launch normally and use your profile.
Let me know if you hit any issues. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I get an error message while running the newest one:

threads.py:157: Warning: 'with' will become a reserved keyword in Python 2.6

ending up in SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Looks like the effect of 35cf774c435239e61deece5b8f2343e572ca0654, but when I remove the offending methods manually I end up with:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'current_thread'
from core/threads.py line 59

Maybe I should just cherry-pick https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana/c...249529d1f8b251 and apply it on a latest release? Will try that and give you a heads-up

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Whoops looks like I forgot to check this under Python 2.5 before committing. :) Should be an easy fix.

EDIT:Fixed in master. :)
EDIT 1.: OK, not yet fixed, working on it. :)
EDIT 2.: Just tested it and master branch now again works on the N900, including address search. :)

Not sure if this is the only commit needed, there might be a few more involved. I admit modRana Git history is rather granular a a bit chaotic in places. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Yeah, it's running smoothly now. Thanks!

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Okay, now I'm sure it was Modrana. Sometimes I get a deadlock after leaving Modrana open for something like 20 minutes (autolock time being 5 minutes). It happens one in 10 cases maybe, the phone stays dark no matter what, reacts only with LED and only to charging. Anyone else experiencing this? It started before the last update. Sorry, no time to search the thread at the moment, leaving town.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Might have been asked already, or might be far out there, but can Modrana use Nokia's Ovi maps file for maps? Maps that have been downloaded from the PC suite onto the N900.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Might be a T&Cs conflict.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Historically modRana did not check that what id downloaded was actually a tile image. And some tile servers return a HTML error page when they can't return a tile (too low zoomlevel, too many tiles downloaded, generic tileserver error,...).

So it could happen that modRana would download something that was not actually a tile image and then after coming to the area, it will try to show the image and fail - and because the "image" is already downloaded, modRana won't try to download it again.

But quite some time ago I've added a check, that tests downloaded tiles and only saves them if they really are jpg/png/gif images (possible thanks to the magic numbers embedded in header of these image file formats).

If you are using some old tiles, it could be there are still some non-image-tiles present - or I forgot to apply the check in one of the tile download methods. :D

BTW, using the new redownload feature in the ON or Update modes should overwrite all tiles, including the offending ones, in the affected area.

Thanks for reporting the issue, I'll check it out. :) Registered as issue 26 on Github for the time being.

For the time being, you can just disable GPS in Options->Location->GPS, but I agree modRana should respect system settings.

I remember this happening a long time ago but it has been some time since I've last experienced this. It could be helpful if you could try to ssh the frozen device (if possible) to check RAM and CPU usage and/or set modRana to log to file and extract the file.

One possible cause could be some sort of memory leak, that would make the N900 swap and be unresponsive. Another candidate could be an endless loop somewhere in modRana or some library it uses pinning the CPU.

Or maybe a GPU driver crash (I remember stuff like that happening in the past).

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Even if I disregard all the issues with re/distributing the map files, they are in some undocumented proprietary format.

And even then, the files contain just the vector data for the given are. You still need a renderer (which modRana does not have yet), that would draw the map layer based on the vector data for the given area.

On the other hand, the currently planed vector map rendering architecture consist of two parts - a vector geometry source and the Kothic map renderer using data from this source.

So once that is up and someone reverse-engineered the Nokia maps file format and wrote a vector geometry source for it, they might be of some use. Not very probably though & and would require a lot of effort that could be spent to to improve rendering or open vector data storage & generation.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

You may remember that I was somehow involved in that history (hit and/or reported that issue).

But that cache is long gone, lost in a reflash....

I hit this one only once, during normal download-as-you-go, where I lost connectivity, the tiles failed to download, and later (with connectivity) didn't get downloaded.

If I ever see it again I'll try to note down exact circumstances or load from commandline.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

It's the same here even though i've already updated to 0.42.1.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Searching for similar error messages seams to pinpoint the cause to using the (non-threadsafe) GTK from multiple threads.

This is quite probably the issue in this case - the route search runs in a thread and might be manipulating the GTK context once a result is returned. Anyway, I'll investigate the relevant code in modRana and will try to do something bout it. :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

goog sat maps are giving error i just installed from repos after a reflash :)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Just came up with an idea for better map orientation:

What if you would take into account multiple positions to figure out the heading when moving at slow speed. Currently when halted or moving very slow, the map will rotate even if your heading isn't changing. So for slow speeds maybe watch multiple points to detect heading?

Just an idea... if I didn't write it down here I might forget ;)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

In the work i do professionally, we ignore the heading when the speed in <5kph. Perhaps an idea is to augment the heading at low speeds is to simply calculate it from the 2 (or more) most recent positions (i.e. completely ignore the heading contained in the gps data).