Google Maps Hacks

Credits

About the Authors

Rich Gibson believes that the world is made of stories, and has unlimited curiosity in the world. He indulges his brilliant, semi-manic children in super-long storytimes, weird science projects, and adventures of many varieties. It is only the steady support of his loving wife that permits him to organize his eccentricity into occasional coherent bursts of creative productivity. Life is very, very good.

Schuyler Erle is a linguist by training and a Free Software developer by vocation. He got into GIS and digital cartography with Rich several years ago, while trying to analyze the best lines-of-sight for a rural wireless community network. He actually believes that maps and GIS, properly applied, can tell compelling stories, and help improve people’s lives. As of this writing, he lives with his wife near 42.375 N, 71.106 W.

Contributors

The following people contributed their writing, code, and inspiration to Google Maps Hacks:

• Tom Carden ([e-mail]) writes passenger flow simulations for YRM Architects, London, and is studying for an EngD in Virtual Environments Imaging and Visualization at University College London’s Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. He also gives occasional lectures for the Bartlett’s MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation. Online, he is a contributor to the OpenStreetMap project (openstreetmap.org), an active member of the community formed around the Processing development environment (processing.org) and posts sporadically to his weblog, Random Etc (www.tom-carden.co.uk/weblog). Offline, he can often be found at Islington’s Tinderbox coffee shop, staring thoughtfully into a latte and contemplating a world empowered by massively distributed collaborative mapping software.

• Reverend Daniel Catt resides in Stoke-on-Trent, U.K. (53.013, -2.1756) with his wife, Charlie Catt, and daughter, Modesty B Catt. A long-time keen walker, he first became involved with mapping in 1998, producing 3D views of national parks from map scans and Ordnance Survey data. His interest was foiled for a long time by the lack of open and free mapping data in the U.K. and not living in London. In 2005, pre–Google Maps API, when Google Maps hacking was really scary, this interest was rekindled in the form of www.geobloggers.com an ongoing project to consume, aggregate, visualize and push geoRSS-formatted data. He has a B.A. from Staffordshire University and publishes his thoughts at http://geobloggers.blogspot.com and http://360.yahoo.com/revdancatt. He can be contacted at [e-mail] or Yahoo! Instant Messenger at [e-mail].

• Drew Celley is a giant fire-breathing monster, standing 300 feet tall. He can sometimes be found toppling buildings and knocking over elevated railways, but spends most of his time as a UNIX Systems Administrator in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When he isn’t rampaging through the city, Drew likes to tinker with technology and help forge snippets of The Future into existence by writing hacks, software, and letters to certain political officials. He is the cocreator of WiFiMaps.com and has a slew of other experiments and projects he’s been working on, which you can read more about at http://www.zhrodague.net/~drew. In his spare time, he can be found gardening, brewing, printing, or searching for his next contract.

• Steve Coast ([e-mail]) started and runs Openstreetmap.org from London (the one in Europe), a project to collaboratively generate free geodata. He consults with two friends through Somethingmodern.com, doing a wide range of heavy-lifting computer work.

• Jared Cosulich created the CommunityWalk site http://communitywalk.com to let you share your community with the world, after work and on weekends while sitting in his apartment at 37.802565, -122.416051, watching the tourists wander by on their way to the curvy part of Lombard Street.

• Andru Edwards is a geek entrepreneur whose duties include acting as CEO of Gear Live Media, a technology blog network, and being the primary organizer and planner of the Seattle Mind Camp overnight geek confab event. Andru’s goal is to use technology and new media to create community both online and off.

• Chris Goad is a computer scientist by training (PhD Stanford, 1980). He worked as a research associate at Stanford from 1980 to 1983 and cofounded two companies: Silma in 1983 and Map Bureau in 1993. His areas of work have included applications of mathematical logic to computation, computer vision, simulation software for 3D mechanical systems, programming language design, and the semantic web. During the last four years, he has concentrated on applications of semantic web technology to cartography, and on the design and implementation of Fabl, a programming language that represents programs as semantic web objects. Chris lives in Astoria, Oregon and works at Map Bureau. See http://fabl.net/chrisgoad.

• Michal Guerquin and Zach Frazier calculated the size of the Google Maps cache of the map of the world. Michal’s web site is http://michal.guerquin.com.

• John T. Guthrie experiments with code and mathematical counterexamples at http://counterexample.org.

• Chris Heathcote is an interaction designer, with a focus on mobile and wireless experiences. He lives in Helsinki, Finland and works on Nokia’s Insight and Innovation team. He writes about buildings and food at http://anti-mega.com, and can be emailed at [e-mail].

• Adrian Holovaty is a web developer/journalist in Chicago. He spends evenings hacking on open source code and side projects that make information accessible to the public. His Chicagocrime.org was one of the original Google Maps hacks. He’s also lead developer of Django, an open source Python web framework (Djangoproject.com). By day, Adrian works as editor of editorial innovations for Washingtonpost.com.

• Anselm Hook is a reformed games developer and social cartographer. He’s currently leading the http://platial.com engineering team.

• Will James is a designer and photographer living in New York City. He created the NYC subway map hack as a cheap stunt to promote his pet project http://onNYTurf.com. It’s working.

• Richard Kagerer is a small business owner in Ottawa, Ontario. His company, Leapbeyond Solutions, provides Outlook-based software and cutting-edge consulting services to small and mid-size companies. In his spare time, he likes to water ski and stargaze.

• Tom Limoncelli has over 15 years of system administration experience and has been teaching workshops on time management at conferences since 2003. Tom has authored Time Management for System Administrators (O’Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison Wesley). Outside of work, Tom has won awards for his activism in gay/bi/lesbian rights and now helps progressive causes use technology to further their goals.

• Robert Lipe, tired of being lost most of the time, bought his first GPS in 2001. Though it was originally justified for his business travels as a software engineer, geocaching quickly consumed it—and him. Frustrated with the available tools to talk to the GPS and the difficulty of moving data between programs, he wrote GPSBabel and made it available to the public at http://www.gpsbabel.org. GPSBabel is now used behind the curtains in programs such as Google Earth and GSAK, the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife. He also wrote and maintains a collection of technical GPS articles on the web at http://www.mtgc.org/robertlipe. Robert and his family live outside Nashville, Tennessee. He continues to develop software for GPS-related technologies for fun and for hire.

• Tom Longson is a web developer with an interest in cartography and wearable computing, which he often writes about on igargoyle (http://igargoyle.com). He gained an interest in software engineering from his father, who was a pioneer in digital arts and used programming to produce unique 3D constructions and CGI. Tom ultimately wants to develop software that will change the way people think and interact with each other, for better or worse, and mucking with maps seems like one of those things that will do so.

• Mikel Maron is an independent software developer and ecologist. He has built several geographic-oriented projects around the worldKit mapping package, including World as a Blog. Previously, he led development of My Yahoo! in the pre-RSS days. Mikel was awarded a Masters degree from the University of Sussex for building a simulation of the evolution of complexity in food webs. Originally from California, Mikel is presently based mostly in Brighton, U.K., where he lives with his wife Anna. Links to various things can be found at http://brainoff.com.

• Tom Mangan is a newspaper copy editor and page designer who blogs at http://tommangan.net. He is an avid hiker and photographer. He also maintains the “Banned for Life” of expressions “so hackneyed and insufferable that they should be forever banned from the nation’s news reports.”

• Ron Parker is a software engineer from Fort Wayne, Indiana who spends his days writing software for the blind and visually impaired and his evenings hacking on GPSBabel and other free software. He has two dogs, three cats, and four computers.

• Anthony Petito created the http://www.stormreportmap.com site to support his interest in weather. He is available for Google Maps consulting.

• Dave Schorr is a weather fan who runs http://www.weatherbonk.com.

• Chris Smoak runs the http://busmonster.com site that tracks buses on Google Maps.

• Edwin Soto is an entertainment columnist with http://www.gearlive.com.

• Mark Torrance is Chief Executive Officer and Principal Consultant at Vinq. He founded Vinq in 2003 to offer services including design, implementation, and support of sophisticated database-backed web applications. In this role, Torrance has grown an effective team of consultants and managers, grown the business in excess of 100% each year, and won new project work for the firm. Torrance was also the lead designer and implementor of KnowledgePlex 2.0, the first version of this web platform developed for Fannie Mae Foundation. KnowledgePlex serves as both a content management framework for its own affordable housing content and as a platform for cobranding and reuse on partner sites. Mark brings consulting expertise in the areas of open source software, rapid application development, design for usability, graphic design and aesthetics of web design, and taxonomy/ontology development.

• Hans van der Maarel is a self-employed GIS/cartographic engineer from The Netherlands. Maps have been a great passion of his since a young age, and he’s very glad he got the opportunity to do cool things with them because he considers it a great field of work that he enjoys every day. Apart from maps, he likes travelling and listening to rock music.