Gasbuddy.com is a website which allows individuals to update the price of gas for any gas stations.
This helps in knowing where the cheapest gas station  in the area you are looking at.
Remember, that the data there is as best as the number of people updating it .So please consider updating the gas prices when you see it :-).Welcometo crowdsourcing.

posted at: 14:09 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

For those of you who might have played with OSM , might have always felt a need to download and view it on their laptop offline.
The files are typically at a contry level or a state level and most of them are pretty huge and memory hogging.
In any case if you feel a need to extract out a bounding box from a huge .osm file here is what you can do.

First download Osmosis from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis#Downloading
Since it is java based it will pretty much run on all platforms where java will run.
Then download the state or country maps in osm format from  OSM or from Cloudmate
The file format which we need to download the file will be something like <Country or State Name>.osm.bz2 like in my case it is california.osm.bz2
Once you download that file you need to unzip it using a command like bzip2 -d california.osm

Now say for example you want to only extract OSM data from a bounding box between Top Left Longitude -122.093566 / Top Left Latitude 37.39062 and Bottom Right Longitude -122.093566 / Top Right Latitude 37.39062 which is an Area of Sunnyvale and Mountain View, California you would give a command like

./osmosis --read-xml /mnt/officedesktop/maps/california.osm --bounding-box top=37.39062  left=-122.093566    right=-121.939929  bottom=37.318027  --write-xml svl.xml

The output of the command will be called svl.xml

This way you can extract out bounding boxes for areas of your interest and use it in applications like Gosmore

posted at: 22:14 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

If you use the Operator Extension  for microformats and whenever you come across a Geo(Microformat) encoded URL  and want to lookup that location on our beloved  Open Street maps , I have written an Operator  plugin for doing just that.
The plugin is available @  http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/downloads/osm.js .You can save the text file using your browser with the name as osm.js.
Once you download it you need to copy the osm.js file in your operator folder.It wiill be something like <Firefox Profile Folder>\profile\operator on Windows and <Firefox Profile Folder>\operator
Please note that you need to install the Operator Extension before you can copy the osm.js file.Once installed you will be able to see the file in the Preferences or Options of Operator like below

You will then need to restart firefox to have Operator load the new plugin.

If everything goes well you should see the following in the Menu of Operator inf Firefox.


If you run into any issues you can send me an email @  Please mention osm.js in subject line so I can distinguish between spam and real emails.

posted at: 22:46 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

This weekend learned about Autokey and  created a few pages and content like FAQ's and online manual as there was no documentation for this very good project.
Look up @ http://autokey.wiki.sourceforge.net/

posted at: 04:20 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

So I wanted to try out configuring one of my old machines to be used for routing and firewall so that I get more advanced capabilities.
At this point I did not venture into making my router a wireless router primarily due to poor support of drivers in Linux for wireless.
So the setup needs an old pc,2 nic cards., knoppix cd/dvd and free hard drive or a usb drive.
I used some of the tools like the ones listed below

1. FWBuilder :  For writing iptables as iptables is really cryptic and I had no energy/motivation to learn it in detail.Even using FWbuiler there is definitely a learning curve and currently it does not do advanced features like QoS etc.
2. Vnstat : For bandwidth monitoring.Now I could have used MRTG but both these software serve different purposes.In mycase since Im with Comcast and now they have bandwidth caps I was interested in aggregated statitistics like uploads/downloads per day etc as I use my internet to donate my bandwiidth for legal purposes.
3. ddclient : I use this perl script to upate my Dynamic DNS at Dyndns.org.

Overall I was very pleased with the outcome as I feel that if you run Bittorrent and other tools/software which excercises your router to the fullest , most of the cheap routers of D-Link/Linksys/Airlink do choke as I doubt it that they have enough memory to handle the load which is put by Bittorrent and other p2p software.
I put the wireless router as an access point and now my wireless does not drop too much.

posted at: 15:38 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

I have finished Yacy setup on my home computer and it is functional at http://bhavesh.gotdns.org:9000
Here are the live stats of my search portal

posted at: 04:35 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

To include my changes to make pyblosxom xfolks aware. The thread is at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.pyblosxom.devel/2099

posted at: 13:37 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

Introduced gps3d as one of the tools which can be used to log gps data on Windows and then can use NMEA sentences to GPX which can be further used at OSM.
My wiki edits can be looked at Wiki Edits my Bhavesh

posted at: 13:37 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

Recently I have been making changes to the maps on openstreetmap.org for the Sunnyvale area.
I have added lot of restaurants around Sunnyvale , pretty much anytime I visit a restaurant or any other place I make changes on OSM.My goal is to add as much details as possible to maps.
I have also added a lot of GPS traces, so pretty much wherever I go these days I carry my laptop and my GPS mouse and record my GPS traces and then convert into GPX format and upload it to OSM.You can see my GPS traces at My GPS Traces

posted at: 13:37 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry

I created a society for Free software a couple of years ago on bitzi, you can see the file collection at http://bitzi.com/society/FLOSS_Free_Libre_Open_Source_Software
So what I do is whenever I download any free/open source software etc I add the magnet/e2dk (kind of fingerprint of the file) so that when other people who download via p2p networks are sure that the contents are good.

posted at: 17:21 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry