This morning, we migrated ZoomIn from rails 1.2.3 to rails 2.02 . The process was relatively painless. Its running about 10-15% faster than previously rails from the initial testing and it fixed the mysterious comma bug that affected rails routing.

Here’s the guide that we used to migrate - http://www.slashdotdash.net/articles/2007/12/03/rails-2-upgrade-notes

We had a couple other things that we found. First, when upgrading to capistrano 2, you will need to make sure that you use the right namespaces for steps that you have customised for the build recipe. Also, be wary of upgrading to RMagick 2, it requires a newer version of Imagemagick beyond what is default package for debian and ubuntu and RMagick has some compile problems as a result. We reverted to older version of RMagick to solve.

We’re in the process on migrating the rest of ProjectX applications over the next couple of days.

We’ve shifted the ZoomIn website from our hosting provider in the US to NZ.

In the lead up to Xmas, we had a number of issues with our hosting provider in the US, and we made the decision to move the site back to NZ. The site has been up since the weekend, and is noticeably faster

We like to think that our technology is being used solely for good rather than evil, but there are some applications where it’s hard to tell. Stalking would be a no-no, but celebrity stalking doesn’t seem so bad. That’s the purpose of the Wellingtonista Celeb Vista group on ZoomIn, which is fully explained in this post on the Wellingtonista.

Simply put, it’s a group for tracking celebrity sightings, but Wellington being Wellington, the celebs being stalked are somewhat more highbrow than on other celebrity-stalking mashups, hence the inclusion of Peter McLeavey along with Bret McKenzie and Shortland Streeters. At least there are no politicians … yet.

IntensCITY week, the celebration of Wellington’s urban spaces, is just about to kick off. A key part of the week is the INSite exhibition, which consists of eight shipping containers distributed around the city as artists’ spaces and installations. Here’s a ZoomIn group to show their locations (or you can go directly to the group map on ZoomIn).

As these are ZoomIn places, you can of course add your own photos and comments and edit the descriptions. I’ve kicked that process off, but if you manage to get some good photos or have some responses you want to share, please go ahead and do so.

While I may be a fan of the “intuitive” and “idiosyncratic” nature of neogeography, we all recognise the importance of getting the core geographic information right. We’re about to start a comprehensive update of all our mapping tiles, and while we were able to get out a relatively quick fix for the Wellington bypass, it will take a bit of effort to do it properly for the whole country.

While we pay good money for our base data, it’s a fact of life that nothing’s perfect, and the physical world sometimes moves too fast for surveyors, councils and data providers to keep up with. We already have a list of updates and corrections that we’ll probably have to make manually, and we’ve had useful reports from ZoomIn users that we’ve added to the list. But we want to ask you, our blog readers, whether you’ve noticed any errors, out-of-date areas or places that could do with a tweak.

Along with that, I’d like to know if there are any improvements we could make to the appearance of our maps. As just one example, as a supporter of pedestrian-friendly cities it has always seemed odd to me that pedestrian streets like Cuba Mall have the same symbology as dirt tracks through the bush. There’s a field in the raw data that distinguishes “malls” from walkways, and if I get the chance I’d like to represent the difference visually. Are there any visual quirks or infelicities that you’d like us to take a look at?

We can’t guarantee that we’ll get every suggestion into the upcoming map release, but we’re keen to get your feedback on what would make our maps the best they can be.

Here’s an interesting definition:

Neogeography, as we see it, is a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in the manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and or artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of “real” geographic techniques .

That resonates quite nicely with what we’re doing at ProjectX, especially with the community features of ZoomIn and some of the new features that we’re coming up with now. With my “urbanist hat” on, it reinforces for me the idea that a “place” is more than just a “space” or a set of coordinates: it’s about experience, memory and community.

The Wellington Inner City Bypass, in all its (ahem) glory, is now properly represented on ZoomIn and Smaps. We’re working on our regular update of all the map tiles for New Zealand, but we figured that a major change to the State Highway system, that also reorganised the one-way system in an urban area, was worth getting right straight away.

We thought we’d taken much longer than we would have liked to get this done, but since changes to the one-way network on the surrounding roads kept on happening right until a couple of weeks ago, we thought it was best to get all the changes done in one go. As it turns out, it looks like we’re the first major mapping system to show the bypass: Google, Multimap, Microsoft and Yellow Maps all still have the old configuration. I can understand why it’s taking them a while: it turns out that we had to do a lot of manual editing of the streets data, and our local knowledge came in handy.

While Karo Drive is now visible on the maps, we haven’t updated our addresses database yet, so you can’t search for it. That shouldn’t be a great hardship, since at the moment there seem to be no actual addresses on Karo Drive (Martha’s Pantry is the only business there, and its address is on Cuba St), and the relocated heritage buildings there and on the adjacent Tonks Grove will remain empty for a year or more. Some would argue that Karo Drive doesn’t deserve to be listed as a “place”, since it’s a means of getting between places rather than somewhere to be, but I couldn’t possibly comment! In any case, we’ll be including Karo Drive and Tonks Grove along with all the other street changes nationwide in our next database update.