Broken Google Maps Rendering on Chrome on Windows

The other day, I noticed that Google Maps rendering on my Chrome (v 36.0.1985.125) on Windows (7) was so broken, that Google Maps essentially became useless.
Streets/Roads were mostly invisible - looks like the line for the street has been overwritten by the street name:

At the same time it worked fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer (yes, I admit to having IE on my machine, just to test stuff like this).

So some testing and googling ... ok a lot of googling, since "google maps broken chrome" reveals essentially every rant on google maps there ever was...

Finally with some refining of search terms, I found the following hint.
Turns out, in this case you should disable the video hardware acceleration in Chrome.
Just open the settings, then search for "accel", and disable it, i.e. unmark the checkbox, if it is marked.

Restart chrome, and it works fine again:

REALLY!?! - On the Problem of Incomplete Data

A couple of months ago, the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) opened their data for Google (maps). Whether this can be already considered "open data" or not, is not todays subject.  Wiener Linien (let's call them the Vienna Transport Authority) did not.

My concern is, that Google now has the time table data of the railways, but not of the (local) public transport in Vienna (underground, tram, bus).

Which leads to incomplete data for commuters in and around Vienna (within Google Maps), or a segment, which I in reverence of SNL like to call

REALLY!?!

So, because there is no underground/metro/tube data. Incidentally ÖBB also operate the airport transfer bus, which happens to have a station right next to my office. And thus... Google Maps fills the gap in Vienna with a nice little transfer to the airport and back to my office... Because that's the only routing data (apart from walking) the find.

REALLY!?!

My regular commute time is around 50 mins.

So please, all, get your act together.

Google Maps Navigation now finally for Croatia

Since mid December Google Maps Navigation is finally available for Croatia.
I drive from Vienna to Zagreb every month or so (for business reasons) , and, yes indeed, I do know the way by heart now, but within Zagreb itself, it really annoyed me that I only had the maps, but no turn-by-turn navigation.

Well, this week when I went there again this week, it was just nice to have it available

HTC Contacts and Google Maps

I don't like the HTC Locations service on HTC Android phones. And I don't know anyone who does.
I really do prefer Google Maps and Google Navigation.

Bummer is was that when you click/tap on the location of an event in the (HTC) Calendar, it always takes you to "locations" instead of Google Maps.

Turns out, there is an app for that :)
Aptly called Select Other Map for HTC and available in the Play Store.

And it does just that. It is only there to register Google Maps for the same intent/scheme as HTC did with locations.
Once installed, the next time you click on a location in the calender, the Android system will find two apps registered for the same action, and will ask you for your preference.

You can pick Location Picker (which you wont, because that's the whole point) or Select Other Map.

Choose this one and say Always (unless you just want to try this once).
And - voilà - Google Maps will open and search for the location from the event.

You can always change this back, by going to the Select Other Map app in Settings > Apps and click on Clear Defaults in the Select Other Map app.  This will undo the Always selection from above and you are free to go back to the cra**y HTC location picker.

Maps mash up: Underground vs post office

The other day, when I had to post an important letter, I was wondering if there is any post office close to an underground station on my commute, and I could not come up with one. So - me being me after all - I decided to do some in-depth analysis on this. And learn Python along the way.

1.  The Idea

Get all the underground stations and post offices as geo coordinates, and find those closest to each other.

2. Getting the underground data

Easy, the geo data of all the public transport stations (or ony the underground stations) can be found easily, since the are part of the open government data, shared by the municipality of Vienna.

3. Going postal

Getting the post office data is rather challenging, because they are seemingly not considered to be public enough.

Still, this can be done; so first get a list of all the post offices in Vienna from post.at. Best with a little python script (my first!!) to parse it.
Get all those with a ZIP code starting with '1' into a CSV file including their full street address.

Then - thanks for the hint, martin - use the Yahoo! PlaceFinder API to convert those postal addresses to geo coordinates. Get an Appid for Yahoo!, if you don't yet have one.

Important trick here: Don't place everything into the q=... query string, but separate it into postal, city, street, etc. Like this

u = yahooURL+"?appid="+yahooAppidy
u += "&postal="+po.zip
u += "&city="+po.city
u += "&street="+quote_plus(unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', po.addr).encode('ascii','ignore'))
u += "&country=Austria"

From Y! we get some fine XML back and use XPath to access the geo coordinates

doc = ElementTree(file=urlopen(u))
lat = doc.findall('.//Result/latitude')[0].text
lon = doc.findall('.//Result/longitude')[0].text

So now we have the geo coordinates of all the underground stations and all the post offices.

4. Visualize & Verify the data
Let's again use Python to create a simple KML file to load the date acquired so far into Google Maps (or Google Earth). There's a Simple KML python library to do just that. Here's are the maps (post offices, underground stations)

5. Do the Geo Math
This is the tricky part. I decided to put all the data into a (relational) database, and since I have DB2 installed on my system, it was of course DB2. I did not use any geo/spatial extension, but just put the latitude and longitude into proper types. Then I created a user defined function (UDF) to do the geo math. Actually, for this purpose this could have been simpler, since one can disregard all spherical aspects and assume the surface (of the Earth in Vienna) to be flat.
With my newly created haversine function the query then looks like this:

select haversine(p.lat,p.lon, u.lat,u.lon) as distance, p.plz,p.street,p.lat,p.lon,u.station,u.lat,u.lon
from ubahn.post p, ubahn.stationen u
where haversine(p.lat,p.lon, u.lat,u.lon) <1
order by 1 asc
fetch first 20 rows only

I'm only interested in post offices that are maximum 1km (distance<1) from an underground, and I only want the closest 20 of those (first 20 rows only)

6. Create a map
Export those data into a CSV file, and run a pyhton script that creates the KML file for this, with the post office being a point, the distance being a line, and the underground again a point. Map can be found here.

Turns out, there are more pairs than I actually thought.

Cool gmaps // twitter mashup

Walterra has hacked a cool mash up with twitter "weather data" for select Austrian cities and google maps to present a twitter weather map for Austria.

Most probably technically not really challenging ("Done in three hours" in his own words), but the idea (to get the data from twitter) is just great.

This is just a simple example to illustrate the hidden power and possible emergence that lies within social media, presence services and livestreams.
This is a quick hack inspired by metaroll.de. Using summize I fetch messages from twitter which contain words about the weather in Austria's federal capitals. A simple algorithm measures what people are talking about and renders a KML file which gets displayed above

Thanks to phreak20 for the hint.

Xing now shows contact map on Google Maps

Xing just added great (beta) feature to the Contacts page.
You can now view your contacts as a map using - of course - Google Maps.

Here's my map (you might want to click to enlarge)



Works surprisingly well, i.e. most of the people seem to have meaningful addresses in their profile.
And the visualization - as often - adds information.

Update for Nokia 6233

Finally there is a new software version for the Nokia 6233 out: V 05.10 (check it at http://www.nokia.com/A4305060).

This fixes my problem with the previous release (4.91) which would not allow Google Maps Mobile to connect to the network. Now it works again...

Vodafone to work with Google (maps) ...

The world (or 3GSM in that case) is full of surprises:

Telecoms.com – News, Events and research for the telecoms industry:

"Vodafone Live! will be drawing on Google for its maps and local search service, it was announced Monday, while the company will be working with Citibank on a new mobile payments system."

So finally, they are opening up their Vodafone Live! and seem to stop developing everything themselves...