a big mappu
May 1st, 2006paper maps are in the past right? but what do you do when you don’t have a net connection and want to see the awfully detailed internet map? i don’t know if that was quite what i was thinking when i started work on this, but that is my official justification :p
google’s mapping api uses some java applet, but behind it is just a massive collection of 256×256 gifs which are loaded as you scroll. so i began by taking the bounds which gave a full coverage of himeji city and its close surroundings.
this resulted in a large number of image files which i was left to join together. from the start i was planning on using imagemagick to do this task, since it is very scriptable and flexible in handling images. unfortunately it seems it wasn’t made to handle joining together this many images 
so i had to break the task down.. to the point where i joined each row of images one at a time using imagemagick. this took roughly 2.5hours on psrv, and left me with 60 odd 19456×256 pixel gifs which are long enough to probably cover the length of perth city if printed (at a low dpi ^^)
leaving imagemagick to then stitch these rows together and form the final image resulted in an even larger problem. the segmentation fault that appeared after a couple of hours made me think imagemagick simply couldnt handle these dimensions. then i tried to copy a file and found out there was no disk space left on psrv..
imagemagick ate 4gigabytes with its tmp files.
i ended up getting another program and this time (wisely) running it locally on my vaio. all went smoothly. the process took only 1 minute 34 seconds after i decided to output to bitmap over gif format. photoshop would handle the conversion smoothly after all.
quite a big file.
quite a few pixels! 330,793,472 to be exact.
this is a very very zoomed out version of it. it was only after i got to this point that i realised the bounds i first set were a bit off.. and its a bit too far east than necessary ^^;. once i get a day off uni i plan on recentering it and then ill try and find a use for it.
to those that still ask WHY?
why not?
omake: my current desktop. its been a while since ive posted a desktop image so :d
