User talk:Biercenator

Need more information ^0^y

Hello, I seen that you made a script to transform Image:BlankMap-World6.svg into a flattered version. I thanks you many times for this, I don't know yet where to use it, but I think it will soon or late be welcome since we are walking toward more SVG integration, and that a next hope stage will be to have SVG maps with standardized looking + scripts transforming them : adding colors according to provided datas ; transforming the map from a Winkel Tripel projection to a Robinson projection or a Mercator projection or some other projections, etc.

Also, can you edit your user page to tell more about your mapping and coding abilities, say if your soft may convert the Image:BlankMap-World6.svg into various projections, and add the projection name produce by your script (it seems to be Mercador projection or Robinson projection, but your convertor-script may use equation of an other few-know projection). If you can precise the projection of Image:BlankMap-World6.svg that's also welcome !

Many thanks for your help,

220.135.4.212 11:33, 17 March 2008 (UTC) (you can simply answer here, on this talk page)

About me

Sure thing. I am an academic in a Japanese law faculty, where I have been working for the past ten years (as of 2008). Before that, I spent ten years working in a law faculty in London, where I taught comparative law and Japanese law. Originally I am from California, where I did both my BA (at Berkeley, in Rhetoric) and my JD (at UCLA).

The only formal training I've had in programming was in high school, when I took a course in the Symbolic Programming System language (SPS-2), which we were allowed to run on the IBM 1401 owned by the local school district on Wednesday evenings. My first computer was a Sanyo 555 running a modified version of DOS, that I used as a word processor in law school. While in London, I discovered Linux and LaTeX, and since then I've played with various languages and systems, including TeX, Perl (both of which I've now pretty much forgotten), C++, Ruby (neither of which I've ever really known), and Python (which I use regularly in my work). In Japan, I went through a period when I built several systems on Zope and Plone, and contributed a couple of items to the Plone documentation project. Today I use Python as a data mining tool for research, and as a toolkit for website maintenance. One of my sidelines is the maintenance of the English language website of my faculty.

The nugsl-worldmap tool was built to implement a design concept for another website of the University, in which a "rotating" Robinson projection of the world will have clickable areas providing information on partner institutions of an academic consortium. The base data for the map generated by the script is from Image:BlankMap-World6.svg, which is a Robinson projection. The script can be used to "flatten" the projection, and has options for "rotating" the image, for extracting country outlines, for adding pinpoint marks, and for rasterizing the image and generating imagemaps for clickable areas. The "flatten" and "rotate" transforms of the Robinson projection are not mathematically determined (and cannot be, given the way a Robinson projection itself is produced). Instead, the coordinates of the outermost points of the "oceans" object are used to build two internal conversion tables, one for the left side and another for the right. When the transform is applied, a step function is used to find the nearest match in the Y dimension for every point in the table, and it is shifted in X by the (approximately) appropriate factor. The code is very specific to this particular map data, and the script is not particularly pretty inside. With that caveat in mind, anyone with the patience for the task is welcome to have a go at extending it.

Biercenator

BlankMap script

are you still developing this? (are you interested in hearing about, and fixing bugs etc?) regards, Marmelad 14:49, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

There are limits on my available time, but the script has not been abandoned or anything. The project for which it was written *should* go live to the web in a few hours, if all goes well. With that project completed, I don't plan any major changes to the script, but I don't have any territorial claims to it either; extensions, bug reports and suggestions for improvement are always welcome, and the code is open for anyone to pick up and run with as they like.

If this item is to have a long life in service, the code should be cleaned up, and it badly needs a set of unit tests, to help assure that fresh changes don't break what is already working. New features should probably wait until it's a bit easier to figure out what's going on in there, but it would be good to have a list of possible future features handy when doing the housecleaning. Biercenator 21:35, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

rsvg for mac

Perhaps I am daft, but it seems like you cannot leverage much of the good functionality of the maptool script without having rsvg installed on your system. I run a mac, and the easiest way to get rsvg installed seems through macports. However, it seems that librsvg is dependent upon glib2.0, a massive library full of all sorts of dependencies. Is there some alternative tool that the map tool script could use to do it's conversions to svg? Or, if not, what is the easiest way to convert the svg files to a properly sized png/jpg file?

Image map capability

Could you explain how to make the image map capability of the script work? Thanks! ~R~

South Sudan

In the map, South Sudan, doesn't appear. —El comentario anterior es obra de 190.239.220.18 (discusión • contribuciones), quien olvidó u omitió firmarlo.

It needs an actualization. Whenever it´s possible, it would be very helpful. Thanks for your work Biercenator. Regards. --Brgesto (talk) 03:06, 8 September 2012 (UTC)