Erik Wilde was pointing out the disparities between Google Maps and Google Ditu, or their Chinese version of maps. However, Google Ditu doesn’t have satellite imagery.

There are several easy ways to fix this. The first was to look at the Ditu tiles, and confirm they are the same as Google’s nominal tiling scheme. Which means you can add the China Street tiles as a simple GTileLayerOverlay with Google Maps standard satellite view underneath. This was incredibly easy with Mapstraction and I put up a demo here.

For bonus points I even added a Mapufacture syndicated feed of Erik’s venues for LocWeb2008 and nearby Wikipedia articles from Geonames.

The other way

The terms of how mixing Google’s various tiles together isn’t clear. So the other way to address his issue is to use the freely available data.

Namely, OpenStreetMap for roads, OpenAerialMap or other remote imagery, and run in OpenLayers. Here is the same map done with open data and open source. The resolution or completeness isn’t there yet, but you can see where it’s going and the ability to be use the information as you want is very appealing.

I’m now back in the US after 2 weeks traveling Central/Eastern Europe and along the way I’ve picked up some new cultural/travel/technology lessons learned.

The first one wasn’t immediately noticeable. I’m a big fan of coffee, and I tend to drink it in large quantities. This is already a problem, and one of the few, when I travel Europe: land of the ‘coffee shot’. However, in hostels and some hotels they will serve coffee normally and let you fill up as often as you like.

The coffee often tasted bitter. I attributed this to the bad coffee served in such large quantities at these ‘reasonably priced’ establishments. On the contrary, this is actually a remnant of the rationing of materials during World War II, where chicory root was put in as an available filler for coffee. This lent it a bitter flavor. Over the years of the war, this flavor was acquired, and even now Europeans will add chicory to their coffee to get that familiar taste.

I like my coffee relatively root free.

Note: Japanese tourists were observed to travel in large tour groups, where as Chinese tourists travel in sets of pairs (2 friend, 2 couples, etc.)

Pictures of people are usually more interesting and enjoyable than pictures of monuments and buildings. I am amazed by what appears to be the gigabytes and gigabytes of (the same) bad photographs being created every minute during high-season in tourist areas. It becomes very apparent that the future of computing is search. How else am I going to find that picture of Mozart statue amongst the hundreds (or thousands) of photos I took on a trip (or that exist on my entire hard drive).

Vienna is a much cooler, and memorable city when you spend less time running around to see all the sites (which are mostly Hapsburg estates), and more time in the “Vienna Living Rooms” of coffee shops and cafes. This is true of many, but not all, cities.

Internet access is a real pain to find, and will probably cost a lot. Forget wireless (at least publicly available wireless)

Another interesting aspect of travel is the end of the trip. Whether or not you’re tired and want to relax. Its the hours and hours in lines, through counters, gates, flights, and sitting waiting that really drives the feeling: “I want to be home.”

It may not necessarily be that you want to go home, but finally getting home is a release from the mundaneness of sitting in the airport and passing through customs after customs agents. If only they could put us in hibernation at the end of the trip so we just “showed up” at home, all exuberant and vibrant from the end of our travels.

Reuters has an article that fewer characters being used in written Chinese than ‘before’ (not sure when before was). For example, you typically need to know 900 characters to read 90% of current publications. People usually gawk at the number of characters they say that Chinese writers/readers must learn, of the 50,000 individual characters that exist.

However, as Slate points out, there are currently almost 1,000,000 (million) English words, 50,000 of which are headwords – or the primary, bold-faced, word. I also had a statistic around somewhere about how many English words make up 90% of a typical daily newspaper, but cannot find it (silly data…)

And Chinese characters are commonly built up of radicals which indicate what the word can mean or deals with. Being an engineer, chinese script feels very “algebraic” to me. I learn what x and 2^y and π mean. However, when you see “angry” and “hungry” do they give you any idea what they mean?

Other interesting facts: there are fewer than 100,000 words in French, and 24,000 different words in the complete works of Shakespeare (1,700 were invented by him). About 80% of the information stored in the world’s computers (such as this text) are also in English. And as Joi Ito quandries: If news is not in English, did it happen?”

Several months ago I made a couple of New Year’s Resolutions. One of these was setting up a bug tracker – yeah, well, that’s still in progress, though I’m thinking of going with the appealing (and Ruby on Rails written) SimpleTicket.

But one resolution I have already been following through with is learning a non-western language. I chose Mandarin Chinese, one because it seems very useful considering the future outlook, and second was that it was available on a night I had available.

Chinese is actually easier to learn than I had thought at the outset. Some of the annoyances of English, such as conjugation aren’t present. For example, “I be” “I am”, “He is”, “She is”, “We are”, are all just “- be”. Though these are replaced by equally difficult translations. For example, there is a different word for Maternal Grandmother and Grandfather vs. Paternal Grandparents. There is even a different term for older vs. younger brother and older vs. younger sister.

We’ve also learned some of the country names. America is “Meiguo”, or 美国. Literally, this means “Beautiful Country”. I found this very endearing… until I learned it’s because the character 美 (Mei) which means beautiful just has the same sound as the “me” in America.

Other countries include:

• 法国 － Faguo is France (lawful country)
• 得国 － Deguo is Germany (moral country)
• 加拿大 － Jianada is Canada (just sounds a lot like Cha-nah-dah)

Happy Tet! or Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

I highly recommend you find a Vietnamese friend to cook you some pho and other Lunar New Years yummies!

It is also the Chinese New Year. Welcome to the Year of the Dog. Check out some new years songs.

Update:Check out this great blog entry and video of the Shanhai fireworks.