[Xastir-Dev] shape file speedups

[Chris Bell]

Hey, just a quick note to Curt... you rock!  Yesterday I selected the
whole state of shape files (water, rivers and roads...) and suddenly
realized I was zoomed out to half the state of california!  Dreading
the normally 10-15 minute map draw, I pressed pagedown a bunch of
times, and started to wander off to another screen to do something
else... within *SECONDS* it was zoomed down to a reasonable city,
panned to match my track-me, and had everything loaded and
drawn... Crash goes my jaw on the floor!!!!!

Between the interruptable draws, and the new shp optimizations... WOW!

Opening and closing the map chooser is still my biggest slowness (10
minutes to open with 30k lines in the map_index) besides map
reindexing.  But I can live with that.  Dropping it down to dirs only
is my acceptable fix.  


Ok, a personal update... 

+ I am back from my trips now, (I had a blast!  The Manta Rays in
Hawaii were magical!!)  Sorry, no scuba aprs tracker.  Yet. :)    
+ I have transparent backgrounds almost finished (programmable from
the geo file) also with programmable zapping of other colors too
(think remove labels or other features from maps) with a list.  
+ I have proj4 50% integrated (programmable from the geo file) so we
will be able to support just about any projection and datum.
+ I have cropping of map borders working (radar legends), will be from
the geo file soon.
+ Working with Pete Loveall I think I have a better projection for the
NWS radars, so with the above additions, they are going to be great.
+ GDAL/OGR is coming, but I am having trouble comprehending the whole
color allocation/mapping nightmare, there are many variations to deal
with, and they are fairly different than the imagemagic models.  
+ ...any interest in a interface to kismet, the 802.11 wireless
scanner?  I will probably be coding that to support a current
consulting project to get realtime maps of 802.11 networks. 
+ this weekend I plan to clean up some of these to initial commit
level quality, to get them out there for you all to beat up. 


Chris Bell
KD6ZWR
cbell at junknet.com