Programming Maps with Perl

So far in my map making endeavors I have done quite a bit with Google Maps, made some introductory strides into Google Fusion Tables, and done a bit of dabbling with QGIS.  Let's be clear I am only just making some baby steps into map making, and having a really great time doing it!  All of these tools will require more and investigation on my part.  Another tool that probably not many people think about is programming directly with a language like Perl or Python.  I'm an old guy so I'll use the former.

A neat thing about maps is that a couple of the most common map formats are in XML.  This includes both GPX and KML.  And languages like perl and python have libraries for parsing and using XML files.  I've never done any XML programming in the past so this was all new to me - but a bit of googling and I found enough information to get me going.

Canadian Canoe Museum

I had to make a business trip to Toronto, and since it was March Break for my kids I took the two oldest with me and set them loose on the Toronto subway while I was at the office.  They had a great time exploring the city for the first time and got to visit the CN Tower, Ripley's Aquarium, and the Eaton Center.  We drove down in the family vehicle and part of my plan from the beginning was to drive back through Peterborough so we could visit the Canadian Canoe Museum.  As much as I know the boys love to paddle, I was not sure whether or not they'd really be in to a canoe museum but as it turned out they had as great a time as I did, and I actually had to peel them out of the place so we could get on our way back to Ottawa.

Having never been in the area before we relied on Google Maps to find the museum.  Since we were staying in a hotel in Markham we started out eastbound on Highway 7, and followed Google through highways 3, 20, and finally the 115 which is a modern 4 lane split highway that took us into Peterborough.  The route along highways 7, 3 and 20 was a nice back-country drive which had a few interesting points along the way that would have been worthy of a stop if we'd had more time.  Mainly along the lines of small town restaurants or general stores.  About 90 minutes after our departure we were pulling into the parking lot of the Canoe Museum.

Geeking out on Maps

It has been a pretty productive 10 days or so - I started on Friday February 23rd manually entering data into a google map from the La Verendrye Park maps. I've long bemoaned the fact that there was next to no good data out there for this gem of a park for paddling enthusiasts, so I decided to do something about it. After 4 days and probably about 20 hours or so you can see the results linked at the top of this site. It is not perfect and there are still a few maps missing, but it is in my opinion a pretty useful tool for planning trips.