[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]
And then, some weeks, I don’t get much done.
I started working on trying to customize my Rails Port (the main “copy” of the OpenStreetMap slippy map), and got very bogged down in the fact that the OpenStreetMap Rails Port is highly complex software written in a language and using an architecture unfamiliar to me: the infamous “Ruby on Rails.”
I dislike the way that the actual name “OpenStreetMap” is hard-coded throughout all the little modules. It seems like a poor application design practice, especially for an opensource project. One area where the name proliferates is in all the internationalization files. So I started wondering how hard it might be to get all these internationalization files to be more “generic.” The answer: pretty hard, at least for me.
I’ve wandered off down a digressive passage where I’m learning about software internationalization under the Ruby on Rails paradigm, but I’m undecided how I want to handle this. Do I want to try to solve it the “right way”? Or just kludge it (most likely by deleting all the internationalization files except perhaps English, Spanish, and Korean)?
Meanwhile I have also got pulled away by some non-computer, non-geofiction projects.
So… not much to report, this week – nothing mapped, nothing coded, nothing configured.
Music to map by: Sergei Rachmaninoff, “Piano Concerto No. 2.”
