Given the GERS fiasco, time to point to bsky.app/profile/simo... again.
06.03.2026 08:19
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Given the GERS fiasco, time to point to bsky.app/profile/simo... again.
I've penned a short blog post on some revelations the Swiss #OpenStreetMap community has had over the last couple of weeks. If you so want a cautionary tale www.openstreetmap.org/user/SimonPo...
We've updated our FAQ sosm.ch/modi-faq/ to the MODI bill to reflect changes in how swisstopo is positioning their Verkehrsnetz CH product in the run up to the guaranteed passing of the bill in this months parliamentary session.
#MODI #OpenStreetMap
My comment on the OGC GERS standards proposal github.com/opengeospati...
There is a lot that could be said from a technical pov and Paul Norman has touched on some of them.
But the OMF is simply not an acceptable body for anything and that is where this discussion should stop.
#OpenStreetMap
Ah yes digital sovereignty is when you bend over backwards to update google but can't be bothered to give the open alternative even just a heads up www.kaisten.ch/aktuellesinf...
Anyway I think I've caught and updated all of the addresses in #OpenStreetMap , tricky because some of them got reused.
Der Fondue-Stammtisch in Zürich findet am Freitag 12. Dez. in einer Woche statt. Bitte meldet euch im Poll [1] bis nächsten Freitag an, wenn ihr kommen könnt. Für genug Fondue sollte gesorgt sein aber es vereinfacht die Planung wenn wir vorher schon wissen mit wie vielen Personen zu rechnen ist.
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We've released V21.2, as our 'traditional' end-of-year release.
There are some minor changes relative to the beta, most notably the addition of a warning if you are moving a way that has a majority of its nodes off screen.
vespucci.io/help/en/21.2...
#OpenStreetMap
#OpenStreetMap Z'nacht in Bern am 2. Dezember osmcal.org/event/4198/
oneway=no and oneway=false are not actually oneway tags that need to be reversed, but oneway=1, oneway=yes and oneway=-1 are.
And when you manually reverse we don't actually change oneway tags but do reverse other direction dependent ones.
#OpenStreetMap
Fixing a small notification bug when reversing a way with @vespucci_editor and taking the opportunity to add support for reversing conditional oneways.
It is some of weirdest code in the app with lots of hardwired stuff, for example
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and many other things from slightly amusing to depressing (for example a letter to the Department of the Interior in Causa SWITCH) .
Framemaker because IIRC that was what I had bought for my Spacstation 1+ which was our office machine in the beginning.
#Internet #Nostalgia
... a talk by me on the Internet at Hoffman-Roche in 91, the contracts for the 1st Internet connections of the UNICC and the @ifrc.org , yes we were brave enough to offer a SLA for the leased line connections, ...
Just spent a couple of hours converting old and half note worthy Framemaker documents from 91-93 to something readable.
Among the bangers: multiple letters to regional PTT offices complaining about the multiple 1000s of CHFs we had to (illegally) pay in bonds to get phone lines in to our POPs, ...
To round off the #cloudFlareDown and #githubdown we had an hour long power outage this morning .... seriously considering getting a power station for the coffee machine because of that 😉
There's a poetic justice angle to this that I might expand on later.
#Internet #Nostaliga
Domain names are, as the name says, names and not addresses and using the same logic the BAKOM could have just as well started regulating company names.
This was later, a lot later, patched up by changing the FMG (the Swiss telecom law) and creating a specific ordinance for domain names.
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It speaks for my nerdy nitpicking nature 😉 that I continue to be annoyed that in 2002 the BAKOM (the Swiss telecoms regulator) modified the AEFV (the ordinance regulating address elements used in telecoms) to include domain names even though there was no legal base to do that.
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November 1994 I did a company internal presentation on IPng (the competing proposals that would eventually give us IPv6), more than 30 years later I'm still exclusively using an IPv4 network at home ... sigh.
#EUnet #Internet #Nostaliga
But instead of getting a multitude of interoperable operating system we ended up with a duopoly.
#EUnet #Nostalgia
One of the depressing things about looking back to 88/89 is that is when open systems en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_sy... really started winning, networking and the #Internet being one of levers that worked in our favour.
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myself, ch.network, July 31st 1992
I suppose this still kind of holds true for ISPs which was the topic of the discussion at the time.
#Internet #EUnet #Nostalgia
"One of the main problems of the "Internet" today is that it is -near- to impossible to earn money from "non-connectivity" services. This is less a technology problem ..., it's just practically impossible to find a service to provide that somebody else is not doing for free."
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In "stuff that I've forgotten", did I coin the term "transit" (in an ISP context)? diswww.mit.edu/menelaus.mit... probably not, though nobody else is using it.
In any case a discussion that underlines how different the early Internet was from the fairy tales of today.
#Internet #EUnet #Nostalgia
In the mean time I'm fairly sure that the first demo was not in 89 but either late 90 or 91. There are simply conflicting accounts and as I said, this was still a non-event at the time.
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So the UUCP maps might be the only way to at least roughly date it.
#EUnet #UUCP #Nostalgia
What I'm specifically trying to pinpoint is when we started registering CH domains for UUCP sites, it doesn't seem this was announced anywhere that has survived the not quite 4 decades and maybe we just sent a mail at the time.
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1989-1990 I managed them at SWITCH on chx400, that's not a secret either. But did we stop distributing them during that period, or did something else happen?
I don't have any mail archives from that period (for obvious reasons), but maybe somebody can remember.
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Very minor mystery:
Does anybody know what happened with the UUCP maps for Switzerland in 1989/1990? That is likely u.che.0 and u.che.1.
Up to 1989 Dietrich Wiegandt (who ran cernvax at CERN) posted them to comp.mail.maps, and from 1991 on I posted them from chsun (the CHUUG/EUnet Switzerland).
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... we didn't actually provide local Internet access in Geneva till 1993 (we did have mail and news customers there though).
* I can't verify this story one way or the other, while the history of the WWW is often told as a straight line going from A to B, it was anything but that.
Just for those wondering: while we were connecting to the shared and #EUnet co-financed Internet access in Geneva at CERN at this time, and this was the actual first Internet presence in Switzerland operating since 1989, supposedly used by @timbl.bsky.social to demo the WWW in the same year*, ...