Charts II: NGA - 2700 Charts

[sae140]

A quick word of caution for anyone who may be tempted to do any independent work using the BIG .jpg's on NGA Charts Status at OpenCPN.info (English) using IrfanView for any kind of processing or format conversion.
I found that IrfanView has one endearing little feature: if displaying a very large image it may decide to reduce that image's size by one-quarter - which just happens to be the difference between Zoomify Level 6 and Level 5 - and hence can cause confusion. This reduction may have something to do with the amount of ram available ?

Whatever the cause, the solution is simple - use FastStone Image Viewer instead.

Many thanks to Pavel (the graphics wizard) for helping me sort that one out.
Colin

[HappySeagull]

...on the same topic,XnView is much improved,I find.
There is even a plugin to view bsb/kaps!
My objection to xnview and Fastone are still their thumbnailing behaviours which slow down my older machines to a crawl.These can be controlled somewhat in their options.
Irfanview has some annoying quirks too.incremental zooming is hopeless in the large NGA jpegs so I always use CTRL+H.(full size)I'll have to check what you are saying,there, SAE140-I hadn't noticed that !!!
Irf's other annoyance for me involves upgrading the colour depth when saving,and needs watching carefully.

[HappySeagull]

and, I've just discovered recently that Xnview can also stitch the pcx tiles of the ol'Maptechs as strips and then put THEM together as single full-sized chart images!
(..too late for me-I did it the hard way!

[sae140]

Couldn't agree more about FastStone crawling along ... it was desperate ! Went and made a cup of tea ... and then a sandwich .. and it was still grinding away.
But - I was glad to be able to achieve a decent conversion. One other thing IrfanView did during a reduction to a 256 colour .png was to convert near-white to a washy blue - and once you've lost yer whites, you've lost 'em ...
PaintShopPro, on the other hand, retained the white ok, but created quite a few of those familiar fuzzy .jpg artifacts around high contrast edges.

FastStone displayed the full-size image, retained the white, and was pretty-much artifact-free (well, as good as it gets with .jpgs) - but the price to be paid was speed, or rather the lack of it.

I must say that viewing these charts at full-size (Zoom level 6) really is spectacular - absolutely crystal sharp images. Beautiful.

Well done guys.

[svrevelations]

Server Access

Can you all still login to the server?
I received the following message from our hosting company;

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION: We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your passwords at DreamHost today. Our security systems detected the potential breach this morning and we immediately took the defensive precaution of expiring and resetting all FTP/shell access passwords for all DreamHost customers and their users. There are three different types of passwords at DreamHost: a web panel password (for logging into the panel), email passwords, and FTP/shell access passwords. Only the FTP/shell access passwords appear to have been compromised by the illegal access. Web panel passwords, email passwords and billing information for DreamHost customers were not affected or accessed."

[nohal]

MooseMoney...
No, we can't. As they write, they have invalidated all the FTP and SSH passwords for all of their customers.
Looks like you will have to get new ones from them (I don't know how though)

Pavel

[cagney]

Anonymous ftp login isn't working either...
Thomas

[sinbad7]

Perhaps I misunderstood but access to the .jpg NGA charts are working as normal for me.

http://opencpn.info/en/nga-charts-status-1

Tore

[svrevelations]

Originally Posted by nohal

MooseMoney...
No, we can't. As they write, they have invalidated all the FTP and SSH passwords for all of their customers.
Looks like you will have to get new ones from them (I don't know how though)

Pavel

Originally Posted by cagney

Anonymous ftp login isn't working either...
Thomas

Who did the server setup & Anonymous ftp login?
If I remember correctly, it was a German guy.
I will have to give him admin control to reset the passwords.

[r.fairman]

is this a new chart resource. i have explored the historical charts at

Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Image Catalog

Some of the charts listed are as late as 2011 I'm not sure if the later charts are unique or just duplicate whats already availiable on NOAA

If you enter a year such as 2002 as a search criteria a list of late charts is displayed via zoomify but they are available to down load as a jpg

regards

Richard

[cagney]

On the site NOAA's On-Line Chart Viewer there is now a new piece. An addition in a red frame.
What stands out is now the sentence

All Rights Reserved.

.....and the fact that the support for half of the chart regions are withdrawn.
It is now only possible to view chart from regions 1,2,5,6 and 9.

Thomas

[r.fairman]

Interesting all the withdrawn regions are still available as paper charts from chart suppliers at $37.00

what does all rights reserved mean

can you apply it retrospectively

i think the genie is already out of the bottle

richard

[nohal]

Hello everybody...
Sadly I have to say I have bad news for this project...
For the last few weeks we've been in communication with the NOAA and, as you can see from the box added later to their chart viewer, their opinion is, that the NGA charts are not covered by title 17 of the U.S. code, granting us free use of these charts.
This project was started in good faith, that it's completely legal, and I'm pretty convinced that at least for part of the charts, for which the NGA did not "borrow" the resources elsewhere, it is, but as now we've been asked by the source authority to stop providing access to all the charts, I've taken them off-line, effective immediately.

I hope we will be able to have better news for you in the future, but now the only option to stay on the bright side of the Force, is to do what we've done.

Also we will try to ask for the permission of the respective parties to publish the communication with the NOAA, which explains their position.

The code for the tools created by myself during this project has nothing to do with the charts and stays available under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2 or later.

Many thanks to all of you, I'm really proud of the work we've been able to accomplish here and hope things will turn better

Pavel

[bcn]

Put in into a context:

-ACTA
-PIPA
-SOPA

[r.fairman]

I think

-F*** Is more fitting

In a totally hypothetical world is there a backup of this data somewhere

and does someone have a pirates hat

I have just spent 6 weeks writing a book on chart access for the world and how to create your own charts only to be shafted by the US Govenment

If this is a copyright issue why are print on demand paper chart suppliers still being allowed access to the images and sell on at a profit.

I am happy to pay for file hosting for free access

regards

Richard