New downloads available

I'm happy to announce additional Shapefile downloads on openstreetmap.la:
those include buildings, national parks, provincial and national boundaries for Laos and Cambodia.
Please find all files at openstreetmap.la/downloads.

Two villages close to Pakxan with buildings displayed in QGIS.
Data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Nam Ngum 2 dam three year ago

Yesterday I found by chance a picture that is exactly three years old. I took it when I flew from Phonsavan back to Vientiane and it shows the Nam Ngum 2 dam under construction.

Nam Ngum 2 dam under construction on 21. November 2009

Heat maps with Python

Heat maps are a quite often discussed topic on gis.stackexchange.com, probably because they are easy to understand and very appealing when showing spatial distributions of features. Working with a Python web framework, I looked for a Python way to create heat maps. Finally I came up with a script that uses OGR to read an input Shapefile and matplotlib to do the actual work.