I wanted to review my route to recent conference, and there are a lot of map servers out there. But, none of them offer good way to print map (analog copies are always useful :-)
I didn't really wanted whole map, I wanted just a part which I viewed. And than, I noticed that those parts already arrived on my laptop (because I can view them in browser). Parts? Packets? With a quick trip to tshark (wireshark but for terminal) I captured network trace of my browsing of route.
So, now I had all the tiles I needed to print out (to find my way through route) in pcap capture format. Quick CPAN search and I found Net::Analysis which seem to fit the bill. Simple HTTP transaction listener later and I have tiles saved in directories which are zoom levels and each tile has coordinates of tile.
Do I want to stitch them together by hand? Of course not, with handy misspelled tool will do that for you. It's written as cleanly as possible, and might be a good way to look at one possible way to write perl code (don't write too much!).
If you didn't checked links to source code, please have in mind whole working implementation is under 3k of perl code!
It does have dependency on CPAN, but just imagine how much time would I spend writing TCP session reassembly and/or multiple-format image handling it I didn't used CPAN.
Off to the road now...
