The Ruhestein hill, used for skiing during the winter months
In the late morning hours the temperature in Karlsruhe was about 18°C. Usually the Ruhestein is about 6°C less, but surprisingly its webcam displayed 18° as well, so I immediately grabbed the bike and went to the station, heading towards Baiersbronn, Black Forest (about 500m).
Due to the rainy August, it’s fungi time. Here is yesterday’s catch. All pictures have been taken using the Nokia N900 mobile computer. The quality is not comparable to pictures taken with a dedicated camera, but frankly I’m quite impressed of what one can achieve with the N900. I hope you enjoy.
Caterpillars
Gudereit LCR Trekking Series bicyle
During the last four years my biking trips almost completely took place in the upper Rhine plane, occasionally touching the borders of the Vosges Mountains or the Palatinate Forest. I tried to avoid inclines, as my bike with an 8 gear Shimano hub was not the best companion for such trips.
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Landscape near Baiersbronn, Black Forest
The »Tour de Murg« is a biking trip from Freudenstadt, Black Forest, to Rastatt. It’s about 70km downhill – a great trip for lazy bikers like me :) . I did this trip four years ago including a lot of initial mapping. What surprised me most was the fact that lots of mapping details still are missing, are not up-to-date or are even totally wrong (see Gausbach).
Statt des erwarteten Nahverkehrsmittels steht dort ein verspäteter IC. Die hallige Lautsprecherdurchsage weist darauf hin, dass das Wunschfahrzeug heute von Gleis 2 abführe. Na gut.
An Gleis 2 steht allerdings noch ein verspäteter EC. Aber es ist ja noch Zeit.
Nachdem der EC weg ist, fährt zur Abfahrtszeit statt des erwarteten Zuges ein verspäteter ICE nach Interlaken ein.
Die hallige Lautsprecherdurchsage teilt mit, dass der erwartete Zug, “ursprüngliche Abfahrt 12 Uhr 10″, heute von Gleis 1 führe. Na gut.
Liebe Betreiber, wie wäre es eigentlich, wenn ihr den kompletten Fahrplan um 15 Minuten nach hinten legtet? Dann würde wieder alles passen, die Züge könnten von den planmäßigen Gleisen abfahren, die Kunden wären weniger verwirrt und die ständigen Klagen über die mangelnde Pünktlichkeit und Unzuverlässigkeit Ihres geschätzten Unternehmens wären jeglicher Grundlage beraubt.
Ach, alles nicht so einfach, wie ich mir das vorstelle? Sicherlich. Aber es gibt Dinge, um die kann ich mich als Kunde nicht auch noch kümmern :) .
Sent from my N900. Das musste auch mal geschrieben werden :) .
Heavy Weather brewing near Wissembourg
Since it was obvious that I need a more reliable bike, I’m looking for the right device. A friend once sent me a PDF of a very attractive gadget. I also considered other options, but the more I was looking for alternatives, the more I wanted exactly this one.
Bergamont Satelite
Back in 2006, I bought a Bergamont Satelite 8 bike (about 600€), mainly to get to work. Shortly after that, I detected that biking is fun and bought a Garmin eTrex Venture Cx (about 300€), together with routable City Navigator Europe map data (about 200€). It just took a couple of days until I understood that the map material was made for car routing, not for outdoor activities. A lot of minor roads for biking were missing, and setting the device to do bike routing just did car routing, except that it omitted highway types like motorways. But heck, I wanted to know the shortest possible biking trail from my home to France.
MoNav displaying a route in Karlsruhe
Today was a cold and rainy sunday, so I grabbed the occasion to play with various software which can make use of our collaboratively collected Openstreetmap data. One major gap in the toolchain is the lack of an end user friendly, working navigation software for mobile devices. There are several approaches, but none of them seems to be capable to replace an average user’s Garmin or TomTom device. Most are hard to compile, install, configure and use. And even if you manage to get it up and running, it is likely that you miss some features which you knew on your proprietary devices.
Spatialite is a GIS extension developed by Alessandro Furieri for Sqlite, the famous file based database system. The upcoming 2.4.0 Release will support the import of OpenStreetMap data. Currently it gets shipped with a dedicated converter called spatialite_osm, which imports the street network from an OSM XML file into a spatialite database. Its usage is simple. Just create an empty database, initialize it and import the OSM data file:
spatialite rlp.sqlite
.read init_spatialite.sql ASCII
spatialite_osm -o rheinland-pfalz.osm -d rlp.sqlite -T roads -m
Spatialite also contains a viewer application. Here’s what the road network looks like while displaying the inner city of Speyer, Germany:
Spatialite GIS showing the inner city of Speyer (data CC-by-SA by openstreetmap and its contributors)
When I joined openstreetmap back in 2006, I immediately understood its potential. However, I didn’t believe it would grow as fast as it actually did. Today opentreetmap pervades everyday’s life. Maps rendered from our data can be found in the »Fahrradbuch Karlsruhe« or in a brochure of the local public transport company, showing all public baths of the Karlsruhe region.
This eve, on the way back home, I saw a display at a pharmacy around the corner, alternately showing some ads and the location of the next emergency service. I knew those maps:
Osm on a pharmacy display
You can even see some dismantled railways which have been mapped by some trainspotters. Here’s a screenshot to preserve the rendering:
The area around the Ettlinger Tor, Karlsruhe, including some dismantled railways (data by openstreetmap.org and its contributors, CC-by-SA)
I find it very interesting where our data pops up every now and then and am curious where they will surprise me next.
Today the weather conditions haven’t been optimal for biking, so I grabbed a car and visited the Black Forest. Fortunately it was open today.
Until last year, I hoped that one day hikers would start to map Black Forest trails. The fun finally started in 2009, when new data popped up frequently. The downside was that you went mapping and noticed that the trip was useless as another mapper was quicker. The more I am surprised that I still find a lot of missing trails nowadays, even tracks of grade 1. I’m not disappointed at all – the opposite is the case :) . That’s the area I’m talking about. Obviously the tracks on the left hand side (west) are almost complete, while on the right hand side (east) a lot of details are still missing. So there’s still room for some occasional weekend trips:
Tracks near Ruhestein (openstreetmap.org and its contributors, CC-by-SA)
On my way back I stopped at the Ottenhöfen station. The last time I was there I had no minutes left to map this area. The only data that existed west of the Allerheiligenstraße and south of the Ruhesteinstraße was the railway and the stream. Now it’s a bit more, but still not complete:
Area around the Ottenhöfen Station (openstreetmap.org and its contributors, CC-by-SA)
I’m not a trainspotter at all, but here’s an image of the historic Achertalbahn at the Ottenhöfen station (I apologize for the overexposure on the right hand side):
Achertalbahn (copyright Christoph Eckert 2010, all rights reserved)
A nice sunday afternoon trip, though it was way too cold.
Incognito@Zeltival
In the evening hours of a warm and sunny sunday, a concert of Incognito took place at the Zeltival (which now more or less is a Hallival, as the Tollhaus built a new large hall during the last year). I’m not exactly a fan of funk, but as I’ve never seen Jean-Paul Maunick and his group live, there was no excuse not to attend.
Many Jazz masters forgot that music was invented to entertain people in the first place. Thus Jazz often is music from musicians – written and played for musicians. I guess all those weird chords, scales and rhythms might have less meaning to the average listener.
Incognito’s funk compacts Jazz into a mass compatible form. They use weird chords and scales as well, but they are not changing them every two beats. This essence gets served in a grooving container, enriched by three black singers (two female, one male) and spiced by a section of three brass instruments. A quite interesting mixture indeed.
The sound in the hall was not the best, except near the mixing desk – my preferred location when attending concerts. Some songs have been built from simple chords (hello II – V), but some even used really weird harmonics. Jean-Paul played the guitar (which I seldom could hear) plus some MIDI controller triggering drum and percussion sounds. He left the solos to the other musicians. Mike Cooper was mainly addicted to an electric piano sound (Yamaha Motif) and some occasional organ (Roland Phantom) and clavinet (Korg Triton) sounds. He used his Roland JP 8000 mainly for some synth effects.
The concert was not exactly cheap, but well worth the bucks. Dividing the 28€ by 120 minutes results in about 25¢ per minute. That’s comparable to the price of an audio CD. OTOH you can listen to the CD more than one time :) .
A very nice concert. I enjoyed every minute. Thanks girls and guys.
Ladybug (openclipart.org, Public Domain)
Today I had a couple of minutes left. I downloaded the openstreetbugs of the area nearby as GPX waypoints, imported them as POIs into Mappero (an excellent mapping application for the Nokia N900 BTW), and started editing the data using osm2go. While editing I noticed that a lot of details (schools, kindergartens, parking lots, cycleways, paths) are still missing all over the city.
I admit that I almost immediately stopped mapping Karlsruhe after other mappers finally joined and we had completed the road network back in 2007. I never wanted to map Karlsruhe. I just started the work as there was no data at all back in 2006. What I wanted to do is riding the bike in the country and the woods – and mapping ways and paths between Germany and France. And so I did.
Others have continued the work, e.g. by drawing buildings, railways, cycleways and addresses. But Karlsruhe never reached a similar level of detail that other cities did.
Since I’m contributing to osm, I always heard proud mappers who pointed out the Google maps are that dated and we have that many details. My usual stock answer was that maintaining the data is much more difficult than creating it. Consider a small village which consists of place=village, landuse=residential and a couple of streets. Who will ever notice whether streets are missing, have been renamed or whether the restaurant around the corner still exists?
Navtec, Teleatlas and others know those issues. We still need to learn it. I guess local mappers need to update the areas of their region systematically in certain intervals.
OSM Booth at GeoKur
In addition to yesterday’s posting, here’s a picture of today’s OSM booth at the GeoKur event. There were about 800 attendees, and Joachim Kast held a talk about OSM. Many geocachers already heard about OSM or are already using Garmin maps etc., but some people reported that they have been unsuccessful using OSM. Some people report they have been told that OSM maps cannot be used on Garmin devices. I do not know whether Garmin dealers are responsible for this misinformation or whether people just do not manage to download and install our Garmin maps on their devices. According to the event, I guess it’s the latter issue.
Fortunately we have been prepared. At the booth, we had a handout available which describes the process of downloading and installing Garmin maps. As an additional service, we installed maps directly at the booth or gave away micro SD cards to visitors. I hope this helps to “spread the word”.
One further issue was that Geocachers tried but did not manage to contribute to OSM. In my opinion we are still missing an easy to find and use editor, something between openstreetbugs and Potlatch.
Many thanks to Joachim for the organisation of the booth plus the talk and Sven Geggus who once again brought the ready-to-use OSM computer.
Tomorrow a geocaching event called GeoKur will take place at Bad Herrenalb, Black Forest, Germany. At the Kurhaus, the central facility, we will man a booth to provide first hand information about openstreetmap to the 600+ attendees.
This evening, there was a nice barbecue party at the Hirschwinkel shelter near Bad Herrenalb, where we helped the first people to solve problems using osm data.
A rather interesting experience was to observe geocachers “logging” a car by scribing their nicknames into its surface. I always knew there are human beings with strange hobbies, but until a couple of hours before I thought mapping for osm was the most strange :) .
Beach Trip (openclipart.org, Gerald_G, public domain)
Most of you might already have heard about it, but anyway, here are two additions to the open source routing pool.
Vodaphone released most of the code of their discontinued Wayfinder navigation product into the world wild web. It seems the code needs maintenance before it is useful. Let’s see whether some enthusiasts are taking over.
The far more interesting announcement, though, has been posted right at the beginning of this year’s State of the Map conference. The Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) is a »high-perfomance routing backend«. Check out the demo provided via Geofabrik. It’s just some C code. After compilation, you’ll get a handful of binaries, including the usual tool to convert OSM XML data into some binary file format and a web server which handles the requests and delivers the resulting route.
The speed is just amazing. However, after reading some of the source code, it currently appears to obey the following limitations. What I recall:
highway=track, tracktype=grade1.Anyway, it’s the initial release, and it looks very promising. I’m pretty curious how it will be accepted by the community, how it will develop over time and whether there will be collaboration or competition between OSRM and Routino.
Flag of Spain (openclipart.org)
Octopus (openclipart.org, public domain)
Flag of the Netherlands (openclipart.org)
OK, here’s the last comment of a bloody soccer ignorant concerning the soccer world cup of 2010. The country which is the preferred vacation destination for many germans won it after 120 minutes of a hard fight against our neighbours. While the Netherlands have been strong in defending their goal and collecting 8 (red-)yellow cards, Spain has been strong in attacking the goal of their combatants but not bringing the balls in. As a compensation they also collected 5 yellow cards.
But in the extra time they finally made the 1:0, and so they bring the world cup to Spain for the very first time. I have no clue what the villages and cities in Spain look like right now, but I guess tomorrow will be a national holiday ;-) .
Ages back I wrote an ugly shell script to configure the offline mode of an m-audio Midisport 8×8 MIDI patchbay. Here it is, including a minor bug fix:
The code is still ugly, but it does the job, at least on my machine :) .
Vuvuzelas (openclipart.org, public domain)
I never was a fan of soccer, but this world cup broke my neck. Though I’m not familiar with the tactics and strategies of this game, it was a great joy to watch the german team and its counterparts.
Thanks to the excellent summer weather conditions somewhere between 30°C and 40°C, I went to a biergarten to attend the match.
The german team is depressed as they, besides others, intended to reach the final game and to get the world cup. But they failed in the semi final versus Spain, so they had to prove they are worth the third place. And they made it. So stop the typical german whining and enjoy what you have reached :) .
They beat Uruguay 3:2. Admittedly, the latter ones did a great job as well. Considering that Uruguay hosts less than a 20th of inhabitants compared to germany (80,000,000 vs. 3,500,000), they by far had the better team :) .
A nice match indeed. I will attend again.
Football (openclipart.org, public domain)
Well, not exactly. There’s still one match ahead. But the dream of winning the world cup turned to dust a couple of minutes ago.
Though I’m not a big fan of soccer, I must admit that even I enjoyed to watch the games of the german team. But despite the hard work during the last years, Spain still has the stronger team, and they won with reason. Congrats.