Archive for September, 2008
Useless Inventions #000,000,001
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Bikemap.net showing bikeroutes
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008Bikemap.net shows a mashup, including OSM maps. Tours can be downloaded in GPX format. It’s somewhat similar to gps-tour.info. I wonder why they didn’t use the cyclemap tiles?!?
Walmart about to discontinue support for DRM music
Sunday, September 28th, 2008Excellent autumn weather for biking tours
Saturday, September 27th, 2008Jep – “the subject says it all!”. I grabbed the occasion and did a further tour to Wissembourg. Once again I traversed the Bienwald to catch up some new ways for OSM. (more…)
OSM-Maps for Navit
Friday, September 26th, 2008If you are looking for precompiled OSM-maps for Navit, don’t miss Dirk’s maps. Recently, Cloudmade have started to provide Navit-maps as well.
As a Navit developer, I’ll of course continue to create my own maps :) .
Federal Constitutional Court of Germany uses osm maps
Thursday, September 25th, 2008The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany uses osm maps on their web pages. Well, as jpeg only, but nevertheless… :)
“Resurrection” of various Papers, SimpleSysexxer and Gebbabel
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008As promised, I started to recover some stuff from the abandoned pages. See the pages section, where you’ll find products of mine like various papers, Gebabbel and SimpleSysexxer.
File system corruption on the N810 – again
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Lecture – a book about corruption in southern germany
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Well, despite its disrepute, germany is a modern and liberal democracy – including all the negative aspects you might expect. Four authors wrote a book about corruption in southern germany, in particular the state of Baden-Württemberg (where I live now). They IMO did an excellent job bringing it to the audience in a humorous manner. Though all topics told stories about a lot of salt grains in our modern society, it was a great, enjoyable event.
Playing (with) the Korg Z1
Sunday, September 21st, 2008Over the last decades, I programmed and played several synths. Nowadays, I have less time for this hobby. Nevertheless, I bought a used Korg Z1 last year. This synth commercially was unsuccessful, thus it soon has been discontinued and now is available as a used instrument at a reasonable price.
So why the heck did I buy this instrument? Well, it simply is an excellent and outstanding synthesizer. To explain this, let’s have a look back in synth history. (more…)
Joel on middle management
Thursday, September 18th, 2008Being an employee of a smaller, steadily growing company without (resp. less) middle management, Joel’s post “How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers” is an interesting read. How will we cope with a growing amount of employees? What will my job look like tomorrow? Whom will I report tomorrow? Will I grow with the company I’m working for?
One further thought: there are always people who prefer to work in straight hierarchies. It’s just like making music. The vast majority of musicians are not (and do not want to be) leaders in any way.
Height contour lines in Navit
Thursday, September 18th, 2008Since this year’ spring, I spent a lot of time in improving the rendering of Navit for cyclist’s purposes. Mainly I told Navit about minor ways such as cycleways, footways and so on, but also added POIs like shelters etc. One of the latest hacks was to experiment with height contour lines. I used srtm2osm to get an osm file with height contours. This file then has been converted to the Navit binary format by osm2navit. Here is a screenshot how it can look like:
Unfortunately I noticed that it looks nice on my desktop machine, but I got a feeling what it means to develop software for handheld devices like the N810. To make it short, the height contour lines render Navit barely usable on the N810. I’ll investigate this further. I simply need to figure out the right balance of map features vs. memory consumption.
“Abmahnanwalt zu 14 Monaten Haft ohne Bewährung verurteilt”
Thursday, September 18th, 2008Schluchz. Dass wir das noch erleben dürfen. Ich bin gerührt wie ein Eierkuchen.
POIs from OSM data
Thursday, September 18th, 2008At the today’s meeting of some local neogeography enthusiasts, I mentioned the POIs I extracted from osm data using a dirtyly hacked tool called osmpoicreator. It’s an ugly hack and I won’t maintain it anymore, so it never will make it into the world wild web. But anyway, it “works for me” and creates useful output. The files provided are updated from time to time (meaning it’s done manually, not automated). The file formats are gpx and gpi. Gpx is a more versatile format, while gpi are garmin POIs usable on several Garmin devices.
The files contain categories like restaurants, castles, shops and shelters. Just have a look at the gpx files to get a clue what this stuff is all about.
Stack Overflow
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008Joel Spolski provides an interesting approach in helping developers finding an answer: Stack Overflow. Don’t miss the introductory post.
Large Hadron Collider@OSM
Monday, September 15th, 2008Large Hadron Collider at the CERN in Genève, Switzerland, showing the layout of the tunnels (pay attention to the smaller “Super Proton Synchrotron”). Be prepared, as the end of the world may happen soon!
;)
OpenStreetBugs updated
Monday, September 15th, 2008Xavier just announced an update of OpenStreetBugs via OSM-Talk. It’s an easy to use web interface where people can mark bugs or missing details in the Openstreetmap dataset. Franc Carter replied:
Just to restaet what I suspect has been said before – OpenStreetBugs is excellent, I have my mother entering data for the bits and pieces she notices around where she lives and there is no way this would happen even with potlatch.
I couldn’t agree more. OpenStreetBugs is a tool which allows almost anyone to contribute to OSM.
Old homepage abandoned, but still reachable
Monday, September 15th, 2008I moved the old stuff out of the way. It’s still available, just in case someone is looking for the old files. I will restore the old stuff “peu à peu”, just as time permits.
Mapping Party in Pforzheim, Germany
Saturday, September 13th, 2008Last Saturday, a Mapping Party took place in Pforzheim, Germany. Unlike Karlsruhe, it is not yet mapped in great detail. The event was well organized by Stadtwiki Pforzheim-Enz e.V. and the Pforzheim Linux User Group. Unfortunately, it was a rainy day, so we omitted the second survey planned for later that afternoon. As a consequence, we didn’t collect that much data as we intended to. But anyway, it was a successful event, including press contacts, and a visit of the Sparkassenturm. For further information, visit the Mapping page of the Stadtwiki Pforzheim-Enz e.V.
init();
Saturday, September 13th, 2008Finally I run a blog. I started one ages ago, but I never felt comfortable about commiting data to a blog service outside my sphere of influence. But as my (well elaborated and well maintained) web pages (including frames, which means that those really were out of date) became more and more dated, I really needed a replacement. So here it is (drumroll): Yet another useless, though important, while innocent blog about stuff that matters – IT, free software, openstreetmap, gadgets, synthesizers, and anything else.