Archive for October, 2008

Why blanks and leading dashes in filenames are both “Donts”

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The generation of contour lines causes some unexpected troubles. After hitting the 60th latitude, it produces empty tiles only. I have no clue yet why.
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Kubuntu 8.10 is out

Friday, October 31st, 2008

A couple of years back, I installed and tried out a lot of Linux distributions. None of them was perfect for my needs, until I installed Gentoo. As any other Gentoo user, I hated the compile times but enjoyed the rest of the system. It provided many up-to-date software packages via its central repository, so there was less need to compile from CVS/SVN. It was on my machine for over three years – compared to its predecessors, a very long time :) .
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Attending a hearing at the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Today I attended a hearing at the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany concerning the use of voting machines. It was quite an interesting experience.
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World creation script hits Karlsruhe

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Today at 13:05h the script which creates contour lines for the complete world hit Karlsruhe. I’ve not been at home all day, so sorry for the delayed post :) .

Hearing on voting machines

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Tomorrow there will be a hearing concerning the use of voting machines during the election of the current german parliament back in 2005. Two citicens believe the used machines, Nedap ESD 1 and ESD 2, are not compliant with the german constitution.
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Men buying clothes, shoes

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Unlike women, real men dislike buying clothes or even shoes. Buying clothes is for chicken. Real men prefer driving cars or bikes or hacking computers.
That’s why I postponed buying some hiking boots for years. Two or three times a year you can need them. But if you have none, you can cope with it. No need to buy some. Heck, it even saves you money!
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Continued mapping of the Black Forest

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Fortunately, the black forest was open today, so I could continue mapping it. I collected a lot of paths and tracks between the parking "Bosensteiner Eck" and the Schliffkopf, trying out my brand new Hanwag boots. (more…)

Electric Chick

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

Recently (2008-07-19), I’ve been at a concert of the reunion tour of Return to Forever. It was a great concert and I enjoyed each second individually. Right now I’m listening to an audio CD called “Electric Chick” (which has nothing to do with "fried chicken", I hope ;-). (more…)

Flexible musical keyboard

Friday, October 24th, 2008

As a hobby musician, this is something which will serve me well as soon as I gonna retire and want to make some noise out in the green :) .

liqbase

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Just playing with liqbase right now. It provides good integration of the N810 hardware buttons. Otherwise its look and feel differs from all the other Maemo applications.

Some organ porn

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Via synthtopia.com I found this nice post about an A100 Hammond organ. Having never owned a real Hammond (but a Suzuki-Hammond XB-1 digital emulation) I enjoyed the valuable knowlede Dave provides, and he even spiced it up with some cool images. I especially liked the details about the preset patch panel. I guess that having a digital organ instead of oily fingers is not that bad either :) . Don’t miss the archives of his blog for more cool vintage synth stuff.

“Earth-creation script” continues

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Due to storage space limitations, the “earth-creation” script was discontinued for a couple of days. Meanwhile it is up and running again, processing the globe around N30°.

Fungi, puffballs and galls

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

During the last two days, I took some pictures of Fungi, puffballs and galls. Here’s a small excerpt:

img_10471.jpg

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Navit for biking: useful, but not ready for »Joe Average«

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Last weekend I thought it would have been the last warm and sunny one this year, but I was wrong. So guess what, I’ve been to Wissembourg by bike again. Having OSM data displayed through Navit on the N810 is a great joy and pleasure, especially the many details I added during the last months. The display of the N810 just is marvellous, you even can read it in direct sunlight. Its colours are excellent.

I noticed the following issues in Navit which we should addredd during the next months: (more…)

Mozilla.org releases “Fennec” alpha

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Fennec is the attempt to bring Firefox to mobile devices. There’s a binary available for the Maemo platform. I won’t have the time to play with it today, but will try it out during the next week.

Which CMS to use?

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

The Webmeister Blog mentions a comparison of Joomla vs webEdition (in german language).

Mapping the »Karlsruher Grat« area, again

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

So where the heck have I been today?!? Well, I visited the »Karlsruher Grat« again to complete some mapping.
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Driving a Mini Cooper

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

As I barely need a car, I’m a customer of a local car sharing provider. Today, all of my preferred cars have been booked already, so I tried a Mini Cooper. More or less, it seems to be a “fun car”. Plus, it has some features IMO mainly invented for women (e.g. there’s an assistant which holds the break while you try to start at a hill). What surprised me most was that this small car has no problems getting as fast as over 200km/h – and you won’t even notice it much. It really was a joy to drive it.

OSM2Go – OSM editor for Nokia’s N810

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Till Harbaum just has updated OSM2Go, an OSM mapping application for the Nokia N810. You can edit ways and nodes, and create new nodes. Basic tagging is available, though there are no shortcuts yet. Seems to be the perfect companion for “on site” mapping. Will try it out for mapping house numbers »real soon now (TM)«.

SRTM script hits the Equator

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

My script, responsible for global warming, hit the equator yesterday. As I was on the road, here’s the delayed entry. Currently it processes the tiles along N13°. Still a lot of power to be wasted :) .