codesqueeze.com has an article about »solution requests«. I wholeheartedly agree. Quote:
Solution requests are a Usability Engineers nightmare
When a feature request already has a solution, developers never have the chance to learn the problem domain that they are developing for.
Probability is you have a solution that only solves one persons needs.
Jakob Haufe holds a talk about the Andrew File System (afs) right now. I’m currently looking for a possibility to replicate my personal data (like mail, feeds, cals but “usual files” as well) to several machines – if possible worldwide. AFS probably could be a solution, but frankly, it seems to be a bit of “overengineering” for this purpose.
The learning curve seems to be rather steep, and to top it, the authentication must be done via Kerberos.
Just got the info that we actually will be 7 people in the VW Caravelle on our tour to the Linuxhotel. The weather forecast does not bring us good news, as snow is expected. I’ll thus avoid to use the A45 and take the A3 instead.
I’m curious about the 22 people who will attend, as I do not know 16 of them. Great occasion to know each other and to link faces to e-mail addresses :) .
I could not resist to attend a concert of Electric Outlet again. I’ve seen them first at the annual Rock-Shop-Party. Today they played at the Universum Kinocenter in Landau. The sound in the cinema was excellent, due to the absorbing wall coverings and the ceiling being non-parallel to the floor.
Ralf Gustke, Frank Itt and Marcus Deml did a great job, while Marcus could not resist to provide the usual stagy show ;) . I even heard something like an 11/8 bar (5+6 beats). Tom Aeschbacher left the Access Virus at home this time. Instead, he treated two Yamaha synths and a digital Hammond organ. I’m really impressed by his playing. If I ran a band, this was the music I’d like to play.
So, thanks guys for a really nice evening. cu!
To torture you, here’s one of the famous badly lighted N810 photos ;-) :
Well worth the read.
Using one of the recently calculated tiles in the middle of the black forest (Lat48 Lon8, Lat49 Lon9), I created a Garmin map which contains, well, height lines :) . As a map which consists of height lines only is rather useless, I used sendmap to combine Carsten’s Garmin map with the srtm tile:
sendmap20 -l typ_gmapsupp.img srtm.img
Just copy the resulting file gmapsupp.img to the folder called Garmin of your GPSr and enjoy the height lines:
Unfortunately the height lines (which are in 40 meter increments) are labeled as either imperial or (more likely) United States Customary Units on the Garmin. I need to figure out whether this is an issue of mkgmap or a device setting.
OK, I finally managed to process the SRTM data for the whole world. The tiles are zipped individually, wasting 61G of disk space. I do not know yet how to distribute it, though. I’ll first announce it via some mailing lists to get an idea how much interest there is (I guess: less). Maybe I should Bittorrent give a try. Would be interesting, as I never used it much. (more…)
As all srtm tiles are processed, I’ll compress them as zip files tonight. Well, the command is simple:
for i in $(ls); do zip $i.zip $i && rm $i; done
Today, Quy Tonthat, the maintainer of Viking, announced that he dropped the support for Google Mas from Viking “due to requests from Google”. Frankly, it was less surprising that Google excludes other applications from using their photo material, as they did with Gaia back in 2006. Noone should complain. Google brought us cool stuff with its maps and Google Earth Software for free. It’s up to Google to decide how their data must be used.
That being said, I’ll keep a copy of revision 824 on my hard drive :) .
Aly Keïta (”Ich bin ein Berliner”) gave a concert at the Tollhaus in Karlsruhe. He played his (DIY) Balafon and was accompanied by a great band. Frankly, I was quite impressed, the more that the tickets just were about 5 euro. But the concert turned out to be excellent. I also thought the Balaphon would be boring if played over three hours. It wasn’t. Aly really is a master of his instrument. The playing varied, and I really enjoyed the vitality in his playing. Additionally, Tollhaus was crowded much more than I expected.
Aly’s band consisted of some further excellent musicians. According to the Tollhaus web presence those are:
At the end of the show, Aly brought some further brass musicians to the stage. We wondered why those have been hidden backstage before :) .
All in all, it has been a great concert and we have been more than impressed. Allthough it was not jazzy enough for my taste :) . Unfortunately, I left my Canon Powershot A650 at home and thus needed to take the pictures with the Nokia N810 instead. Judge for yourself:
Webmeister mentiones the Tiny Geocoder, a tool to get geocoordinates after passing an address. Such geocoding, of course, is needed for many Web 2.0 geolocation based services. Unfortunately, you need huge amounts of data before you can create such a service.
While openstreetmap has data down to street name level, we still lack housenumbers. And it will last a while until we have them in our database. But: We will have such data. When? We will have 98% of all housenumbers for germany in two years. Sure? No. But likely.
Not really efficient, but osm2go makes it possible to map house numbers “on-the-go”. Just the right thing for a walk on a warm November evening (please don’t bother me with global warming theories ;-) .
The great script processing height lines from srtm data processed its last tile on 2008-11-10, 15:31h. The second quadrant took the most time, as it contains huge portions of the landmasses in Africa, Europe and Russia.
Some particular tiles are missing for some reason, and the “border” tiles (north-, south-, east- and westmost tiles) haven’t been processed at all. srtm2osm cannot cope with longitudes like 180 and -180 or latitudes like -90 and 90. My attempt to deduct one tenth of those values led to unacceptable system resource usage by srtm2osm. Probably I will not care much about those tiles and process them any time later. But I need to identify and process the other aforementioned tiles.
Diebold, an US manufacturer of voting machines, seems to violate the GPL. According to engadget.com, Diebold used a modified version of Ghostscript (a Postscript interpreter) without publishing the modifications of the source code. Artifex, of course, are not amused. See the archieves of the gs-devel Mailinglist for the related posting.
In case of machines that are built on top of trust (Diebold also build ATMs, BTW), Diebold machines seem to be the wrong choice. The whole issue will, unfortunately, discredit other companies as well.
James Turner interviews Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery and now member of the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission. She correctly states that open source voting machines weren’t a panacea. (more…)
Well, since I reformatted my hard drive using ext3, the scripts are running without any further issues. Quadrants 1, 3 and 4 already are finished, but quadrant 2 still will need a while: It just hit lat 35 and thus still has to process central europe and russia completely.
After that, I’ll process the boundings of the map; the current run omits the outmost rows and columns of tiles due to a limitation in srtm2osm: it cannot cope with the values of 180 and -180 for the longitude. So I decided to process the 1076 tiles of the bounds as an extra run.
If you feel like it, you can subscribe to the change.gov blog. Even if there will be not much change about the actual interdependence between Northern America and Europe, I really hope that the communication itself will reach another level.
On sunday, 2008-11-02, evening, I again restarted the script which creates the heightlines. Why? Heck, it seems that the used file system (vfat) limits the amount of files per folder. My code reported “Disk full”, while there was still space available on the disk. After some trial and error, I jsut reformatted the drive, but using an ext3 file system this time. How should I say? Finally, it’s up and running since then now. (more…)
Since revision 1498, Navit fails to cross-compile for the N810. 1497 still works. No prob on the desktop, however. During the next days I need to figure out which particular change causes the build to fail.
