I’ve just seen Lyambiko at Tollhaus. The current band consists of a classical jazz trio (Marque Lowenthal on piano, Robin Draganic on bass and Heinrich Köbberling on drums) plus Lyambiko as singer.
Photo: Alexander Kowalski, CC-by-SA
Archive for March, 2009
Lyambiko@Tollhaus: „Saffronia“
Monday, March 30th, 2009Openstreetmap License Change: “Point of Interest”
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
After ranting about the suspicious role of the OSMF concerning the relicensing debate here’s my personal point of view.
As I started to contribute data to OSM, I was like “If someone uses the data, derived data should go back to the project”. So the CC-by-SA-license just seemed to be a good solution. Many mappers still feel the same today, or want at least the data to be protected from being “stolen” or “abused” by a commercial company. Some find a “viral” license important, some the share alike and some would be pleased if it at least was an attribution only license. All valid points.
Openstreetmap License Change: Practical Options
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
I have listed some theoretical options, but practically, there’s currently only one option: ODbL. This will be enforced by the OpenStreetMap foundation, a non-profit organisation which aims for the following:
OpenStreetMap is an open initiative to create and provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international non-profit organisation supporting but not controlling the project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.
Openstreetmap License Change: Theoretical Options
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
The current license used for OSM data does not seem to be suitable. Therefore there are attempts to change it. This will be a hard process, as it requires to either get all contributors into the same boat, or to drop the contributions of those who are in the minority in case of a popular vote.
The advantages of voting machines for ballot-rigging
Friday, March 27th, 2009
According to The Seattle Times, the CIA assumes that Hugo Chávez has cleverly used voting machines in Venezuela “to undermine democratic elections”:
When Chávez won, Venezuelan mathematicians challenged results that showed him to be consistently strong in parts of the country where he had weak support. The mathematicians found “a very subtle algorithm” that appeared to adjust the vote in Chávez’s favor, Stigall said.
The article also mentions causes in Macedonia and Ukraine. I personally still hope that there will be electronic voting systems we can control and trust in the future. But nowadays voting machines offer alluring possibilities of tampering.
German Police being tricked by DNA contaminated cotton swabs
Friday, March 27th, 2009For several years, the german police searched for the “Phantom of Heilbronn“, a female only known by her DNA, being suspected for several crimes in germany and neighboured countries. Meanwhile the person in question was found: She’s an empolyee at a firm in Bavaria who boxes the cotton swabs used by the investigators. You guessed it, she likely is not the person responsible for the crimes…
OpenStreetMap book updated
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Jochen Topf and Frederik Ramm just announced the update of their (german) book »OpenStreetMap – Die freie Weltkarte nutzen und mitgestalten«.
You can find more information about it on www.openstreetmap.info.
Speech by German Federal President Horst Köhler: “The Credibility of Freedom”
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Election Conspiracy in Kentucky
Friday, March 20th, 2009The Brad Blog has a notable article about an election conspiracy, “changing votes at e-voting machines”. Part of the cause was to trick voters who have not been that familiar with voting machines. But that’s not the main point, as such things also could happen with traditional paper ballots. The main point is that a couple of “election officials” managed to corrupt the whole voting process. In turn, this means that it is possible for a minority to get control over voting machines and to possibly manipulate them in a manner that it will be either difficult or impossible to detect the fraud.
One further synthetic Numpty Physics Level
Friday, March 20th, 2009I played a bit more with the file format of Numpty Physics, so here’s the result:
More Numpty Physics Levels
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Quote from the Numpty Physics homepage:
If you wish to be clever, edit the level file directly – it’s just a simple text format.
As I wished “to be clever”, I did:
Basic Cubes
Interestingly, it is not possible to create perfect sqares. It is possible to draw “horizontal” lines, but as soon as you try to create vertical ones within a square, weird things happen. This is why the vertical edges of the squares seen above are not perfectly perpendicular to the baselines.
My first Numpty Physics levels ever
Monday, March 16th, 2009As I fixed my Numpty Physics installation yesterday, I grabbed the occasion and created my first two levels ever. Don’t assume I have solved them yet – it was difficult enough to design them!
As my webserver does not support direct loading, download the files to the tablet and move them to the following directory:
Hope you enjoy :) .
Fixing Numpty Physics crashes in Diablo
Sunday, March 15th, 2009One of the best applications for the Nokia Internet Tablet N810 is Numpty Physics. I’ve never been a fan of computer games, but this one is outstanding! Unfortunately, it crashed on my Diablo installation, but I managed to fix it a couple of minutes ago.
The job of “program managers”
Saturday, March 14th, 2009Joel Spolsky did me a favour and wrote an excellent article on “program managers”.
Issues with OSM quality assurance tools
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Meanwhile there exist a bunch of tools which try to indicate errors in the OSM data, such as Openstreetbugs, the OSM Inspector or various tools written by Gary68. I find such tools important and cool, but in the past I have seen some disadvantages.
Are Patents as bad as Monopolies?
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine allege that »the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace.«. They just published a book called »Against Intellectual Monopoly« to prove their theories.
Such a book is overdue. Not that I’m completely against patents or intellectual properties, but nowadays both are abused to hinder innovative competitors quite often. Thus it is time to review our national patent systems and to control what patents are granted by our patent offices.
Read the book online or download it in PDF format.
SociaLibrium@Tollhaus
Monday, March 9th, 2009Bernie Worell (keys), Blackbyrd McKnight (guit), TM Stevens (bass) & Cindy Blackman (drums) gave a concert at the Tollhaus. While most of the visitors obviously enjoyed the music, I was just bored. I visit concerts to listen to each individual musician, what he is doing, how he is doing it and what sounds he uses. I also like to hear well done arrangements.
Today, however, this was impossible. It was just noise. The only two instruments that always have been present were the distorted guitar and the snare drum. It was impossible to determine what the bass played, and the keyboards have just been masked completely.
Of course it was my fault to attend spontaneously. I should have read more about SociaLibrium beforehand. I learned my lesson :) .
Global Positioning in 1915
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009Shorpy has a nice “poser” image of workers in the “U.S. Geological Survey engraving room.”. What was openstreetmap like in those days :) ?
German Federal Constitutional Court bans current voting machines
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009As I expected, the currently used voting machines have been banned, as they are not compliant with the german constitution. One of the major arguments is that such machines conflict with the principle of transparency – average citizens must be able to control an election (Cite: “Jeder Bürger muss die zentralen Schritte der Wahl ohne besondere technische Vorkenntnisse zuverlässig nachvollziehen und verstehen können”). There are several articles about it:
- Press Release (summary) and
- quite detailed reasons for the judgment of the court
- Slashdot
- Zeit.de
- Tagesschau.de
- Spiegel.de, including a video how to exchange an EPROM within seconds
- Spiegel.de again
Frankly, the judgment is not surprising. I’m also glad that voting machines have not been damned per se, so we still have the opportunity to develop secure and transparent e-voting. I’m really curious what mechanisms we will see in the future.
If you are curious why all this e-voting stuff is that complicated, here’s the video of an interesting talk about this topic.
Reminder: OpenStreetMap-Einführung in Karlsruhe
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009Nur kurz nochmal der Hinweis auf die OpenStreetMap-Einführung am Donnerstag. Alle Interessenten, auch ohne jegliche Vorkenntnisse, sind herzlich eingeladen.