If you didn’t attend this year’s Linux Audio Conference, you might be interested in Rui’s report.
@Rui: A trackback-URL would be fine :)
Archive for April, 2009
LAC 2009 report
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
How a roman highway looks nowadays
Sunday, April 26th, 2009I have been asked what still can be seen of the roman highway I mapped recently. The answer is simple: Not that much. It’s just a trail of about 3 to 5 meters in width, covered with trees and other plants, which is raised compared to the ground by approximately 70 centimeters. If you are not aware of its existence, you probably would not notice it. If you know that it’s there, you can clearly see it, but it’s difficult to see it on a photo. Anyway, here’s an attempt.
Weather like in may – for several weeks now!
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
What spring, what april. The weather was warm and sunny for several weeks now, and reminds me of the extremely hot summer back in 2003.
Loosing the track of a hiking trip
Sunday, April 26th, 2009Due to some unknown accident, Maemo Mapper (which is an excellent application, BTW) dropped a huge portion of the trackpoints of today’s hiking trip. I have no clue what happened. The remaining trackpoints start around an area where the tablet startet to complain about the battery being low. I exchanged the battery ca. 15 minutes later, so maybe the system notification triggered some unwanted behaviour. As I was mapping live using osm2go, it’s not really a severe loss, but I wanted to geocode some pictures I have taken.
What I learn from this is that I should make backups of the track while still on tour.
Continued roman highway mapping
Sunday, April 26th, 2009More or less I have finalized the mapping of the remains of the “Via Rhenana”, an ancient roman highway. The visible remains start in Berg and end south west of Jockgrim. I read about some minor remains in Rheinzabern and near the Zirkerhof (which is still missing in OSM), but I’ll leave it up to true archaeologists to enter more details of the trail :) .
I still find it surprising that its stretch is not as straightforward as usually assumed, especially as there does not seem to be any topological need for the deviations. Maybe they have used existing trails, but if so, I wonder why they followed them without any need. Building a roman highway was expensive, both in terms of money and labour.
“Landgraben” in Karlsruhe now part of the openstreetmap data
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
Based on a description of a local Wiki, I have added the Landgraben to the openstreetmap database. It’s an old ditch, started back in 1588. Nowadays it’s completely covered in the inner city and part of Karlsruhe’s sewer system. It still gives some places and streets their unique look and (often triangular) shape, like the Lidell- and Ludwigsplatz or the Sophienstraße.
Trouble uploading edits via osm2go 0.7.0 and API 0.6
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009As the OSM servers are up and running since Tuesday, I did some live mapping using the famous osm2go yesterday. Unfortunately it has problems uploading the edited data. The error it emits reads as:
Uploading to http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6
Create changeset failed, code: 417 (Expect rejected)
Upload done
Process finished.
Others also had similar problems, so it should be possible to locate the issue during the next couple of days.
Programming the Korg Z1 Synthesizer
Saturday, April 18th, 2009While I have excessively done synth programming in my youth, I rarely find time for it nowadays. Nevertheless it happens, especially when it is raining all day.
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OSM servers going down
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
In order to bring API 0.6 live and to port the database to the new server, API 0.5 “will go into Read Only mode at 10:00am BST (9:00 UTC) Friday 17th April”. More details can be found in the OSM Wiki. Hopefully, API 0.6 will be up and running (including the usual hiccups) after the weekend. Remember to update your editors. Thanks a bunch BTW for the hard work of all people who are involved!
Collaboration of Wikipedia and Openstreetmap
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Not really hot news, but the planned collaboration of Wikipedia and Openstreetmap is overdue. There are some (german language) articles (netzpolitik.org, Schwarzwälder Bote) and blog entries (Raphael Mack, Der Schockwellenreiter) available. More details can be found in this wiki.
Live streams of the Linux Audio Conference
Thursday, April 16th, 2009After checking the program, you might be interested in the life streams of the LAC. You can use VLC to attend.
Why volunteers are writing code “for Nokia” for free
Thursday, April 16th, 2009Sebastian Spaeth points to a study (german language) of the ETH Zürich which sheds a little light on the motivation of Nokia and open source hackers who collaborate on the internet tablets.
Past are easter, warm weather
Thursday, April 16th, 2009I spent easter with friends and the family, doing some mapping but almost no hacking. Fortunately the warm weather now is past and rain is back, so I’m back to bits and bytes :) .
Short notes for today:
- The N810 features a text to speech synthesis system known as flite. Unfortunately it only speaks english. On internettablettalk.com you can find some links to additional languages, but it does not contain a german package.
- Andrew M. Bishop wrote a routing application called Routino, which converts and uses an OSM XML file for routing. It supports various types of routing, but is intended to be used as a backend, not an end user application. There’s an online demo available.
- I have still no luck in running micro.py on the N810 to record audio. While the sample code runs on my desktop machine, it fails on the tablet when it tries to create the pipeline to gstreamer, regardless that python2.5-gnome is installed:
_pipeline=gst.parse_launch(‘gconfaudiosrc ! capsfilter caps=audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=1,depth=16 ! fakesink name=sink signal-handoffs=true’)
The error message reads as:
gobject.GError: no element “gconfaudiosrc”
I also tried to access the audio drivers directly by replacing gconfaudiosrc by alsasrc and osssrc with no luck. If someone out in the world wild web can share a hint it would be great.
More Roman Highway Mapping
Monday, April 6th, 2009I wanted to test the application I wrote yesterday, so I did some more mapping of »Via Rhenana«, the remains of a roman highway west of Wörth and Hagenbach. The highway followed the terrace deposit (the german article has some more nice graphics) of the river Rhine. I was surprised that the trail has a lot of curves; usually the roman highways are told to be as straightforward as possible.
Writing a GPS-app using PyMaemo
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
Completely neglecting Paul Ferrill’s tutorial, I played a bit with PyMaemo to create an application which allows to record waypoints easily using the N810.
Serdar Somuncu – „Hassprediger – ein demagogischer Blindtest“
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
In this floor show, Serdar, a turkish-german cabaret artist, used citations of people like terrorists, politicians and other prominent (or not so prominent) people. The tricky bit was that you didn’t know what was citation or even who was cited.
An excellent show which was well worth the 16€, though it definitely was not for the fainthearted. If you are offended by harsh words, Serdar is not for you. All others might enjoy the show. Tourdates are available via his web presence. If you are unsure, find some samples on Youtube.com.
April 1 post of Fake SteveC
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
OSM insiders might enjoy today’s post of Fake SteveC.
OpenStreetMap Plugin for WordPress
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
If you want to embed maps in your posts, you might be interested in this plugin.