Archive for May, 2009
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Panorama of Myrtos, Crete, 2009
It’s the third consecutive year I visit Myrtos, Crete. It’s one of the southmost villages of europe with an almost tropical climate, where the swallows don’t leave towards africa during the winter months. It’s a quiet village with no clubs or big hotels. A small gravelled but nice beach and the usual infrastructure of cafes and restaurants make it the right place for some relaxing days. It’s sited at a primary road, so it’s easy to visit several locations in the east and north of Crete by car.
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Posted in Pictures, Travel | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 29th, 2009
Bull’s eye. I spontaneously visited a concert of Céline Rudolph. Not the worst decision I did today. If you are, like me, a fan of scat singing and Flora Purim, you’ll like Céline as well.
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Posted in Lifestyle, Music, Pictures | Comments Off
Friday, May 29th, 2009
(Image shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia)
My friends over at Geofabrik provide a summary blog post about the results of the public transport workshop. Don’t miss the linked wiki pages in german and english language.
If you are interested about public transport in openstreetmap, check the talk-transit mailinglist and its archive.
Posted in Openstreetmap | Comments Off
Monday, May 25th, 2009
During yesterday’s election of the german president, some interesting glitches happened. I’m not talking about the political aspects of the election, but of some housekeeping issues.
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Posted in History, society | Comments Off
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
On the 60th birthday of the Grundgesetz, Horst Köhler has been reelected as the President of Germany by the Bundesversammlung.
As in 2004, Gesine Schwan was his main competitor, but Horst Köhler won again. Though we left the chance to get the very first female president ever, Horst Köhler might be the right guy for the next five years. As he is not allowed for a third term in 2014, he might be tempted to even more show the way towards the future, independently from political parties and “daily business”.
Posted in History, society | Comments Off
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
(Image shamelessly stolen from de.wikipedia.org)
The german constitution, the »Grundgesetz«, became effective the 1949-05-23. Since then, after 12 years of Nazi terror and the lost second world war, the Grundgesetz became the base of our free and modern democracy. Together with the Bundesverfassungsgericht, it served us very well during the last 60 years. Kudos to its fathers and mothers!
Posted in History, society | Comments Off
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
I just finished reading the latest book of Helmut Schmidt, “Ausser Dienst”. It’s an autobiography, and due to his age and (political) experience, he has a lot of things to tell about domestic and foreign policy, about economies and the challenges we will face in the near future.
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Posted in Literature, society | Comments Off
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Taking pictures is an art of its own, and I personally know almost nothing about it. But what I’ve learned so far is that there are occasions where you need to use the flash light – and that there are occasions, where the auto mode of the camera will enable flashing but you shouldn’t use it.
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Posted in Gadgets, Outdoor, Pictures | Comments Off
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
I have continued writing some C++-code to stuff some openstreetmap data into an sqlite database file. The results look promising so far. Though it took 13.5 hours to convert a 20GB europe.osm file, the first tests show amazing speed when selecting some simple data from the dataset. However, I’m curious how more complex queries will perform.
Currently I use one normalized table for all tags, regardless if the tags are linked to nodes, ways or relations. This surely saves a good portion of disk space, but it seems to slow down queries a lot. Maybe I should drop the helper tables, stuff the tags into the table redundantly and just link them directly to the data objects by a foreign key.
Obviously I feel adventurous about all this SQL and database stuff :) .
Posted in Openstreetmap, Products | Comments Off
Monday, May 18th, 2009
Here are some further pictures I have taken recently. A tree suffering from cancer:
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Posted in Gadgets, Outdoor, Pictures | Comments Off
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
Todays mapping tour was interrupted by some thunderstorms. Being out in the woods, I desperately desired a shelter. If you ever thought that mapping hunting stands is a useless waste of time, I can tell you it isn’t :) .
(Picture shamelessly stolen from Wikimedia Commons)
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Posted in Openstreetmap, Outdoor, Products | Comments Off
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
12 OSM addicts are attending the workshop at Geofabrik:
Clockwise:
- Sebastian Schwarz
- Markus Bader
- Malte Ahrens
- Matthias Merz
- Melchior Moos
- Christian Berreth
- Frank Sautter
- Thomas Reincke
- Jochen Topf
- Frederik Ramm (sitting on the floor)
- Heiko Jacobs
- Me (left of Heiko) is missing as someone needed to take the photo :)
Posted in Openstreetmap | Comments Off
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Thanks to a hint of HMK, the code to convert an OSM XML file to an Sqlite database is way faster now. Sqlite encapsulates any INSERT statement into a transaction per default.
To circumvent this behaviour, I just used a START TRANSACTION statement at the initialisation of the database and an END TRANSACTION statement (which is an alias to COMMIT) at the application’s exit. The code now is at least 10 times faster. All credits to HMK who shared the results of his research.
Posted in Products, Software | Comments Off
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
If you haven’t noticed yet, a workshop about mapping and using public transport data will be held on Sat, 2009-05-16 at Scheffelstraße 17a, Karlsruhe, Germany. Anyone interested is invited to drop by, though “registration” is appreciated.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
My familarity with databases might equal my knowledge of french language, thus the subject ;-) . More sincerely, I’m currently playing with some C++ code to stuff an OSM XML file into an sqlite database (which caused less posts on my blog, BTW). Firstly osm data in an sqlite database has been “requested” on the mailing lists more than once, and secondly querying such a database file will make the former tool, osmpoicreator, obsolete.
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Posted in Openstreetmap, Products | 4 Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Subbersach wenn man gerade auf die Pizza wartet :)
Posted in Gadgets, Lifestyle | Comments Off
Monday, May 4th, 2009
When I hit crossings while mapping, I tend to draw the joining ways as a small stub, as an indication for the next mapper (well, err, hopefully me :). Admittedly, those stubs look ugly on the map. But of course this is an interim state as we will have the missing ways in out database soon:
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Posted in Openstreetmap, Outdoor | Comments Off
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
During today’s mapping tour I took some pictures of Bienwald inhabitants:
A genista bloom:
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Posted in Outdoor, Pictures | Comments Off
