Archive for June, 2009

Playing with Ruby on Rails

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

As I finally run an up-to-date operating system, I read this excellent rails tutorial. I’m not familiar with the hacking details of web technologies at all, so it’s time to get started.

Though I have not understood all details of rails yet, I am really impressed by its proper MVC design. I now need an idea for some application of my own to learn more. Accidentally, I already have a clue what I want to do, so I read another posting concerning the upload of binary data.

It’s summer, so I will not proceed that fast. But I hope to have a little app running before autumn.

Posted in Software | Comments Closed

Operating System Installation Joy

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

OK, so it is done. A new operating system, much more up to date than the previous Gutsy installation, arrived on my hard drive. The system starts up really quickly, I’m impressed. KDE looks more modern than KDE 3, though I’m not that excited about its look and feel.
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Disconnected

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Some years back, I somehow was the king of pop, errr, operating systems :) . I tried different Linux distributions in various flavours, like SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, and Gentoo. Not to mention Windows and Mac operating systems.

Things and interests have changed since then. Instead of exploring the secrets of operating systems, I started to write my own code, and last but not least, mapping and hacking for openstreetmap.org.
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Even more freaks in Karlsruhe

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

I just noticed a blog of two people from Karlsruhe who plan a one-year (sic!) trip across the world. I mainly found it as they also use the OSM plugin for WordPress mentioned two days before. Nice to have the trip visualized directly in a blog posting. They are clever enough to spend christmas on New Zealand, when it is summer there and the inhabitants celebrate their holidays.

Posted in Openstreetmap, Software, Travel | Comments Closed

Displaying tracks using the OSM plugin for WordPress

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

OK, got it. Here’s the biking tour I did on sunday. The cherries, grabbed directly from the tree in Büchelberg, tasted excellent :) .

Unfortunately I was trapped by some rain in Minfeld, and MaemoMapper once again crashed while being in the train to get back to Karlsruhe. Thus the gap in the track:

Use the control in the upper right hand corner to switch the layers. Note that you even can dis- and enable the track!

And here’s the code, just one single line, to include the map into this posting. Put the square brackets directly before and behind the line. I needed to insert a line break, as the parser of WordPress seems to be pretty greedy and otherwise would display a map instead of the code :) :

[
osm_map lat="49.03" long="8.26" zoom="11" gpx_file="http://www.christeck.de/wp-content/uploads/tracks/20090621-kandel.gpx"
]

And here’s the code of yesterday’s post, including the marker:

[
osm_map lat="49.02" long="8.17" zoom="11" marker="49.02,8.17" marker_name="marker_blue.png" marker_width="16" marker_height="16"
]

What a joy! A nice map in your wordpress blog! Without any coding! With zoom, pan and layer controls!

Thanks to all contributors of openlayers and Michael Kang once again for this marvellous OSM WordPress plugin!

Posted in Openstreetmap, Software | Comments Closed

Openstreetmap-Plugin for WordPress

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

A while back, I searched for an OSM plugin for the blog software which drives this web presence. It appeared to be in an early stage and the maintenance state was unclear, so I did not investigate it further.

Today its feature set sounded too promising and there has been a recent release – time to try it out.

As it is late, I have no time to figure all options out. To add a map view after the installation of the plugin, go to the settings section of wordpress and follow the instructions there.

And this is what it looks like, including a nice marker. “Where have you been today?” – “Well, cycling via Büchelberg to Kandel.”:

There are rumors you can even display tracks in gpx and kml format on top of it. Tomorrow’s evening is saved. Thanks Michael Kang :-) .

Posted in Openstreetmap, Software | Comments Closed

Bikerouting in Navit

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

After some months of abstinence, I updated Navit from SVN and had a closer look of what has changed. Navit supports different “vehicle” types (such as car, bike, horse and pedestrian) for a while now. Meanwhile it also supports vehicleprofiles. A vehicleprofile can be linked to a vehicle and contains roadprofiles. This way it is possible to define which ways a “vehicle” uses for routing. It is even possible to pass speed and routing weight parameters to a roadprofile. This actually means that one can define the routing behaviour via Navit’s configuration file, navit.xml. I immediately started to play with it to get bike routing:

Bike routing in Navit

Bike routing in Navit

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Posted in Gadgets, Openstreetmap, Software | 2 Comments »

Dinosaurs entering Web 2.0 – slowly, but steadily!

Friday, June 19th, 2009

After me and Linus, one further old fart, who is a friend of both usenet and IPv6, but also openstreetmap, entered web 2.0. Welcome Sven :) .

Posted in History, society | Comments Closed

Even more panorama pics of Crete

Monday, June 15th, 2009

I have updated the panorama picture of the pass of ambelos and added two more panoramas of the Lassithi plateau to the posting. If that’s not yet enough for you, I have some more panoramas.

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Posted in Gadgets, Pictures, Software, Travel | 1 Comment »

Back to work

Monday, June 15th, 2009

After two weeks of vacation, I spent the first day back in the office. I immediately was back to 120% CPU load, doing what my job is: Helping others getting their things done better and more efficiently.

Everything was just as I never had been away. Even the coffee machine noticed me being back and begged for maintenance :) .

Frankly, I enjoyed it. Thanks to the crowd, and special thanks for obviously keeping as much of work as possible away from my desk while I was unavailable.

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Back from Crete

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

The night was short, as the car wanted to leave Myrtos at 6AM. Travel back went very well. The plane left a couple of minutes earlier, luggage was delivered really fast at Frankfurt/Main airport and there was a train back to Karlsruhe almost immediately.

Back to office tomorrow. I’m curious what cool code my colleagues over at extragroup have written in the meantime. And yes, I will resist to log in remotely to know it today :) .

Posted in Travel | Comments Closed

“I like greek-ish food”

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

I love spending my holidays on greek islands for several reasons. One of them is the excellent traditional food. I appreciate the simplicity and taste of the fresh meat, fish and vegetables. It tastes completely different than the food at greek restaurants in germany. It’s not that the latter ones do a bad job. It’s just the fact that the taste differs.

As tourists, we do wrong anyway. If greek people go to the restaurant, they tend to be a lot of people participating. So a lot of different dishes are put on the table, providing a rich variety of food. As tourists, we often are two people who just order two main dishes and that’s it. So the meals look a bit poor, just providing, for example, some meat and potatoes on the plate. Well, not exactly. If you have good luck, the operator of the restaurant also has a garden where she grows some vegetables. If so, also the main dishes will show some fresh vegetables like tomatoes, paprika, onions and olives.

So here are some pics to wet your appetite. The greeks are masters in preparing very tasty starters. Here’s the “Various Appetizers Plate” of the Mirtos Hotel’s restaurant (which was accompanied by an excellent dark, sweet red wine):

Various Appetizers in Hotel Mirtos

Various Appetizers in Hotel Mirtos

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Posted in Lifestyle, Pictures, Travel | Comments Closed

The Lassithi Plateau on Crete (Updated)

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

The Lassithi plateau is an interesting geoformation. It’s almost a circlar area, completely circumvented by some mountains, up to 2148m in hight like the Δίκτη (Dikti). The plateau itself is about 800m above the sea level. There are only a few passes to enter it. One is the pass of Ambelos, where I took a panorama picture showing (from left to right) the Lassithi plateau south, the pass with some ruins of its windmills and then the sea north of it:

Panorama of the pass of ambelos

Panorama of the pass of ambelos

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Posted in History, Openstreetmap, Pictures, Travel | Comments Closed

Mapping alleys in Ierapetra

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Today I was doing some mapping in Ierapetra, especially in its ancient quarter. Though I use an excellent GPS receiver, it is very difficult to map all those tiny, non rectangular alleys.

The GPS reception is poor, so you need to cope with zig-zagging position information. The result looks pleasing anyway, and I hope it’s not too far from reality.

Still a lot of work needs to be done, and I did not map the street names due to the lack of a greek input method on the tablet. There are additional keyboard layouts for the N810, but those do not contain a greek layout. Therefore there seems to be another hack to teach the N810 a greek layout, but frankly I was too much of a chicken and didn’t install it.

Posted in Openstreetmap, Outdoor, Travel | Comments Closed

Strong wind on Crete

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

aeolus1.jpg

(Image: Wikipedia, Public domain)

There’s a strong cool wind these days in Myrtos. The wind is that strong that you can neither go swimming (well, you can, but I guess it’s not much fun) nor read a book outside. Even the lid of the notebook will not resist. So I spend a lot of time cruising around the island and visiting various places. Of course this triggers some mapping work as an absolutely unwanted side-effect :) .

I remember a similar wind being present for almost two weeks on Samos and hope it will not last that long.

Posted in Outdoor, Travel | Comments Closed

Struggling with Maemo mapping applications

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Again I lost some tracks using MaemoMapper – which of course is all my fault, because I neglected Hakan’s tipp :) .

It usually happens when the device shuts down due to a drained battery while MaemoMapper is running. Though Sqlite supports transactions (actually it uses them per default), it seems that a system shutdown causes MaemoMapper to leave a defective database file. Of course, badman only appears if you have no backup available. If you do backups, nothing will happen :) .
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Posted in Gadgets, Openstreetmap, Software | Comments Closed