Enthiosys shares an interesting article concerning agile product managers and product owners. Of course they are painting a somewhat »ideal world«™ or at least a product manager under ideal circumstances. Real life, however, is much more complex as their article admits.
Archive for September, 2009
Enthiosys on Product Managers
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Gebabbel available for openSuse
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Andreas Schneider, who also seems to be an GPS enthusiast, just told me that Gebabbel is available for openSuse. The application’s page still does not exist but shoud materialize within a couple of days.
The return of the Fungi
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
White Puffball
Under best late summer weather conditions I’ve again visited the black forest to map some ways and paths between Seibelseckle and Hinterlangenbach. That’s today’s route:
Germany has voted
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Today the 17th Bundestag, the german parliament, has been reelected. As a short summary, one half of the former government is past, while the other half has been reelected. According to the first extrapolations, here are the first results:
- CDU/CSU: 33%
- SPD: 23%
- FDP: 15%
- Linke: 13%
- Grüne: 10%
- Others: 6%
Both of the major parties (especially the SPD) lost, while the smaller parties won a lot of ballots. The result means that the CDU will form a government with the FDP.
I’m just listening the broadcast of the Deutschlandfunk. One of the speakers postulated that the SPD will reunion with the Linke. I was not a big fan of such plans.
The result is not exactly my taste. I prefered a government of one of the two major parties together with two of the smaller ones. But maybe it’s is better than the current (read as: former) government of CDU and SPD (aka grand coalition).
Bundestagswahl – was sollte man wählen?!?
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
Musterstimmzettel zur Bundestagswahl 2009
This post is in german language. It’s about tomorrow’s election of the german parliament, the parties that stand for election and the difficulty to make a decision.
Morgen steht die Bundestagswahl an. Ich halte mich üblicherweise mit politischen Aussagen zurück. Dem Wahlkampf jedoch konnte man sich nicht entziehen, selbst wenn man keinen Fernseher sein eigen nennt – die Wahlplakate waren schlicht omnipräsent. Zudem haben wohl alle Parteien die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten entdeckt, die die modernen Kommunikationsmittel so bieten. Egal ob klassische Webseiten, Blogs oder Twitter, der Wahlkampf ist pervasiv und verfolgt einen auf Schritt und Tritt.
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Waypoint-Catcher publicly available
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Waypoint-Catcher
I’ve just released Waypoint-Catcher into the world wild web. It’s a very basic application for the NOkia N810. It just allows to set a waypoint and to tag it with a name and comment. It helped me a lot with occasional mapping, so I hope it is useful for others, too.
Wheelchair-Routing by the University of Bonn
Monday, September 21st, 2009The University of Bonn provides a web based routing service for handicapped people, especially wheel chair routing. This router takes into account attributes like inclines (with configurable percentage), surfaces, and kerbs. This service shows the flexibility and versatileness of the simple tagging scheme used by the openstreetmap database, which is a key figure of the project’s success.
Unoriented Mapper attacked by Ladybugs!
Monday, September 21st, 2009
A Hoverfly watching me and the bugs
Today I was tricked by my own lazyness. I have two batteries for the N810. Each of them usually lasts for up to 4 hours while being mapping. I am used to charge them immediately when I return from a mapping tour. Seems I messed it up after the last tour. As the first one was drained, I put the second one into the device – and it immediately complained that the battery was low!
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Devotional Object: Openstreetmug
Friday, September 18th, 2009
Openstreetmug
At the last monthly meeting of the local geo enthusiasts on wednesday, Fred sold Openstreetmugs. “179 of the most important OSM tags” are printed on its surface, so it’s a must have for the 150,000 project members. “1.30 EUR of each sale go to FOSSGIS e.V.“, which will be the German OSMF chapter “real soon now™”. Get it now!
Ruby on Rails on the Nokia N810 – sqlite lib needed
Thursday, September 17th, 2009I’m currently playing with Ruby on Rails, just for my very own pleasure and joy. Admittedly, that’s only one half of the truth. Some ruby (respectively rails) knowledge will also help me during my “daytime job”. What I’d like to do for now is to develop some rails application for the Nokia N810.
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The joy of using german ATMs
Thursday, September 17th, 2009I moved to Karlsruhe, Germany, 9 years ago, due to my employment at extragroup:
My default bank, however, still is in a town called Miltenberg where I grew up:
Until now, that was no problem at all. The bank has siblings spread all over germany, even in Karlsruhe. I could use their ATMs without being charged for the service – I just enjoyed the benefits of living in the digital millennium.
The only thing that causes complaints is the (absence of) speed on the machines. It’s simply unbearable. First, they put absolutely dated computers into their ATMs – stealing your time. Then, they use the delay times to annoy you with some advertising. And finally, their user interfaces just suck. Not to mention the often unresponsive keyboards of the machines. But anyway, remember you use a free service.
However, things have changed. Due to some business war (true, that’s a hendiadys), even the banks of similar provenience now charge their customers for each individual transaction (this means, as a consequence, that I will discontinue the contract with my long-term bank soon).
But that’s only one part of the story. Tonight, we met at the monthly meeting of the local GPS and geo enthusiasts. Unfortunately I was short in money supply, but someone lent my some bucks. On my way back home, I passed a bank and tried to get some money at its ATM machines. Unfortunately, three of them treated me with ads for about a minute, but then told me that there was some timeout.
I tried another bank which I frequently use, but all ATMs there have been out of order. So yes, I got no money at all.
Abroad, germans usually are impressed how reliable and fast the ATMs work, though the distance is much bigger than within germany and the machine you use belongs to a totally different company.
What can we learn from this? True. The germans still suffer from the consequences of WW2, have no working infrastructure and very slow computers. In short, we need your assistance! If you have some used computers left, please dedicate them to the german VR-Banks. Thanks a bunch!
Subgroups in JOSM presets
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009The presets in JOSM are built at runtime parsing an XML file. JOSM gets shipped with one default file which I usually maintain. Users beg for the inclusion of further features regularly, so meanwhile the menus as well as the dialogs are both densely populated. This makes JOSM hard to use on devices with smaller displays, like the popular Netbooks or internet tablets.
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Mapping Villages in Alsace again
Sunday, September 13th, 2009As it was as warm and sunny autumn day, I grabbed the occasion to do a medium mapping trip visiting our french neighbours. While germany gets mapped better day by day, the mapping densitiy significantally decreases as soon as you cross the border. Even worse, most of the mapping you can see there has been done by some pedantic germans like me. Besides a lot of the tertiary roads and village names in northern Alsace, I have also mapped most parts of Wissembourg:
Anyway, meanwhile some of the villages are mapped down to some residential roads:
But it is still surprising how detailed the german map is compared to the french area. I’d really like to see our french friends “à bord” rather sooner than later. Here’s the trail of the trip I did today:
Black Forest mapping between Seibelseckle and Hinterlangenbach
Monday, September 7th, 2009It’s just good luck to live in Karlsruhe, as it is just about 80km/40min by car to get to some typical locations (like the infamous Mummelsee :) .
Day by day, more black forest tracks are being mapped by OSM addicts, but there are still a lot of gaps to fill and refinements are always possible. This weekend I have chosen the area between Seibelseckle and Hinterlangenbach.
Yesterday it began raining while being in the woods. The forecast and some webcam pics fooled me, so there was not much “outcome” concerning geo data. Today, however, it was a wonderful sunny late summer day, even allowing for some nice pictures. Here’s the area:
The track of the recently purchased WBT-201 bluetooth GPS receiver and logger IMO is again not as accurate as it could (respectively should) be. Unfortunately, I left my GPSMap at home, otherwiese I could compare the tracks. I am at least disappointed with its bluetooth reliability. Maemo Mapper often reports that it is looking for a GPS fix. The current position often is far away from the already existing objects, and if you go a way twice, the two tracks often are far apart.
But I’ll better put the typical krautish :) whining aside. So here’s the final drumroll, announcing some of the usual pics.
I really like moss closeups. It just looks a bit unnatural while it is the opposite:
Moss closeup
Even more, though not shot properly:
Moss closeup 2
I’m not the biggest fan of spiders, but I am not a chicken as many other people. I grew up in a rural area, thus being used to all kind of animals:
Spider in Moss
And finally a nice one. I managed to take a closeup of a grasshopper. Unfortunately, I could not remove the grass in front of the lens, as the grasshopper would have escaped:
Grasshopper
The above pictures are not public domain. The copyright is still owned by me, and copying is hereby not allowed except you got my written consent.
FLOSS Weekly Podcasts about Openstreetmap
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009Floss Weekly shares a lengthy podcast concerning openstreetmap. It sheds some light on many aspects of the project. If you are an OSM newbie and want to learn more about the project (e.g. »What is the difference between Mapnik and Osmarender?«), this podcast is the right thing for you.
Steve Coast, the founder (and benevolent dictator :) of openstreetmap.org, chairman of the openstreetmap-foundation and co-founder of cloudmade, shares a lot of insights. At the beginning of the subsequent podcast, there’s still some information about routing with OSM data.
Thanks to HMK who pointed me to those podcasts.
Last t-shirt-only-tour 2009?
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009On a cloudy, but warm (and humid) day, I did an after work mapping tour from Karlsruhe via Neuburg, Mothern, Neewiller and Niederlauterbach to the Bienwaldmühle:
The latter one hosts a traditional german restaurant (and Biergarten). If you plan to go there, avoid Mondays and Tuesdays as they are closed these days.
I left the office too late, so I was trapped by the dusk. The way back from the Bienwaldmühle was a hot ride following some main streets in the dark, which was not only fun. Arriving in Maximiliansau, I missed the train back to Karlsruhe by a couple of seconds and needed to wait 50 minutes – enough time to type this post into some text editor on the N810 :) .
Anyway, a nice trip with some new ways and objects for our open content geo database.
Maintaining JOSM Presets
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
JOSM presets - Museum
JOSM, an openstreetmap editor written in the Java programming language, provides some “presets” which allow the user to tag objects easily just by selecting it from a menu. This menu and the corresponding dialogs are all defined in a huge XML file, presets.xml. It allows to define menu entries, subgroups and finally dialogs with standard GUI controls such as checkboxes, comboboxes, line edits, labels, icons etc.
The aforementioned presets.xml is included in josm.jar, but JOSM even can load such presets over a networking connection (http). This makes it easy for users to create and use their very own presets, maybe for specialized use cases like event mapping, mapping ski pistes or nautical stuff.
On request, I have just added the tag “opening_hours” to various presets like shops, restaurants, museums and the like:
JOSM presets - Museum Dialog
If you have further requests, do not hesitate to open a trac ticket. It’s even possible to do this as anonymous user, so there’s no excuse :) .