Archive for July, 2010

Openstreetmap@GeoKur

Friday, July 30th, 2010
Geocachers "logging" a car

Tomorrow a geocaching event called GeoKur will take place at Bad Herrenalb, Black Forest, Germany. At the Kurhaus, the central facility, we will man a booth to provide first hand information about openstreetmap to the 600+ attendees.

This evening, there was a nice barbecue party at the Hirschwinkel shelter near Bad Herrenalb, where we helped the first people to solve problems using osm data.

A rather interesting experience was to observe geocachers “logging” a car by scribing their nicknames into its surface. I always knew there are human beings with strange hobbies, but until a couple of hours before I thought mapping for osm was the most strange :) .

Posted in Openstreetmap | 1 Comment »

Openstreetmap Routing News

Monday, July 19th, 2010
Beach Trip (openclipart.org, Gerald_G, public domain)

Beach Trip (openclipart.org, Gerald_G, public domain)

Most of you might already have heard about it, but anyway, here are two additions to the open source routing pool.

Vodaphone released most of the code of their discontinued Wayfinder navigation product into the world wild web. It seems the code needs maintenance before it is useful. Let’s see whether some enthusiasts are taking over.

The far more interesting announcement, though, has been posted right at the beginning of this year’s State of the Map conference. The Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) is a »high-perfomance routing backend«. Check out the demo provided via Geofabrik. It’s just some C code. After compilation, you’ll get a handful of binaries, including the usual tool to convert OSM XML data into some binary file format and a web server which handles the requests and delivers the resulting route.

The speed is just amazing. However, after reading some of the source code, it currently appears to obey the following limitations. What I recall:

  • The result gets shipped in KML format. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I guess a GPX format was more versatile. I’m pretty sure, though, that KML has been chosen with reason.
  • AFAIR there’s only the web server’s output, no file output.
  • The code can only cope with a single tag per element, e.g. using the highway tag. It currently is not possible to select items by multiple tags, e.g. highway=track, tracktype=grade1.
  • Most options are hard coded, so it’s not possible to play with the options by editing a configuration file.

Anyway, it’s the initial release, and it looks very promising. I’m pretty curious how it will be accepted by the community, how it will develop over time and whether there will be collaboration or competition between OSRM and Routino.

Posted in Openstreetmap, Software | 1 Comment »

Made in Spain

Monday, July 12th, 2010
Flag of Spain (openclipart.org)

Flag of Spain (openclipart.org)

Octopus (openclipart.org, public domain)

Octopus (openclipart.org, public domain)

Flag of the Netherlands (openclipart.org)

Flag of the Netherlands (openclipart.org)

OK, here’s the last comment of a bloody soccer ignorant concerning the soccer world cup of 2010. The country which is the preferred vacation destination for many germans won it after 120 minutes of a hard fight against our neighbours. While the Netherlands have been strong in defending their goal and collecting 8 (red-)yellow cards, Spain has been strong in attacking the goal of their combatants but not bringing the balls in. As a compensation they also collected 5 yellow cards.

But in the extra time they finally made the 1:0, and so they bring the world cup to Spain for the very first time. I have no clue what the villages and cities in Spain look like right now, but I guess tomorrow will be a national holiday ;-) .

Posted in society | Comments Closed

Midisport 8×8 Configuration Script resurrected

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

Ages back I wrote an ugly shell script to configure the offline mode of an m-audio Midisport 8×8 MIDI patchbay. Here it is, including a minor bug fix:

mspconf.sh.tar

The code is still ugly, but it does the job, at least on my machine :) .

Posted in Products | Comments Closed

Made in Germany

Sunday, July 11th, 2010
Vuvuzelas (openclipart.org, public domain)

Vuvuzelas (openclipart.org, public domain)

I never was a fan of soccer, but this world cup broke my neck. Though I’m not familiar with the tactics and strategies of this game, it was a great joy to watch the german team and its counterparts.

Thanks to the excellent summer weather conditions somewhere between 30°C and 40°C, I went to a biergarten to attend the match.

The german team is depressed as they, besides others, intended to reach the final game and to get the world cup. But they failed in the semi final versus Spain, so they had to prove they are worth the third place. And they made it. So stop the typical german whining and enjoy what you have reached :) .

They beat Uruguay 3:2. Admittedly, the latter ones did a great job as well. Considering that Uruguay hosts less than a 20th of inhabitants compared to germany (80,000,000 vs. 3,500,000), they by far had the better team :) .

A nice match indeed. I will attend again.

Posted in society | Comments Closed

Germanes eunt domus

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Football (openclipart.org, public domain)

Football (openclipart.org, public domain)

Well, not exactly. There’s still one match ahead. But the dream of winning the world cup turned to dust a couple of minutes ago.

Though I’m not a big fan of soccer, I must admit that even I enjoyed to watch the games of the german team. But despite the hard work during the last years, Spain still has the stronger team, and they won with reason. Congrats.

Posted in society | Comments Closed