This year’s winter is an early bird, and some snow offers an excellent opportunity for all kinds of winter sport activities across the black forest.
Archive for November, 2010
Early winter impressions
Sunday, November 28th, 2010
Herbie Hancock live @ Festspielhaus Baden-Baden
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
After Lee Ritenour the next master did me a favour and came close enough to make me spend some money. His works do not exactly fit my taste, so I mainly know his most popular works. He has always been a very progressive musician (remember »Future Shock«?) and he played with some of my favorite artists like Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea. Baden-Baden is just about 40km south, and as the synth addict and fusion enthusiast I am, attending the concert was a must.
The lineup consisted of Herbie Hancock (grand piano, Korg Oasys), Kristina Train (vocals, violin), James Genus (bass), Trevor Lawrence (drums), Lionel Loueke (guitar) and Greg Phillinganes (Korg Oasys, Korg Triton, vocals). His current project is called »The Imagine Project«, but of course he could not resist to play some of the hits (like Cantaloupe Island) that made him popular. The way he puts different influences and styles together is pretty interesting. Plus it is a great joy to see how he treats the piano and his synthesizers. He also used a Roland AX-Synth twice, really excessively during the last tune.
A great concert indeed. There are some further tour dates nearby during the next couple of days, so don’t miss your chance.
Lee Ritenour @ Tollhaus
Friday, November 12th, 2010
Lee Ritenour @ Tollhaus
This was a concert I visited on spec. I never heard a lot of music of Lee. I only knew he’s a well known guitarist. But a price tag of 22€ left no room for any excuse. Visiting the concert really was a good idea.
The lineup consisted of Lee Ritenour (guitar), Patrice Rushen (Bechstein grand piano, Yamaha Motif ES6, Yamaha S90), Melvin Davis (seven (sic!) strring Bass and vocals) and Will Kennedy (drums). Patrice mainly used sampled standard sounds (like Rhodes, Organ, and Clavinet) and there was no synth solo. A prejudice of mine seems to materialize. Men use the upper dynamic range of an instrument, while women are more familiar with the lower range.
The whole combo did an excellent job. I was surprised that I actually enjoyed the music, though it was a bit too straightforward for my taste. Great to see real pros at work, where everyone knows his job. I’m tempted to buy a semi acoustic guitar, as I really liked Lee’s sound.
A very nice concert, well worth the bucks. Herbie Hancock, next week in Heidelberg, won’t be that »cheap« :) .
Current pet projects
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
Cat Head (openclipart.org, public domain)
After a long and hard office day (we needed to recall some already released code) I needed some compensation. As always, the best recreation is working on some software :) .
I’m currently working on integrating libosmscout, a vector rendering library for osm data, into MoNav, my favorite routing application. I thus subscribed to either mailing list, modified and recompiled the Importer of libosmscout (as it didn’t finish importing germany.osm since last eve) and added MoNav as a project to the german osm community server, even setting up a first build script.
Now it’s 1AM and I’m quite tired. But it’s interesting and pleasing to see what one can achieve in one day only. Sleep well :) .
MoNav tracklogging patch finished
Monday, November 1st, 2010
Animal Footprints (openclipart.org, public domain)
My favourite OSM based routing application, MoNav, lacks tracklogging. Thus I sat down this weekend and wrote some code to accomplish this.
The current code collects the data from the positioning subsystem. After a configurable period of time (default is 60 seconds) it flushes this data to a simple CSV logfile. While writing the data, a copy of the file is kept to avoid data loss in case the battery drains at the very same moment. The folder for the logfile is configurable, while the filename gets automatically created according to the current date and time. When closing MoNav, the logfile gets converted to a more versatile GPX track file.
I tested the code during an six hour trip to the black forest, and it seems to work just fine. I hope my code will make it into the main MoNav repository sooner or later.
While I usually do mapping by foot or bike, I mapped steep inclining ways in Obertal by car today. Many of those ways end at isolated dwellings or farm houses, or morph into graveled forest tracks. That’s the area of interest, sited in the Murg Valley, Black Forest:
A very nice trip under sunny and warm weather conditions, untypical for november. I’d like to get more of those, at least until christmas :) .