Bundesarchiv - Bild 173-1321 - CC-BY-SA

50 years ago, the Berlin Wall was installed, completely encircling the part of Berlin which was not controlled by the Soviet Union. Together with the Inner German border, it was mainly built to stop inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic emigrating to Western Germany. It withstood from August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989, effectively imprisoning the eastern citizens for 28 years.

Recently I met two young girls in Eastern Germany discussing whether it was better to study in Leipzig or Gießen. Despite the problems we encountered, I’m glad the reunion of Germany was a huge success.

Winfried Kretschmann (by FishInWater, CC-by-SA, via de.wikipedia.org

Baden-Württemberg is the southwestern state of germany, known for the black forest, Cuckoo clocks, apple trees, its automakers, and its strong economy. It was governed by the Christian Democratic Union for about 58 years.

After the last election, the green party formed a coalition with the Social Democratic Party. Today, Winfried Kretschmann has been elected as the minister-president, for the very first time for a member of the green party.

I doubt that this government really represents the mainly conservative inhabitants of this state. Actually, according to what I read, many people seem to fear the new government will degrade the economics. Additionally, there are some legacy issues they will have difficulties to cope with, e.g. the purchase of EnBW by Stefan Mappus or Stuttgart 21.

Others may desire dramatic changes. »Kretsch« and Nils Schmid of the SPD already announced a more democratic style of government, and promised better education as well as to enforce the nuclear power phase-out.

I personally find the two latter points very important. Thus I really appreciate the change. As I doubt that Kretschmann has a chance being reelected, I trust he really knows how to make use of the next five years.

Mapping Traces of the Karlsruhe area

Back in 2006 I bought a new bike to get some physical training to compensate the work and computer sitting motionlessness. I also bought a Garmin eTrex Venture Cx GPSr together with the City Navigator map material for routing. The device was about 300€ and the maps about 200€.

Though the device offered a bike routing algorithm, it did a very poor job as the data just didn’t contain ways reasonable for biking. I searched for other maps, especially for the region along the german-french border, but to no avail.
I first considered to create my own maps, but I knew this was futile. I realized that other people must have had the same problem and there surely was some interesting project out in the world wild web – bulls eye!

I monitored the activity of openstreetmap for a while, as I didn’t want to waste my time mapping for a project which has no future. It seemed to be healthy, though I didn’t understand yet how the project was organized, paid and controlled.

I thus decided to contribute to the project. Karlsruhe and the area around it was complete whitespace, except for some fragments of the motorways. I mapped huge portions of the Karlsruhe City between August and December of 2006, before Fred and Jochen joined the team.

I never intended to map Karlsruhe completely. I always hoped that others would join and help doing the hard work. On the other hand, I really enjoyed it. I live in Karlsruhe since 2000, and cycling through all the streets led me to places I would have never seen otherwise. So it was not just altruistic work. It was an excellent occasion to combine some afterwork physical activity with knowing your hometown better and collecting data for a cool project.

As Karlsruhe (right center on the image) was more or less completed a while after the Mapping Party in Spring of 2007, I started to do what I originally intended: Cycling, preferably outside of residential areas. So I did. Some trips headed south, but most trips I did headed west. First crossing the river Rhine. I mapped some palatinate and french villages there, but also cruised a huge forest called the »Bienwald« until I reached Wissembourg (leftmost on the image), which I mapped as well :) .

Today I compiled some of the traces I collected during the last three years and created the above rendering thanks to some specialized tools. Frankly, that’s pure pr0n. This is the command used to create the image:
python ./render.py -d ./ -r 42 -s 2880 --pos=49.0,8.2

After that, I created individual images for each track, cropped the transparent borders and stuffed it into an animated GIF:

Traces animated

Here are the commands I used for cropping and for creating the animated image. Convert is part of the famous ImageMagick package:
for i in *.png; do convert "$i" -crop 766x420+1+170 cropped$i; done
convert -delay 30 *.png TracesAnimated.gif

All credits to Fons for the 32′ Bombarde in Aeolus :) .

(Hint: Firefox 3.5 plays ogg files autonomously)

Panorama of the pass of ambelos

On the left and right hand side hills of the pass, there are about 27 ancient windmills. Most of them are only ruins nowadays, but some of them are preserved resp. restored. It must have been hard to bring the corn up and the flour down after milling. Here’s a picture of the pass and its windmill ruins:

There are some further passes. One in the east where one can leave Lassithi in direction of Agios Nicolaos. There is one further pass in Kaminaki in the south, but I read it’s only passable if you have a good offroad vehicle.

Crete usually is known for many sunny days and a hot respectively mild climate. However, due to the height of some mountains (like the aforementioned Dikti), they are covered with snow in winter. Lassithi is much cooler than the coast of Crete in autumn, winter and spring. When the snow melts, I read water covers the base of the plateau. As there seems to be no canyon leaving Lassithi, this sounds plausible. The water then seeps away as ground water. The farmers used windmills to bring it back up to the surface. Today, the windmills get replaced by diesel powered pumps to become independent of changing weather conditions. However, the ancient windmills seem to be the more ecological alternative:

The villages are placed around the plateau, to preserve the fertile agricultural ground. In Ψυχρό (Psychro) there’s a tourist attraction, the Dictaean dripstone cave where Zeus was born. There are two paths from the parking place up to the cave, a new paved footway (recommended for climbing uphill) and an old “mountain hiking” trail.

Here’s a further panorama picture of the plateau, shot from the entrance area of the aforementioned cave:

Lassithi shot from the area of the dictean cave

North of the main plateau, there’s a further small plateau, about 950m above the sea level. It’s a very lovely place, where you are alone with the winds and the cowbells of the sheep:

Plateau north of Lassithi

Some notes about mapping. The complete tour lastet about ten hours. The N810 did a great job, running the connection to my bluetooth GPSr, MaemoMapper, osm2go and a homegrown waypoint recording application. One battery lasted for about 4 hours, which is an excellent time compared to its size and the CPU and memory usage of the running applications. I have two barreries available, which means both are not sufficient to accompany you for the whole trip. Due to limitations (I’d call it a bug) of Maemo Mapper, ensure to quit it before the device shuts down due to a drained battery. To avoid hassle, also make backups of its tracks regularly.

osm2go also shows some bugs, making it crash every now and then. If a crash occurs, you will have certainly lost the last parts of its track. Today I have seen crashes when I zoomed in extremely and tried to join the end node of a way to any node of another existing way. Again, ensure to make backups of your track regularly.

What I found annoying has been some mismapping. A mapper has drawn some ways over and along already existing ways. It is hard to fix that “on the go” using osm2go on the N810′s small screen. I therefore fixed it on the notebook back in the hotel.

The master of the ceremony was the president of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert. There have been four candidates. The election consists of at least one round. To win during the first round, you need the simple majority of all votes. If this is not the case (which can easily happen if there are more than two candidates), a second round tries to achieve the desired result. If none of the candidates gets the majority in the second round, a third round will take place, where a plurality is sufficient to win the election.

I followed the election while biking, listening to a broadcast of Deutschlandfunk. After I returned, I read some more about the election. Here are some notes worth noticing:

• While the ballots have been counted, Horst Köhler left the Reichstag and drove to his office. Nothing wrong with that (though I found it a bit strange that the favourite candidate leaves for this short period of time). The counting took a bit longer as expected (they have been counting twice), but as the result was about to be published, Horst Köhler was not back to the Reichstag. So Norbert Lammert went outside the building to wait for him – clearly anticipating the announcement of the result of the election.
• While Mr. Lammert was waiting for Mr. Köhler, bouquets have accidentally been prepared publicly in the Reichstag. This was a further indication that the result of the election already is final.
• The result of the election has been leaked by members of the Bundesversammlung immediately after the counting – using Twitter. Here’s the entry of Ulrich Kelber (14:15) and the one of Julia Klöckner (14:18 local time).
• Horst Köhler arrived around 14:26
• Norbert Lammert finally anounced the result publicly ca. 14:30, first announcing the votes for Horst Köhler, then the results of the other candidates.

Frankly, this looks more like a comedy or even kindergarden than the election of the german president. At least it shows an absolute lack of taclessness concerning the three other candidates. Maybe I’m an old and conservative grandpa, but unlike members of the paliament, I still try to remember my education and social skills. Don’t get me wrong. Horst Köhler will continue doing an excellent job, and he’s the right guy at the right moment. And as far as I can judge, Norbert Lammert usually does an excellent job as well. And anyway, the aforementioned circumstances clearly show that our political class consist of human beings no better than you and me ;-) .

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”.

(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!

I have drawn two dashed lines on the photo, showing the ground level and the top of the trail. The photos have been taken from south east to north west and stitched together using hugin: