Points of Interest

After an intense working day (we are doing some last-minute bugfixing to get interiorcad 2010 released) I needed something to relax and read the backlog of some mailing lists. This means I did what I do all day: processing information :) .

Here are some bits of stuff I preseved for later inspection.

openstreetmap

Engadget shares some videos concerning the new routing capabilities of Google Maps. A phantastic service, and I was immediately asked whether this will influence Openstreetmap. The answer clearly reads as »yes«. Some people who are interested in free routing will surely leave OSM and use this cool new Google service. But anyway, it won’t harm OSM much. Still Google Maps focusses a different audience than OSM does. And competition always is a good thing, as it cheers us to do better.

Some guys in the nederlands have created a service where you can export POIs from OSM data. Some time back I provided POIs extracted from OSM data by some home-grown C++ code. I’m glad that this is now available as a web service – much better for users than installing some weird command line app developed by an squirrel hacker like me.

I always wanted to write a tool which converts OSM data into some MIDI or audio data. But if you are too lame, chances are given that you are overhauled by someone else. So here it is, some Ruby code to convert OSM into MIDI data. Need to try this out »real soon now™«.

Some hiking map now allows to load, edit and save routes on top of OSM maps. Great service, while the inclusion of Google Sat imagery would be a great addition.

Sarah Hoffmann provides a map which renders hinking relations. It’s now available world wide and updated once a day. If you want your area to be renedered in a different style, write her an electronic message.

Nick Whitelegg updated Footnav, a 3D OSM visualisation tool aimed at countryside use.

The german newspaper »Die Zeit« shares an article concerning the history of the prime meridian.

Linux Audio

I’m using Linux for over 10 years now, and as a consequence I do all audio and MIDI processing on Linux boxes.

Rui released fussy doula of his famous Qtractor audio and MIDI sequencer. Highlights include audio send/return auxiliary inserts, mixer peak meters gradient eye-candy, MIDI System Exclusive setup manager etc. The recently added SysEx support means that my summer hack on Simple Sysexxer more or less was an unnecessary effort, except for the fact that I learned some more about C++ hacking :) . Nevertheless, Simple Sysexxer still is a famous tool to do mass backups of your synths.

Steve Harris released an update of Time Machine, now capable of automatically starting and stopping the recording after a certain treshhold has been passed.

There also was a release of Guitarix, a software guitar amp emulator. Need to build and try it out on weekend.

That’s it so far – time to go to bed. Another challenging and pleasing days of managing the release of some CAD/CAM software is ahead.