SimpleSysexxer Resurrected
There are various tools for Windows and Mac OS available to backup and restore the memory contents of MIDI devices. For Linux there’s none except for amidi (a command line tool which does a great job BTW) and Jsynthlib. The latter one does not contain drivers for all of my devices and does not act as an ALSA sequencer client as I’d need it. So I was looking for a simple, generic tool with a graphical user interface, but to no avail.
This weekend I have written some code to deal with MIDI system exclusive data. Primarly I wanted to create a graphical tool to do backups of the memory contents of my synthesizers. There are some tools available for Mac OS X and Windows, but there was none for Linux. So I had written SimpleSysexxer back in 2006, but it has some bugs and its backend code is rather experimental. So I removed all backend code from it and started from scratch.
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I have continued writing some C++-code to stuff some openstreetmap data into an sqlite database file. The results look promising so far. Though it took 13.5 hours to convert a 20GB europe.osm file, the first tests show amazing speed when selecting some simple data from the dataset. However, I’m curious how more complex queries will perform.
Currently I use one normalized table for all tags, regardless if the tags are linked to nodes, ways or relations. This surely saves a good portion of disk space, but it seems to slow down queries a lot. Maybe I should drop the helper tables, stuff the tags into the table redundantly and just link them directly to the data objects by a foreign key.
Obviously I feel adventurous about all this SQL and database stuff :) .
Todays mapping tour was interrupted by some thunderstorms. Being out in the woods, I desperately desired a shelter. If you ever thought that mapping hunting stands is a useless waste of time, I can tell you it isn’t :) .
(Picture shamelessly stolen from Wikimedia Commons)
Thanks to a hint of HMK, the code to convert an OSM XML file to an Sqlite database is way faster now. Sqlite encapsulates any INSERT statement into a transaction per default.
To circumvent this behaviour, I just used a START TRANSACTION statement at the initialisation of the database and an END TRANSACTION statement (which is an alias to COMMIT) at the application’s exit. The code now is at least 10 times faster. All credits to HMK who shared the results of his research.
My familarity with databases might equal my knowledge of french language, thus the subject ;-) . More sincerely, I’m currently playing with some C++ code to stuff an OSM XML file into an sqlite database (which caused less posts on my blog, BTW). Firstly osm data in an sqlite database has been “requested” on the mailing lists more than once, and secondly querying such a database file will make the former tool, osmpoicreator, obsolete.
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I played a bit more with the file format of Numpty Physics, so here’s the result:
Quote from the Numpty Physics homepage:
If you wish to be clever, edit the level file directly – it’s just a simple text format.
As I wished “to be clever”, I did:
Basic Cubes
Interestingly, it is not possible to create perfect sqares. It is possible to draw “horizontal” lines, but as soon as you try to create vertical ones within a square, weird things happen. This is why the vertical edges of the squares seen above are not perfectly perpendicular to the baselines.
As I fixed my Numpty Physics installation yesterday, I grabbed the occasion and created my first two levels ever. Don’t assume I have solved them yet – it was difficult enough to design them!
As my webserver does not support direct loading, download the files to the tablet and move them to the following directory:
Hope you enjoy :) .
Joel Spolsky did me a favour and wrote an excellent article on “program managers”.
For this year’s biking trips, I want to replace my worthy Garmin GPSMap 60Cx with my Nokia N810. But unlike the GPSMap, the Nokia is neither water- nor shock-resistant. I searched the web for a bike mount, but that led me nowhere. So I came up with a rather DIY’ish solution, which I started today:
Gebabbel will be available in Ubuntu 9.04. Just type
sudo apt-get install gebabbel
to install it.
I feel honoured. May Gebabbel’s config files contaminate as many Ubuntu machines as possible ;-) .
I’ve just written a small Ruby script which can convert GPX waypoints to a sqlite database file to be used in MaemoMapper. The next time I get surprised by some rainy clouds while riding my bike in the forests, I will at least know where the next shelter can be found:
If you need some material to play with the script, I have just updated the POIs for europe as well. Hope you like it.
For personal requirements, I wanted to convert some POIs in GPX format to a SQLite database file. I did it in Ruby, which was my very first Ruby code ever. It turned out to be not that difficult, though Ruby (object orientation aside) is different compared to C++. The code I wrote, however, is not much object oriented; instead it looks more like C-code or a bash script containing lots of functions. Nevertheless it does the job.
I’m just playing around with Ruby “to get some work done™” (he he). I want to read some waypoints from a gpx file and stuff them into a sqlite database file. REXML wasn’t that intuitive. so I just installed the gpx GEM:
su
apt-get install rubygems
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/50755/libxml-ruby-0.9.8.gem
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/32625/gpx-0.4.gem
gem install libxml-ruby-0.9.8.gem
gem install gpx-0.4.gem
Will figure out tomorrow how to actually use it.
Sequence 15 shares some interesting details about the system exclusive manufacturer IDs in the MIDI specification. It reminds me of the days when I wrote SimpleSysexxer (see the products section of this page), a tool that allows to backup and restore the memory contents of MIDI instruments. (more…)
On 2008-11-28 I processed the whole planet file and extracted all kinds of POIs. The archieve contains GPX files (one for each category) and one huge GPI file, ready to use with your Garmin gadget. See the pages section on the right hand column for download links.
I just released Gebabbel 0.4. There’s not much new in this release:
Gebabbel has been downloaded over 2,500 times in 2008. Not that much compared to the 65,000 downloads of gpsbabel, but on the other hand, I’m of course proud having written an obviously useful piece of software.
Again, many thanks to Trolltech for offering their excellent Qt4 class library under an open source license.
Small hint: If you want to try the french translation on non-french systems, add the following line to the section »[General]« of the file GebabbelUserSettings.ini:
Language=fr_FR
