I have just integrated a french translation (credits to Lionel Maraval), some copyright files (thanks to Hanno Stock) and the gpsbabel sources into the Gebabbel source tree. If I survive struggling with the release system of sourceforge.net, I will release the source and binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X during the next couple of days. If you want to help testing, feel free to catch the preliminary source package.
Archive for the ‘Products’ Category
Preparing 0.4 release of Gebabbel
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Why »solution requests« suck
Thursday, November 27th, 2008codesqueeze.com has an article about »solution requests«. I wholeheartedly agree. Quote:
Solution requests are a Usability Engineers nightmare
When a feature request already has a solution, developers never have the chance to learn the problem domain that they are developing for.
Probability is you have a solution that only solves one persons needs.
OSM hacking weekend at the Linuxhotel
Friday, November 21st, 2008Just got the info that we actually will be 7 people in the VW Caravelle on our tour to the Linuxhotel. The weather forecast does not bring us good news, as snow is expected. I’ll thus avoid to use the A45 and take the A3 instead.
I’m curious about the 22 people who will attend, as I do not know 16 of them. Great occasion to know each other and to link faces to e-mail addresses :) .
SRTM tiles processed, distribution method still unknown
Saturday, November 15th, 2008OK, I finally managed to process the SRTM data for the whole world. The tiles are zipped individually, wasting 61G of disk space. I do not know yet how to distribute it, though. I’ll first announce it via some mailing lists to get an idea how much interest there is (I guess: less). Maybe I should Bittorrent give a try. Would be interesting, as I never used it much. (more…)
Deflating the whole world
Friday, November 14th, 2008As all srtm tiles are processed, I’ll compress them as zip files tonight. Well, the command is simple:
for i in $(ls); do zip $i.zip $i && rm $i; done
World creation finished – almost
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008The great script processing height lines from srtm data processed its last tile on 2008-11-10, 15:31h. The second quadrant took the most time, as it contains huge portions of the landmasses in Africa, Europe and Russia.
Some particular tiles are missing for some reason, and the “border” tiles (north-, south-, east- and westmost tiles) haven’t been processed at all. srtm2osm cannot cope with longitudes like 180 and -180 or latitudes like -90 and 90. My attempt to deduct one tenth of those values led to unacceptable system resource usage by srtm2osm. Probably I will not care much about those tiles and process them any time later. But I need to identify and process the other aforementioned tiles.
SRTM-processing – the never ending story?!?
Saturday, November 8th, 2008Well, since I reformatted my hard drive using ext3, the scripts are running without any further issues. Quadrants 1, 3 and 4 already are finished, but quadrant 2 still will need a while: It just hit lat 35 and thus still has to process central europe and russia completely.
After that, I’ll process the boundings of the map; the current run omits the outmost rows and columns of tiles due to a limitation in srtm2osm: it cannot cope with the values of 180 and -180 for the longitude. So I decided to process the 1076 tiles of the bounds as an extra run.
And on the 8th day, god redesigned the whole planet…
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008Due to some problems concerning file naming and filesystem errors, I decided to completely restart from scratch. I have dropped all blanks from the file naming scheme, and prefixed them so there are no leading dashes in any of the filenames. (more…)
World creation script hits Karlsruhe
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008Today at 13:05h the script which creates contour lines for the complete world hit Karlsruhe. I’ve not been at home all day, so sorry for the delayed post :) .
“Earth-creation script” continues
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008Due to storage space limitations, the “earth-creation” script was discontinued for a couple of days. Meanwhile it is up and running again, processing the globe around N30°.
“Resurrection” of various Papers, SimpleSysexxer and Gebbabel
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008As promised, I started to recover some stuff from the abandoned pages. See the pages section, where you’ll find products of mine like various papers, Gebabbel and SimpleSysexxer.
Old homepage abandoned, but still reachable
Monday, September 15th, 2008I moved the old stuff out of the way. It’s still available, just in case someone is looking for the old files. I will restore the old stuff “peu à peu”, just as time permits.
C++ – loading a binary file
Wednesday, May 25th, 2005I didn’t expect it wouldn’t be that difficult to load a simple binary file in C++ (of course, I’m talking about a sysex file).
The problem is not to load it to the heap, the problem is to find documentation to do so. Most documents load text strings – but I cannot use strings for binary files.
First steps in C++
Monday, May 16th, 2005A friend has politey written a wee small Qt application for me to get me started. I improved it so it now requests and loads a binary file from the hard drive when pressing a button. Pressing an other button writes the hex code of the data to stderr.
I already know that I will be interested in multithreading as soon as possible. When writing the data to stderr one can already see the GUI to freeze for a short time – and the data has only been 34KB :) .
I wonder that it was that difficult to load binary data. I guessed that for a computer it should be very simple to handle it. But no, various data types are represented by a different amount of bytes on different platforms/architectures. Furthermore, you need to know that if you load binary data into a string object the machine will convert bytes that look like row endings. Urgh.
C++ programming
Sunday, May 8th, 2005I finally decided to learn some C++ so I can help improving existing free software and to be able to create own helper applications.
In fact, C++ seems to be a language difficult to learn. Having some knowledge in Basic and shell scripting, C++ is more complex and abstract.
The problem is not to start writing some C++, the problem is to get enough knowledge to understand existing code.
I fear it will last a long time until I can read code written by others, and I’m curious if I will continue learning C++.
Linuxtag Papers
Sunday, May 1st, 2005Due to the fact that I needed to write the two papers for the Linuxtag, I still haven’t had the time to write down my thoughts about the Linux Audio Conference last weekend. Friday in the evening hours I submitted the papers, so this task is finally finished.
LAC ahead
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005Finally I finished my slides for the talk on the Linux Audio Conference, while watching some streams about the new pope.
A german traditionalist. Well, if I were christian, I’d be disappointed.