QJackControl Firewire Settings
Meanwhile I got the Phonic Helixboard Universal PHHB24U mixer connected to my Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope powered Dell Precision M 4300 notebook via IEEE 1394 (aka firewire). The basic setup is simple for an experienced Linux user, but not straightforward for an average computer user. So here are some hints what to do to get such a device up and running.
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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The sheer amount of comment spam I received was just incredible. I hope the WP-SpamFree plugin hopefully will do its job, so I can refrain from switching off the comments completely. Thanks a bunch, Sven, for evaluating various alternatives!
As I finally run an up-to-date operating system, I read this excellent rails tutorial. I’m not familiar with the hacking details of web technologies at all, so it’s time to get started.
Though I have not understood all details of rails yet, I am really impressed by its proper MVC design. I now need an idea for some application of my own to learn more. Accidentally, I already have a clue what I want to do, so I read another posting concerning the upload of binary data.
It’s summer, so I will not proceed that fast. But I hope to have a little app running before autumn.
OK, so it is done. A new operating system, much more up to date than the previous Gutsy installation, arrived on my hard drive. The system starts up really quickly, I’m impressed. KDE looks more modern than KDE 3, though I’m not that excited about its look and feel.
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Some years back, I somehow was the king of pop, errr, operating systems :) . I tried different Linux distributions in various flavours, like SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, and Gentoo. Not to mention Windows and Mac operating systems.
Things and interests have changed since then. Instead of exploring the secrets of operating systems, I started to write my own code, and last but not least, mapping and hacking for openstreetmap.org.
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I just noticed a blog of two people from Karlsruhe who plan a one-year (sic!) trip across the world. I mainly found it as they also use the OSM plugin for WordPress mentioned two days before. Nice to have the trip visualized directly in a blog posting. They are clever enough to spend christmas on New Zealand, when it is summer there and the inhabitants celebrate their holidays.
OK, got it. Here’s the biking tour I did on sunday. The cherries, grabbed directly from the tree in Büchelberg, tasted excellent :) .
Unfortunately I was trapped by some rain in Minfeld, and MaemoMapper once again crashed while being in the train to get back to Karlsruhe. Thus the gap in the track:
Use the control in the upper right hand corner to switch the layers. Note that you even can dis- and enable the track!
And here’s the code, just one single line, to include the map into this posting. Put the square brackets directly before and behind the line. I needed to insert a line break, as the parser of WordPress seems to be pretty greedy and otherwise would display a map instead of the code :) :
[
osm_map lat="49.03" long="8.26" zoom="11" gpx_file="http://www.christeck.de/wp-content/uploads/tracks/20090621-kandel.gpx"
]
And here’s the code of yesterday’s post, including the marker:
[
osm_map lat="49.02" long="8.17" zoom="11" marker="49.02,8.17" marker_name="marker_blue.png" marker_width="16" marker_height="16"
]
What a joy! A nice map in your wordpress blog! Without any coding! With zoom, pan and layer controls!
Thanks to all contributors of openlayers and Michael Kang once again for this marvellous OSM WordPress plugin!
A while back, I searched for an OSM plugin for the blog software which drives this web presence. It appeared to be in an early stage and the maintenance state was unclear, so I did not investigate it further.
Today its feature set sounded too promising and there has been a recent release – time to try it out.
As it is late, I have no time to figure all options out. To add a map view after the installation of the plugin, go to the settings section of wordpress and follow the instructions there.
And this is what it looks like, including a nice marker. “Where have you been today?” – “Well, cycling via Büchelberg to Kandel.”:
There are rumors you can even display tracks in gpx and kml format on top of it. Tomorrow’s evening is saved. Thanks Michael Kang :-) .
After some months of abstinence, I updated Navit from SVN and had a closer look of what has changed. Navit supports different “vehicle” types (such as car, bike, horse and pedestrian) for a while now. Meanwhile it also supports vehicleprofiles. A vehicleprofile can be linked to a vehicle and contains roadprofiles. This way it is possible to define which ways a “vehicle” uses for routing. It is even possible to pass speed and routing weight parameters to a roadprofile. This actually means that one can define the routing behaviour via Navit’s configuration file, navit.xml. I immediately started to play with it to get bike routing:
Bike routing in Navit
I have updated the panorama picture of the pass of ambelos and added two more panoramas of the Lassithi plateau to the posting. If that’s not yet enough for you, I have some more panoramas.
Again I lost some tracks using MaemoMapper – which of course is all my fault, because I neglected Hakan’s tipp :) .
It usually happens when the device shuts down due to a drained battery while MaemoMapper is running. Though Sqlite supports transactions (actually it uses them per default), it seems that a system shutdown causes MaemoMapper to leave a defective database file. Of course, badman only appears if you have no backup available. If you do backups, nothing will happen :) .
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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.
If you didn’t attend this year’s Linux Audio Conference, you might be interested in Rui’s report.
@Rui: A trackback-URL would be fine :)
Due to some unknown accident, Maemo Mapper (which is an excellent application, BTW) dropped a huge portion of the trackpoints of today’s hiking trip. I have no clue what happened. The remaining trackpoints start around an area where the tablet startet to complain about the battery being low. I exchanged the battery ca. 15 minutes later, so maybe the system notification triggered some unwanted behaviour. As I was mapping live using osm2go, it’s not really a severe loss, but I wanted to geocode some pictures I have taken.
What I learn from this is that I should make backups of the track while still on tour.
As the OSM servers are up and running since Tuesday, I did some live mapping using the famous osm2go yesterday. Unfortunately it has problems uploading the edited data. The error it emits reads as:
Uploading to http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6
Create changeset failed, code: 417 (Expect rejected)
Upload done
Process finished.
Others also had similar problems, so it should be possible to locate the issue during the next couple of days.
Not really hot news, but the planned collaboration of Wikipedia and Openstreetmap is overdue. There are some (german language) articles (netzpolitik.org, Schwarzwälder Bote) and blog entries (Raphael Mack, Der Schockwellenreiter) available. More details can be found in this wiki.
After checking the program, you might be interested in the life streams of the LAC. You can use VLC to attend.
Sebastian Spaeth points to a study (german language) of the ETH Zürich which sheds a little light on the motivation of Nokia and open source hackers who collaborate on the internet tablets.
