I bought myself a shiny new little camera. It’s a Panasonic Lumix FX-10. There’s not much to say about it, except for my amazement at how cheap technology has become. That means, there will be a lot more photos in this blog once again.

The camera is 6 megapixels with decent image stabilization in the subcompact class. It uses SD cards, which just fits nicely with the eeePC heading the same way.

The following sentence contains lots of keywords to help people googling for error messages, please ignore if you did not come here by these means: The Panasonic Lumix DMC FX-10 gets easily detected as a USB external drive by ubuntu. Not by gphoto2 though, which aborts with an “unspecified error”. Disable automatic camera detection in System - Preferences - Removable Drives and Media.

Freimap, the topology and traffic analyzer I am working on in not so regular intervals has moved here. It used to be located at freimap.berlios.de. But since that latter service is showing more and more irregularities and little maintenance, I decided to set up my own little trac farm. Given the experience I have with my own server projects, there may be more downtimes, but at least I can fix it if it breaks.

Here’s a screenshot from the latest svn version, to keep you entertained. It shows flow data visualization from the freifunk network at the 24c3 in the bcc berlin.

Since I couldn’t find a library that implements the Schulze Method for Condorcet Voting in Java, I wrote one. Click here for the source code. It’s not extensively tested, but should work. Comments are welcome.

Having just returned from the twenty-fourth chaos communication congress, I am now preparing to make a relaxed transition to the next release of time 2.0. We’ve collected quite a bunch of measurements in the freifunk network set up at the congress, and I will parse through these during the next days.

The congress itself was great, as usual, and I sincerely suggest that you parse through the schedule and recordings of the talks if you haven’t done so already.

I am as always impressed by the sheer number of intelligent, creative people gathering in such a small place and the things that just emerge.

..and other pictures I made during my recent stay in down under, are now available in the gallery. Click on the sunset below to get there directly.

Things happen while blogs starve.

My plans to build a graphic tablet display got spoiled by the sudden appearance of Penabled tablet PCs on my horizon of knowledge. Especially the Tecra M7 convertibles which we will use for demonstration purposes at my company.

Recently, I spend a lot of time drawing maps for the OpenStreetMap project, which I fully support. Because information should be free.

I am planning to visit the Chaos Communication Camp in Summer. Hopefully, I will be able to build an Open Source Flying Drone at the workshop of the same name. Who knows, maybe one could use this for mapping even.

source: mikrokopter.de

And finally, I have just booked a business trip. Serious business, honestly. The conference venue is at a place which you can easily find when you enter “Surfers Paradise” at Google Maps. (Try and envy!)

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Sixties music is playing in my head.

KMLbag is a small PHP script which allows you to aggregate multiple KML files into one single file, via a web interface. For example, you and your friends may each create your own Google “My Map”. KMLbag will show the combination of all Placemarks in a single map.

Download KMLbag version 0.2 alpha. (+KMZ support)
(Older versions: KMLbag version 0.1 alpha.)

I will be heading west to Hamburg for the easterhegg during the weekend, where I was promised a place for my hammock. And I am hoping to abuse of the incredible synergies of a horde of caffeine-intoxicated code-monkeys to yak about Some Things Measurement[tm] in the freifunk network.

The above is a screenshot of freimap, a small visualization and analysis tool for olsr networks I wrote during the last weeks.

…well, at least I get to wake them up from time to time.

(more…)

..will not make it easier to read or compile, but entertain a simple mind like mine for hours.

wenn [ # $$DIR>- # eq “” ]; hallen Sie dann wider - n
“Verzeichnis zum zu unterstützen: “lesen Sie DIR FI