This and that...

Been too busy with work (and school) to do anything really interesting for Mapper the last couple of weeks. I'm rewriting how Mapper handles paths (tracks and routes) to be a bit more generic. And for routes be more suitable for handling routing internally. Also gypsy seems interesting, need to add support for that.

Oh, and I finally gave in and joined facebook, should be easy to find me.

g_convert (iconv wrapper) transliteration

I was playing with the g_convert iconv wrapper to get rid of all öäå and other special characters so searching for, lets say: "Hämeenkatu" would work with just "Hameenkatu" in Mapper. All I got was a bunch of ?????? instead.
Anyway, this blog post explains it.. annoying.

Some Mapper progress...

Mapper has now a pretty nice feature list:
* Can uses OSM data for Places, Streets and POIs
o Importer converts planet XML file to sqlite database with selected features
o Reads bzip2 compressed 0.5 API planet XML files
* POIs and Streets can be searched
* Displays street and place where you are
* Setting arbitrary destination point
* Setting destination to POI or Street
* Display rough estimate of distance to destination
* Periodic distance to destination announcement
* Show a bearing to destination in heading compass
* Show a bearing to next way point in heading compass
* Quick POI Add interface (Hard coded list for now)
* Click POI for information
* Displays GPS sky and signal information
* Route way point list with directions
* Simple Track point filter (by HDOP, VDOP and angle)
* Speech output for route way points and destination information
o Uses espeak+gstreamer
* Supports both normal Desktops (plain Gtk+) and Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810) (Hildon)

Unfortunately, I haven't had enough free time to work on routing just yet, but it will come soon I hope.

Next Mapper version

Work is getting in the way for all the fun stuff, but some nice Mapper features are planned for the next (1.0.4?) version:
- Search POIs
- Search streets
- Route waypoint display/list
- Handling of connections with libconic

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

So Nokia released a new version of the Internet Table, the N810.

But they made some strange design decisions once again.
- Keyboard must be open to use keypad
- Compared to the N800 they removed a memory slot
- Memory type changed again (RS-MMC -> SD -> mini/microSD)
- And the best of all, API and ABI break *again*
- No protection cover for the screen, like on the 770
- microSB connector, one more bloody cable to carry around and forget

Don't get me wrong, I like it. It looks very nice, much nicer than the toyish N800, but still not as good as the original IT, the 770.

Positive features:
- Slide keyboard
- Integrated GPS
- A bit more Mhz
- 2 Gig of internal flash
- Updated Gtk (even if 2.10 is already old)

The integrated GPS and keyboard should make it a very nice platform for doing OpenStreetMap work.

The next thing is to get Mapper running on Chinook and add some OSM editing features.

Mapper

I finaly got my maemo-mapper fork in such a shape that it should be usable. Check it out here.

OpenStreetMaping using satellite images

As I've written before, I help out with OSM, mainly around Turku, but thanks to Yahoo, OSM can now use high-res satellite maps for some cities. Unfortunately, only the Helsinki/Vantaa/Espoo region is available here in Finland, but I've been making some progress in drawing some of the missing main roads around Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa. I've also added some nice details like Helsinki-Vantaa and Helsinki-Malmi airports.

SPSS Dimensions survey system

Unfortunately I must work with the above piece of shit software for a while. I don't understand how the hell SPSS justify the cost.
The documentation is a mess, web interface works with IE only (there is not technical reason for this, gmail and other "web 2.0" interfaces are much more complicated than DimensionsNET), the web admin interface kicks me out from time to time without any reason and when I try to login again, it just gives an internal error (wait 4-5min and it works again).
Could be that it's just some simple configuration problem but unfortunately I'm not the administrator (and the server is located some 500km away so I can't even go and kick it myself...)

Well, back to building the survey...

Winter by a child choir...

I've been Tori Amos fan since 1994 (since Under the Pink), I even had a pretty popular web site from 1995 to 2004, but after that I just didn't have the time and bandwidth to host all the stuff anymore and thanks to youtube and torrents I don't think a plain old ftp site is even needed anymore.
Anyway, to the point... I was searching youtube for some clips from the new album (American Doll Posse) and found this a childrens choir singing Winter.
They have a pretty cool teacher... my music teacher sucked soooooooo bad.

Learning maemo/hildon

I started playing with the Nokia 770 development SDK last summer and ported an old gtk+ 1 based game (xhyperoid) to the device. First I had to fix it up to use gtk+ 2 and then hildonize it. Not too bad, the first packages had some silly key assignment bugs, but that is now fixed in the latest version, available on maemo garage.
The original xhyperoid has also sound effect support but it's using old OSS and maemo only supports gstreamer or esound, there is no Alsa or OSS emulation available. Anyway, I'm planning on getting sound support in the next version.

Learning gstreamer

gstreamer is quite nice... after some head scratching I was able to get a audio streamed from my desktop to my 770.

On the desktop:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="KNULLA.MOD" ! modplug ! audioconvert ! lame ! queue ! tcpserversink host=nokia770

and on the 770:
gst-launch-0.10 tcpclientsrc host=angel.tal.org ! dspmp3sink

Fun stuff! :)

OpenStreetMapping Finland

I got myself a Nokia 770 last summer and been using the most excellent maemo-mapper to navigate around Finland. I'm mostly very happy with it but route planning and place search is something I would really like to have (and for free that is). The biggest problem is that there is no free map data available (for €€€ you can always get the digiroad data but that is not an option).

On my quest to find map data I found out about the OpenStreetMap project. And since couple of months been eagerly adding as much data as I can gather when I drive around. It's not loong ago when Turku was almost empty, but now it's starting to look like a map. I think I'm mostly alone in Turku, but someone is working around Tampere and Helsinki. But we would really need more people involved.
There is still a lot of work to do but