rullzer

This weekend I spend getting the srtm data (thanks NASA) into postgres to use it. To do that I used Sjors way to do that which is with python. I got it to work in no time on my Gentoo-amd64-dev-box. That was Saturday.

Now Sunday I spend all day trying to get it to work on the dutch openstreetmap server. Which was quite a bigger challenge. Since well on CentOS 5 not all packages were correct. So I ended up compiling a lot myself, this however is pain in the ass if it turn out you have to compile almost all dependencies yourself to.

But it works! Check it on altitude.openstreetmap.nl. There you won’t find much but check the wiki page for more info on how to get data out of it. We only host the srtm data for the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. This since the data is quite large and well, I am not the only one using the server.

But back to the title. YOURS is an OpenStreetMap routing service. Which is kick-ass by the way. YOURS supports the altitude data and give the altitude profile of your route. Right now only a plot of the altitude is shown but I guess we get some nice stats soon!

Now for a little problem YOURS does not work really well when using Konqueror. I tried to figure out why but I’m not really a java script expert. So if you are and have some free time. Please find the problem

Now for another project idea of mine (probably around Christmas): porting Sjors python implementation to C. This since well. I love C.

Yesterday Sander and I released a new version of QtMPC (0.4.1).

However when thinking about some of the features we would like to have in QtMPC we once again got annoyed by the MPD protocol. One of the main issues we had was that it is not event based, or even publish-subscribe. You have to ask for every little detail you want. This is a choice and it is true that this way you do not get unwanted messages thus generate unwanted network traffic.

But we feel that some sort of event based protocol will do a better job here. Lets say in the default nothing is send as well. That way mobile clients can still control the player without receiving anything unwanted. Or just subscribe to events related to playback. This way mobile clients are still supported but again. They do not have to request the status ever x seconds. They just get a message once had changed.

For full blown clients event bases is also a positive thing. For example the reaction time. When adding a new song. Right now this has to be noted by the client when requesting the version of the playlist. A simple message from the server saying playlist current newsong …….. (or something like that) could be send right after the song is actually added. It just makes things easier.

Another thing that kind of bother us that there was no inotify support. This would be great however. Lets say you have a music server running on your server. And add some new music to the collection. It would be best of course if it would find the new music. Add it to the database and notify the clients of a change in the music library.

Now we have not written any code yet. But we are thinking about it. For the music playback part we are planing to use gstreamer. Since well it already supports a lot of audio formats. And why reinvent the wheel right?

I’m pretty sure you all know what I’m talking about. When you are at some site and you fill in a form. Doesn’t matter what is is for. And you submit (everything you entered is OK) and a warning box pops up telling me that everything is send.

First of all why is this a Warning? I mean I know I pressed Send. And besides that if it is a waring they should provide me with contact information on how to get my submission removed.

Now apart from the warning box it could be a message telling me everything is inserted into the database. Let say they have some java script in the background that does that and once everything is inserted it gives the warning (still a warning is wrong but OK). However I checked the source of the site and guess what? All the button does is generate the pop-up after which the stuff is submitted.

Now I’m wondering why people do this? It does not look good, since it is a wrong pop-up box. It does not speed up the process. It is wasting my time. Which in general I do not like.

I really like bash.org. However there is no RSS feed available for the latest quotes. This makes me sad. However after a 15 minute php session (which was more than enough php for me) it is working.

Checkout my bash.org rss feed. It updates every 15 minutes. Enjoy

It has been long since my last post. Too long. I won’t fill you up on all the things I have done. Or maybe I will in other posts. But today I want to talk about openstreetmap.

As you might (or might not) know openstreetmap aims to provide a free (as in speech) map of the world. You can help by adding or editing the map. This is what I have been doing the last couple of months. Mostly fixing roads or adding new cycleways. Now of course cycling is good exercise. And it feels good to contribute to a free world map. However the real kick is seeing your changes of your work!

This can be seen on the main website. However that is only updated once a week. There are several other tile servers that serve a part of the map. These servers are generally updated more often. However when you use a tile server you are can’t change the rendering. So how great would it be to create your own rendering?

Check out my wiki entry. Of course it is a wiki so add all improvement you can think of.

So at my fathers work the pc’s had to be replaced. It took a while since he works at a the CWI a semi goverment thing in the Netherlands. However for a soft price I could get 2 pc’s. Compaq’s. 2Ghz, 256mb RAM. So pretty nice desktop pc’s for my sisters. And well since they are almost identical I can build binary packages on each system and use them on the other.

Now I won’t stop compiling all my pacakges but this gives great advantages If I (might come soon) have to handle some homogenous systems. Since well if they are identical in hardware and you want to do the same stuff of them why not reuse the packages that are already build.

Now with those two computers this brings the total number of computers at my folks at 7. I’m secretly building my own server farm to take over the world in case you are wondering.

Now abut those 7 computers:

• Desktop downstairs - Running Windows
• Mothers laptop - Running Windows
• My old laptop - Running Gentoo
• Server - Running Gentoo
• Oldest Sister Computer - Running Gentoo
• Youngest Sister Computer - Running Gentoo
• My testbox - Running Gentoo

Now the two windows boxes are in a Domain controled by samba. It works. However the gentoo boxes connect all much easier. Man i love nfs!

Ofcource I have my current laptop which is also running gentoo. So linux is taking over at least over at my folks. I’m guessing it takes only a couple of months before I can confince my dad to move to linux to That would be a great day….

So my base system is running smooth. Distcc and crossdev are up and running and the server is doing a great job compiling everythin for it. NFS is running which safes a lot of space and keeps me from cleaning the distfiles every day. Since well 4 gb is not a lot :P.

Other than that I’m supprised how fast the system boots. I guess it is because there is not much hardware to detect. Other than that the kernel is also very small and when I get over at my folks tomorrow I can get it even smaller I believe.

Right now KDE is compiling since I promised my gf’s father to check what the old thing could do. currently I’m at packag e 146 of 192 since this morning. So that will be done tomorrow. And it will be time to run KDE…. that would be the ultimate test. Howver I feel fluxbox or something will run a lot smoother. But maybe I’ll test that later.

I’m wondering what I could do with the laptop. Cause it would be nice to put it to good use. Now useing it for presentations or something would be great. Or other than that using it for some basic school stuf for one of my sisters or something could also be the case. Ah well I’ll check it tomorrow

After going trough my /usr/portage/distfiles/ I found a lot of tarballs that belong to versions of packages that are no longer in portage. Now these tarballs take up a lot of space. Doing a nice rm -rf * will ofcource take care of the problem but then all the tarballs that are still in portage will have to be downloaded again if once of the gentoo boxes in the network needs it (currently 4). Now it is not that I have a datalimit but it is a matter of principle.

So there must be an easier solution. I’ll try to look into it but python is writen in portage so maybe I can just include it and check for all packages and versions and remove the tarballs that have no corresponding ebuild. This script doesn’t have to run every day since it would take some time I guess but once a week or so just to keep the system clean.

Please let me know if anybody is interested in such an app or knows if it already exists…

So this weekend my girlfriend father pointed out that they had an old laptop lying around. I decided it would be fun to run gentoo on it and use it for anything I could think of. First to give you an impression

Compaq Armada 100s
550 Mhz Cpu
56 meg ram
8 meg video-ram

This laptop is old so that means the CD-ROM does not react that well to CD-R’s. This is bad when you want to boot from a CD-ROM. But I got it working. Now after booting the kernel (nofb ofcourse, and more options). An error messgae kept spamming my screen wich was caused by udev loading the usbmodule (while I gave nousb as one of the options to the kernel). This is not what should happen so I filled a bug (#206954).

The solution was easy just rmmod uhci_usb and it stopped. So that ment no USB support into the kernel. The USB port (yeah only 1) is know to be broken on this laptop I read on other sites.

Now since I wanted to use the laptops full potential I ofcourse changed the CHOST etc. But a downside ofcourse was that gcc and glibc needed to be recompiled….. It is compiling gcc for 10 hours straigt now. And I have no idea how long it will keep on going. But if it isn’t finished in another 10 hours It will be killed and I have to think of something else.

I’ll keep you posted on the process with this laptop.

It has been some time since my last post where I wrote I had the need for a Project in the vacation. And well I found one and altough the vacation is already over for a week I’m still (when I’m nog busy for school) working on it with Sander. For more info about why and the program see his blog.

But in shoort. We are working on a Qt4 frontend for mpd: QtMPC. So far it is already useable. Sander even kicked apache from his media PC since he didn’t use it anymore. We are far from supporting everything MPD supports but we are getting there. Soon (I hope) 0.3 will be released since we are making good progress but ofcourse the svn is available all the time

svn co http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/svn qtmpc

Working on QtMPC made me realise that I had way to many music files. So maybe it is also time for me to get a media PC. However the budget is limit. But after talking to Sander yesterday I realised that an old pc would also work. However they make way to much noise. So right now I’m looking for some kind of old thin-client or something like that. Since crosscompiling can be done on the server or on my old laptop.

Now I could ofcourse get a cable and connect it to the server and the stereo but I’d rather not have alsa running on my server. Also if it is a pc with lets say 300 mhz. That would be more than enough to play music. It would consume much less power than my old laptop (wich is currently hooked up to the stereo). So that is again a big plus.

Ah well maybe when my next salary arrives.