I wanted to setup a small and easy mailing list for the music group of the local choir society, the Gesangverein 1860 Konradsreuth. First, I messed around with Mailman, but I wanted something much simpler.
Well, I didn't find any program that matched my needs. So I wrote my own: the very simple mailing list. After some weeks of initial testing and bugfixing, it does it's job now. So it's time to do a release and call it 0.1 :-)
Perhaps, somebody out there also looks for such a small mailing list solution that is only email-controlled without a web interface or the features of a fully-blown mailing list. If so: have a lot of fun :-)
There has been no release of b8, my PHP implemented statistical spam filter, for quite a while now. But b8’s not dead! It does it’s work day for day, here and probably on many other homepages. Just to say it: development goes on!
At the moment, I’m working on improvements on the database. The goal is to abstact the database layer in a way so that SQL backends can actually use multiple columns to store the data and don’t have to emulate the Berekely DB behaviour with only key-value-storage. Additionally, the infamous lastseen parameter will be finally kicked out, as it never has been used for anything and just eats computing time and database space.
As this is a one-man project, it will probably take me some more time until the new b8 0.6 release will be done. But I’m working on it :-)
Seit Freitag bin ich stolzer Besitzer einer schicken Böhm-Klarinette aus dem Hause F. A. Uebel. Liegt gut in der Hand, spricht sauber an – ein guter Kauf! Von wegen die Deutschen können kein französisches System bauen :-)
Wer übrigens der Meinung ist, das deutsche System wäre besser als das Böhm-System, der möge sich beispielsweise den „Wild Cat Blues“ von Chris Barber oder – noch eindrucksvoller – „Auf der Autobahn“ von Slavko Avsenik anschauen. Auf einer deutschen Klarinette bricht man sich bei solchen Stücken schier die Finger ab. Die schnellen Wechsel zwischen h', dis'' und cis'' sind hingegen mit dem Böhm-System problemlos zu spielen.
Abgesehen davon war ich so frei, eine Grifftabelle für Böhm-Klarinette online zu stellen, die – anders als das, was man sonst so im Internet findet – nicht einfach von irgendwoher eingescannt ist und mit ungeklärtem Copyright online steht. Vielmehr hab ich die Tabelle selbst geschrieben und stelle sie unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC BY-SA zur freien Verfügung. Vielleicht braucht’s ja jemand.
Die Griffe, die mir als Saxophonist am einfachsten bzw. vertrautesten erschienen, habe ich jeweils als erste Variante genannt, sofern es alternative Griffe gibt. Man beachte aber vor allem die äußerst praktischen alternativen Griffe, die die Redundanzen zwischen den Klappen ausnutzen, die mit den linken und rechten kleinen Finger gegriffen werden!
Jetzt muss ich bloß noch ein bisschen üben, weil mit der Virtuosität auf der Klarinette ist’s noch nicht allzu weit her ;-)
Internet forums are full with the question "How can I convert GPX to SVG?" but no really good answer is given. At least, I didn't find one program that "just" does the job. At the end of the day, we're talking about my newly released gpx2svg program and why I had to write it here. Just to have the link in the first line ;-)
What did I want to do?
I tried to convert an OpenStreetMap-extracted coastline of Iceland to an SVG file. Here is the source GPS file, shown by GpsPrune:
What do we have?
There's an online service called gpsvisualizer by which a GPX file can be converted to SVG. It actually could do that with a proper projection, but the output of my dataset was scattered in thousands of small paths, so it was completely unusable.
Then, there is one small piece of code in the OpenStreetMap SVN repository that claims to "spit out a svg file" [sic]. It's called svg.rb and resides in the directory gpx2svg. But apart from the fact it seems to be unmaintained (just a few updates back in 2007) and there's no release, it just didn't work:
This is what I got using the gpx2svg/svg.rb script from the OpenStreetMap SVN repository, viewed with Inkscape:
Apparently, the script does also not use the Mercator projection. Notice the top-bottom compression.
gpx2svg
Self do, self have. Finally, here's a screenshot of the output of the gpx2svg program I wrote, also viewed with Inkscape. The whole coastline and all the islands around are closed paths that can be filled as-is:
The output fitted my needs. Probably, someone else also wants to do such a conversion. If so, have a lot of fun with it :-)
