July 2008

For pretty long I thought that YouTube is a pretty useless and time-eating monster. Things have changed since I discovered some pretty interesting channels (and clips). A short primer:

• The Google Channel I really like their Tech Talk clips, featuring Linus Torvalds talking about git, the Google maps clips, etc.
• Sketchup Channel That software is amazing! Its so easy to use and yet you can make such good models (I can remember the time when I started learning Blender).
• Randy Pausch - Last Lecture That lecture is really a must-see. It’s so moving and positive.

A few days ago I experimented with some data files from the Open Street Map Project. Because I do most of my quick’n'dirty prototyping with Python, I looked for a Python module which would read osm files (which is, to be fair, really no problem because it’s clean XML).

I stumbled over Rory McCann’s python-osm lib over at Github. His version was missing the relation feature of the osm data structure but it was a one minute walk to implement it.

You can access the forked project @Github.