After some more »out of memory«-messages by josm, I thought it's time to look out for alternatives.

For the openstreetmap-project, the two main editors are josm (java) and potlach (flash). I think using java probably wasn't a very wise decision (I still wonder how an app can get »out of memory« after loading about 5 MB of images, do they create a pixel class and store every pixel in an object?) and I don't like flash either.

There's another project called merkaartor and today I had a look. My first feeling is that it's promising. It has good performance, it does nice live-rendering and it supports the basic features (adding nodes and ways, up/downloading stuff to the osm-system).

Sure, comparing to the large list of plugin features josm has, it's limited. Maybe I'll try to hack in some bits I'm missing at the moment.

In my continuing effort to improve gentoo for geo-related stuff, I've just added a merkaartor package to portage.

I recently wrote about geo-tagged images. This makes use of the fact that different devices collect data and you can associate the data by the timestamp. It's most probably interesting for much more than gps/images.

While it's possible to get accurate timesetting by hand, it's usually not what you want. Preferably one wants to sync all devices with an internal clock automatically from the computer or some kind of network connection.

As a first step, we want to get our computer's time accurate. There are tons of tools out there, some linux distributions (and also windows xp) do this automatically on boot. I'm usually using rdate, it's small and simple:

rdate -s [any public timeserver]

There's a list of public time servers here. Other tools like netdate, ntpdate etc. will do it as well.

Now, my digital camera is a Canon Ixus 50. It uses PTP (picture transfer protocol) for data communication. If you have a PTP camera, most likely it supports time syncing. Syncing the camera time to the system time was recently added to libgphoto svn, but it's not yet available in a release. It also doesn't support any timezone management yet, so I'll get GMT time (while I live in the CET zone). The command to do it is:

gphoto2 --set-config synctime=on

If you don't have PTP, you're not completely lost. There's support for a lot of proprietary cameras in gphoto, some of them also support time syncing. Give it a try. I don't have information about usb storage devices (many cameras are just storage devices), links welcome.

Next device is my mobile phone, Nokia 6230i. As a mobile phone is permanently connected to the GSM-network, the obvious option would be time syncing over gsm. This protocol exists and most phones (including mine) support that. But bad luck, many mobile providers don't support it. So I'm out of luck here (vodafone, pointers to information about different provider support that are welcome).

Now, this device also speaks bluetooth, so timesetting via the computer should be possible. Both gammu and gnokii (the common applications to talk with all those proprietary mobiles out there) have a timesetting-option, but it rounds down the time to zero seconds, thus making it useless for exact time. I'm not yet sure if this is a limitation of the hardware or a bug in the software. An option would be to send the timesync-signal at the moment seconds turn to zero, but that would require application support, as there's a relevant diff between the application call and the moment the time get's set (because you have to ack the connection on the phone).
Though at the moment my phone needs manual timesetting, but the only data I'm collecting with it is gps-data, which get's it's timestamp via gps, so this is fine.

Over two years ago, it was announced that the security scanner nessus will no longer be free software starting with version 3.0. Soon after that, several forks were announced. For a long time, none of these fork-projekts produced any output.

openvas was one of that forks and from my knowledge the only one that ever produced any releases. It recently had 1.0-releases for all packages, I just added ebuilds to gentoo.

While openvas isn't perfect yet (many of the old plugins fail, because some files had to be removed due to unclear licensing), it's nice to see that we have a free, maintained security scanner again that will fill the gap left by nessus.