Lukas Plan came from Vienna to learn more about the Toporobot approach he intends to use. He is a very active austrian caver and excellent sketcher. He and his friends (e.g. Eckard Herrmann, Andreas Neumann, Michael Behm et al.) produce some of the best cave maps I have ever seen. I am looking forward to a very inspiring collaboration.
Lukas manages the data of some major caves (Dachstein and Tauplitz) and used Smaps and Compass. We successfully translated the Compass data and progressed nicely with the Smaps data. The process helped me a lot to understand the american formats and gave confidence in the feasibility of a common CaveXML standard. I enhanced the Perl script to convert Compass data: handle Windows - Mac char-set conversion, Backsights and .mak files. Quite important, the conversion back to Compass resulted with no loss of information. Translating Compass data is becoming routine work.
I will continue to work on the Smaps data conversion and expect to be finished 'real soon'. Lukas is marking up the Dachstein data so all comments and the hierarchical micro-structure within the directories can be extracted to trips, methods and folders. We will gradually introduce markup to steer the series building process. The next attempt after Smaps will be the conversion of Survex data from Thilo Müller. I am quite optimistic :-).
Andi Neumann suggested using the ActiveState Perl tool to create stand-alone versions of the conversion scripts. With this, users could convert their data themselves. Will look into this and provide the scripts as soon as they are more mature.
Georg Kaufmann pointed out that LimeLight did not work on Executor (MacEmulator) anymore. As I figured out, it had not worked since 1.6.2000 (version 8.8.6). A confusing error-message came up with: "Use a more recent version of 'Basilisk' to run LimeLight_F". As nobody else had complained, I wonder how many are still using Executor. Anyways, I fixed this in 8.9.9. You should be able to use LimeLight on Executor again. But I had to work around a very nasty emulation error: the 'round' function gave randomized results :-(. By the way, Basilisk had the same error until build 28052000. I had fixed this in version 8.8.1 and removed the fix in version 8.8.6, as it was not required anymore for Basilisk. Because of this rounding error, all versions before and also version _Sx had subtle numerical problems under Basilisk and Executor.
I am back from a cave surveyors meeting in Germany. It took place in the Vereinsheim on the Laichinger Tiefenhöhle, was pleasant, interesting, and very well organized. The Vereinsheim is quite incredible.
I went with Andreas Neumann and Kurt Zimmermann. Had a demonstration of Toporobot and Andreas gave an overview about his diploma-work on cave-cartography. More about his exciting work on his server: www.karto.ethz.ch/~an/.
Jochen Hartwig's CaveRender was shown. It has progressed very nicely over the past year. It sports a convenient user-interface and is simple to use. Various german cavers will use this program for data entry and quick visualisation . They only need to transfer data to Toporobot for specific needs, e.g. 3D visualisation.
Eric Sibert gave an impressive demo of CyberTopo. As CyberTopo can read and write Toporobot data, it is a promising partner program. The transfer is not yet fully implemented. Some features still need to be done. We will have to adjust our programs until everything works.
Tobias Bossert showed the latest (three nights old) version of AutoCAD für Höhlen. It runs on AutoCAD2000 as well as AutoCAD 14. Gottfried Buchegger launched a project to draw the map of Hirlatzhöhle in CfH and asked for participation. Thilo Müller, Andreas Neumann, and others volonteered to each draw a part of the map. This will serve as great test for AutoCAD. Hopefully, a common style will emerge, too. Also the interface between CfH and Toporobot will be tested and optimized. Once the Hirlatz data is completely transfered, all other CfH data will be converted and the old Lotus data-entry of CfH will be phased out.
Similarly, we will try to convert Thilo Müller's data of 'Totes Gebirge' from Survex to Toporobot and back. The survex data had been streamlined by Thilo to a form, that should allow easier conversion. He adopted a normalized form proposed by the survex group working in Kaninchenhöhle.
And there are plans to convert Lukas Plan's data of Dachstein-Mammuthöhle from Smaps to Toporobot. In this process, we hope to learn a lot about the different data models; something that could help in the design of an XML exchange format.
We installed version 8.9.7 successfully on various PC's using Basilisk.
As Eric Sibert, the author of the program CyberTopo, was in Laichingen too, we had long chats about ways to exchange data between our programs. His development is currently on the back-burner, as he took a post-doc post in Ulm.
To my great surprise, Eric offered me the Delphi sources of CyberTopo. This is really very kind. Thank you very much, Eric.
I will look into the code to learn more about his data model and hopefully to learn more about programming the PC. Eric had shown me Delphi already at our last meeting in France. That was very encouraging, as I was just starting to look into Delphi. I am convinced now. It seems to be a very good environment. It makes designing user-interfaces much easier. The language is quite similar to the ObjectPascal I am used to. And the same environment will come out soon for Linux: Kylix. If Kylix would come out on MacOS X, it would be ideal. Maybe there will be a CyberToporobot sometimes in the future... Not in the near future, though :-)