Social Science?

I have to give a short talk to educational science students about the usage of PowerPoint. So I am reading up a lot about PP and presentations, but also tried to get informed what exactly educational science students do...

I tried Wikipedia, the german version has some definition of Pädagogik, mainly saying, paedagogues don't know for sure themselves what it is all about. It has something to do with education and teaching, but most of it seems to be discussing about what exactly this branch of science is all about. From the main page I went to some special branches, which consisted of bulleted lists saying author A thinks that this branch does a, author B thinks it does b etc.

It seems it is a well defined science...

I prefer the natural sciences: if it runs away, it's biology; if it blows up, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics. No need to argue what is the actual field of each science. Physics is whatever a physicist does...

Nuts

European buerocrats have decided (well, wanted to decide, they are not yet completely in power) that it is dangerous to drink alcohol and we need warning labels on the bottles. Because that stopped everybody smoking. And if you forbid everything which may cause harm, then nobody will get harmed. Yep. Ban DHMO! It's the chemical with one of the highest dead tolls...

My new scanner didn't come with a scanning software. It didn't have a driver. It had a Solution Center, which updates itself continously to give me solutions. Yehaa, I never wanted my scanner to scan images, I always wanted it to provide me with solutions. (And by the way, the black and white solutions it provides are crap. I tried a program found on the net which still does the scanning instead of solving problems and this actually delivered brilliant images). In ages when all scanners are cheap and deliver a gazillion of dpi, well, that in these times the important thing would be supporting even esoteric OSes like Linux and having good software would improve sales, nobody would ever think of that.

Sony made it illegal for anybody else to sell their stuff. After infesting harmless people's computers with spyware. After making a lot of other decisions that made me never to buy a Sony product again.

This list of random rants could go on and on. The essence: all those important decision makers have completely lost their contact to reality. Why should they still be in contact with it? They get millions of dollars each year, they don't need to interface with the lifes of ordinary people. They don't get alcohol with warning labels, they sniff other stuff. They don't scan images, they let their underlings do it. And if those underlings complain, well, get new underlings which don't. They don't buy Sony stuff. They own Sony.

Can somebody remind me why the left doesn't address this but still discusses if Lenin or Marx was the better dialectic materialist (or whatever)? Why aren't people rioting in the streets? Why don't managers get shot? Why do we still vote for those idiots which support this?

We do not have to live in misery. Even if HP would make scanners that scans images instead of providing solutions they would get rich. Even if somebody else than Sony would sell PSPs, Sony would survive. Making people happy is the better option for all sides. This is what nobody seems to have understood (well, there are some, but usually these people are either highly drugged or got nailed to a cross and become the symbol of studid fundamentalist who also didn't get it).

I am angry.

As a small boy I had two dreams, and I was torn between them. At times I wanted to become scientist, and at other times I wanted ro run away and join the circus. But thanks to God and a career in the Departement of Energy's laboratories, I've been able to fulfill both dreams

C. Paul Robinson - Director of Sandia National Labs

Parmiggiano crisps with Goat cheese mousse

Recommendations

Today e-bay recommended as an ideal birthday present: a PhD...

Heinrich Heine

Mit dummen Mädchen, hab ich gedacht,
Nichts ist mit dummen anzufangen;
Doch als ich mich an die klugen gemacht,
Da ist es mir noch schlimmer ergangen.

Die klugen waren mir viel zu klug,
Ihr Fragen machte mich ungeduldig,
Und wenn ich selber das Wichtigste frug,
Da blieben sie lachend die Antwort schuldig.


Listening to Heinrich Heine Lyrik und Jazz

Computers are teh suck

Why doesn't it just work? (And don't tell me to get a Mac or Windows or whatever, because they also suck...)

Apparently during the update from dapper to edgy, for some reason one of the essential system packages got lost, so I didn't have any consoles. After about 2 hours I fixed this.

Then I tried to get the external monitor thingy working. I sometimes got output in weird colours, sometimes nothing, sometimes X wouldn't start. Very annoying. Now I have this section in my xorg.conf and it works, cloning my screen to the external output:


Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Option "backingstore" "true"
Option "XVideo" "true"
Option "VideoRam" "65536"
Option "XvMCSurfaces" "6"
Option "DynamicClocks" "true"
Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Option "Clone" "true"
Option "DevicePresence" "yes"
EndSection


Dear unknown Physicist...

... staying in the ground floor of my hostel: If you watch porn movies on your laptop, please close your window. It's not enough to close the curtain, you can still hear the sound. And yes, also ordinary people with a healthy sex live watch porn movies occasionally, not everybody who watches porn movies on a laptop is a socially disturbed jerk. But taking into account at where I am staying right now, this second type is much more probable...

I want to go back to real world.

On shift

So, I am on shift again. This time even shift leader, responsible for the experiment, taking care that everybody gets good data to analyse, leading spin physics to better understanding of the proton, advancing human knowledge, working for a better humanity...

Basically I am sitting around, until something beeps. Most of the times the beeping goes away if you ignore it for a while. If it doesn't go away, I'll call somebody. And I have to do some paperwork, filling out forms with data which is also automatically written to disk, just to keep me busy and make me look at screens. (This is the difference to Target Shift, where you just sit around, without any paperwork)

And you can't really work here, as there is a constant hissing of pumps, computers and air condition, the air is dryed, the light is bad and you sit seven floors underground...

Optics

I have been to an optician, because I get headaches after a couple of hours working in front of a computer. Saturday I went to one of those big chain opticians, it turned out that they don't measure your eyes on a saturday. I had to wait some 10 minutes to get attended (although being nearly the only customer there) and then they didn't seem to be very competent. They did arrange the frame of my old glasses though.

Today I went to a local optician, only in Erlangen, and this since a long time. The shop was full of customers but I was attended as soon as I entered it. The senior boss took the measurements, then four people helped my chosing the frame. I was impressed by the friendliness and competence...

And finally the arranged my old frame again, seeing that it wasn't done properly, and suddenly the world got three dimensional again and the headaches got better... So far for the big chains.

In a week I will have my new glasses and hopefully see much better (and look better ;-) )

Thank god it's friday

It's weekend! This week I actually did something for my thesis, I did some physics stuff...

It seems that I need a new bed or at least a new cushion, I didn't sleep very well the last weeks, waking up everything hurts and I am as stiff as a ironing board. My feet are bad again, so no sports, maybe some cycling on sunday, depending how drunk I get tomorrow and how bad my feet are on sunday.

Anyway, nothing changed, everything is as good or bad as usual.

Avast!

Maybe a good alternative: now there is a german PIRATE party. HARRR! And hope you all enjoyed the international talke like a pirate day, ye landlubbing beauties and jimlads.

Wer ko' der ko'

I just did race a highly pimped Mercedes convertible, tuned by AMG or something, blasting RAP music out of it's speakers, roaring exhaust and everything. I won. The driver got seriously pissed when I overtook him three times at a traffic light. On my bike :-) Wer ko' der ko'

Motivation

Everytime I manage to get a faint bit of motivation, just so slight that I would actually start doing something useful, I get a call, a mail or an IM which makes it go away instantly. Today I was asked if the rumors that I will be in HH for the next three weeks are true. I have not heard about it. I hate it when I am being managed and nobody even bothers to tell me...

Somebody should tell some people that it is all nice if they make plans for others. But they shouldn't be surprised if they hear a fuck off as an answer if they don't ask, don't tell...

Workflow

This is the bash script I use to convert my photos from RAW. It works most of the time well, only a few pictures need hand-treatment...

#!/bin/bash
set -e
ext=.CRW

for i in *$ext; do
# Get basename of file for easier treatment
bn=`basename $i $ext` ;
#
# Convert from RAW
#

# The following line converts directly to jpg without any treatment
# dcraw -a -c $i | ppmtojpeg > ${bn}.jpg;

# This should do some basic image treatment:
# dcraw -a -4 $i ;
# convert -normalize -gamma 1.8 ${bn}.ppm ${bn}_dcraw4_normalized.jpg ;
# rm $bn.ppm;

# Including an ICC profile, this gives the best results for my screen
dcraw -4 -c -w -m $bn.CRW | pnmnorm -bpercent 0 -wpercent 0.1 -brightmax | pnmtotiff -truecolor >temp.tif;
tifficc -w -i /PATH/TO/eos10d-linear-8apr2004.icc temp.tif ${bn}.tif;
convert $bn.tif ${bn}.jpg ;
rm $bn.tif ;
rm temp.tif;
#
# Copy and set EXIF stuff
#
exiftool -TagsFromFile $i $bn.jpg;
exiftool -Author="My Name" -OwnerName="My Name" -UserComment="(c) My Name" $bn.jpg;
rm $bn.jpg_original;
#
# rotate according to EXIF (only needed if dcraw only is used)
#
# exiftran -i -a ${bn}_dcraw_only.jpg;
done


Home Again

So, I returned safely from 4 weeks of dives, hiking attempts, helping the revolution and tanning on the beach of luxury hotels (without actually staying at them, but at better places instead...). Now I face the threat of converting about 1000 Photos from RAW to something readable, of selecting a couple of them for the web, some more of them to show to friends and to actually get some friends to see them... (I might use bribery for the last task, some food and wine always helps to get people interested in slide shows ;-))

[Starting Computer and Photo babble now, non-geeks please skip the following]
To convert the RAW files to JPGs, I am experimenting with various methods, all involving dcraw. I am still a bit undecided which gives the best results, but the third method looks nice on my screen most of the time, although sometimes a bit on the blue side... I have put some sample images below, all taken at Lusco Fusco in Erlangen at 2nd of Septembre.

Method 1
dcraw -a -c foo.CRW | ppmtojpeg > foo.jpg

Method 2
Inspired by this webpage:
dcraw -a -4 foo.CRW ;
convert -normalize -gamma 1.8 foo.ppm foo.jpg ;


Method 3
Using an ICC color profile for an EOS 10D camera, which uses a similar sensor as my EOS 300D and as found here:
dcraw -4 -c -w -m foo.CRW | pnmnorm -bpercent 0 -wpercent 0.1 -brightmax | pnmtotiff -truecolor >temp.tif;
tifficc -w -i eos10d-linear-8apr2004.icc temp.tif foo.tif;
convert foo.tif foo.jpg ;

Examples
dcraw only.
dcraw to 16bit pnm, normalizing, converting to JPG
dcraw to 16bit tif, applying ICC profile and converting to JPG

dcraw only
dcraw and normalize
dcraw and ICC profile

dcraw only
dcraw and normalize
dcraw and ICC profile

It never rains in southern california

It might not rain in southern california, but it always rains a lot when I go the the Peneda-Geres National Park... Which on one hand was bad, because I could not go hinking, on the other hand th ehiking path I wanted to do the first day would have led me directly into a forest fire, so although I did get wet to the bones, at least I did not get burned.

I went for a car trip instead, which was really nice, although I will never go again to a megalithic site close to the road again. Close is relative and might be long enought to get you really wet in the rain and if you have seen one megalithic thing, you have seen all. It's just at the name suggests some big stones...

Shown on the picture above are espigueiros, little stables to dry corn in them despite the usual quite wet weather there.

Changes

Some things never change, some do. I still get handshakes from the waiters at the cafe I spent half o my stay in portugal. On the other hand, having a coffee and a cognac there now costs a fortune compared to the good ol' days. But for compensating it was full of nice girls (unfortunately half of them french). One of them looked like the twin sister of a girl I know from Erlangen...

Tomorrow I will go up north, to the Serra do Geres, trying to find a camping site in the part which is not burning. If you don't hear anything from me in the next five weeks, I got a stroke while trying to do some walkabouts in open sun with something like 32°C...

El umbelico del Mondo

Today I drove from Lisbon to Coimbra via Almourol (a very interesting castle of the Knights of the Temple), Abrantes (a village in Ribatejo which looks like any other village), Vila de Rei and Lousã. I stopped at the geodesical centre of Portugal, which you can see above. The big pilar is the first geodesic mark, marking the first starting point of mapping portugal. It was discovered heroically in 18something. Thank god it was on a hill, else the triangulation would have been tiresome....

The little pilar in front is the geodesic mark TF4, which marks todays starting point of triangulation. At this place next to Vila de Rei there is the most wimpy museum I ever visited (it's for free, else I would be annoyed...). The only things on exhibition are a theodolite, a leveler and a computer with a GPS from Leica. Together with 4 posters on Geodesy, this is the whole museum... If it wouldn't be for the cafeteria, this would loose any reason for existence.

I'm Leaving on a Jet plane

Plane
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Don't know when I will be back again...

Actually I do, 4th of september. But I'll be gone nonetheless for the next four weeks. I won't respond to mails, if not considered important (important in this case means either from good looking girls or telling that the detector has blown up (in the second case the answer will be "Yooohoooo"...))

I may post some stuff here and put photos on flickr... But I am on holiday, so I will keep my contact to the internet to a minimum.