Gumboots

[...]
It was in the early morning hours
When I fell into a phone call
Believing I had supernatural powers
I slammed into a brick wall
I said hey, is this my problem?
Is this my fault?
If that's the way it's going to be
I'm calling the whole thing to a halt

You don't feel you could love me
But I feel you could
You don't feel you could love me
But I feel you could
[...]


Just finished watching Graceland, still one of the best concert videos ever.

The End is nigh!

I am running out of "Blabla"-Parts to write for my thesis. I already wrote "The Experiment", "The Theory" and "A general Description of Stuff". Now just two chapters are left: "Stuff I actually did" and "Conclusions and Outlook". Those will be the hard part...

Sommerloch

Today at the physics institute, around 5pm: we were having coffee and chatting, the medicine physics people were playing cards, the work shop people were already at home. Only the astro-particle people where working and appearing generally over-motivated. They scare me...

Circles

A possible solution to my current bad mood would be finishing my thesis and getting a girlfriend. Which won't happen soon because of my bad mood not providing sufficient motivation do finish the first and get anywhere close to the second. Catch 22...

Hiking

Größere Kartenansicht

I have been hiking again this weekend. I started to do the Xacobeo, St. James Way. There is a way which passes close to Erlangen, which I eventually want to do from here to Santiago. I started in Kronach, which is the northern most point of the bishopry Bamberg (which this year celebrates 1000 years of existence). I managed to do 28km, which I think is not bad for a start. Most of it was asfalt, so now my ankles hurt like hell... Next time I'll take a bike with me.

Just to scare you (and myself): sunday, 6:25am and I am having breakfast :-)

Gajo Simpático listens to music

A couple of Albums I bought recently:

dunkelbunt - Morgenlandfahrt

"A mix of Dub, Reggae, Bossa, Jazz, Electronics, Trip Hop and Break Beats woven with a Balkan Twist" says the liner note. It'S an intercultural mixture, created by an Hamburgian in Vienna, covering everything from Hamburg to the Balkan. Unza Unza Music, electronics meet Reggae. A very relaxed and cool Balkan influenced album. See for a taste the video to "The Chocolate Butterfly"

Oi Va Voi - Laughter through tears and Oi Va Voi

Klezmer crossover with the singer KT Tunstall. Very cool Klezmer and Balkan Beats inspired albums with a great singer. Very creative mixing, a modern dancable Klezmer meets Balkan Sound.

Balkan Beat Box

A nice compilation of Unza Unza Music, but to be honest, not up to par with DJ Shantels Bukovina Club.

Pink Martini - Sympathique, Hey Eugene and Hang on Little Tomato

A very nice Jazz combo, with brilliant songs. The sound of an upper class cocktail party from the 50ies. I especially like the song "Sympathique" on the album of the same name, a brilliant Chanson based on a poem, first you think it's about the normal work frustration, then you understand the tragic love story behind it...

The Puppini Sisters - Betcha Bottom Dollar

A sound from the 40ies, swingy and jazzy. Three sisters bringing back the jive of ye goode olde times... With brilliant cover versions like Wuthering Heights and I will survive as well as the standards like Bei mir bist du schön (בייַ מיר ביסט דו שיין) and Mr. Sandman. A very nice Swing album.

Hurray for Lawyers

So, I am not allowed to write "GEZ Brief". I need to write "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird". I am all in favour to only allow completely correct law-speak whenever anything is published. No longer these spongy formulations, if GEZ-Brief actually means the "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird" or actually only means a love letter or anything else in letter form send by an "Beauftragtendienst der öffentlich rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten oder Rundfunkgebührenbeauftrag".#

BTW: that's the same guys who annoy the hell out of you with letters and threats if you don't confess that you have a TV. I am paying my TV fees, but nonetheless they sent my parents (sic!) about 20 letters that I have to pay my TV fees for the TV I have at my parents home for sure (I don't). They only stopped after we threatend to call a lawyer. Public Broadcasting Service Mafia, of the worst kind...

[Edit] Nice article from jetzt.de

Sympathy

Nice e-cards to show your friends your sympathy :-)

Writing...

Writing theses sucks. You stop having social contacts because you are always busy with writing. In the short times where you wait for your software to run you mailbomb friends and the time you are neither working or writing you annoy your surroundings by being generally weird. Not a good time to meet people...

Culture Shock

Back from the holidays. A nice week of hiking through the alps. Now I am in a state of cultural shock, there is much to much people outside, it's to noisy, to hectic, to confuse. Adding to it this morning at 5 a couple of drunken russians started to sing russian folk songs very loudly below my window. Thank god I don't own any weapons. (I should have thrusted one of my hiking socks at them though. Even if that would oppose the Geneva conventions.)

Procras^H^H^H Gaining Experience in GIS and Mapping

I bought a new mobile phone. My old Siemens SK65 started to annoy me by being generally shaky and having a flickering display (as you might have noticed I am not that into Flickring anymore...)

So I got a Nokia, it has WLAN, can do VOIP, has lots of other stuff with fancy abbreviations. And it can talk to a GPS via bluetooth. So I bought a bluetooth GPS mouse. I tried the Nokia Sports Tracker which is quite cool but cannot do a lot. It can do tracking though.

I then found AFTrack, which can do everything, from tracking to moving map. If you use a bitmap map, you need to calibrate it, which really sucks doing with the mobile's keypad and it is really slow. So I tried to find a better way...

AFTrack can read OziExplorer map files. OziExplorer can read GeoTIFF with a plugin (via Import Map->Import single DRG Map). So taking a scanned map, reading it in GRASS, marking coordinates in GRASS, saving as GeoTIFF, transfering to my Laptop (Windows...) to read it in OziExplorer and save as map-file. Then editing the map file by hand to convert from UTM to Latitude/Longitude using a web-based converter. Then saving it on the microSD card of my mobile, importing it in AFTrack and voilá, now I know where I am and find my way around Erlangen. Not that I didn't before...

(If you ask now why I needed GRASS, and did not use OziExplorer from start: I hoped not to have to use OziExlorer. And knowing a bit what a GIS does is also fine. And it can do a lot of warping around the map to get rid of distortions...)

Next Step: get the maps of the Virgen-Valley onto my mobile, so that I can get lost in the alps next week.

Competent Publishers

In Ferbruary I went to a conference in Vienna, where I presented a poster. The proceedings I wrote got accepted and will be published in NIM A, a high reputation journal published by Elsevier. Today I got a mail where I had to sign a copyright transferal. The copyright on the article, all included figures etc. has to be given to Elsevier. They can now do whatever they please with it. This is just the normal procedure how science publishing works: scientists (and people like me) write articles, where they do not get any money. The articles are then peer reviewed by other scientist, who also don't get any money. Then the article gets published, the original writer looses all copyright and the publisher sells the journal for some thousand Euro per edition. So far I did not really worry more than normal...

They did however address me as Dr., which is still wrong (and will be for some time...). So I sent them a mail:

Dear Sirs,

my contact details are not completely correct, I am not yet a Dr.
Can you please remove the title?


Tonight I got an aswer:

Dear Dr....


Should I trust publishers who cannot read mails?

No Comment.

Slight Redesign

As you may have noticed I changed the colours and the fonts of this blog. For best viewing experience you should have one of the fonts "Day Roman" or "Linux Libertine" installed (both free).

I also added a link to a portuguese science blog, which looks nice: De Rerum Natura

Digitising Slides

I am trying to digitise slides with this setup. For Sample images and more info follow the link at the picture above...

Smoke

Taking pictures of smoke is harder than I thought. You need to be faster than 1/60s, you need to focus fast and you need good smoke. And a CF card that works would also be nice... I lost about 50 pictures due to a crappy card.

Discalculy

Just saw an ad on TV:

Phone Flatrate: 0,--
DSL Flatrate: 0,--
No Base Fee: 0,--
Various other stuff: 0.--
-----------------------------
Sum: 29,-- Euro

Is it just me or do you also find this summation strange?

Two of my Hamburg pictures on flickr made it to a tourist guide on the web: one, two

Thesis

It seems that everything I was directly involved failed. While writing up it seems that all data that I took was useless, all tests I conducted showed that the detector is not understood and that the tests were useless. At least it will improve my english when I try to make it sound that everthing was great.

Else: this weekend my car wouldn't start (empty battery), my mobile broke (wrong pin entered three times while it was supposed to sit in my pocket being switched off), I met a lot of advanced-level-geeks and had a lot of good wheat beer. The beer was definitely the high point the last couple of days...

Weekend

A loaded weekend: saturday samba festival in coburg, sunday up at 4am to follow friends in a balloon to pick them up after landing, then back again to the samba festival. I took something about 700 photos this weekend. Now I have to wade through them all to pick the good ones and delete the bad ones...

But for some strange reason I am close to motivated to work. I should do weekends like this more often.

WTF?

Instead of ranting about our minister of interior going completely nuts (wanting targetet killings etc.) I'll blog about a city in Oregon who discovered that their traffic pilars look like penises:



I think they are right in banning these things. There is an awful lot of stuff which looks like penises and should be banned. Examples? Here they come:





Need to say more?

Moving slowly to the 21st century...

Today a lot of laws got passed by the Bundestag. Inbetween them is §202 E-StGB, which makes software illegal which has the purpose of attacking other computers. This includes nmap, ping and other usefull network tools, because they can be used to figure out weak points in your IT. It also includes all the tools any decent IT security person would use to check the systems he is responsible for.

Also passed got the second bucket of the Urheberrechtsnovelle, basically the copy-right law. From now on you can only access electronic publications from your university's library on special computers. The electronic subito is no longer allowed. To access research result's which were funded by tax money, published with tax money paid to the publisher, peer reviewed by tax money paid scientists (who don't get anything for this review), you now need to spend even more tax money to access. Elsevier and others will get rich, science will go boink.

Hurray to our well informed and competent politicians. [Note to those who can't understand German: it's politicians saying: "Internet, yeah, I think I have heard of it..."]

Computer

The next time some hardware fails I'll get a Mac. I just bought a new motherboard for my old PC and it took only some 5 hours to get things working again. Now I still don't have graphics via the DVI port, only some not very sharp output on the analogue port. But at least it works and I hope it won't crash that often as the old one did. As for the barebone which I had and where the porwer supply died: you cannot get that power supply anymore. This barebone is less than two years old... Hurray for short product cycles.

[Edit] Finally got the DVI working. It seems that envy is pretty useful if you have an nVidia or ATI card and want to use it with Linux. Also the nVidea settings program is quite OK (you have to run it as root though and the user interface is not really intuitive). So I have now a working graphics output on my DVI port, with 3d acceleration (including wobbly windows and desktops on a cube)

How to print an a5 booklet

You've got a file full of a5 pages and want to print it on an a4 printer so that you can fold it and it will be a booklet:


psbook -s<number_of_pages> file.ps file_sorted.ps


Number of pages is here the number of pages in a stack (normally the number of pages of the document plus a bit that it is dividable by 4). If you are binding a real book, it is the number of pages which will be folded and sewn together.


psnup -2 -pa4 -Pa5 file_sorted.ps printme.ps


-p is the page size of the output file, -P the page size of the input file.

Print with flipping on the short edge. This is tricky on the command line, but if you print from a viewer this should be easy...

Think. flickr, think!

Think. flickr, think!
Originally uploaded by perreira

As flickr seems to go the same way compuserve did go back in the early nineties (from a successfull community to a huge coorporate hell which ignores it's users and only focuses on shareholder value, from being great to being bancrupt because they overlooked what it really was they had...) I am now trying some alternatives. There is a good overview of alternatives (in german only though). I signed up at zooomr and 23hq, experiences will be posted here...


[EDIT] This is how flickr treats it's customers... (For those of you who do not speak german: this guy sent a mail saying that he is leaving. He got a response which basically tells him "We don't need you, just f*ck off")

[EDIT2] I also signed up at ipernity which looks quite nice

Politics

According to the political compass questionnaire I am belonging to the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism. I am more left and liberitarian than Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama (Economic Left/Right: -5.50; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82).

Think. flickr, think!

Think. flickr, think!
Originally uploaded by perreira

lickr sperrt uns aus! Und auch dich!
Seit gestern werden für deutsche Nutzer keine Bilder mehr angezeigt, die als 'moderate' oder 'restricted' markiert sind! Es gibt keine Moeglichkeit das umzustellen - das ist eine grobe Unverschämtheit und Frechheit von flickr!

In English:
If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off.
In other words that means, that german users can not access photos on flickr that are not flaged "safe" ... only flowers and landscapes for the germans ...
We will not let this happen! Copy and upload this picture to your account - show flickr who we are!

Lade dieses Bild runter und poste es in deinem Account! Lass uns das Bild überall auf flickr verteilen und es in 'Interestingness' heben!! So geht es nicht!
Original Version: farm2.static.flickr.com/1299/543864623_7aadef1e69_o.jpg


Weitere Infos:

-http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91085
- www.flickr.com/groups/404938@N23/discuss/72157600347681500/
- www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/42597/

----- Addition -----
Grundgesetz Artikel 5
[Meinungs-, Informations-, Pressefreiheit; Kunst und Wissenschaft]
(1) Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten. Die Pressefreiheit und die Freiheit der Berichterstattung durch Rundfunk und Film werden gewährleistet. Eine Zensur findet nicht statt.

Bikes and Computers

I got a new saddle for my bike today as the old one was falling apart. It has a ventilation system which keeps your rear end cool. Actually quite a nice feature...

I did a short cycle trip to check the saddle, to play with my GPS and to get some training. See picture for the trip, in total 19km.

The power supply of my computer died today, taking the fuse with it. So my living room (where also my fridge is located) was without electricity for some time... Fortunately the fridge is mostly empty. The computer was switched off while it happened, the computer has some fancy display which is always on, so the power supply was doing something. As it smelled quite badly, I think one of the capacities just exploded. This computer had about a year and a half... Hurray for reliable technology. So I am sitting now at my old desktop and wonder why I bought the new computer as it does not feel slower.

Berch

Der Kessel
Originally uploaded by perreira

Pictures are online here...

I actually liked the days when there weren't that many people. I am getting old...

Web 2.0

Just returned from a field trip with fellow flickrites to the bergkirchweih... As we talked also a bit about geotagging, I was wondering, if you can include geo-tagged pictures in google earth. Well. You can... So, here is a google earth link of all my photos :-)

Fliegende Kinderscheisse

5. An Age of Confusion, or an Ancient Age, is
one in which History As We Know It begins to
unfold, in which Whatever Is Coming emerges
in Corporal Form, more or less, and such times are
Ages of Balanced Unbalance, or Unbalanced
Balance.
6. An Age of Bureaucracy is an Imperial Age in
which Things Mature, in which Confusion becomes
entrenched and during which Balanced Balance,
or Stagnation, is attained.
7. An Age of Disorder or an Aftermath is an
Apocalyptic Period of Transition back to Chaos
through the Screen of Oblivion into which the
Age passeth, finally. These are Ages of
Unbalanced Unbalance.
HBT; The Book of Uterus, Chap. 3

It seems, we are now in the Age of Bureaucracy (although today is Boomtime, the 6th day of Confusion in the YOLD 3173). I will go and eat an hot dog as it is friday.

WIECZNY KWIAT WTADZA!!!!!

(In case you wonder: uni is turning surreal...)

Oh, the youth of today

It seems that the youth of today is to busy binge drinking or downloading ringtones to go up to the bergkirchweih and get decently drunk. Nobody up there, us the only once dancing on the table to the music of a quite bad band.When ordering a beer, the waiter was saying something on the lines of "Thank God, finally somebody ordering a beer!" The only ones I met at the way down were the usual suspects of the biologists and the old physicists fraction. Back then when we were young, we wouldn't have been like that. We would have been on the Berg, ruining tables by dancing, getting seriously drunk and then annoying people in the city. But nowadays...

The Organizers

The Organizers
Originally uploaded by perreira

Amazing where your pictures might end up when you put them on flickr...

This one is used (correctly) by some italian school organisation (my italian is not good enough to figure out what the do exactly, but it looks like improving and coordinating didactics...) as a stock photo on the news page. I have no clue why somebody associates swedish carneval organisers with news on didactics in italy...

Contacts

L1110191.JPG
Originally uploaded by COOP666

Why don't good looking women come around and undress for a modelling session at my pad?

Sometimes my Flickr contacts make me feel miserable...

Response for Phil

Judging now having returned from the After-Berg-Party I would opt for a skewness of the sky being the cause for the peak at 1.5 instead of 1.65. Knowing our detector I am positive about the detector being misaligned, the analysis being wrong and all other possible effects anybody could imagine.

The sky is still above

For those who were wondering why my page counter seems to be stuck: I fought a battle with two year old data during the last three weeks. First getting it converted, then getting it combusted by our tracking software and now the last few days getting the output analysed. Thanks to a lot of my colleagues who I bothered with stupid questions I today produced my first own physics plot containing actual particles (after nearly five years of my PhD):



It shows that cosmic rays are coming mostly from above (Phi being the angle to the horizontal plane). That's great neaws, as it means current theories about the universe are still correct. (OK, there is some ambiguity, they can also come from the bottom. We can't distinguish with that detector. But there is a 50 % chance that they mostly come from above.)

The left

Don't leave the political left to the left! Everytime I read an article containing an intelligent point of view which takes apart critically the madness of our times, I think there is hope for a politic inspired by traditional left ideas. Then I get to the comments section and see all those would-be-revolutionaries fighting about the exegesis of Marx and distributing their conspiracy theories, generalising not-generalisable stuff, making up examples, misquoting, making up history etc, and then I loose all hope. Why can't there be any intelligent people on the left? All intelligent people I know who have been politically left gave up because of these trolls...

Maybe we should get together and create a new intelligent left (or something which is outside the classical left-right scheme, I think this is obsolete anyhow).

GPS

I got a PDA with GPS, WLAN and a lot of other stuff, including TomTom Navigation for west europe. So now be prepared to more boring posts about GPS...

This had as a consequence a lot of fights with the GPS and my computer. The PDA is running Windows Mobile, which is a pile of crap and annoys me with sheer stupidity. The WLAN connection is dying randomly, but else you can work with it under the normal annoyance level of Windows.

I installed Outdoor-GPS for tracking and general GPS purposes. It's free and looks quite nice. Tracks are saved as opx, so in a format which is actually usable. With gpsbabel you can convert it eg to kml and import the track in google earth, which you see in the screenshot (I took the GPS with me on the way to the supermarket. Inside it had no GPS reception, this caused the track to look like I went swimming in the pond.)

Getting google earth to run again was also some pain in the ass, for some reason it froze at the splashscreen and ate up all my CPU. What helped was exchanging libGL as mentioned here.

Conference Talks

This is basically how a conference talk is recieved by the people who don't work on the specific area of the talk. Which is everybody but the speaker.

Grongrpieeurovisiongdelachangsong

Eigtenlich gibt es nicht mehr zu sagen, als es die SZ tut. Außer dass ich für die Estnische Moderatorin gewesen wäre...

Grammophone

Grammophone
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Yesterday I went to germany's biggest flea market in Nürnberg, the Trempelmarkt. I couldn't resist this grammophone...

»¿ʇı̣ əsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı̣ ɓuı̣ɥʇʎuɐ sı̣ pooɓ ʇɐɥʍ«

Fun with Unicode. Found in a signature...

No milk today...

Saturday evening, 19:30. You can't get any milk at the supermarket anymore. Meat would be difficult, for sure including a rant that everything has been cleaned already. So far for the 21st century...

Supervillain

13256278887989457651018865901401704640

It seems that for posting this number you can get arrested in some countries as it violates the DMCA in the USofA.

Recipetable

This Table looks cool. You place food items on it and it suggests a recipe what to make of them. Re-arrange them, and you get another recipe. I want one of these!

Instant Food

Today I tried an instant salad dressing. You add some powder to olive oil and water and are supposed to get a dressing italian stlye. It just tasted like sodium-glutamate. Yukk. Are people actually liking that stuff?

I think I will continue to not buy stuff which contains sodium-glutamate. I don't like the taste of it and it makes me edgy.

How to write a thesis

I am currently reading a lot of PhD theses to see which I have to mention and were I can copy^h^h^h cite stuff. It also helped to figure out how a thesis shoud be written. The general structure seems to be:

1) Intruduction:

From the dawn of mankind people have always wondered about <obscure purely academic problem you write about>. This thesis will present the latest and best theory and/or data and will show mankind the way to a brighter future, where there is no hunger, no wars and everybody knows and cares about <obscure purely academic problem you write about>.

2) Theory:

I have read a lot more papers than you did, and I cite all of them. I even cite stuff I haven't read. I cite more stuff. I can use fancy words which nobody, even me, has any clue about what they mean.

3) Experimental Apparatus:

We have the best apparatus ever. You can't even imagine how great it is. The latest technology, the best ideas, blablabla.

4) Methods used:

I took some software, changed some parameters and let it run on a bunch of data. This took two years until I realised everything was wrong, because of a stupid bug and I did a fast workaround and got some results which might be correct.

5) Results

I got some numbers. Of course these are the best numbers, better than that of the other experiments. Some fancy plots and some vague statements where you have no clue about your data. Try to cover up the discrepancies by comparing plots with different scales and axes so that nobody notices that they show inconsistent data.

6) Conclusions and outlook

Paraphrase introduction.

Bibliography and Acknowledgements

Be sure to include advisor, referees and anybody who will have a say on your exam/defense.

Trend

Thanks to XL, who graphed my progress in writing :-)

[EDIT]: Just to clarify: the graph was kindly produced by Axel (or short XL) who has a job in industry and is therefore excused for the use of Excel (or short that-crappy-program-which-cant-calculate-stuff-decently). I of course would have done that in root and have used the very convenient drag and drop feature to get the points closer to the fit. Or maybe in PAW because it's FORTRAN and I like self-flagellation.

Guernica

70 years ago the german Luftwaffe attacked the basque village of Guernica. This air raid was one of the first with large scale bombing of civilian targets, one of the first with large scale destruction, large scale killing of innocent people. Not for the first time but for a very prominent time, a military target (the bridge across the river Oca) was the excuse of bombing a complete city. The bridge was not even hit by a bomb. Hundreds of civilians died.

The german leader of the attac afterwards complained that it was no fun (because of being too easy and being annoyed by the smoke of the bombs) and senseless, as no troops took the town after the bombing...

Guernica is and always will be a symbol for the stupidity of war.

Almansa

300 years ago today the battle of Almansa started. This battle placed Catalunya under spanish government, making Castellano the official language and starting the suppression of Catalan. As a sign against this imperialist movement, I will start learning Catalan next week (there are lectures at my university...)

Interesting factoid found in a blog (from where I shamelessly stole the image):
The city of Xàtiva was burned, and its name changed to San Felipe in order to punish it. In memory of these facts, nowadays the portrait of the monarch still hangs upside down in the local museum of L'Almodí.

Electrical Typewriter

Electrical Typewriter
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I found this beauty in my parents basement. During easter I cleaned it a bit and checked if it works. It does, but only the small letters. For some reasons the shift-key does not work. It didn't work some years ago when I last played with this machine, but back then I coul only type capitals LIKE THIS. After taking it apart, it changed to small letters only...

Maybe I'll still be able to finde someone to repair it.

Spam

Since some time I recieve quite often spam originating from portuguese adresses, most of them have some legal garbage in them that it would be allowed to spam according to european law. Well, it ain't. Actually, there's a portuguese law (Decreto-Lei n.º 7/2004, Art. 22.1) against it, which implements a european directive. So I tried to find where to complain, but unfortunately the website of the portuguese telecom legislative organ is an unbearable burocratic moloch. What I did find was the address of the OECD Task Force on Spam, so I sent a mail to them.

Today I received a mail from them, stating that they received my communication and are analysing it. It was a simple question: "To whom should I complain?"... If they need a Task Force to analyse this, I fear it will take some time till spam stops. Anyway, let's hope they can do something.

I also complained to the sender of the spam, which is a real estate agency franchising from cascais, which I hope won't do any buisiness anymore soon. I asked them to remove my mail from their databases and send me an acknowledgment that they did so. Up to now they didn't...

Maybe this is a little bean-counterish, but if I can find out the sender of spam, I complain and send them a link to the law which forbids spamming. It won't help, but it makes me feel a bit better.

Dear youth of today,

please memorise the lyrics of bella ciao. I hate it when I am the only one singing revolutionary songs out of tune aloud at Bucovina Club.


Una mattina mi sono alzato,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
Una mattina mi sono alzato,
E ho trovato l'invasor.

O partigiano portami via,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
O partigiano portami via,
Qui mi sento di morir.

E so io muoio da partigiano,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
E so io muoio da partigiano,
Tu mi devi seppellir.

E seppellire sulla montagna
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
E seppellire sulla montagna
Sott l'ombra di un bel fior.

E le genti che passeranno
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
E le genti che passeranno
Mi diranno «che bel fior».

E questo è il fiore del partigiano
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
E questo è il fiore del partigiano
Morto per la liberta.


This is the german translation:

Eines Morgens, in aller Frühe,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
eines Morgens, in aller Frühe
trafen wir auf unser’n Feind.

Partisanen, kommt, nehmt mich mit euch,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
Partisanen, kommt, nehmt mich mit euch,
denn ich fühl’, der Tod ist nah.

Wenn ich sterbe, oh ihr Genossen,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
wenn ich sterbe, oh ihr Genossen,
bringt mich dann zur letzten Ruh’!

In den Schatten der kleinen Blume,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
einer kleinen, ganz zarten Blume,
in die Berge bringt mich dann!

Und die Leute, die geh’n vorüber,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
und die Leute, die geh’n vorüber,
seh’n die kleine Blume steh’n.

Diese Blume, so sagen alle,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
ist die Blume des Partisanen,
der für uns’re Freiheit starb.


And next week: the lyrics of הבה נגילה (Hava Nagila)

Script Foo

In case you want to convert a bunch of eps-files to pdf-files (e.g. root generated plots, as the pdf output of root sucks and the eps sometimes produce strange encoding-effects when converted directly...):


#!/bin/bash
for epsfile in $*;
do
echo "Converting $epsfile ...";
eps2eps $epsfile ${epsfile%.eps}_temp.eps;
epstopdf ${epsfile%.eps}_temp.eps -o=${epsfile%.eps}.pdf;
rm ${epsfile%.eps}_temp.eps;
done


Getting Serious

I think it is a sign of old age when you start cleaning out all those mp3s you never listened too when sober, those party-tracks for which you need at least half a bottle of vodka to like them or find them remotely funny...

Anyway, I got to the letter H tagging and cleaning my mp3 collection. Though it's only legal mp3s it's much too much to listen too.

Die ächte Verachtung haßt nicht,
sie ist reine Ueberzeugung
vom Unwert des Anderen

--- Arthur Schopenhauer

Just to correct the citation I made when standing in front of one of the local discotheques.

Book Fair

Reading
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Today I went to the Leipzig Book Fair. It took about 5 hours by trains (local trains, as I went with the "Schönes Wochenende" ticket) to get there, which was a torture. But it was worth it, very nice fair. More when I got some sleep...

Shaun the sheep

Nick Park is just brilliant...

Flohmarkt

As I had to get up early anyway on sunday, I decided to get up really early and go to the flea market. Most of the stuff they had there was 80ies crap, but I found some nice books, including this handbook for drivers and car-owners from 1914. It explains everything you needed to know to get a drivers licence in 1914, which includes knowing how your car actually works and how to repair it.

I also got an engineers handbook from 1896, which belonged to a railway engineer. It still has a paper in it with a mark from the Königlich Bayrische Staatsbahn, the royal railway of bavaria. Maybe some scans will follow...

Pagecount

As I am getting more and more frustrated and might answer questions on how my thesis is going on in a style which might annoy people you can now find a page counter in the sidebar. It is updated daily, everything more I would tell you would be on the lines "don't ask..."

In case you want to know how I did the counter:
convert -background white -fill black -font Helvetica -pointsize 24 -size 50x label:`pdfinfo $THESIS | grep Pages | awk '{print $2}'` $PNGFILE


Vienna

Cafe Central
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Back from Vienna. A week of conference, on detectors and how to build them. Lots of physicists around, some nice, some annoying; amazingly enough there were some good looking female physicists, two from Brazil, one from Poland, one from somewhere else.

I managed to see something of Vienna as well, I think I have got an overdose of culture on friday after visiting two mueums and the theater...

Pictures will appear on flickr as usual.

Conference

I am off to a conference in Vienna. Luggage: about 3kg of laptop and stuff for the laptop, about 5kg photography equipment, 5kg in beer, 1kg in food and some t-shirts. Hurray for light travelling...

Defenitely looking forward to visit the Esperanto Museum in Vienna (just one floor beneath the globe museum).

Decimal Day (not to be confused with Domino Day)

On the 15th of February 1971 Great Britain switched from a currency system based on the traditional LSD system (yes, it's called that way - Librae, Solidus, Denarii) to a boring decimal system. The old one was much more logical...:

4 Farthings are a penny, 3 pence a thrupence, 2 thrupence a sixpence, 2 sixpense a bob, 2 bob a florin, 1 florin + a sixpence are half a crown. 4 of these half crowns are a ten-bob, 2 ten-bobs are 20 shilling or 240 pence or 1 pound. One pound and a shilling, or 252 pence, are a guinee.

And now: 1 pound are 100 pence. How boring. Anybody could remember that...

And before you ask: yes, I spend too much time surfing wikipedia.

The Wrath of God will come upon you!

Those sinners in Portugal who voted for unchristian and abnormal things shall fear the wrath of god! Todays earthquake shall be a SIGN!

Sometimes nature has a sense of timing which amazes me... Back in the middle ages (and maybe still today in the more rural areas of portugal) this would have made people burning a lot of witches.

Welcome in the less uncivilized world!

Yesterday about a quarter of the portuguese entitled to vote placed portugal on the map of countries being on the way from the middle ages to more civilized times. Though only 43% voted, 59% of those voted for the change of a law, which up to now lead to up to three years of prison for women having an abortion. The law resulted in those considering abortion going to spain (the rich) or doing clandestine abortions (the poor) with horrible conditions, leading to the death of thousands of women each year. A referendum in 1998 failed to change the law, as the supporters of change stayed at the beach and the voters against change were all sent to vote after church by priests who seem to have been stuck in a mindframe appropriate for the year 1100 (and even then considered conservative). (This is my polemic version, your truth may vary...)

Não esta a mim de votar, mas...

Burn!

Yes. Just burn those witches. And their family. And their village. They all are sinners and must go to hell. BURN! BURN!

(For those not reading portuguese: the link is about a bishop stating that not only the women considering abortion should be penalised, also their husbands and doctors.) Middle ages are still alive in Europe.

A disgrace to all craftsmen

Today I wanted to get the battery in my watch changed. It is a swatch, so nothing fancy. It eats standard batteries. So I went to a, well, not a clockmaker, not even a shop who sells watches, more like a shop who tries to sell watches but failing.

The sales drone there was the most incompetent sales drone I ever met. He stared at the swatch as he had never seen one before and then said they don't have that type of battery (which might be true) and he didn't want to change the battery because he didn't know how to do it. Well, changing the battery of a swatch is an artform which only the best craftsmen ever manage. You take a 10cent coin, put it in the slit of the battery compartment and then turn the battery holder about 10 degrees counterclockwise. Then it falls out, you change the battery, put it back and turn the thing in the other direction. That's hard to do. I know. But sometimes people master this craft...

Worse yet, in the house that shop is in Emmy Noether was born, one of the greates mathematicians. What a step down.

Then I went to another watch-shop, a very good looking and nice girl changed the battery in about a minute, chatted a bit with me, set the watch correct and was generally nice. Much better...

Invasion of the Brain eaters

Sometimes modern world just pisses me off. I tried to contact ebay that their e-mail server apperantly has a clock going wrong. All mails I get from them are in no way in a correct time-zone or time. (Well, maybe ebay has their servers sitting in a time bubble which is 5 hours into the future, but I think they only have this at google.)

I got an answer by one of the customer satisfaction bots, made of pre-fabricated sentences. It seems they have a very small pile of these sentences, as they were exactly the same as in a mail I got from them on a different problem. Instead of: "well, we have looked at the mail header, you are right/wrong", they sent me some customer satisfaction brabble, at least addressing me five times by name to get that personal touch. Is it only me or does nobody see that this is not taking me serious? Why do they have sales bots? Just put the emacs psychatrist there, that would at least be some 20 minutes of fun for everybody...

In the fear of not being friendly and unsatisfactory to their clients, they hide behind their shield of pre-fabricated sales-blubber. I very much prefer the way they treat me at local workshops. They grunt at you, they are not really friendly, but they take you serious and take care of your problems. They won't bullshit you with these false friendliness of shareholdervalueoriented companies.

Ah, and ebay wanted me to fill out a survey on how to improve their customer service. Luckily it's all multiple choice questions, where neither the question nor the answers fit to anything I would tell them. And when I tried to fill in the free-form text area, it just stopped working. Yehaa.

25.000 Views

Stylish in Barcelona
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Not on this photo. This photo had only something like 30. But my flickr-stream hit the 25.000 views mark yesterday :-)

Sometimes...

you just should go home. I tried to help cleaning up after this years winter party, being quite intoxicated (still being intoxicated while posting this, so sorry for the spelling).

While I tried to lower one of the speakers from its stand, I moved a cable, which resulted in a lamp tipping over, falling down, hitting the bar, catapulting one of the candles on the bar into the air, which spilled liquid wax all over a friend of mine. While this might look like a comedy, all his outer clothing was full of wax and most probably can only be used in hard weather conditions as a wax jacket again, he also got some of the wax in his face which is as far from funny as you can get. Thank got he did not have any major injuries (at least none were discoverd up to now)... Hope he is alright...

So: Lesson for today: when drunk - leave.

Scientific Progress goes Boink

Well, another week nearly over. Nothing done for science, done a little for the car, done something for the party tomorrow, done some politics (well, sitting in a meeting), done nothing in special...

Just another week.

Todessturm tobt über Deutschland

Fest wie unsere Eichen halten alle Zeit wir stand,
wenn Stürme brausen übers Deutsche Vaterland.
Wir sind die Niedersachsen, sturmfest und erdverwachsen.

Wer es auch noch hören will: mp3s gibts hier, nehmt die Variante von Herbie G.

State of mind

It seems that I am entering the writing up phase of my thesis. My flat gets cleaner everyday, without me remembering of cleaning it up on purpose. The same already happened during my diploma thesis. You just start cleaning, to not need to write...

Engine Block

Engine Block
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Successful week: I managed to seperate the engine head off the motor block of my DKW, cleaned out all the rust and dirt. It looks like it needs a bit of honing and some cleaning, but else it looks usable again.

I also managed to make two plots for my thesis and to copy a couple of pages into my thesis taken from an old report.

Cap d' Any

Sagrada Familia
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Back from Barcelona. And not very motivated to go to work again...

Sharpness

Sharpness
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I am close to turning vegetarian as it is so much fun to cut vegetables with this...

Incompetnce

I had to to an exercise sheet for the first year students. As most of the exercises I found in books were either shite or wrong (or both), I tried to do some of my own. I dug out the paper of Henry Cavendish, were he determined the density of the earth with his famous torsion balance. I calculated everything with his measurements. It took about two days until I had understood what he did and ended up at a Gravitational Constant which made sense.

I made an exercise out of it. I had to simplify it a bit, because the students did not yet know the torsion pendulum. While simplifying it, I introduced a couple of errors, which went unnoticed but made the complete calculation bollocks.

I had another exercise on an hammer bouncing off the floor where I mixed up elastic and in-elastic bounces.

When doing the example solution to the problems, the one which all other tutors would read and use to correct the exercises, I made about every possible error and mis-calculated about every quantity at least twice. So it took me about 8 or 9 iterations (all sent around to all tutors) to have a solution sheet, which was nearly right (I didn't find the errors myself, btw.). I think I should quit doing my PhD, hand back my diploma and do a ritual suicide. That would be the correct outcome of this. As I have met people who are even more incompetent and got away with it, I will wait a bit, maybe I can get away with it too...

The Helsinki Complaints Choir.

They are right!

Being a mediocre physicist sucks. You're nerdy enough that girls won't talk to you but still not nerdy enough to not bother...

Gone Beta

So, I am Beta now as well. Which means I can do colourful texts. Yehaa. Web 2.0. Much more enterprisy!

Pickert per Inhabitants

The highest density of Pickerts per inhabitants is found in the Ohrekreis. The lowest in Dresden. Interesting statistics you can get on the intarweb...

Question

Can I kill cyclists who go around in dark clothes without any lights in the dark just so or does it need to look like an accident?

Typography

Lisbon seen by Typographers

In related news: I have been doing a web-page on Typography, LaTeX, Presentations and related stuff. If you miss something which should go on this page, please drop me a mail.

Blogging

Finally, after only about a year, I managed to put some updates to Cogumelos Aporcalhados

Usefull presents.

Today, when I went to lunch at the university canteen, a good looking girl gave me a condom.

Unfortunately she didn't give me her phone number. So now I have to find another use for it. Maybe I'll build an underwater microphone. Always handy, those underwater mics.

Another day...

Things positive today:

• sent the abstract for a conference to the referees one day before the deadline.
  

Things negative today:

• pissed off a nice girl I would like to meet more often.
  
• bored a lot of students to death.
  
• showed my incompetence at a meeting.
  
• didn't write anything for my thesis.
  
• lost badly at cards.
  
• wrote an email to above mentioned girl which will turn out a completely bad idea and show that I am a complete idiot.
  
• didn't even get drunk.
  

Yeeha for successful living.

Homebanking

For some reasons Ubuntu cannot ship gnucash with HBCI (a german homebanking standard) enabled, due to some licensing problems which seem to be no problems for other packages. You need to compile it yourself, after editing the rules file. Strangely enough, all dependencies (including those who have that bad licence) are in the repositories, so no need to get other stuff...

Did it, went well, had the option to get HBCI running in gnucash. Then I discovered that my chip-card-reader was not recognized... Googling, trying a lot of stuff, hours pass. Then I found out that I need to download a driver from the manufacturers page (they have packages for ubuntu) and then do some symbolic linking. All this hidden in a non-google-able web presentation...

Now my chipcard reader is recognised, but unfortunately the automagic updater, which I asked to update everything, re-installed the official gnucash package without HBCI. So I am now recompiling it again and waiting for the outcome...

Paper and pen is by far the most easy and safest way of keeping track of your money...

168 hours of a Rotating Fork

168 hours of a Rotating Fork
Originally uploaded by perreira.

A post for Phil: yes, the tapes are still there, except tape number 3. Somebody might have taken this home. It's a nice movie if you cannot sleep.

Manuals

On shift, we have various manuals which should explain the responsible persons what to do on shift. They should be easily readable, should be logical and should enable somebody new to the business to do the necessary tasks. Unfortunately they don't. They are very good examples on how not to write manuals. (With some notable exceptions, but unfortunately the hardware they describe isn't in use any more.)

These manuals have no clear typography. There is random usage of list, enumerated lists, bold and cursive printing. Stuff is not described in chronological order: quite often you find "do A after you have done B". This is bad. Better written would be "Do B. Then do A."

Tables and images are referred, but not shown, or in different sections than noted. No images of the hardware or the user-interface of the software. Everything is randomly ordered, no clear sections where to find stuff (software or hardware), no explanation what it does and what it does not, no differentiation between trouble-shoot sections and normal operation. To get from step one to step two you have to fight through a lot of words, which you don't need to read as long as it is working as it should.

Most of them were written by people who don't speak English as a first language. They want to sound professional, so they chose huge words. They used thesauruses to find elaborate words. The manuals are full of filling-words; if you would strip those, the manuals would be half as long and much more readable.

As a contrast, I read the manual for my DKW some time ago. It had very clear and precise steps, images, clear wording. Everything was ordered chronological, one step after the other. It stated at the beginning of each task the tools you need. After reading this manual I feel confident that I can do a complete overhaul of the engine. After reading the manuals on shift, I can't even tell what the thing the manual is about is doing or if it is working correctly.

A day at the Zoo

Löwen
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I am on my last shift ever right now. From 16:00 to 24:00 I sit seven floors underground, stare at computer-screens and wait that something beeps. Most of the time it doesn't. It is not very entertaining...

This morning I went to the Zoo with two friends. So at least some fresh air and some stuff not related to computers or physics. Pictures here and soon here.

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.