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...