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Y2K10 Bugs - Jahr 2010 Probleme überall (UPDATE)

abusch@gmx.net — 2010-01-04T20:15:46+01:00

Es ist erst ein paar Tage her und schon brodeln die Meldungen über auf Twitter. Das Jahr 2000 alias Y2K haben wir mit viel Panikmache überstanden, aber welche Workarounds damals auch programmiert wurden, scheinen dies wohl nur 10 Jahre lang gehalten zu haben. Im Jahr 2010 - Y2K10 angekommen zeigen sich nun erste Blüten dieser Schlamperei. ...Wie jedes Jahr müssen unsere Kollegen im weiten entfernten Osten, nahe der Datumsgrenze, immer als Erste daran glauben wenn mit der Technik etwas schiefgeht, oder sie nur einfach mit Viren, Würmern und Trojanern geflutet werden. So kamen denn die ersten Meldungen auch gleich aus Australien, wo der Neujahrsgruss auf dem Handy sich per SMS dann prompt aus dem Jahre 2016 meldete. Soweit bekannt handelt es sich dabei um ein Windows Mobile Problem, dass auf allen PDA's und Telefonen mit Microsofts Betriebssystem auftritt. ...Ebenfalls nicht verschont blieben die Palm Pre Nutzer, welche auf ihrem nun wirklich gerade erst eingeführten, nagelneuen Gerät, keine Exchange-Kalender-Einträge vor 2010 mehr sehen können. ...In der Taxi-Metropole New York konnten die Fahrgäste plötzlich ihre Rechnung nicht mehr mit der Kreditkarte begleichen, da die Kreditkarte abgelehnt wurde. In Australien scheinen die Bankkarten der Bank of Queensland abgelaufen zu sein. ...Die neuen EC und Kreditkarten in Deutschland/Europa welche mit dem neuen EMV-Chip versehen sind, funktionieren nicht mehr an den Automaten seit das erste Stündchen des Jahres 2010 geschlagen hat. ...Eigentlich soll der Chip ja die Sicherheit erhöhen, und in einigen Jahren den zu leicht kopierbaren(Skimming) Magnetstreifen ersetzen. Hat man nun solch eine moderne "Schrott"-Karte kann man sich evtl. dadurch behelfen einen veralteten Automaten zu finden, welcher den Chip nicht ausliest, oder diesen einfach mit Tesa abkleben, und hoffen, dass die Karte wieder rauskommt. (Kürzlich wurden ja erst alle in Spanien benutzten Kreditkarten ausgetauscht, nachdem interne Mitarbeiter eines Kreditkartenabwicklers dort einfach die Kartendaten auf dem Schwarzmarkt verkauft haben. ... Vielleicht die Ami's, die haben heute ja gerade Freddie Mac und Fannie Mae unbegrenzte Schuldenübernahme zugesichert, da fallen die paar Cent auch nicht mehr auf.) Ein weiterer Y2K10 Bug soll bei der Bank Societe General im Libanon irgendwie dafür verantwortlich sein, dass Transaktionen in US Dollar statt in libanesischen Pfund abgewickelt werden. ...Unsere beliebten eBay-Bezahldienste wie Paypal/Verisign welche uns extra mit Hardware Security Keys (Tokens) ausgestattet haben, um den bösen Phishern im Internet zu entgehen, scheinen Gerüchten zufolge ebenfalls ein Y2K10 Problem zu haben. ...Bei Internet-Providern welche als SPAM-Schutz (ein nicht aktuelles) SpamAssassin verwenden, werden Mails mit Versanddatum > 2010 als "ungewöhnlich weit in der Zukunft liegend" gebrandmarkt und landen evtl. im SPAM-Ordner, oder werden gleich gelöscht. ...Berichten auf Twitter zufolge, soll auch der Photoshop mit einem Y2K10 Problem zu tun haben und will neu installiert werden. ...Nur den guten alten, mittlerweile mächtig verstaubten Apple Newton hat Apple bereits vorab mit einem Update den früh erkannten Jahr 2010 Teufel ausgetrieben. ...Virenscanner von Symantec bekommen keine Patternupdates mehr, bis der Fehler in der Software behoben ist, werden nun aktualisierte Pattern mit dem alten Datum 31.12.2009 ausgeliefert. Das Intrusion Detection System Dshield zweifelt auf einmal an Logeinträgen die mit einem Zeitstempel aus dem Jahr 2010 versehen sind. Lastverteilungssysteme von Cisco können sich nicht mehr erinnern welche Pakete sie wohin verteilt haben weil ihnen die Cookie-Timestamps komisch vorkommen. Auf SAP Systemen folgt nach dem 31.12.2009 der 01.01.2100, ah ja interessant..... ...Die Fahrtanzeiger der Rheinbahn wissen nicht mehr wohin sie eigentlich fahren sollten. So ich hör jetzt mal auf zu schreiben, geht sicher noch ein paar Tage so weiter....

Internetzensur schützt uns vor Terroristen, ähh Dir.

abusch@gmx.net — 2009-05-20T23:09:41+02:00

Falls Du’s noch nicht wusstest, Du bist Terrorist.

Du bist Terrorist from lexela on Vimeo.

Wenn es nicht alles Hand und Fuß hätte und nicht wirklich so traurig wäre, wäre es fast zum Schreien komisch. Vielleicht versteht jetzt langsam auch der letzte Einsiedler was uns Schäuble und Co in den letzten Jahren Stück für Stück mit schönen Schlagworten verziert untergejubelt haben. Man kann nur hoffen, dass nie wieder ein faschistisches Regime an die Macht kommt, denn gegen dieses wird sich mit den nun gewonnenen Daten mit Sicherheit kein Widerstand mehr etablieren können. Man könnte fast sagen, da hat einer was dazugelernt, nur - auf welcher Seite steht der eigentlich ?

Triple Live Summer 2009

abusch@gmx.net — 2009-05-17T22:01:43+02:00

Am kommenden Mittwoch den 20. Mai 2009 ist es wieder so weit, dann startet wieder der jährliche Triple Live Sommer 2009 in München. Den Anfang macht wie gewohnt das Stustaculum in der Studentenstadt, gefolgt von der Garchinger Garnix und dem Tunix Festival der TU München. Die genauen Zeiten sind: Stustaculum 20. - 23. Mai 2009 (ca. 100 Events) In diesem Jahr auch wieder mit den BeNuts ! Garnix 15. - 19. Juni 2009 (12 Events) Tunix 29. Juni - 3. Juli 2009 (12 Events) Hier schon mal ein kleiner Vorgeschmack auf das was Euch bei den BeNuts erwartet:

MacHeist 3

abusch@gmx.net — 2009-03-26T22:35:33+01:00

Wer frische Software für seinen Mac braucht sollte schleunigst auf MacHeist das aktuelle Bundle kaufen. In der dritten Runde sind wieder einige gute Programme dabei, wenn man die Mission zuvor alle mitmacht und die dortige Software auch noch mit dazuzählt, bekommt man abzüglich aller Missionsgutscheine für ca. 30 Euro Software im Wert von 1000 Euro. Wie immer ist natürlich vieles dabei was man evtl. schon von anderen Herstellern hat, aber hey, man muss es ja nicht nutzen, die Lizenz kann man zur Not auch verschenken. Empfehlenswert sind in jedem Fall die Programme: - Picturesque (für schnell absolut grafisch ansprechende Bildveredelung wie für Blogs) - Kinemac (für super Vorspänne oder Trailer für Videos) - iSale (für schnell tip top aufbereitete eBay Verkaufsseiten) - Und wenns denn bald freigekauft wurde, BoinxTV (ein Mini-Filmstudio für daheim) Alles andere ist Geschmacksache, wer sich an Spielen erfreut wird ebenso bedient wie Leute die auf ihren iPod oder ihr iPhone direkt aufs Filesystem zugreifen wollen (ohne es zu jailbreaken).

München hat einen Apple Store

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-12-06T10:00:00+01:00

Lange hat es gedauert, nun ist er endlich da und wurde pünktlich zu Nikolaus eröffnet. Deutschlands erster Apple Store eröffnet in München. Zugegeben, wenn man mit Apple-Produkten deren Funktionalität und Service noch gar nicht in Kontakt gekommen ist, ist der Hype wohl kaum zu verstehen. Man denke sich Microsoft würde einen Store aufmachen und seine Produkte dort verkaufen ? Interessiert wohl keine Sau. ;-) Zumindest weiss ich jetzt wo ich mir den Nehalem Mac Pro abholen werde, wenn er denn kommt im Januar. Bei dem Andrang konnte ich leider nicht rein, die Warteschlange ging noch zwei ganze Häuserblocks weiter. Aber wir haben ja ein paar hundert Meter weiter gleich noch den Gravis, wo ich dann schliesslich meinen iPod touch gekauft habe, nachdem ich den Tag zuvor einen für meine Frau gekauft hatte. Ich dachte ja immer für einen MP3-Player ist ein iPod einfach zu teuer, als ich ihn allerdings an den Mac angesteckt hatte und er mir komplett alle Daten synchronisiert hat.... boah.... absolute Perfektion. Also hab ich einen Tag später gleich einen für mich selbst nachgekauft :-) Ab sofort nie wieder vom Sofa aufstehen :-D Internet/eMail/GoogleEarth/... super. Kobaan.

X3 Terran Conflict Sectormap 0.7

abusch@gmx.net — 2009-04-07T21:57:00+02:00

(0.7 online) Hab ich doch glatt vergessen die Files online zu stellen, von Euch sagt aber auch keiner was ! ...basierend auf meiner alten X3 Reunion Karte und einigen Informationen zu Terran Conflict auf Seizewell (danke Euch allen). Version 0.7 mit weissem Hintergrund (für unsere Tintenstrahler, und Laser) Version 0.7 mit weissem Hintergrund als PNG 4400x4000 (6,8 MB) Version 0.7 mit weissem Hintergrund als 3x2 Seiten PDF 1200dpi (6,7 MB) Version 0.5 mit schwarzem Hintergrund (was für grosse Farblaser oder Plotter) ...Version 0.5 mit schwarzem Hintergrund als PNG 4400x4000 (6,2 MB) Version 0.5 mit schwarzem Hintergrund als 3x2 Seiten PDF 1200dpi (7,8 MB) X3-TC läuft auf meinem Athlon 4000 und 1GB Speicher äusserst unbefriedigend, ausserdem ist auf der Northbridge der Lüfter durchgebrannt, ... * Auf der Karte habe ich die ungefähre Position der Tore sowie alle SKW's, Ausrüstungsdocks, Schiffswerften und Piratenbasen eingezeichnet. * Zusätzlich stehen dann noch die jeweils lukrativsten Erz-, Silizium- und Nividium- und Eis-Asteroiden für jeden Sektor dabei. * Es wird angezeigt wo man welche Superfrachter kaufen kann und ausserdem sind die Sektoren anhand ihres Torabstandes unterschiedlich gross skaliert. ... * Änderung aller Farben und Objekt-Ebenen um eine Version mit weissem und schwarzem Hintergrund, auf einmal pflegen zu können. ...Tja, jetzt bleibt mir nur X3 Reunion über Crossover auf meinem Mac. ... * Unbekannte Sektoren doch den richtigen "Behörden" zugewiesen, besser so. (danke an Yuna_Miyoki) ... * Umgestaltung nur noch Version mit weissem Hintergrund gepflegt ... * Die Position der Tore fehlen noch für die neuen X3TC-Sektoren (nur noch rechts unten) ...Einige der Sektorkreise sind recht dunkel und dann noch eine schwarze Schrift... das ist nach dem Ausdrucken nicht ganz so optimal. ...Die Dinger sind Schrott, nein Korrektur: Asus hat für seine "Billigboards" (alles unter 200 Euro) eine ganz miese Biospolitik. Die haben nicht umsonst so eine Speicherliste mitgegeben, alle anderen nicht aufgelisteten Speichermodule sind nur unter gewaltigen Kopfschmerzen halbswegs zum Laufen zu bringen. ... Und ich rede hier nicht von Billigspeicher, sondern von Modulen wie GEIL Black Dragon Edition oder Muskin 1066+ MHz... ...Ja die weisse Version hängt bei mir nun an der Wand auf 12 DIN A4 Seiten ausgedruckt, und ich brauch immer noch eine Lupe wenn ich was genau wissen will. Mittlerweile bin ich bei einer Version 0.7 und die enthält kein schwarz mehr, so ganz glücklich bin ich damit noch nicht, zudem sollen noch mehr Infos drauf, wo man Waren mit den grössten Gewinnspannen los wird, das Gesuche geht mir nämlich auf den Keks. Wann ich mal dazukomme die 0.7-0.x zu exportieren... mal sehen. ...Ich kann mir das Spiel schon gar nicht mehr ohne sie vorstellen.

Apple WWDC 2008, 9.-13. Juni, San Francisco

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-06-09T12:06:31+02:00

Vom 9. bis zum 13. Juni findet in San Francisco im Moscone Center West wieder die Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2008 statt. Auf die Keynote von Apple darf man schon gespannt sein, wird doch ein überarbeitetes iPhone erwartet, und wer weiss was da noch so alles kommt, der Mac mini ist ja schon etwas überfällig. Ein genauer Zeitplan aller Seminare und Workshop findet sich auf den Entwicklerseiten von Apple.

Prix Ars Electronica - Preisverleihung, 5. September 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-09-05T12:00:14+02:00

Die Verleihung der goldenen Nica's für Computerkunst der Prix Ars Electronica findet dieses Jahr am 5. September 2008 auf der Ars Electronica Gala im Linzer Brucknerhaus statt. Preise werden verliehen in den Bereichen: Computer Animation / Film / Visual Effects Interaktive Computer Kunst Digitale Musik Hybride Kunst Digitale Communities Forschung Medienkunst Freestyle Computing Die Gala wird von 3sat und dem ORF im Fernsehen übertragen.

Die lange Nacht der Musik in München 31. Mai 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-05-31T20:00:00+02:00

Bei der diesjährigen langen Nacht der Musik in München nehmen 109 verschiedene Bands bzw. Veranstalter teil. Genauere Infos zu teilnehmenden Museen sowie allen bereitgestellten Verkehrsrouten der Shuttlebusse gibt es -> hier.

Die lange Nacht der Münchner Museen 25.10.2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-10-25T19:00:00+02:00

Zum zehnten mal haben in München 90 Museen bis spät in die Nacht (19 Uhr - 2 Uhr) geöffnet. Genauere Infos zu teilnehmenden Museen sowie allen bereitgestellten Verkehrsrouten der Shuttlebusse gibt es -> hier.

Fantasy Filmfest, 12. August -10. September 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-08-12T11:28:44+02:00

Das Fantasy Filmfest findet teilweise zeitlich versetzt in acht deutschen Großstädten statt. 12.-20. August 2008 Berlin - Cinemaxx Potsdamer Platz - Kulturbrauerei Hamburg - Cinemaxx Dammtor 20.-27. August 2008 Dortmund - Cinestar Köln - Cinedom 27. August - 3. September 2008 Frankfurt - Cinestar - Metropolis Nürnberg - Cinecitta 3.-10. September 2008 München - Cinema - City Stuttgart - Metropol Genaue Programminformationen gibt es ab Juli 2008.

Asia Filmfest 2008, 31. Oktober - 9. November 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-10-31T11:25:33+01:00

Das Asia Filmfest ist ein internationales Filmfestival in München und findet im Mathäser Filmpalast sowie im Gloria Palast statt. Das Asia Filmfest ist das größte asiatische Filmfestival in Deutschland. Das genaue Programm ist noch nicht bekannt.

Akasia - Mongolei Tag

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-07-10T11:14:39+02:00

Am 10. Juli 2008 ab 18.30 Uhr in der Friedrichstr. 25, ESG-Gebäude, Erdgeschoss, Raum 04, veranstaltet der asiatische Kulturaustauschdienst Akasia der LMU München wieder einen Kulturabend. Das Thema des diesmaligen Mongolei-Tags ist: Das Mongolische "Naadam" Fest

Akasia - Korea Tag

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-06-05T11:14:39+02:00

Am 5. Juni 2008 ab 18.30 Uhr in der Friedrichstr. 25, ESG-Gebäude, Erdgeschoss, Raum 04, veranstaltet der asiatische Kulturaustauschdienst Akasia der LMU München wieder einen Kulturabend. Das Thema des diesmaligen Korea-Tags ist: Die Vorstellung von Kultur und Land mit anschließender Zubereitung von Kimchi.

Akasia - Japan Tag

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-05-15T11:14:39+02:00

Am 15. Mai 2008 ab 18.30 Uhr in der Friedrichstr. 25, ESG-Gebäude, Erdgeschoss, Raum 04, veranstaltet der asiatische Kulturaustauschdienst Akasia der LMU München wieder einen Kulturabend. Das Thema des diesmaligen Japan-Tags ist: Die "goldene Woche" zudem gibt es ein Überraschungsanime zu sehen. (Das Mädchen das durch die Zeit sprang.)

Theatron MusikSommer 2008, 6.-24. August 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-08-06T10:24:16+02:00

Der Theatron MusikSommer 2008 findet dieses Jahr wie gewohnt im Olympiapark München statt, vom 6. bis zum 24. August 2008. Das Programm steht erst am 31. Mai fest, ich werd dann nochmal ein Update bekanntgeben.

TUNIX 2008, 30. Juni-4. Juli 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-06-30T10:24:14+02:00

Im Anschluss an die GARNIX 2008 folgt die TUNIX 2008 am Münchner Königsplatz, vom 30. ...Wer beim StuStaCulum 2008 die "The Steamy Dumplings" verpasst hat, da seit Jahren eine Ska-Band statt am letzten Abend diesmal am ersten Abend gespielt hat, kann diese hier am Dienstag nochmal hören und sehen. ...15.30 Uhr Nico Debris 17.00 Uhr eastwood 18.30 Uhr Big Kahoona 20.30 Uhr Audiopilot ...14.00 Uhr TANZKINDER 15.30 Uhr EinerZuWenig! 17.00 Uhr Cambero 18.30 Uhr Shavez 20.30 Uhr The Steamy Dumplings ...14.15 Uhr Geoffrey Hammond 15.30 Uhr Blues Yourself! 17.00 Uhr SUBMARIEN 18.30 Uhr Anamity 20.30 Uhr 24indigo ...Juli 2008 15.00 Uhr BLUES POLISH ...18.30 Uhr Scarlet Fire 20.30 Uhr Face Invaders ...Juli 2008 15.00 Uhr Vroudenspil 16.30 Uhr Tir Nan Og 18.30 Uhr SEQUEL 20.30 Uhr Cumulo Nimbus

GARNIX 2008, 16.-20. Juni 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-06-16T10:24:14+02:00

Und nach dem Stustaculum geht's im Anschluss gleich weiter mit der GARNIX am Hochschulgelände in Garching bei München, vom 16.-20. ... Falls ihr das Stustaculum verpasst oder noch immer nicht genug habt, könnt ihr hier evtl. nochmal nachlegen. ...Juni 2008 16.00 Uhr Hans Blöchinger (Bayrischer Liedermacher) 17.45 Uhr Blues Lick (Bayerisches Songwriting) 19.30 Uhr Michael Dietmayr (Liedermacher) ...15.30 Uhr TWIG (Fun Punk) 18.30 Uhr Baxter (Melodic Punk) 20.00 Uhr tune circus (Alternative) ...Juni 2008 16.00 Uhr Livid Halcyon (Melodic Metal) 17.30 Uhr Rebellion of One (Rock/Metal) 19.00 Uhr Wild Scream (Heavy Metal) 20.30 Uhr LAST GRAIN IN THE HOURGLASS (Progressive Rock) 22.30 Uhr 24 Days To Fall (Metal/Hardcore) ...Juni 2008 17.00 Uhr CREKKO (Alternative) 18.30 Uhr Pardon Ms. ...20.30 Uhr Legends Of The Livingroom (Punk) 22.30 Uhr ALEV (Rock) ...Juni 2008 16.00 Uhr Jah Children Harambee (Reggae) 18.30 Uhr SUNRISE TRIBE (Reggae Dancehall) 20.30 Uhr Madame Pacifista (Ska/Funk) 22.30 Uhr á la SKA (Ska)

StuStaCulum 2008, 20.-24. Mai 2008

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-05-20T10:24:13+02:00

StuStaCulum-Impro-Match „mit StadtLandImpro & Mixxit Improvisationstheater“ Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle ...18.30 Uhr Julia & Peter (Liedermacher / Folklore) (Änderung) Ort: MKH-Bühne 19.00 Uhr Tir Nan Og (Irish Folk / Akustik Rock) Ort: Atrium 19.00 Uhr DJ Cyruption (Electro Breaks / Liquid Drum ’n’ Bass) Ort: Cocktailzelt 20.00 Uhr Joon (Indie / Akustik Alternative) (Änderung) Ort: MKH-Bühne ...21.15 Uhr Siggi Björns (Singer / Songwriter) — fällt aus — Ort: MKH-Bühne ...22.00 Uhr M-Riddem (HipHop / Funk) Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle ...15.30 Uhr The Smeatons (Rock / Powerpop / Indie) Ort: Festzelt ...17.30 Uhr Ex-Hopp (Impro-Theater) Ort: MKH-Bühne ...22.00 Uhr Park Lane 7 (Punkrock / Crossover) Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle ...18.30 Uhr Domino (Impro-Theater) Ort: MKH-Bühne ...20.30 Uhr Scarlet Fire (NuRock / Crossover) — fällt aus — Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle ...22.00 Uhr The Bulletmonks (Heavy Rock ’n’ Roll) Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle 22.15 Uhr Schlumpf im Nil (Liedermacher) Ort: MKH-Bühne 23.30 Uhr Derek Singleton (Singer / Songwriter) Ort: MKH-Bühne ...14.00 Uhr Station 2 (Politisches Puppentheater für Erwachsene) „Hitler im Himmelreich“ Ort: Gelände 15.00 Uhr StuStaCulum-Cup (Rugbyturnier) „Das Duell: LMU versus TUM“ Ort: Sportplatz am Englischen Garten ...16.30 Uhr Die Goldene Weißwurscht (Kleinkunst-Förderpreis) Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle 16.30 Uhr Hitler im Himmelreich (Politisches Puppentheater für Erwachsene) Ort: Gelände ...17.00 Uhr Los Sprachlos – Das Interkulturelle Theater von München (Theater Performance) Ort: MKH-Bühne 18.00 Uhr Kroding (Akustik Pop) Ort: MKH-Bühne 18.30 Uhr Hitler im Himmelreich (Politisches Puppentheater für Erwachsene) Ort: Gelände ...20.30 Uhr Die Goldene Weißwurscht (Preisverleihung) Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle ...22.00 Uhr Jura - The pirates of Tyrol (Akustik Rock / Pop) Ort: Hans-Scholl-Halle 22.15 Uhr Mixxit Improvisationstheater (Impro-Theater: Harold) Ort: MKH-Bühne

Freiheit statt Angst / Versammlungsrecht

abusch@gmx.net — 2008-05-31T19:00:00+02:00

Es ist noch nicht ausgestanden, Schäuble's Pläne gehen weiter ! Das neue bayerische Versammlungsgesetz: Das neue Versammlungsgesetz, das die Bayerische Staatsregierung noch vor der Sommerpause im bayerischen Landtag abstimmen lassen will, liest sich wie die Erfüllung aller polizeistaatlichen Wunschträume. Dieses Gesetz fügt sich nahtlos ein in eine ganze Reihe von Gesetzen, die der Überwachung und Bespitzelung dienen, wie dem polizeirechtlichen Lauschangriff, der Kennzeichenerfassung und der Speicherung und Aufzeichnung der Telekommunikation. Bayern spielt dabei den Vorreiter für die anderen Bundesländer, die den Erlass von Versammlungsgesetzen zunächst zurückgestellt haben. Mit dem neuen Gesetz werden Versammlungen noch stärker polizeilicher Kontrolle und Schikane unterworfen und zugleich bisher rechtswidrige Praktiken der Polizei und Behörden gesetzlich verankert. Eindringen des Staates bei Veranstaltungen in geschlossenen Räumen. Polizei darf bei allen Versammlungen „Übersichtsaufnahmen“ erstellen, die auch ausgewertet und beliebig lange gespeichert werden dürfen. VersammlungsleiterInnen und OrdnerInnen werden zu „Hilfspolizisten“ gemacht und können von Behörden und Polizei sogar als „ungeeignet“ oder „unzuverlässig“ abgelehnt werden. Zukünftig ist ein Versammlungsverbot auch möglich, wenn „Rechte Dritter unzumutbar beeinträchtigt“ werden. Der neu eingeführte Begriff des „Militanzverbots“ gibt der Polizei die Handhabe, gegen Demonstrationen oder TeilnehmerInnengruppen vorzugehen, wenn sie den „Eindruck von Gewaltbereitschaft“ vermitteln und “einschüchternd” wirken. Durch die Einführung neuer Straftatbestände wird die Leitung von Versammlungen zum unkalkulierbaren persönlichen Risiko. ...SPD-Verfassungsexperte Klaus Hahnzog sagt: „Der Gesetzentwurf ist obrigkeitsstaatlich“. Nach seiner Ansicht sollen den Veranstaltern so viele Auflagen für eine Kundgebung gemacht werden, dass das Ergebnis eine Einschränkung der Versammlungsfreiheit wäre, obwohl die bayerische Verfassung ausdrücklich Versammlungen unter freiem Himmel ohne Auflagen erlaubt. Laut Staatsregierung sollen Kundgebungen künftig mindestens 72 Stunden vorher angemeldet werden müssen. Außerdem sollen die Veranstalter den Behörden unter anderem melden, wie viele Teilnehmer sie erwarten, wann die Versammlung beginnt und endet, außerdem die Namen und Adressen der Leiter und der Ordner. Die Polizei soll alle Teilnehmer in Übersichtsaufnahmen filmen und fotografieren dürfen. Bei Verstoß gegen die Vorschriften drohen Strafen. „Der Staat muss die Versammlungsfreiheit gewährleisten und darf nicht abschreckend wirken“, sagte der Passauer Verfassungsrechtler Dirk Heckmann. „Ich habe Zweifel, ob das Bundesverfassungsgericht das akzeptiert.“ Der Würzburger Verfassungsrechtler Helmuth Schultze-Fielitz nannte das Gesetz die stärkste Einschränkung der Versammlungsfreiheit seit den fünfziger Jahren. „Die deutsche Rechtstradition baut darauf, dass der Staat es durch Verbote schon richten wird.“ Eigentlich ziele das Grundgesetz darauf, den demokratischen Kräften zu vertrauen. Der Gesetzentwurf der Staatsregierung bewege sich zurück. ...Und hier eine Zusammenfassung als Bild:

German parliament passes telecommunication surveillance law

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-11-09T23:21:37+01:00

The german parliament has passed the new telecommunication surveillance law dictating to store telephone, cellphone, text-messages and internet connection data, as well as time-based location information for 6 months. The previous law only allowed storing that kind of information up to the time issuing an invoice, if needed at all. Logging information had to be deleted after issuing an invoice or upon request of the affected person. The main reason mentioned by the politicians was to combat crimes and terrorism more effectively, but this new law allows the government to spy on doctors and lawyers professional secrecy and makes it impossible for journalists to protect their informants, thus violating the constitution of germany. The new measure will go in effect on january 1st 2008. From that time on it is possible to file a complaint of unconstitutionality, which will definitely happen, as there were more than ten-thousand people demonstrating all over germany against this law last tuesday. All in one, a black friday for germanys democracy. Kobaan.

One blogpost for Burma - Don't look away, join the petition FREE BURMA

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

They need us NOW !!! Please inform yourself about the current situation in Burma. Don't close your eyes, as the former demonstration meanwhile have turned into a killing of innocent people. You can sign a petition online here and donate money online here and you can help by telling other people. Spread the word ! An appeal to the UN Security Council to protect the people of Burma Un appello al Consiglio di Sicurezza della Nazioni Unite per proteggere il popolo birmano: ビルマの人々を保護する国連安全保障理事会への懇願: Een beroep aan de Veiligheidsraad van de V.N. Om de inwoners van Birma te beschermen Un appel au Conseil de sécurité de l'ONU pour protéger le peuple de la Birmanie Una súplica al consejo de seguridad de la O.N.U para proteger a la gente de Birmania RAISE YOUR VOICE NOW !!! www.petitiononline.com/9848/petition.html FREE BURMA - http://www.free-burma.org DONATE ONLINE - http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk GALLERY - http://picasaweb.google.com/niknayman/Burma

Google Earth - Astronomy and Flight simulator

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-09-12T21:30:49+02:00

Google finally did it, again ! The latest Google Earth 4.2 has a new sky feature, for hobby astronomers: (Select: View -> Switch to Sky) or even something for flight simulator fans. Fly a F-16 jet or a SR-22: (PC: CTRL-ALT-A / Mac: Apple-Option-A) Check here for commands.

Gerry Anderson - U.F.O. (S.H.A.D.O.)

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-09-11T21:10:34+02:00

Looking through various offers of SciFi DVD's on Amazon, I re-discovered an old classic which I liked very much watching in my childhood. It's the old british 1970's series U.F.O. more commonly known as the S.H.A.D.O. (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization) by Gerry Anderson (also known for Thunderbirds ) starring Ed Bishop and George Sewell. Although almost 40 years old, and most of the actors already deceased, it was still fun to watch the whole 26 parts of the series again on my DVD collection. And guess what, after the Firefly series and Firefly Serenity, my wife finally became a SF fan now. I wonder if she would fit the purple wig too ? :-)

iBlue 747 GPS bluetooth logger modding for MacOS

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-09-13T00:21:47+02:00

Have you ever had the same problem, shooting a photograph in holiday, and back home you can hardly remember where exactly you've been all around ? The solution, GPS photo tagging. Unfortunately cameras with integrated GPS, are f****ing expensive, GPS PDA handhelds, mobile phones, also costs a lot of money, and GPS car navigation are not suitable for photo tagging at all. But there is one kind of gadgets that work well as a camera accompaniment are GPS loggers. Two of them are wide spread, the Sony GPS-CS1 and the iBlue747. I decided myself for the latter one, as its price is half of that of the Sony, further it has bluetooth realtime navigation capabilities (when peered with PDA or mobile) and higher precision support through DGPS. But there was one drawback. Connecting the iBlue via USB to my Mac and get it working fails due to missing drivers for the GPS's USB to UART serial chip-set (not anymore see drivers). OK, Mac has bluetooth, iBlue has bluetooth, so just peer them together, device type "Other", PIN "0000", Bingo ! I got my device: /dev/tty.iBT-GPS-SPPslave-1 But then came the next hurdle, GPS information was received from the iBlue, but sending commands to setup the device's auto-logging timing and verboseness, and the more important download of the way-points stored in the 16MB flash, failed. After some googling I did find the final solution: Soldering a 1kOhm resistor between the bluetooth modules RX-line and the GPS chip input, enables control of GPS chips registers via bluetooth. Now it's possible to send commands via bluetooth, and initiate a download of the stored GPS logs. It's also possible to reprogram the GPS chip to take up to 5 samples per second instead of 1, thus filling up your flash memory of the logger faster, resulting in less way-points to store, be careful. There're further more dangerous things you can do, as the GPS chip offers more than 180 commands for tweaking. Good enough for me, just pushing the front button when I take a picture and I'm done with a marked way-point in the loggers internal storage. Some things I found on the net, useful when playing with the iBlue: ▪ iBlue-Home ▪ Drivers ▪ MacOS PHP Widget ▪ Java Webstart Software BT747 ▪ BT747-Sourceforge-Project ▪ BT747-Project-Homepage

Site redesign - expect more soon

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-09-10T21:29:11+02:00

As you can see I'm currently redesigning my whole website. Lots of category changes, but I try to maintain most of the permanent links. The main goal is to get a more dynamic front page which is to reflect all content changes in all of the subcategories. Meanwhile a huge bunch of blog entries is waiting to be, once "cleanly rewritten and illustrated", published. I'll also feature on site news aggregation for different interesting news channels. And I'm planning to have an interest-tree-like news structure on the site as well. You may also want to add my new RSS feed on my private diary entries, as I have already moved them to their own sub page (permalinks maintained). Be curious...

Distributed computing - Teraflop/s statistics august 2007

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-08-24T19:10:36+02:00

What have I done... ...besides being busy again at work... Meanwhile I've set up an almost automatic teraflop/s data-collector for distributed projects computing power. The old dinosaur of distributed computing distributed.net has recently been available via Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in the yoyo@home project. Yoyo@home wraps the real last distributed.net project the OGR-25 challenge to BOINC clients, since RSA has cancelled the pricemoney for the RC-72 challenge (has the RSA algorithm been fallen ?). Worldcommunity-Grid, also counts into BOINC for some longer time, with their projects to find cure for: Aids, Malaria, Dengue, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer, Parkinson, ... And finally a not yet integrated into BOINC project, but even bigger in calculation power: Folding@home (FAH) FAH has once almost reached 1 petaflop/s as the first non-commercial distributed project in may this year, when GPU's and the PS3 were added as folding clients. But then came the hot/wet summer, earthquakes and power-outages, ... At least the summer is almost over, and as you can see in the graph FAH is getting faster again, ready to break the petaflop mark. Using Mac OS X grapher tool, it produces some nice graphics like this one: On the other side, this years supercomputing conference predicted the first commercial installation to reach more than 1 petaflop in october this year. So, fire up your engines... let the race begin... ;-) Kobaan.

What ? 2 months no blog entry

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-08-05T08:34:48+02:00

Yeah, right, whatever. Work kept me busy for the last 2 month, although I had holiday for 10 days before. Just updated to the latest version of my blogging software, I promise to start over blogging more frequently.

NBC reporter almost tarred and feathered at DEFCON conference

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-08-05T10:07:41+02:00

It appears that there are always some people which need to learn it the hard way. This was the case for NBC dateline reporter Michelle Madigan trying to undercover filming the DEFCON 15 conference in Las Vegas without permission, and without a press badge. When she was told (by staff/also undercover hackers) that she would need a press badge and is not allowed to enter certain areas for "hidden" filming she just ignored the warning, thus getting more attention than she could have wanted. Suddenly a conference speaker introduced the game "Find the undercover reporter", which lead to big bawl and an escort to her car, with lots of embarrassing comments. Meanwhile her MySpace account is removed as it was flooded with angry comments. See Michelle, such stupid things can ruin your cyber social life.

Don't buy a new computer, until...

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-05-31T23:55:25+02:00

Just in case you want to buy a new computer, and you can't wait any longer for AMD biggest battleship to arrive, at least you want to wait for Intel's price-drop on available processors. The highest category price-drop is almost 50%, this could also mean that the yet not publicly available QX6800 Core 2 Quad with 2,93GHz will be around the price of the Q6700 now. (950-1050US$) By the way, my northbridge fan just cracked of the mainboard this afternoon. Is that a sign or what ? ;-)

Kobaan on vacation - Holiday on Malta

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-06-05T14:30:19+02:00

Don't expect any blog updates for the next two weeks. Chief not in tipi, out in the woods elk stalking.

Online video getting more and more mainstream

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-06-02T23:11:48+02:00

More and more video streaming/clip viewing portals have arisen in the last few years. One of the biggest is YouTube (which will convert its contents to a higher quality h.264 MPEG4 codec video for the AppleTV(by the way just upgraded)), and many more like GoogleVideo, MySpace and the newer Veoh. Most of them hold amateur video content or at least are uploaded by amateurs. Copyrighted material isn't allowed but can be found such as complete anime series if you're interested. But, all of those were bad quality unlike real TV. On the other side P2P video exchange became popular on sharing networks like bittorrent, the bad thing is, that most of the content offered in these networks is also pirated copyrighted material, thus must be the reason for Vuze (former Zudeo, an enhanced version of the bittorrent cross-platform client Azureus) and Tribler to establish a user-friendly and comfortable video sharing platform for LEGAL content. (Try it out, it's really great.) And again, downloading millions of bits for high quality video hence the problem that you have to wait for the download to finish, or even worse, you'll have no real preview. This is were Zattoo, Joost, Babelgum, Joox and TV-Links come in, the latter one more illegally I guess. All of the above offering P2P realtime video for free with depending on service/channel and your own bandwidth, HD-quality TV. This could be the future, at least giving competition to our cable-tv and internet-providers. Pay one bill get Internet/Phone/TV/Mobile. That' s called Quadruple Play.

Google Maps StreetView - for the virtual tourist

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-06-01T23:05:26+02:00

Yet no update on my site, and still no native german content, but things are piling up so fast that I'll post some quick news now. Google Maps now has a new service called StreetView, which enables user to virtually walk through the streets and look around in 360 degrees of freedom. (The service is available for some US cities only so far, if you have trouble accessing switch your browsers default language to english.) A video will say more than a thousand words ;-)

Long time no see you...

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-05-28T20:02:08+02:00

Hi Folks, lang time no see ya.... No, it's not because I upgrade my RapidWeaver blogging software finally, but because of the final steps at work moving to another building which now lasted almost one and a half years. Those last weeks in april and may I had to work all the weekends and some nightshift, that's why the blog lost my attention. Quite like my wife's blog which is also unmaintained since she is just finishing her studies now. But the good thing is, that I have lots of content in the back which I just noted down from time to time and which is just waiting to be published. Ahhh, forgot one more bad thing for you guys, I'll be on holiday next week, so don't expect too much activity soon. Further I want to redesign the blog content (without killing the permalinks) to be more informative, such as writing in german and english since my readers are germans, most of them. And I also want to start a new blog category about architecture which is one of my hobbies. Although I'm not sure yet how to bundle all these different contents into one blog, I hope you'll soon be able to enjoy the first articles. For the RapidWeaver Upgrade itself I must say, I've got absolutely no idea why I spent the money for the upgrade since I can't see any difference yet. Hopefully I'll discover some new features in the future, and don't experience one or more of the known/unknown bugs. At least my old content and layout loaded without warnings. Let's see if everything breaks when I press publish..... ...yours Kobaan. I'm back.

GPG Expired Keys Cleanup - Howto

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-04-08T23:57:06+02:00

A lot of people leave their "expired" public keys on the public key servers forever. They even keep expired secret keys in their keys, or worst, they delete expired secret keys from their keyring before revoking according public keys and publishing this revokation to th key servers. ...sec 1024D/9DC0387E 2006-02-21 [expires: 2007-02-21] Blogentry April 2007 uid Andreas Kobara (privat) ...sec 1024D/F373037D 2006-02-21 [expires: 2007-02-21] Blogentry April 2007 ...As one can see, I have two keys, that are already expired, and that I have already created a follow-up key for. As long as I do not revoke the expired public key, others can still encrypt mails to me ignoring the expired key, and I (or someone who has stolen my old secret key) will be able to still decrypt an expired key encrypted mail. Usually you should create a revocation certificate for a newly generated key, to be able to revoke it later, in case it was stolen, or just expired. In my case, I will create a revocation certificate now, to revoke my key from the keyservers. ...sec 1024D/9DC0387E 2006-02-21 Andreas Kobara (privat) ...access to this certificate he can use it to make your key unusable. It is smart to print this certificate and store it away, just in case ...Nothing happened so far, you can store your revocation certificate now, or use it, based on your needs. ...pub 1024D/9DC0387E 2006-02-21 [expired: 2007-02-21] uid Andreas Kobara (privat) ...3 9DC0387E 2006-05-07 Andreas Kobara (privat) ...3 9DC0387E 2006-02-21 Andreas Kobara (privat) ...pub 1024D/9DC0387E 2006-02-21 [revoked: 2007-04-08] ...9DC0387E 2007-04-08 Andreas Kobara (privat) uid Andreas Kobara (privat) ...3 9DC0387E 2006-05-07 Andreas Kobara (privat) ...3 9DC0387E 2006-02-21 Andreas Kobara (privat) ...We can now publish this key back to the keyservers to tell everyone that this key is not any longer valid for signing and encryption. ...Although, as long as I do not delete this key from my own secret keyring, it will be always posible to open very old mail archives which used that old key.

Netpong on Mac Book with acceleration sensor support

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-04-07T23:46:21+02:00

This one is funny, following MacSaber, here's another short game to be played on Mac Book' s featuring the embedded acceleration/motion sensor. In this case, to play the old Atari classic Pong, of course via wireless networking, but at least monochrome. NetPong:

First internet router in space

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-04-12T23:34:13+02:00

NASA is launching its first internet router to be placed in earth orbit. Thus internet network routing is not anymore limited to undersea fiber optic cables, direct copper links or low range wireless communication. On the other side, this way it is no longer possible for "friendly" states to eavesdrop communication on ground based wires/fibers. Fibertapping is already as easy and unnoticeable as traditional wiretapping. Ultra broadband uplink interception, is something completely different. The next stage will probably be routing from satellite to satellite, and once this is done, USA is the only party having complete control over global internet communication. Ah, I forgot to mention chinas newest ability to destroy satellites within 30 minutes by ballistic missiles if needed. Lets call that, stalematt.

HTML Body

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-04-10T23:30:05+02:00

Most people can't live anymore without WYSIWYG editors, but there are others, which can't live without HTML anymore: Oh my god, he tattooed it on his back, bad mistake. Now he can't see it, only in a mirror, of course mirrored.... hmmm. Maybe next time.

Sam Triggy - A Real Triple Guitar Hero

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-04-03T23:26:15+02:00

Just wanted to share one of my latest discoveries on youtube. Sam Triggy from Malaysia, doesn't play guitar... ...he does not play two guitars... ...no, he plays three guitars, at the same time. Man, he's a real pro. Enjoy Take 5 and Autumn Leaves performed by Sam Triggy alone, with his 3 e-guitars. And one more video to give you an impression of his ability to play different style music too. This one is inspired by Jimi Hendrix: Feel free to search on youtube for more different styles, instruments and concertvideos of Sam Triggy.

Bloody hell, I hate mondays...

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-04-16T23:22:01+02:00

Bored beyond believe... ...then this is for you, a blood pud pillow. Anyway better than shoot yourself for real ;-)

Cheap 3D controller device

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-29T00:21:35+02:00

Just ordered my 3D input controller device brought to us money saving folks from 3dconnexion for 59.- Euro. If you can remember the first 3d mouse and its price, this offer is really cheap. No more clicking and pointing in Google Earth, just pure entertainment. Windows/Linux/MacOSX supported ;-)

Switching browser default applications on Mac

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-27T22:45:30+02:00

Since I had to search a bit hard on this one, you might be interested in HOW TO CHANGE A DEFAULT APPLICATION that is called when you open a file within your browser. I just wanted to click on a link, that proofed to be a mms-video-stream, to open in my favorite video player VLC, instead it ended up opening in the rosetta-translated ages old windows media player for mac. That was simply a no go. "was" Searching through various preferences in Mac OS and its applications, even within Firefox as it is done on Windows... ... I found this entry (already fixed): kobaans-computer:~ kobaan$ defaults find mms Found 1 keys in domain 'com.apple. LaunchServices': { LSHandlers = ( {LSHandlerRoleAll = "org.videolan.vlc"; LSHandlerURLScheme = mms; } Since modifying plist files can be tricky for some people (not using developer tools, or being familiar with "vi" and/or "defaults" class syntax) I found that great application (actually a preferences panel) called RCDefaultApp, which can be used to change and inspect almost every file/mime/uri/... handling on Mac OS easily. Enjoy. Kobaan.

John Popper - Blues Traveler - Hook

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-26T22:41:55+02:00

This time I want to share this great video with you of John Popper from Blues Traveler performing the song "Hook" on Horde Tour 1998. If you don't know what John Popper is famous for, forward to time: 2:34

iTunes Cover Art without iTunes account on Intel Macs

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-28T22:40:37+02:00

If for some reason you don't want to use your iTunes account to fetch cover art for your music collection, maybe this is for you. Aric Friesen has written an iTunes script called Fetch Art to fetch cover art for your songs from Amazon. Unfortunately it will only work on powerpc Macs, as it uses some compiled perl modules which are not yet universal/intel. Although the author stated that he is willing to build an universal application if he would get donations, there is still no updated application for intel Macs available, and the application will crash, when it comes to downloading the cover art. UPDATE: the author meanwhile has released a universal binary of the application. ......so what we need to do is to call the perl module in Rosetta mode. ...kobaans-computer: kobaan$ file /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures /usr/bin/perl (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386 /usr/bin/perl (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc So, perl, is actually a universal binary, that means an intel platform Mac will call the intel code natively. Let's correct this for the runtime of Fetch Art. FIRST: make a backup of your original perl binary kobaans-computer: kobaan$ sudo cp /usr/bin/perl /Users/kobaan/perl SECOND: strip the intel code from the perl binary kobaans-computer: kobaan$ sudo lipo -remove i386 /usr/bin/perl -o /Users/kobaan/perl-ppc THIRD: copy the stripped ppc-only binary of perl over the original "location" of perl kobaans-computer: kobaan$ sudo cp /Users/kobaan/perl-ppc /usr/bin/perl ...kobaans-computer: kobaan$ file /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture /usr/bin/perl (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc What will happen if we call the Fetch Art script from within iTunes now.... ... select your files, (choose your amazon store in preferences), and fetch the cover art, ...After using the script for your collection, quit Fetch Art, and copy back your original "universal" perl binary. kobaans-computer: kobaan$ sudo cp /Users/kobaan/perl /usr/bin/perl

Folding at Home at PS3 once again - UPDATE

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-25T23:16:51+02:00

Sony Playstation 3 firmware update 1.6 is just out of the door, featuring then Cure@PS3 folding at home client, and just 20 hours later 3000 PS3 contributors already reached the mark of 100 TFlop/s processing power. Unbelievable, as this is the average equivalent of 120000 computers folding under Windows OS. Unbelievable further, that PS3 is not even released yet in Europe, South Africa and Australia, which will happen in just a couple of hours. Probably the first people will do tomorrow is to upgrade their firmware, which means they'll all get the folding client installed on their hardware, and if they're curious enough might become contributers as well. So might do the people which had to work during the week, and just waited for the coming weekend. The expectations are that the 1 PetaFlop/s mark, will be reached for the first time in the world plus on a non-commercial and non-government project, by public distributed computing, at about 24000 participants which could be reached within the next 5 days. UPDATE: Well we just missed the petaflop in the first approach on sunday 25th, instead after reaching 990 teraflop/s Stanford's network collapsed, sort of, although they blame the people playing PS3 instead of folding ;-) Stay tuned for the petaflop announcement which will definitely happen within the next few week, I guess.

The Future has began - Bigger Multitouch Displays

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-22T19:35:09+01:00

The next generation of Jefferson Y. Han's Interactive Multitouch Display presentation has arrived. Compared to the older video of Multitouch in January 2006, this one is amazingly advanced: Get me one immediately... Kobaan.

Bavarian for beginners...

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-21T23:34:04+01:00

Some content in german, aehm, bavarian: Real fun ! :-)

Ode to the "expensive" Mac

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-20T23:01:14+01:00

Sure bigger is better, ;-) but a smaller price tag would be nice too ;-) We demand new Mac's and we demand them bigger, better, faster and cheaper. Uhh, and we further demand cheaper PS3's :-)

First Steps Cocoa Programming

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-19T23:51:21+01:00

Well, if you wonder why my blog has some gaps recently, it's because of me doing my first steps towards Cocoa programming on MacOS with XCode. I didn't do programming for a longer time, and a friend of mine gave me that great book, that helps me a lot now to get into the Objective-C slang, used for Cocoa. In short terms, its really amazing how simple and structured Cocoa programming with XCode actually is. And the best thing is, objective-C has already implemented reference counting as this was one of the best features of the Crystalspace 3D Framework, for which I contributed to for 3 years. These are some screenshots of applications of my first steps programming with the previous mentioned book. A lottery application: More or less, the same application in a GUI frontend: A letter counting GUI application: And my latest finished training chapter, a speaking text application, with choose-able voices. Really, really, big fun... stay tuned for more within the next days. Further I'm really looking forward to see all the great new features of MacOS Leopard's XCode 3.0, which is said to have graphical instant performance tuning of running code.... wow... I really wanna see this... So far, Kobaan.

Next Apple Store maybe in iRaq ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-12T19:54:23+01:00

Hot Icecubes ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-15T21:55:26+01:00

I don't know if it's big news for you, but it was for me. Ice doesn't have to be cold as one might think. We're talking about water-ice, right. According to Sandia Labs I just learned that, water can have a lot more than only one iced aggregate state. In our everyday live we only know 3 states for most substances: liquid, hard, gas respectively in case of H2O=water: water, ice, steam. In fact there are 11 states of different ice states known for water, yet. Using the Z machine at Sandia Labs, scientists managed to compress water to ice within the record time of only 100 nanoseconds by using a pressure of 50.000 to 120.000 atmospheres. In this state, water becomes hard as ice, but it is also extremely hot. The Z machine itself is intended to create extremely high temperatures, like in the interior of stars, by heating a plasma with 20 million amperes of electric power. What do we need this for ? ;-) ...melting diamonds... ...creating the ultimate cocktail on the rocks... ...you know there was this discussion about global warming and stuff... ...yeah maybe we just all need to open the door of our fridges, or a z machine.... ... I'm gonna order one.

Cure@PS3 - Folding at Home on your PS3 finally available

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-17T13:31:46+01:00

Finally, finally, finally... ...just in time for the european release of Sony's Playstation 3 on friday, march 23rd, Sony presents the final "now public" client software for contributing 100 GFlop/s of CELL computing power to stanford university's Folding@Home project. Let's all help to fight deceases and boost scientific calculations for the good of all mankind. (A note for the green enthusiast: YES, it will consume 180 watts, but it's 20 times faster than the average PC, now think again.) Kobaan.

Natto Storage Devices ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-10T16:44:07+01:00

For the ones of you not knowing what "Natto" is: Natto are fermented (fouling) soy beans, and are quite favourite as food all over asia. In my opinion, it smells horibble, so stay away. The bacteria used to get the beans so sticky fouling is called Bacillus subtilis and only rarely causes food poisoning. ;-) Now back to storage devices... ...well that's the news, - it - is the new storage devices, not the Natto itself, but the DNA of the bacteria. Scientists (Natto lovers ?) from Keio University in Japan, of the Institute for Advanced Biosciences, managed to "store" a short message "E=mc^2 1905!" inside the genome of this bacillus subtilis. Since DNA copying over generations and other environmental influences, always leads to mutations (that's evolution baby...), the scientists decided NOT to use a cryptic and complex algorithm, but instead used 4 different positions inside of the genome chain to place the message information data multiple times. Thus providing redundancy against damage and a possible error correction when the message is read back from the DNA sequence. Although this method already works quite well, there still is the problem of the slow process (about 24 hours) of DNA construction and sequence analysis, to actually write and read data. But once these problems are solved, It might be that your harddisk or DVD is not any longer your biggest data storage, instead you could explore the billions of secret contents of your "Natto" storage device. Uhh.., smelly computer... Natto drive ? Kobaan.

The ultimate hiphangers...

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-05T01:46:45+01:00

You sure all know hip hanger jeans, and ultra low hip jeans most of the time (hopefully) combined with a nice looking string... but that was yesterday. The new fashion trend coming from Japan, is an even more low hanging jeans, which already embeds the (look) of panties.... :-D How convenient...

The Fratellis - Flathead / Song from current iTunes commercial

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-04T22:40:46+01:00

Amazed by the new iTunes commercial title song, I looked around to check for the band and song-name. Then I found this video-clip of The Fratellis called Flathead: I liked it so much that I had to put everything on my amazon wishlist, the CD too. ;-)

Mac Mail application speedup, cleanup

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-03T22:36:10+01:00

For those of you experiencing slowdowns on Mac OS's Mail application over some time, this might be a cheap trick for you to get back speed and disk-space. Mail, is keeping track of mail message subjects in a database, to quickly scan, search and organize threading in your mailboxes. The good thing is: once you delete a mail, it is also gets deleted in the database... The bad thing is: a database needs to be maintained, and this is not done automatically... What does this mean now.... ...your database deletes items by reference, but it does not free up the allocated disk-space, thus blowing up your overall database size which leads to longer access times as more (empty) data needs to be parsed through. The solution: While your Mail application is NOT running... ...use a terminal and go into "cd ~/Library/Mail"... ...open the database with: "sqlite3 Envelope\ Index"... ...and free up the already deleted database disk-space using: "vacuum subjects;"... ...et voila, quit sqlite3 and you're done. Mail will be quite fast again, and your disk capacity should show a few more free blocks.

Over the time of graffiti sprayers - wrong.

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-04T22:29:12+01:00

You thought graffiti sprayers just vanished ? No, they just needed a tiny little bit bigger canvas and some more high tech color, in this case: high power laser energy. Find out more on this website: http://graffitiresearchlab.com/? page_id=76

It's a couch potatos dream

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-01T22:10:34+01:00

Imagine, you're sitting on your couch after you found your most comfortable position, watching your favorite game on TV, your throat gets dry, and the tension is rising more and more so it'll be impossible to get up and get you a cool drink. Woman are already more than adequately emancipated they wont even pay attention to your desperate situation.... ...but this could be the answer to all of your problems: A cooled beer can throwing robot companion, ready to serve you whenever you're busy elsewhere.

Mac - Eve of destruction

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-02-20T21:53:10+01:00

So less bytes and so deadly: 524946464407030057415645666D7420 1000000001000100007D000000000000 000000006461746120070300 I'm starting to get angry now, as I filed in this bug 1 year ago, and there's still no fix for such a trivial bug. Also I filed it in as a security issue since you can crash every Mac from remote with these little numbers, but Apple degraded it to be cosmetic only as it is not possible to alter or execute code. I guess they're not anymore interested in fixing Tiger, as the Leopard is waiting for its victims..... Hint: Check for zero values before dividing.....

PayPal transaction token key offer

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-03-02T21:27:25+01:00

Today I got my PayPal trasaction token. Using a token generator is much more safe than using traditional passwords, as they generate a time based one-time valid token-number which is then used to sign a transaction. Phishing of useraccounts and passwords might still be possible, but of less use, as the token code is only valid for a short time, and one-time only. Compared to the token of my bank account, PayPals token is a little bit smaller, and uses a button to activate itself other than pulling the left side on the other token. The number of digits is equal, but usually a secondary secret PIN is used to complete the code. For example you may need to enter: tokencode+PIN or PIN+tokencode, or even PIN1+tokencode+PIN2(or a displayed session number) Finally PayPal also delivers a nice laminated note with a top ten of essential security behaviour rules, as well as a shart manual on usage of the token, and helpdesk information. All in one: I really appreciate PayPal going this direction, what a great idea, I just hope lots of banks will follow PayPals example on how security can be increased efficiently, as there is a big demand for this on the customer side, but only a few banks or transaction providers offering such a service. Get your token now from PayPal's special offer: "Der PayPal Sicherheitsschlüssel." (search on PayPal.com for offerings in your language/country)

What about the Tanuki ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-02-07T18:12:07+01:00

You might have heard it or not: A Tanuki, seen almost everywhere around temples in Japan, is a famous native japanese animal there. To be more precise it's a racoon dog. While looking around for a nice picture of a Tanuki for my website layout I just found an explanatory figure to better understand the eight lucks a Tanuki is a symbol for.

Plen Skating Robot

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-02-06T18:10:09+01:00

This is the newest toy on the japanese market, its name is PLEN. And you'll be surprised how easy this construction is balancing its movement without any complicated sensors. This is PLEN skating, controlled by a bluetooth mobile phone: Here, you can see PLEN skateboarding, in perfection, he's a real pro: And finally PLEN can also play soccer: The price for this toy is also very promising its only 2000 US$, thus being the perfect gift for.... yeah someone you really want something. ;-) Anyway, try to compare this price with the AIBO or QRIO ? Ah, one last thing: My delivery address is on the frontpage :-)

Vista Installation Guide for Geeks

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-02-05T18:10:08+01:00

Well, you may agree that Windows Vista can be bought everywhere even by the bloodiest dummy on this planet. Upgrading online if somewhat more for the professional a.k.a. uninteresting, so lets see how geeks are doing the major install of Windows Vista Ultimate Geek Edition:

Wanna Vista ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-02-04T18:10:08+01:00

...no words...

More Theme Wrangling

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-02-03T23:44:21+01:00

to be continued... not yet finished, stay tuned. More changes happened as you might have noticed. The fresh green vine leaves are gone, and finally sakura cherry-blossom is to become my final layout, for the springtime at least. (Hopefully browser-caching didn't steal my show. So if you're still seeing a green/blue layout SHIFT-RELOAD your browser, or clean your cache.) I hope you like it, (too). Kobaan

MMORPG Fever - Guild Wars - Nightfall Campaign

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-01-28T14:17:47+01:00

Almost one week since my last post, so what happened ? About 1 year ago I build a gaming PC, and the only game I did play was X3 - Reunion, well meanwhile getting a bit bored of it, or didn't play anything else at all, I decided to enter world of MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). Having played Neverwinter Nights a certain time ago, which was a offline role playing game, I searched for a transition game to enter the "for myself mysterious" world of online gaming. And there I found Guild Wars - Nightfall, usually online role playing games do charge a monthly fee for gaming and storing your data, while Guild Wars gaming is for free. And the best thing is, the latest add-on Nightfall, is a complete standalone game, which further can be played "online", but without the need to build guilds with other online-players. An ideal transition for "single-players" to get into guild playing. So within the last 4 days of gaming (yeah right not one complete week), I've already reached level 13 as a derwish/elemental-magician. Here are some screenshots of the Guild Wars World. It also has its own wiki in english and german. So, what's next ? Just in a few days the "non-game-based" MMO-World SecondLife will be released for the german market, as it becomes more and more hype recently, I'll certainly give it a try, but as of now, I still can't get the "sense" of SecondLife other than making virtual/or_real money in a virtual world without any aims/targets. May the magic power be with you, and your guild ! Kobaan.

RapidWeaver Theme Wrangling

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-01-21T12:14:37+01:00

Getting bored of the old "Autumn-Fall" RapidWeaver theme, and further getting told by my friends over and over again, that it looked like grandma's paperwall, I finally invested some time searching for new a theme for my site. Not easy to find themes for free, and those which are usually destroy some of my blog formattings, or do have other difficulties. Well, as you can see I finally ended up with an already shipped default-theme "Medieval", which I pimped a little bit to get some more space in the blog section, and further the heading color is changed. Since I'm not yet completely happy with the result, as I'm missing this piece of art here: it's likely possible that I'll tuned it a bit more within the next days. Stay tuned. Kobaan.

Permalinks Rollout

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-01-16T22:00:00+01:00

A friend of mine (Hi Marcus) gave me the valuable hint to not use auto-magically hashed blog URLs created by my blogging software, but instead use customized perma-links, the help search engines like google, to better index and categorize my blog-entries. The times where search engines were driven by keywords in the page headers are all over, meanwhile it's most important to have meaningful keywords in your page-title and/or your page-URL. Unfortunately Rapidweaver's blogging module does not yet support per blog entry page titles, at least I didn't find out yet if it should work already. Thanks to Marcus. If you want to check it out, he has a great site about the Dominikanische Republik and its small town El Limon. And there's lots of delicious recipes there.

Dining - Ninja Style

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-01-12T20:04:10+01:00

Having seen a few adventure restaurants already in Tokyo by myself, there now opened a ninja theme adventure restaurant in New York. It is called Ninja New York, everything is built like a small village and ninjas appear and disappear silently as you select your menu. But, see for yourself: As for a comparison you can take a look at some picture on the website of The Lock Up in Tokyo where you're getting arrested by attractive police office girls in uniform, and where you can mix your own cocktails in chemistry vitro glasses. Or for the more video type of you, check out Tokyo's Alcatraz (Prison-Hospital) adventure restaurant: If you're interested into more of the ninja stuff, be sure to take a stop here: http://askaninja.com ;-)

iPhone papercraft

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-01-10T23:01:43+01:00

MacWorld San Francisco 2007 Keynote was great as expected, although much of the long time awaited smaller things didn't show up yet. At least Apple TV is now ready to be pre-ordered, and finally the iPhone became reality. If you didn't see anything yet, it is a must to visit Apple's iPhone site and walk through all the quicktime videos or even the now published keynote livestream. Now for the fun stuff. For those of you, who have kids, or the completely desperate guy - who can't wait any longer (Hi Alex, Reyk, Gerd...) to have the new iPhone in their own hands - here's a guide how to build your own paper-craft iPhone. ;-) (Please, excuse the red color shift in my pictures, as my laser printer is missing cyan toner at the moment.) A bigger version of the paper-craft cut template can be downloaded here. Feel free to modify with your own iPhone front-cover. Also the measurements are not completely true for now, see the apple spec page for exact measurements to scale your image to the printer. Have fun, ;-) Kobaan.

Waiting for Keynote 2007

abusch@gmx.net — 2007-01-08T22:33:07+01:00

Only a few hours left until MacWorld 2007 Keynote in San Francisco. check the live event coverage here: http://www.macrumorslive.com Here's a list of the expected announcements: ...- iPhone like iPod nano + touchscreen wheel - iPhone Pro like iPod Video with Blackberry like features - iPod nano with doubled capacity - iTV as previously announced, a settop-box to beam iTunes and maybe more to your TV ...- MacMini with Core2Duo processors and a bundled version with keyboard/mouse + 17" Cinema Display - MacPro with improved memory and maybe dual-quad cores ? - reveal 600Mbps Airport Extreme already working inside a few devices ? ...Mac Account with increased storage capacity up to 50GB for iDisk and TimeMachine usage - Own domain names and eMail addresses ...- iPhoto + Google maps integration and GPS tagging features ...Leopard Mac OS 10.5: - release end of january 2007 ...- TimeMachine (backup and archiving) ...- iChat with screencasting, video feature and videoeffects ...Widgets / easy and completely new DashCode - Spotlight with network functions ...- 64bit support for the entire system - ZFS filesystem, but not as system filesystem - Mail pretty messages using templates - iCal CalDAV share/publish calendars via Internet - VoiceOver fluent, new better voice including japanese and chinese language support ......lets hope that at least some of this widely rumored stuff will become true...

Happy New Year - Fireworks

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-31T23:59:59+01:00

Happy New Year to all of you !!! Best wishes for 2007 ! And may the force be with you. Kobaan.

23rd Chaos Communication Congress

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-22T23:05:06+01:00

The annual Chaos Communication Congress, will be held 27th to 30th december in Berlin. This year there will something very special, since internet live streaming of events reached its limits last year, the Chaos Computer Club folks managed to get a license for broadcasting events in DVB-T. And they broadcast their selfmade DVB stream by themselves with a selfmade DVB-T transmitter, and all this for less than 1000 Euros. To be sure that noone gets disturbed they got a licensed fequency and are allowed 5 Watts sending power, enough to cover direct eye contact distance to Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Isn't that great. I guess a lot of TV station get pissed when they recalculate their investment for their DVB equipment. ;-) The agenda is still not final, but a major issue will be trust and security, especially dedicated to voting machines, RFIDs, DRM, DataMining, forensics, electronic passports, bluetooth, biometric, console hacking, VoIP, Web2.0 and the end of traditional TV. Be curious....

Journey to the moon/space/orbit whatever...

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-21T19:34:21+01:00

Finally Jules Verne's idea of shooting a man to the moon will become reality, almost. The US AirForce is building a 2.4km long magnetic accelerator, which shall be used to shoot up to 100kg of "baggage" into the orbit, thus saving the cost of the expensive supportflights with traditional rockets. Although it will not be possible to transport human beings or any other lifeform with this "vehicle" into space, it might work fine for already dead meat ;-) or miniature satellites. The principle of the "cannon" is quite familiar to the particle accellerator at CERN, which just finished installing all the superconductor magnets of its 25km ring. I can already see the headline: Chinese spy satellite seriously hit by frozen french fries....

Real tough Sudoku

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-22T19:27:01+01:00

Sudoku became world famous in the last months, although it exists since 18th century when swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler discovered a puzzle game called Latin Square. The name Sudoku comes from the japanese sentence: 数字は独身に限る, meaning as much as: limit to unique numbers. Although published in various newspapers over the years, it reached world wide fame quite recently. Meanwhile there are also a lot of more complex sudokus for "the advanced puzzle fan". Sudoku with 16 sqaures and numbers. Sudoku as jigsaw puzzle, non square based: And for the real freaks, pre-requistiting a computer, and probably a 3D graphics card: The ultimate 3-dimensional Sudoku called: 3doku, available for Mac and PC. If you're interested in the different mathematical approaches to solve a sudoku take a look at wikipedia.

Good news, it works. Bad news, it works.

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-20T21:15:54+01:00

Bad awakening for Mac users, Apple fixed a bug. It took almost 2 years for Apple to release a security fix so that it's not anymore possible to hijack the builtin or even the external USB camera from within a webpage. At least everyone believed that this issue has been fixed in the security update 2006-008, and people became already sad about missing the feature to preview realtime effects on local video like on this page: (only works for Mac people.) But there's also good news. It still works. Oh wait, or is it bad news ? Anyway the good news is, that the bad news of a killed feature is not true, and that the security fix works, as your realtime video cannot be sent via ajax/javascript or a java applet to someone you don't even know by just accessing someone's evil website. How do we check that ? Apple doesn't say anything about it. So the real good news is, enjoy the feature as long as you're not sitting naked in front of your mac. ;-) Oh, uhh, aehh did I mention the bad news is, we don't know if its really fixed, or apple became so much interested in your homevideos that they patched something in your system to get much sharper pictures of you than anyone else does. ;-)

Thai / Laos Food Cooking Video Websites

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-13T21:37:36+01:00

One of my big favourits is thai food, I like almost everything of it. Meanwhile there's more and more recipes on the net on how to cook thai food, but it comes even better, more and more sites come up with short cooking howto videos for the different meals. Here are some links for thai and laos food cooking videos. (Please mind using a quick search on youtube to get the same video as on these sites, to save the peoples homepage bandwidth.) http://www.thaifoodtonight.com/thaifoodtonight/recipes.htm http://www.enjoythaifood.com/videos/ http://thai-laos-food.blogspot.com/ Enjoy cooking ! Send me pictures :-D

The magic table

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-12T20:16:32+01:00

Seen on a podcast, this table is used on a Yacht, must be pretty expensive, but the technology is simply great. Never seen something like it before. Who wants to bet with me on how many fingers got lost when changing the size of the table ?

Cart racing was yesterday, time to fly micro airplanes

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-11T23:51:44+01:00

If you still remember my bog entry on virtual reality glasses used to steer and enjoy a model airplane, this is something much more realistic. Although I guess you need to have done everything in your life before trying to start with this...

Long time no post, Guitar Hero 2 finished

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-05T22:48:18+01:00

Sorry folks, for not posting for a while now. Yesterday I celebrated my second wedding anniversary in a castle in Würzburg. Additionally I bought the second sequel of Guitar Hero (2) which bound me to finish the game before continuing writing this blog.

Thumb Wars - the complete trilogy

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-06T21:43:51+01:00

Yeah I know this is rather old, but it's still classic. The whole StarWars (tm) trilogy made with thumb characters shown in only 20 minutes. Well a few of the events and text has changed, slightly. ;-)

And the loosers are: web.de-users, again

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-10T12:31:21+01:00

I just don't understand why people are so happy with their web.de freemail accounts. One should read the forums about web.de, especially the parts where they should pay a monthly fee for clicking on a banner to create a premium account, although they haven't seen any banner or button. A few days later they get snail mail from a lawyer to pay a surcharge, and so on.... People suffering from this should immediately contact the consumer advice center, because they already know this case and handle the case with you. Now these days, another big surprise came up by web.de: If you're using Voice over IP via web.de, you will not be able to continue, and further you'll loose your assigned telephone number, cause web.de decided to stop offering VoIP. But I'm sure they will make a great offer for xmas where you can have 2MB extra space on your freemail account.... Fuck web.de.

Wii run on Mac, do Wii run on PC too ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-09T12:21:17+01:00

We already know that the Nintendo Wii controller can also be used on the Mac platform, but can it be used on PC too ? Yes, it can.... And for the more romantic types of you, just try to replace the infrared bar on your TV with two candles to the left and right. It will work.

Great technews site discovered

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-10T12:11:09+01:00

Since I'm always interested in the latest high tech news, I have a bunch of websites to visit to carry all the latest news together in my brain. Now I finally found a big comprehensive site, which covers of of it on one place. Of course they provide RSS too. http://www.physorg.com covers the latest development on: - Nanotechnology - Physics - Space and Earth Science - Electronic devices - Technology news - General Science news - Medicine and Health further it has a discussion forum: http://forum.physorg.com and its own video collection: http://video.physorg.com

Could Wii have a problem ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-08T18:04:28+01:00

Lots of folks are gonna buy the Nintendo Wii these days. But be careful, there's already numerous amounts of people which suffer from broken TV screens, glasses, lamps, pictures, and one successfully managed to smash his Wii nun-chuck controller through the plastic frame of his plasma.... Replacing the wire strip with a steel wire or gluing the controller to your hand is recommended. See the whole gallery of destruction here: http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/index.php

Extreme skateboarding

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-12-07T19:58:13+01:00

This one is only for skateboard freaks with nerves of steel. Can't believe it, more and more stupid people on this planet... ;-) oh wait, that was great, just once again, uh oh no I forgot my chute. ahhhhhhhhhh

Beryl, a fork of compiz 3D desktop for Linux

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-18T19:23:41+01:00

Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops, I'm sure you'll ask yourself where's the difference between compiz and beryl. See it this way, what options do you have if you want to check something on your desktop or another window, if a window is already placed on top of it. Sure, you can minimize the window, move the window or even close it. You may use taskwitching, window transparency might work as well. But how about, just taking a quick look behind a window border or corner, like what you would do if it's just a piece of paper. Watch this: Beryl is a fork of the compiz 3D desktop composition manger for Linux.

Free blog translations

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-15T23:37:31+01:00

Many bloggers blog in their own language, thus limiting readers and contacts to only this language. The reason why I started to blog in english (as I am german and living in germany) was, to improve my english, or at least keep my english active. I never saw a problem in my friends and parents not being able to read my blog because of its english language, but in their lack of internet connectivity. Now, things have changed, internet connection is everywhere, even my non-tech parents got internet, language translation can be done on the fly, almost. So, this is the time I include hot links for translating my blog in "maybe your language". Check it out on the menu to the right. Please let me know, if you're missing YOUR language, but I think I got most of my friends languages covered.

Linux with Compiz + Xgl - beating the Apple desktop

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-09T21:37:00+01:00

Apple's Aqua graphical user-interface was the absolute leader in eye-candy desktops for home computers. Now Linux can offer a quite similar but also further extended desktop environment like on Mac's. The new XServer with integrated OpenGL support Xgl, enables owners of 3D graphics cards in their computers to use the new compiz framework to draw their favourite desktop like Gnome or KDE in a 3D context. Thus enabling beautiful window-effects and workspace usage-features never seen before. Check it out here: WARNING: The only distribution at the moment which enables compiz by default on supported hardware at the moment is the latest Fedora Linux. Although you can easily enable compiz on Gentoo Linux, Ubuntu and others, there's still some things to do by hand which requires a lot of reading howto's, especially if you want to fallback to your old "working" configuration.

My favourite podcast channels

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-10T23:15:36+01:00

As podcasts are becoming more and more professional and entertaining I want to take the chance and share some of my favourite podcast channels/sites with you. Ehrensenf: one of the best german daily podcasts Geek Brief TV: the most of the time Mac side of life... Rocketboom: the long traditional internet podcast CinemaTech G4TV: focussed on latest computer games Lynne's SciFi News: all about the latest developments in the SciFi scene FrenchMaid TV: focussed on, of course, french maids ;-) Galacticast: a SciFi comedy show For subscribing to these podcasts channels you can either use iTunes, or as I recommend you the free and opensource Democracy player available for almost any platform. Have fun... Kobaan. P.S.: Leave me a note if you know amazing and popular channels that I've missed so far...

SUPERCOMPUTING 2006 Tutorial on GPGPU on 12th november

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-12T06:02:22+01:00

Right in time to this years supercomputing conference 2006 GPGPU will release lots of tutorials on how to use graphics cards GPU's for computation in supercomputer scale. Most interesting will be the direct use of NVIDIA's CUDA respective ATI's CTM, both a C-like programming language, which should make it easy for he average joe to use the mighty processing power of GPU's for the homeuser. You may also checkout and/or join Stanfords latest development in F@H protein folding, as they now support multiple GPU's (Crossfire or SLI) in their latest client. See further details on supercomputing for everyone on http://gpgpu.org or for the more business type here: http://sc06.supercomputing.org.

Japanese Get A Mac spots out

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-11T10:35:40+01:00

Following all the english only commercials of Apple's Get A Mac campaign, today japanese ads were released, featuring new/japanese actors: Watch them up to HD quality here: http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

George W. Bush Speechwriter

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-07T22:50:26+01:00

Elections in the US, until the results are going to be published, you can try to prepare George W. Bush's speech here: http://www.actofme.co.uk/bush_speech/bushspeechwriter.html

Parachuting for professionals... ouch

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-06T20:04:14+01:00

For those of you thinking about to start with parachuting.... mind the gap..... ehhh cacti.... Worse quality link: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pVSD_EvEKO0 as the above one often has capacity issues.

As the wintergames are coming closer...

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-11-05T14:02:18+01:00

Found a new funny game for the winter season on the web, create your own tracks and join the community videos at: http://www.linerider.org

Why does everyone like Halloween ?

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-30T23:12:42+01:00

Have you ever wondered why everyone likes halloween ? Well, here's an explanation: :-)

Click To Play

Asia Filmfest 31. Oct. - 05. Nov. 2006

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-24T21:53:57+02:00

This years Asia Filmfest is starting in munich cinemas Gloria Filmpalast and Mathaeser from october 31st to november 5th. Movies shown are:

StarTrek meets Simpsons

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-25T19:49:18+02:00

Found this guy on youtube who mixes the tunes of Simpsons versus StarTrek in a very funny video:

Completely exhausted - End of the Week

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-20T20:38:29+02:00

This week was very hard work for me, and I'm completely exhausted. At least, I'm not alone with this feeling:

Happy Halloween

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-31T23:59:59+01:00

(null)

Hello I'm a Wii and I'm a PS3 ...

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-18T22:18:22+02:00

This one is for all lovers of Apple's PC vs. Mac commercials. If you're still unsure whether to buy Sony's upcoming PS3 or Nintendo's Wii, watch this: Just in case you missed the original ones, go here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Kung Fu - And they fly for real

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-16T20:22:20+02:00

I'm sure most of you people think all the Kung Fu stuff shown in movies are tricks, but when you see this guy "Joe Eigo" its much easier to belief that "they" can fly ! Checkout Joe Eigo's homepage: http://www.multilevelmoves.com

Open House Day - Science Campus Garching 15.10.2006

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-12T21:38:20+02:00

Inform yourself about the latest progress on different science projects at the Science Campus Garching on sunday, october 15th 2006. At this event you have the chance to talk to scientist about their work, get things explained and make your own suggestions or simply ask them questions you wanna know. Science Campus Garching consists of several Max Planck Institutes (MPI), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Ludwig Maximillians University Munich (LMU), Leibnitz Rechenzentrum (LRZ) and more. Further the subway construction to Science Campus Garching is finished and will open the day before. LRZ will present one of Germany's top supercomputer SGI Altix 4700 with 27 TFlops (doubled next year). You can take a look at the latest fusion reactor experiments, reach for the stars at ESO's remote controlled Very Large Telescope(VLT) in Chile, or or or...

StarWars Reality - 3D holographic projection in perfection

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-11T21:25:28+02:00

Over, the time of special effects in movies like StarWars where holographic displays showed video transmissions or tactical maps. Cheoptics 360 is a holographic 3D projections system, which displays 3D information in color in middle of a room.

GPU Power outperforming CPU Power

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-08T13:04:05+02:00

According to the latest F@H statistics, graphics cards processors are pretty much outperforming traditional CPU's. The current factor is about 75 GFlops on GPU against an average of 1GFlops on a CPU. (this varies because of very old processors and modern processors with about 14 GFlops). Anyway at the moment we see 370 GPUs doing the same amount of work as 29000 CPUs. This is really great for the F@H project, although the GPU cores at the moment are only capable of doing basic calculations with the gromacs application. Other applications have to be heavily rewritten, and/or are not able to run every calculation on GPUs and therefore have to use the main CPU for those parts of the calculation.

Exress yourself - light emitting t-shirts by Philips

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-10-07T18:31:30+02:00

This one is a must have. Philips managed to integrate organic LEDs inside of a t-shirt, and the best thing is that it can be animated. Watch this great impressions here:

Pssst - Google World Domination

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-28T21:18:34+02:00

Penguins would say: "You haven't seen anything......." ...flying saucers made by google.... ...oh my gauge, I'm so glad that google works for humans on earth and not for some other alien intergalactic invasion race...

Photokina Super Tele Lens 1700mm

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-27T23:05:55+02:00

Finally there's something for the real tele-photographer enthusiast. Ladies and Gentleman, the worlds "last civilian" tele-lens for photographers. 1700mm focal length luminous intensity 1:4 weight 256 kg And some overview figures to see the whole "monster" at once: If you're still looking for something "bigger" I can only suggest to hijack the hubble space telescope, or google the net for earth based extremely large telescope projects like thess one.

Science Sports - Calculate PI

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-25T19:30:02+02:00

And another game for the next birthday party: Let your guests calculate Pi by playing some rounds of "darts". Do this by targeting the blue shaped square on the above figure. And then simply count the darts you are throwing and that will be inside the square, and additionally the darts that miss the board and hit inside the marked blue area. And after a few rounds, let's say 1.000-100.000 ;-) should be enough to see some good results. Now use this formula: A small hint for the frustrated, invite people that are able to aim the upper left square, but are not so much pros that they will always hit the board only.

RC-Flight next generation

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-26T19:08:19+02:00

Some of you might remember cable-remote-controlled cars, with even fixed or wire- pulled steering. And our highest dreams would be to be able to afford the money to buy a remote controlled plane one fine day. Then came the day we had enough money to do so. And we didn't allow our kids to fly by themselves because "this toy is just for daddy" and much to expensive if it crashes. Yeah, someday later we crashed it by ourselves.... done. Kids nowadays will come up with this, and just keep smiling at us, dinosaurs, and don't let us play because we might not understand how, cause we're so "seventies ?" ;-) And for those people of you that didn't like the sound of the first video, here's something more scary..... ;-)

Spamming my caregivers blog

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-21T07:33:04+02:00

bla bla bla... brrrrr.... me superteddy now, being on my daddy's blog....

Spinach Dumpling - Okonomiyaki Style

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-03T19:24:35+02:00

Today my wife came home with a recipe from a friend. And we made a kind of bavarian bread dumplings, but this time mixed with spinach and cheese. Italian style, with parmesan cheese, cutted in slices and fried in a pan: Japanese Okonomiyaki style, with plum sauce: Oh, man, that was so delicious....

Jack the Ripper

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-21T07:30:13+02:00

This late morning was so foggy, I was almost scared to go to work ;-)

Join Stardust@Home

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-19T19:09:46+02:00

Following the search for extraterrestrial life with the SETI@HOME project and huge amounts of further other projects that are being worked on using a cross-platform distributed computing architecture named BOINC, there is now a new project for volunteer participants to help work on: Stardust@HOME The spacecraft Stardust was launched in 1999 to catch dust particles of comet Wild 2. Therefore a substance called aerogel was invented which is capable of catching high speed dust particles and softly de-accelerate them so they will stuck inside the aerogel and can be brought home to mother earth without any damage. The aerogel which holds the dust particles "maybe from beginning of the universe" is now to be inspected by "you". Since it's almost impossible to find a needle inside of a soccer-field, you can imagine the work that has to be done to find particles from outer space sticking inside the aerogel. So what has been done to solve this problem ? "Simply": The aerogel is scanned layer for layer by a microscope and the images are stored in a database. From this database you're now able to access pre- and past-focussed images and search for dust impacts. Once you finished a short tutorial and training, you're presented new images to analyze mixed with already known images to test your discovery "or spamming" skills. Wow, that's what I call science by wire.... ;-)

VIA invents the "TreeMark"

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-13T21:24:23+02:00

VIA has just invented a formula to measure ecology of processors. In it's "TreeMark" called index, VIA's new C7-D processor takes a top position, by only needing four trees over 3 years to compensate the CO2 produced by the energy consumed for the processors operation. Compare your own processor, it's just that easy: 1 Assuming 27% standby mode, 3% sleep mode, 67% idle mode, 3% performance mode 2 Global average carbon intensity of electricity 3 Based on average broad leaf tree Other "TreeMarks" ordered by their integer performance: 35 Trees = Mac Pro Quad Xeon 3,0 [115,3 SPECint_rate_base2000] 73 Trees = 2 x Xeon DualCore 2,8 [ 59,0 SPECint_rate_base2000] 53 Trees = 2 x Opteron 285 (2,6) [ 76,4 SPECint_rate_base2000] 6 Trees = iMac 2,16 [ 34,5 SPECint_rate_base2000] 19 Trees = Athlon X2 5000(FX-60) [ 34,0 SPECint_rate_base2000] 21 Trees = Pentium D 820 [ 28,3 SPECint_rate_base2000] 18 Trees = Pentium IV 540J 3,2 [ 17,4 SPECint_rate_base2000] 2 Trees = Mac Mini G4 1,2 [ 6,0 SPECint_rate_base2000]

Nostalgically - Dark Faith of 3rd Millenium Projects

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-09-03T20:09:38+02:00

Browsing through my computer library archives, I rediscovered some demo screenshots of a computer role-playing-game that I was programming together with Sun(Gerd) as graphical artist, Loki(Reyk) and Bernhard for background story and concept. Within 3 years, and only 1 programmer, we didn't achieve a finished playable game, but anyway we all learned a lot doing this Dark Faith Game for he 3rd Millenium Projects initiative. Click on the image above or here to see further screenshots of "our" programming and "graphics design" progress. Back right now, Sun is heavily creating in Blender again, as you can read in his blog. The more interesting thing is, that all project members changed to intel Mac's by this year. :-D

Orange moon over Sheraton

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-31T22:24:15+02:00

Wow, what a night. The moon shines in bright orange like a delicious peach, over at Arabella Sheraton.

24inch monitor in full HD resolution from Dell

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-07-17T21:49:51+02:00

Now I'm happy with my new 24-inch monitor, which was a very cheap offer from Dell for only 830 euros. Thus always longing for a big apple screen, I had no chance to resist. And the best thing is, it's full HD capable on my Mac mini. And also it has amazing connection possibilities: VGA, DVI, YUV, SVIDEO, Composite and Picture-in-Picture, Pivot and so on. Simply great, what an awesome investment.

Supercomputer on your graphics board

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-31T21:37:11+02:00

Most people don't even know they're already owning awesome computing power. They take a look on their CPU, compare the speeds on a supercomputing archive like Top 500.org and after that, they're disappointed. But compared to CPU's (the main processor), modern graphic boards GPU's are already a lot faster than their complex instruction processing pendants. Fast GPU's (graphics processors) are needed for the latest 3D games which are getting more and more hype. They even bundle lots of GPU's to virtual graphics boards for maximum performance. For the consumer that's called SLI or crossfire, for graphics offices Nvidia introduced quadroplex recently. Now back to supercomputing, ok GPU's are faster ? ...A GPU has the limit that it can only handle simple instructions which are highly optimized, further they work from their own board based but extreme fast memory banks. So, a CPU is needed for complex calculations and system management and flexible functions, whereas a GPU can do the simple but effective calculations. Some smart people started to use GPU's to accelerate physics calculations for games, making Ageia's Physx accelerator board a nonsense investment. More smart people started to figure out how to use GPU's for their own purposes. A programmer needs an API to abstract function calls to the hardware. The common API for GPU's is OpenGL, and this leads to a very uncommon thinking in programming, as a graphics API like OpenGL has graphics functions. ...Now if we want to give the GPU work to do we copy input data from the main memory to the graphics board texture buffer. ...The next thing is, we implement an algorithm workflow in assembly as a shader ...(The graphics card thinks we will animate a flickering fire for example, and does the calculation according to the shader program from the input texture buffer to an output texture buffer.) And now we transfer back the output texture buffer to the main systems memory, and wonder wonder.... the calculation was done by the GPU. Depending on the shader program and implementation possibility the GPU will be lightyears faster in calculation as the CPU. The big advantage of GPU's is of course graphical calculation, this is why makes sense to use them for floating point and limit calculations. ...Lineare Algebra auf GPU's GPU Tutorials GPGPU Implementations Now it's only a matter of time when distributed computing projects like setiathome, faah, hpf, hpf2 and so on will run a hundred times faster on peoples

Designed for Apple Design

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-31T19:56:59+02:00

Ikea is now using Apple iMacs for their catalogue decorations. Now there's two possibilities why they're doing that. 1) Ikea's design really sucks, so they need to focus attention to something else. 2) The table is built so weak that it would fall into pieces when it had to hold a PC. Now take the survey: ;-)

Great Artists on Youtube - Say it's possible by Terra Naomi

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-06-16T20:48:58+02:00

Listening to my daily dose of youtube flicks I found that one and about an hour later ordered the CD ! Thanks Naomi you made my day.

Great Artists on Youtube - Cannonball by blinktwice4y

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-06-26T20:46:09+02:00

When listening to some people doing a cover of Terra Naomi's Say it's possible, I found a real perfect voice. Hey guy, if you should ever produce a CD, I'll buy it.

Suki Yaki - Homemade

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-05-09T20:35:28+02:00

Finally I got some time to work on my first few video podcasts. Todays special is a japanese style SukiYaki.

Satey - Homemade

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-05-01T20:35:10+02:00

Satey originally is thai food, as far as I know. It’s really great to prepare everything, and then go for picnic camp fire and enjoy lunch. ;-)

Teppan Yaki - Homemade

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-04-30T20:34:52+02:00

Nothing is more delicious and enjoyable then directly grill your meat on the table.

Garden BBQ

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-06-10T20:33:28+02:00

Today I visited my parents for BBQ in their garden. Hmmm, that was delicious... can you smell it ;-)

BeNuts Ska@StuStaCulum

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-05-25T20:32:37+02:00

Right after their big tour in Japan, the BeNuts finally arrived at Munichs biggest annual student festival, the “STUdentenSTAdt spectaCULUM”. Above video is from one of their biggest hits: Ska Summer Night, filmed during their concert today. I have to excuse for the bad quality, but I only had my wifes camera by the hand, which only does QVGA, with horrible 8kHz mono 8bit sound. The BeNuts started 12 years ago in munich, and have already managed to be successful on tour in Madrid, Moscow and the big japanese cities Tokyo, Osaka... Check out the BeNuts Homepage, buy a CD there and further checkout the StuStaCulum website.

Guitar Hero - Hands on

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-25T20:26:13+02:00

Today I had the chance to try out Guitar Hero for the Playstation... :-DDD wooo, that was fun. Guitar Hero 2 will be released in november this year, enough time to save some money. Hey, no more jokes about my broken guitar...

Preparing for X3 Reunion - Part I

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-11-13T21:54:38+01:00

Finally I bought all the components for my new X3 - Reunion Game-PC. ...(I know the images aren't in the right order, but after converting this blogentry for the second time, I have no more energy to drag and drop that image positions over and over again...) Although I will still miss the great Thermaltake Armor Chassis, which I cannot afford, the Aerocool Engine II on the picture to the right, is really a good alternative for 1/3 price. The main focus was a combined front and rear fan working inside the PC case. I also downgraded the CPU from a dual 4600 to a simple but fast enough for X3 Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego. ...To further push performance to its peek I decided to invest in a high class graphics chipset at a low cost. ...Compared to all the other X850XT its price is lowest, but outperfoms an Geforce 6800ultra quite nice ;-). Since I did not yet buy my windows OS I just did a quickrun in Gentoo Linux, which was installed in a second(hour), and measured about 9700 fps with glxgears. ...a lot of people suffer from AC97 sound issues, whilst people using a seperate sound card report to get a 10% performance increase. Now I had two choices, buying a seperate soundcard for more money, or buying a mainboard with high quality onboard sound. When I saw the specs on the MSI K8N Diamond compared to the Asus A8N SLI Premium or the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D, the thing was crystalclear. MSI offers 6x SATA 3GB's with excellent equipment, and an onboard Soundblaster Live 24bit on a lower price than the Asus..... ...Because of the 6 SATA's and the possibility to upgrade the CPU to dualcore in the distant future, I was looking for a power supply with all those connectors for the future and a low-noise 12cm fan. And I remembered the tests on tomshardware that showed only a few surviving candidates in a power supply stress test. And the winner is: a 500 watts Seasonic S12 power supply with 4 SATA and Dual-CPU(not core) connectors ready for every usage. Further it has an active power factor correction which saves energy when the system doesn't need the full power. ...It's a samsung whatever I have no idea what version code or features it has. I just read it has 130ms access time for dvd, which is bad. ...But it was cheap and my favourit Plextor 713 in black was sold out that day. And.... so to say, I just bought it to get Gentoo Linux installed that day. :-DDD Since I didn't want to have all technology and more important no cables filling the view into a windowed PC case, I installed a Samsung 200GB SATA2 8MB harddisk with native command queueing. I didn't read much about harddisk speed yet but cache transfers show up with 1799.89 MB/sec in Linux and buffered reads with 55.26 MB/sec. ...Although I'm not convinced by SATA data and poer connectors yet, I can see them breaking apart someday. Yep, and the memory... 2x512 CL2,5 Kingston DDR400, since I'm not the overclocking guy, everything here standard, and MSI's intelligent overclocking is also disabled. (maybe it's worth putting mem, cpu and gpu on fire when X4 is being released, we'll see)

X3 Reunion - First Impressions

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-12-14T19:32:10+01:00

Time to spend some time on blogging about my X3 Reunion progress ...Whenever you want to enjoy space / flight sims having a joystick is a must, even better when you got force-feedback ;-) So if you bump, it will bump back to you, physically. Reunion, is the 3rd part of Egosoft's space trading and combat series, above we can see Nikonofune which is the ship of Saya. This is mine, at the very beginning, you'll already get a M4 Argon Buster and a Mercury TS, but earning money is still hard to achive at the beginning. This shows the landing lights of a solar power plant. Space stations are huge, and there are only a few docking bays now, most of the time they'll be in the middle. Nebula rendering, atmosphere and lighting textures are incredibly improved. ...Most of them don't differ anymore between races, but their designs textures, bumpmapping and light effects are really eye-candy. ...Although it's a space game there's good sound effects too, even in space, well it's a game so that goes ok. And there is a great variety of BGM for all the space-sectors, some frightning, depressing or relaxing... as in Kingdoms End. Are you still reading this text ? ...This one is a bit obscure, this is the station in Grand Exchange, which obviously was sprayed by some teenagers ? ...Inside of the station it seems someone painted some japanese kanjis on the walls.... strange. ...Being attacked by the side.... shame on them. My turret is in the rear. Someone's in a hurry.... profitsssss.... A nice shot from the side, lighting is really great here. ...Asteroid fields are beatiful, as long as you see them early enough when flying through thick sight-killing shield-eating nebulas. (X2 had acid nebulas damaging your hull, I guess it's still the same, I don't wanna try this. But in X2 the shielding was weakened by lightning charges inside nebulas, which I haven't experienced yet in X3. The weather is cloudy, beautiful storms cycling in the planets atmosphere. A huge carrier ship of the Teladi. ... But who wants to be on war with that trading geniuses. Expect more, when I find some time and mysterious places...

Last minute XMAS gifts

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-12-15T07:28:29+01:00

To all of you seeking for last minute xmas-presents, I can suggest this great audio CD of the korean band Bulldog Mansion which has a wide variety of different music styles as they play some funk, bigband, ballad, ska and rock. In my eyes a perfect xmas gift for all people who want to escape the last frustating 5 years of english and/or german top100 music. I just loved the songs of Bulldog Mansion when I did find a nice flash cartoon on the net: there she is (goto->amalloc) another part of this cartoon series will be published soon. http://www.sambakza.net http://www.bulldogmansion.com

Own X3 Map released

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-12-21T23:39:10+01:00

I know there are already some good sectormaps available, even for the latest Release X2 of the X-universe saga. There're also quite a few lists with some more information available, so I decided to include as much information as possible into my very own map. If you're interested you can download it here: http://home.mnet-online.de/tuxine/x3kobaanmap.jpg (gif and png version also available) ...Showing all sectors for X3 by their names ...Mark Solar Power Plants ...List Superfreighter I/II availability ...Mark profitable asteroids for each sector by ore, silicon, nividium List sector protection M1,M2,M6 and TL availability Energie Support/Shortage mapping through the whole map Prepared non-functional space-gates ...Included marketprice comparison list Included rocket-data list ...set non-functional gates visibility ...Energy-Support and shoratge highlighted through the map (blueish background) Legend scaled to a more readable size Scaled some known wide sectors in width t.b.c. ...Include information on highest asteroid value: ore, silicon, nividium Added pinpoints (yet invisible) for non-functional spacegates List Superfreighter I/II availability ...Include information on shipyards, docks, pirate bases, solar power plants Include information on spacegate positions List sector protection M1,M2,M6 and TL availability ...Scaled sectors by their size (middle spacegate distance) Initial version based on old maps, with additional sectors I didn't translate the map to english yet, this may follow someday later.

X3 Reunion - Patch 1.3 - Xenon/Khaak Invasion Massacre

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-12-22T23:06:14+01:00

Since Patch 1.3 Khaak and Xenon become once more a real threat in the X universe. Some people already roll back to Version 1.2.01, as they suffer from massive universe wide khaak, xenon and even pirate attacks backed by multiple carriers and destroyers. The problem is that in former version, enemies that were killed didn't respawn, that way the universe became more and more ...Now with v1.3 all the destroyed ships recoreded in the savefile will be respawned at once, thus sending huge waves of enemies to the player and other races. As a result, it might happen that complete sectors will be entirely destructed by huge invasions, supply stations and their ships being attacked, the whole economy that you knew before ...But if you recall the beginning of the story in X3, you've been warned by the senator, who said, that they can hardly hold 30% of their fleet because of the war. But that's bad news for us traders, who cannot afford an armada of defence-ships or even destroyers to push back the enemies or secure their stations and sectors. Help is needed by other races KI ships, but as they might be also destroyed and their supplies cut, you'll be finally on your own. However further improvements have been done to the graphics engine and overall speed is greatly improved allover. Some storyelements should've been fixed too, but who will have the time to find out that. Protection of your profitssssss is what you need to care about

Support privacy !

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-03-01T23:27:00+01:00

This time I want to encourage all folks of you owning a router which is capable of running the OpenWrt system. What you need: OpenWrt can be installed on many different router-hardware. See here for a list of supported devices. What you get: Compared to other router system-software, OpenWrt by default is a very slim system. You can think of "minimalistic"="more secure". Almost everything you'll ever need can be simply installed as packages or compiled by yourself. (e.g. a webserver/VoIP-proxy a.s.o.) For GUI-enthusiasts the white-russian-release also offers the possibility to update, and configure your router via web-interface, although most of you people will be happy to have ssh-access and therefore full control over you linux-routerdevice. Getting even more: Most of the listed hardware devices, can use external or internal memory-sticks, sd-cards or at least nfs or samba shares, to install more software or hold more data accessible from your router. How you can help: Back to my initial thought for this blogentry. As your router is usually up 24/7, and most people have flatrates, there's a great possibility to support the TOR network by installing a tor-server on your router and use it(or not) from within your LAN by accessing privoxy on your router to browse the web anonymously for example. What is TOR: TOR (The Onion Router network) is a concept to tunnel networktraffic through multiple other nodes before connecting to the final destination node. That way it will be harder for evesdroppers to trace your origin IP-address, and for hosters more safe to offer content without the danger of being shutdown when a server-ip might get blocked by someone. Further you can provide access to the whole internet, dedicated services or even dedicated addresses through your own TOR server. If you don't want others to use your router to access the internet, you can just contribute as a tunnel-peer for other TOR-servers. Where to get: All required packages for OpenWrt-capable routers can be found here and a precompiled privoxy-package here. I'm addicted: Of course you can do even more crazy stuff with OpenWrt see here. Peace !

Todays special: Mac Mini - Intel Style

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-03-18T18:57:18+01:00

Year after year I enviously watch he development on Apple's newest Mac creations, Mac OS X, iPod's, iMac's, Mac mini and this year finally Apple decided to switch over processor technology from PowerPC over to Intel CPU's. The biggest showstopper for me was their high selling prices . But with their new Intel Core chips which you can't buy yet for the PC market, and a relatively low price for a new revolutionary technology assembled together in a tiny little box, I couldn't any longer resist buying a Mac mini. Calculating together all the pieces, shows that the price is fair enough to buy, and as usual for Apple you can count on reliable prices for a long time period. So, if you buy later, it will cost almost the same and you will miss the technology advantage. Compared to other processors, the Intel Core definitely has it's place, especially compared to power consumption (31Watts). So here're some pictures of my new baby, the Mac mini Core Duo: A new mac fan.

The Mediacenter Ecstasy - Part IV

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-09-09T22:09:26+02:00

Success ! I got DRM/DRI compiled cleanly and have an totally accellerated X-Display. XVideo Motion Compensation is also working as I found a precompiled Xorg version with all the stuff needed. The funny thing is, that my MythTV database is now broken, had no time yet to investigate that further, to much to do at work. Meanwhile there's also a patch available for IR-Support on my DVB-T Terratec 1400 card. But I think I'll skip this one and use my good old X10 radio remote, which is already supported in the kernel. Let's see when everything is done, I'm also planning to strip down the whole system to a working Image for you EPIA-folks out there. Good night...

The Mediacenter Odyssee - Part III

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-09-04T12:52:32+02:00

Finally I decided to delete all the Fedora trash from my epia. Since I found some good howto's for debian I gave Debian Sarge a chance which installed fairly easy, and most important, rather ...But again it lacks the newest kernel features that will support my newer DVB-T card Terratec Cinergy 1400, as well as framebuffer-support for the Epia M10000. Fortunately, after some frickling, I managed to backport the DVB stuff into the older "newest" debian development kernel, and also the via-frambuffer driver. A bigger problem was the DRM/DRI drivers which refused to compile for my debian kernel, with some strange missing symbol errors... Anyway Mythtv is now up and running, although without hardware ...Menuloading is a real pain in the ass, and also channel switching, but timeshifting and the EPG works great anyway... On the internet I found an article on "KnoppMyth" which promised to work "out of the box(from CD)" on a Epia system... waahhh.... After a short try, I realized that it works also without accelleration ...Not to mention the missing support for my DVB card, but OK. I really wonder that after those many years of DVB introduction it's still impossible to buy a settopbox which has all features ...For example Pinnacle's Showcenter (a streaming-client) can be combined with a streaming server PC which has a PCTV card (analogue or DVB) so it is possible to programm it like a VCR. ...Live-TV is to programm a channel via Showcenter, wait for the recording to start and then pickup the file inside the videolist and play it.

The Ultimate Mediacenter - Part II

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-08-31T23:41:15+02:00

Meanwhile I gave Fedora a chance to proof that it's worth to build a mediacenter in less time than on gentoo. After hours of downloading and burning the installation dvd (what happened to the good old network-install) I managed to setup a minimal Fedora Core 3 system (minimal means 700MB on Fedora, ughh, Gentoo does the same in 40MB). Due to the high demand of diskspace for a core installation I needed to assign a unused logical volume of my gentoo base system and relocate /usr to it. But anyway everything works out of the box. ...The Via Epia M10000 C3 Ezra mini-itx system needs special packages for hardware-acceleration (direct rendering, mpeg2-decoding, motion compensation). Those are available for FC3 on: http://washington.kelkoo.net/epia/FC3 Simply installing xorg-x11 will select the epia-specific packages, as long as the epia repository is set up correctly. Currently there's only a binary rpm for via-drm on the C3 nehemia(i686) version of the Epia M10000 board available. So I had to rebuild a native C3 ezra-t(i586) version of the package: rpmbuild --rebuild --target i586 kernel-module-via-drm-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-2.6.7-1.ucr.src.rpm For the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T card and a few others there, just right in time, an backpatch-update for the cx88-driver on FC3 became available on http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable cx88-kmdl-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-0.0.4_20050708_202133-58.rhfc3.at.i586.rpm ...I intendently left out more detailed setup of configfiles, startup-entries and so on, which can be found everywhere on google. (xorg.conf for epia, minimal fc3 init.d, modules.conf, rc.local, .xinitrc) For a mediabox which should boot really fast, a big window desktop is just overhead, so I'll use the minimalistic twm as my windowmanager, although there're people who prefer a minimalistic windowmaker instead. We'll see later if that's worth a change. After installing TWM, I do "switchdesktop twm", for activation (twm should be default anyway). ...I decided to use mythtv, as it is best supported and has wide plugin support for almost every feature someone could want. Not sure yet if streaming internet tv will be supported through a playlist-wrapper for mplayer. ...The Mythtv-suite as well as mplayer and friends are all available here: http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable Fedora will not be my favourite system, but at least it's fast on Epia and package support is ok for common use. Except for the compile time gentoo's package-management is lightyears faster than on fedora.

The Ultimate Mediacenter - Part I

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-08-30T23:24:59+02:00

I'm already looking a long time for the ultimate media and entertainment center out of the box, but yet nothin' serious came up my horizon so far. Since living in a flat, I'm not allowed to use a satellite-dish which terminates my dream of the wonderufl DVB-S. We got cable with almost 40 channels, most of them home-shopping-crap... but at least Munich is DVB-T broadcasting about 24 channels since May this year. DVB-C brings only 8 free digital channels on cable, all the other stuff is commercial and really expensive. So the obvious way to go was, using DVB-T together with analogue channels from the cable and mix all that well with the usual mediacenter stuff (movie player,photos,music,dvd,text). I studied all of the latest set-top boxes, and commercial media-centers, but all of them lack one or more big features: Internet-TV-channels and custom onscreen infos/ticker Finally you would end up with more single media boxes than a home-cinema-rack has AV-connectors. Building my own PC media center seems the only way to achieve my "everybody's?" ...The big problem now is, that it's almost impossible to find a software which can handle DVB-T and analogue channels within one channellist. That means you always have to change the device/tuner and then select the channel, instead of simply channeljump through analogue and digital broadcasts. Further to pass analogue channels the same way as a DVB receiver does to a mpeg2 decoder, analogue channels will need to be encoded to mpeg2 first to feed a unique output-decoder... grrrrrrrrr. I think most people will not understand the above as long as they haven't tried by themselves. OK, I skipped the analogue part for the moment, and start using DVB-T. Yesterday I bought the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T Card, which is now officially supported in Kernel 2.6.13. (There're also mixed-mode cards available, but without mpeg2 encoder, which means it's just two cards in one, nothing more.) Already a long time ago, I bought myself a Mini-ITX PC, to have a compact, powersaving and silent computer for the living room. Since I'm a gentoo linux enthusiast, I compiled everything from scratch on that slow=powersaving machine. Compiling the new kernel for an Epia M10000 Ezra board, was quite a challenge, although I had absolutely no problems in the past, but I found out "vesafb-tng" doesn't work anymore in 2.6.13, "vesafb-old" does only work if it's not compiled as a module. And compiling takes quite a time on this 900MHz hardware. For a first try I skipped patching the sources with older 2.6.7 epia patches, which I'll need later to get hardware-mpeg-acceleration CLE266, framebuffer and XVideo motion compensation XvMC running. After compiling 2.6.13 for the third time, this time successful, I gave up and did go to sleep. Not sure if I'll pick up there tomorrow, or simple use my already prepared debian-dvd's. It's hard to reduce power consumption, if you have to let the computer running the whole night to get some stuff compiled. Where's the powersaving here ? A fast machine can at least save power when it's unused.

Kobaan's Blogspot Initializer Post

abusch@gmx.net — 2005-08-24T14:18:29+02:00

Hi fellows, welcome to my blog... as you can see, there's not much here right now, as I'm still trying to figure out how to import my old html diary. check back soon... This was actually hosted on http://kobaan.blogspot.com and again it moved to another webspace ;-)

English garden and BBQ

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-06-10T23:30:19+02:00

Today was a beautiful summer-day so I decided to join my parents for BBQ in their garden. Taste was great, as usual.... ahhh. Try to smell the delicious sparerips... ...potatoes already eaten at the time this picture was taken. Sorry.

Holiday

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-06-09T23:28:39+02:00

Ahhh... holiday, finally. My wife is on her way to Japan, visiting her parents, some friends and a marriage-party. Time for me to let good old times roll... ;-) Try all that cigars that are already waiting for me a long time, and my expensive bottle of australian red wine that I kept for a special moment. Bought me that wonderful tub chair directly at the airport after my wife left me alone back here.... :-( But I guess I’ll find some things to do within those two weeks, and if it’ll be pure relaxing only.

Vocabulary Trainer ProVoc

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-05-28T23:26:35+02:00

I’ve been looking around for some time now to find the ultimate vocabulary training application on Mac. Since my focus goes to the ability to train japanese vocabulary, the range of applications supporting asian characters is rather small. My first finding was Kotoba which is specialized on japanese kanjis, but it’s more or less a vocabulary card type learning program, as you enter your vocabulary or load an existing one, and you view one language and guess the other then review the answer. ProVoc goes much further, as it has real multimedia abilities, like audio and even video support. Additionally you can type the answer even in japanese or any other input style, or just point and click from multiple choices, or just enjoy a cinematic slideshow of vocabulary. And for those of you on the road it is even possible to export your vocabulary to the iPod including audio and exercise wherever you are. Statistics freaks may enjoy the historic view of hopefully getting better vocabulary testing results. It’s also possible to train only the last wrong answers. In other words.... ... ProVoc is simply great !!!!

Virtualization @ MacMini

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-03-26T23:23:21+02:00

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my Intel-Mac. Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation software. For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a universal binary, which means that it will provide near native performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo Linux ;-) as it doesn't need to translate all the CPU operations to a foreign architecture. Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot. I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS. But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked myself, why I would need another OS. I found no reason. Virtual machines shutdown. Mac OS is simply great. I'm not missing a single application that I had used before on win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own application if I'll feel that I would miss something. Apple, Intel, good job.

Tribute to the Ninja

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-06-15T23:13:39+02:00

When the sun goes down, the ninja comes out. It’s true, they’re among us. And they’re just waiting for you to be too curious and make a mistake, and they’ll just kill you. If you like to know more about Ninjas it’s a must to see the podcast episodes at askaninja.com Meanwhile I managed to uncover some of those nightactive friends with my infrared spycamera. The Kitchen Ninja, awaits you in the night, when you’re sleep-walking. The Todana / evil cupboard Ninja... ...and the most deadly of them all, the fridge-ambush Reizoko Ninja, just waiting until you want to get some midnight food or drink when the service has already finished and then just cutting your arms off, followed by the head. I just mean, watch out, they’re really there and deadly. Lucky me, with my knowledge about ninjas I survived this last night, with my head still on its place.

Apple WWDC 2006

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-07T23:11:51+02:00

The latest information from WWDC 2006: - new MacPro all dual up to 3GHz , new XServe all quad - 64bit and 32bit UI applications simultanously - TimeMachine backup and historical review - BootCamp, FrontRow, PhotoBooth in Leopard - Virtual Desktops (Spaces), Spotlight as AppLauncher - CoreAnimation (desktop/application compositing) - Voiceover real natural human voice - Mail: stationary, notes, to-do tracker, templates, photobrowser, mail to todo function - Dashboard: dashcode, 4 clicks dilbert widget created - iChat: multiple logins, visibility, animated icons, video recording, and tabbed chats, slideshow exchange, realtime effects, video integration - XCode 3.0

Windows Part 2 of 3

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-07-24T23:10:36+02:00

Another day of Windows de-installation ;-) Wooohh, I love that sentence...

Fireworks

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-07-29T23:08:32+02:00

In case you missed it, today we had a big commercial fireworks. But: me smart, me clever, me no pay money... Again time to see if my cam was worth spending so much money for it. OK, for the money I could have bought some more fireworks tickets too. ;-)

Helicopter Rescue Training

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-07-15T23:06:45+02:00

Today, I had the chance to catch eye on helicopter emergency excercise. At least, I guess that’s what I saw. Again and again, I heard a helicopter noise near the powerstation next to my home. So I picked my cam and did some shots, and a short video, but missing a tripod shooting video on a flying object without any stabilization looks ugly, so there’s no podcast available. The helicopter approached the roof of a building, threw some green smoker on top, and then began lifting up firemen. Flying one round, the chopper approached the roof again and the firemen was released back to the roof. Maybe he forgot his watch ? ;-)

Eye Toy Kinetic

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-07-30T23:00:25+02:00

Quit your fitness contract, buy Eye Toy Kinetic... ...you’ll get a virtual personal trainer and do various funny, although exhausting training lessons, three times a week. For those of you thinking that they’re fit enough to do a harder training, you can exercise freestyle. But I promise you, you’ll sweat like you never did before :-D Even Tai Chi or Meditation lessons, really can be a challenge.

Windows Part 3 of 3

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-10T22:56:44+02:00

Finally, all my windows “not Microsoft ;-)” are renewed. This time the workers did a real good job and also fix all the remaining problems from my last window(s) de-installation. ;-) Man, I like that windows de-installation thing ;-) Now, as soon as my budget will allow it, I can start buying my final furniture. I’m quite happy now, except for the window cleaning. 8-(

New Homeoffice Desks

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-19T22:51:08+02:00

250 kg heavy, high quality, made in germany, new desks, in my homeoffice. Now my wife has much more space to fill up with batches of books and papers. For myself I enjoy the space and the clean desk, completely opposite to my desk at work, I love the chaos there. It’s really amazing how much space is left although all the techie stuff is already installed (now 3 computers inside). For anyone who wants to take the offer, I bought the desks at XXXLutz which give a 40% discount at the moment as they called it birthday-special. When I talk to the salesman he didn’t know why it’s called birthday-special since it’s always a birthday-offer all over the year... Those marketing guys... ;-))) ...let’s just call it humu humu nuku nuku...

Quote of the day

abusch@gmx.net — 2006-08-20T23:00:34+02:00

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.