MICHA.ELMUELLER

These are some impressions of the Anti-Acta protests that took place all over europa a week ago. The “surveillance”-camera which you can see on the right picture was set up by Simon (@taxilof). Besides the labelled cardboard he took his smartphone, attached it to a long pole and set up a live stream.

I just love this idea! It always reminds of how far we have come with technology. So far that almost anybody with a modern smartphone can easily set up a real-time video stream of some event. The internet really is changing things and most people still haven’t noticed.

Over 1.000 people attended the protest and I have the impression that this is mainly due to the facebook event someone created. The number of anticipated protestors heavily grew after people started to invite other people to the event: from 50 to far over 1.000.

I also tried to do some voice recordings. Got myself a Zoom H4n lately. Still learning how to use it properly though.

soundcloud direct link

These are some impressions of the Anti-Acta protests that took place all over europa a week ago. The \"surveillance\"-camera which you can see on the right picture was set up by Simon (@taxilof). Besides the labelled cardboard he took his smartphone, attached it to a long pole and set up a live stream. I just ...

I have just returned from a trip to Morocco. With some friends I went there straight after christmas to spent the new years eve and some more days there. This trip was just amazing. So many people met. So many impressions. I am still overwhelmed. I can’t describe all of what I have experienced here, but I will try to write down some of my memories.

We spent one night in Marakkesh. Man, this city is insane. You remember all those insane traffic scenes from movies? People honking at each other all the time, little mopeds driving everywhere, donkey carts besides normal cars? I found every cliché to be true. The next day we straightly took a 4hr-busride to a much smaller city, not so touristicly, deeper in the country at the sea. The city is called Essaouira. We all liked the city so much, that we spent the rest of our time there.

Although we only spent some days in Essaouira we got to know many many people. I had the feeling that if we spent two more weeks there we would know a large part of the foreigners. We were often invited for (a super amazing arabaic) tea and talked to a lot of foreigners.

One man we got to to know introduced himself as a former philosopher. He told us we had to seize the sunset — which we actually did as you can see on the photos. We went through the silent city, to the harbor and walked on the beach. When it was still dark, a straying little dog joined us and stayed with us for the whole time. He walked for hours with us and stayed until we finally got into a place to eat something. On the photo above you can see one of my friends running into a swarm of sea gulls. Once the little dog saw him running, he joined him in scaring the sea gulls.

When we met the philosopher by random again, he invited us for a tea. He and his nephew-teenager are selling paintings to make a living. The philosophers nephew was proud to show us a large catalogue where someone has photographed various artwork from North Africa. On one of the photos one of the nephews paintings was shown. It showed the african continent as an abstract face with eyes, nose and a mouth. Tears were rolling from the eyes. When I asked him why the continent was crying he answered “chômage” — unemployment. People are very poor in this country. Much poorer than the photos below might indicate. It makes me sad that we people here live in overwhelming luxury, pure decadence, compared to the living in some of the third world countries. This is one of the things I often think about: How can we as engineers help solving modern world problems like poverty? How can I use my talents, my knowledge for something else than maximizing the revenue of some random company.

We spent new years eve on top of our hostel with some other backpackers. Our arabic hosts cooked a huge dinner for us and played traditional music with an electrical amplifier. One of the other people I got to know that evening was Tibari. He makes his living as an artist, specialized in arabic calligraphy and art. I talked a lot to him and we often invited him to join us in the evening. On the last day he cooked a large meal for us and some other backpackers we met at the hostel. We also went to visit his gallery, one of the photos below was taken at his workspace there.

So many interesting cultures. So many interesting people. Damn, I really want to travel more.

  I have just returned from a trip to Morocco. With some friends I went there straight after christmas to spent the new years eve and some more days there. This trip was just amazing. So many people met. So many impressions. I am still overwhelmed. I can\'t describe all of what I have experienced ...

Last year I did a review for 2010. This year I want to do the same.
A lot has been going on in 2011 for me. I’ve attended hackathons, barcamps, writeathons, contests, hackcamps, seminars, workshops and stuff. This has proven to be a very good idea. I got to know about a hell lot of stuff out there I didn’t even know existed!

Most interesting website discovered:
Kickstarter. So far I have invested in 3 projects.
I find it a very interesting concept to just crowdsource the investment process of a project. I hope this enables more people to realize their ideas without having to take a huge debt from a bank.

Book I learned the most from:
Douglas Crockford — JavaScript: The Good Parts.
Taking JavaScript to the next level. Last year I wrote that one of the most interesting projects I’ve discovered was node.js: serverside JavaScript. In 2011 I did a lot of stuff with node.js and JavaScript.

Most interesting fictional books:
The books Daemon and its successor FreedomTM by Daniel Suarez have been a big inspiration for me. I really enjoyed reading them. I don’t know about the german translations though, I generally read and watch stuff in english.

I also liked Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I got interested in reading the book after I read an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where he talked about his favorite scifi book.

Video, movies, music
I still stream my music-use to last.fm. Since I am incredibly forgetful I use this as a way to determine what my favorite music has been. But I listen to far too much music to have one album I liked the most. Currently I am heavily listening to the LPs Casper – XOXO and The Jezabels – Dark Storm.

Looking at movies my favorite one was “Into the Wild”. A really amazing movie that deeply impressed me. Also an amazingly fitting soundtrack by Eddie Veeder. I also loved Tron. The story is not really surprising, but I loved how the digital world was presented and I have hacked through many nights by listening to the great Daft Punk soundtrack.

The video I liked the most was Carving the mountains. A video about pretty girls riding longboards.

Best decisions:
Writing a blog, saying yes, spending money, following interests and dropping everything else.
Just doing stuff. Not waiting for anybody.

The rough plan for 2012: (I am surely getting back to this next year!)
I have several things on the road, most of them can be summarized under the term “Free software“.
I want to replace my existing workflow to a majority of free software. I have started several efforts of migrating to Linux/*BSD, but I always failed because the Apple stuff is so incredibly comfortable. But: I don’t want to support a closed, proprietary platform anymore. I don’t want to have to pay for software anymore. But most of all: I want to build my own system, I want to write more software straightly suited for me and I want to improve existing free software.

Since all my past efforts to migrate miserably failed, due to not being radical enough, I always got back to the Mac as my main workstation. But now I have a new plan: I will leave my Mac at home and will only take my netbook (currently running OpenBSD) with me. I will still need the Mac for some advanced Multimedia stuff (Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom). But since I mostly work at the university, I presume this will drastically limit my use of the Mac.

Also I will go for a much more commandline-oriented workflow. Last year I wrote about my plans to look into zsh — which I did. Thing is: The software works great, but it is incredibly bloated. I use a 5k lines config file from the Grml project. You need 5k for it to work well?! C’mon! So for 2012 I plan to get into ksh. I also use vim *a lot*. Same problem. My config is too bloated since I copy-pasted most of it from various sources. So I am going for vi and a plain .exrc. I aim for a minimalistic setup where I understand why everything is in its place. I am sure I will gather a better understanding of e.g. vi, if I understand exactly why the config file looks the way it does.

Also I don’t want to speak of “Open Source” anymore, I will try to accomodate the term “Free software”. I had some discussions with meillo on this topic and he finally brought my attention to an article that briefly describes the difference.

Last year I did a review for 2010. This year I want to do the same. A lot has been going on in 2011 for me. I\'ve attended hackathons, barcamps, writeathons, contests, hackcamps, seminars, workshops and stuff. This has proven to be a very good idea. I got to know about a hell lot ...

… free music

Tymphony — I wish i could erase (instrumental, symphonic)
My Bubba & Mi — Apple Spell (folk, acoustic, country)
pornophonique — Sad Robot (electronic)
Nine Inch Nails — Ghosts II – 14 (rock, industrial)

… article

Auf die Universitaeten bezogen, ist das das Bild der Uni als Ermoeglichungsplatform. Studenten muessen von Ideen getrieben sein. Die Universitaet sollte dafuer sorgen, dass ideengetriebene Studenten ihr Potential bestmoeglich zum Nutzen der Menschheit entwickeln und umsetzen koennen. Dabei gilt es, den Studenten ein Fortbildungsangebot anzubieten, wissenschaftlichen Austausch zu beguenstigen, durch gute Ausstattung das Experimentieren zu ermoeglichen, und nicht zuletzt muss durch gemeinsame Werte eben diese Welt am Funktionieren gehalten werden.

–Markus Schnalke, Die Universitaet

... free music Tymphony -- I wish i could erase (instrumental, symphonic) My Bubba & Mi -- Apple Spell (folk, acoustic, country) pornophonique -- Sad Robot (electronic) Nine Inch Nails -- Ghosts II - 14 (rock, industrial) ... article Auf die Universitaeten bezogen, ist das das Bild der Uni als Ermoeglichungsplatform. Studenten muessen von Ideen getrieben sein. Die Universitaet ...

For the past few weeks I have been working intensely on a new project: A timelapse of the city Ulm, where I live in. When I had the idea I started searching around for pictures of Ulm with locations I liked. For half the locations I didn’t have any idea from where this was shot. In the meantime I have filmed a timelapse at about 25-30 locations. Some multiple times. My lense actually froze 2 times! Some locations don’t look as good as I thought, so not all are in the final video.

The artist spinmeister was so kind to provide an instrumental version of his song “Moments in Space” for this video. The song is licensed under CC-BY and available here.

The video was actually shown as a supporting movie in a local cinema here for one week.

There are some really amazing stills in the movie which I uploaded in full resolution to deviantART. They make pretty good wallpapers!

Update: Wow, the video has been online for ~2 days and has been viewed more than 3.000 times!
I posted it to Facebook, Twitter and G+ and am quite surprised how fast it spread! In the meantime I did a little interview with the Cineasta, where the movie was shown as a supporting movie. Check it out here (in german).

Update: Hello visitors, from the SWP .

direct link to vimeo

  For the past few weeks I have been working intensely on a new project: A timelapse of the city Ulm, where I live in. When I had the idea I started searching around for pictures of Ulm with locations I liked. For half the locations I didn\'t have any idea from where this was ...

I regularly participate in events by the Chaos Computer Club. I’ve been to the camp and held some seminars here in Ulm. Besides that we have a radio program at a free radio station here in Ulm: /dev/radio is on every two weeks for two hours at 13:00. 102.6 Mhz / Radio freeFM. Free radio means that anybody who becomes a member of the non-profit association and pays a small annual fee can get his own slot. /dev/radio plays only free music. Meaning music under a free license, preferably Creative Commons.

In one of the last broadcasts matou and hannes set up a challenge to submit a proposal for a jingle. A few hours before deadline I decided to give it a try. This is what I came up with:

soundcloud direct link

The morse code in the beginning was originally created by matou via a smartphone morse app. I applied various effects and did some editing on it. The background song is licensed as CC-BY-NC and is called “Rooted in Peace” by rocavaco. It is available here.

I regularly participate in events by the Chaos Computer Club. I\'ve been to the camp and held some seminars here in Ulm. Besides that we have a radio program at a free radio station here in Ulm: /dev/radio is on every two weeks for two hours at 13:00. 102.6 Mhz / Radio freeFM. Free ...

Yeah have been looking forward to get one for a very long time. Since there are rumours that new Canon models are to be released soon the prices dropped heavily. I was lucky to get a good price for a used body in excellent condition on eBay.

My second choice would have been the 7D (60p is some great argument!), but the amazing film quality (full hd) and the full frame of the 5D just outweighs the 7D for me.

Actually I have been thinking about studying film school before deciding for computer science. Whilst in school I was pretty enthusiastic about movies and did a lot of filming and cutting. I recently came across this clip from the upcoming movie “Drive” and just thought “Damn, I really have to get back to filming and photography“.

Still thinking about where to put the pics. Blog? Nah, don’t want a whole post for every single shot. Probably flickr.

So you are going to encounter a lot more photography and video stuff here in the near future .

Photos made using a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8.

Yeah have been looking forward to get one for a very long time. Since there are rumours that new Canon models are to be released soon the prices dropped heavily. I was lucky to get a good price for a used body in excellent condition on eBay. My second choice would have been the 7D ...

Last weekend nearly 300 teams of up to 4 people participated in the global Node.js Knockout — a 48hr Hackathon. We had a team from Ulm participating: Stefan, Benjamin, Simon & myself.

We decided to create a website that visualizes public transportation movements from Ulm on a map.

What we did was to transform time tables into a digital format called GTFS (a format for public transportation schedules and related geographic data). The shape files (the route a bus takes) were scraped by faking HTTP requests to a public webservice. A parser then reads the GTFS files and transforms them into comfortable JavaScript objects (GeoJSON, etc.). This data is then used to generate a live map. The maps are done using Open Street Maps material with a custom Cloudmade style. The frontend was created using Leaflet, among other libraries.

Browser communication for “live” events is done using socket.io. Socket.io is a very clever project, what they basically do is to implement websockets so that they work everywhere. This cross-browser compatibility is done by using a variety of techniques like XHR long polling or flashsockets. socket.io enables you to have an asynchronous communication between client-server. This way you can build realtime webapps.

If you go to the website you see a visualization of the time tables. It is live in the sense that it is the exactly how the pdf time tables look. It is not realtime, however. We hope to replace the GTFS feed with a GTFS-Realtime feed one day.

The whole project was build using JavaScript as the only programming language.

Further links:

• Online demo: ulmapi-de.no.de
• Source code: GitHub repository (MIT license)
• Our entry page on the nodeknockout site: ulmapi-de

Oh by the way: You can throw any GTFS data in there. Some cities (none from germany) have public data available (see list). The project can be used as a general way to visualize GTFS data. Just change the line var gtfsdir = "ulm"; in server.js. We tried Ontario and it worked like a charm, however if your files are too big you will have problems since V8 (the JavaScript engine under the hood of node.js) is currently limited to a fixed memory size of 2G. Also note that some cities don’t offer shape files.

Also notice: We didn’t get around to create GTFS data for the whole time table. So you don’t see every bus / tram on the map.

Last weekend nearly 300 teams of up to 4 people participated in the global Node.js Knockout -- a 48hr Hackathon. We had a team from Ulm participating: Stefan, Benjamin, Simon & myself. We decided to create a website that visualizes public transportation movements from Ulm on a map. What we did was to transform time ...

Das Turbo-Abi macht unsere Kinder zu Lernrobotern – sie schaufeln den Stoff in sich hinein und spucken ihn für Noten wieder aus. [...]

Wir müssen Fächer streichen und die Lehrpläne auf ein Mindestmaß reduzieren.
Notwendig ist das eigenständige Lernen in Projekten, in denen unsere Kinder die Kompetenz entwickeln,
die sie für die Zukunft brauchen: Teamfähigkeit und soziale Verantwortung statt Ellbogenmentalität,
Kreativität und Erschließen von Zusammenhängen statt Fachidiotie, Lernen aus Interesse statt Lernen für die nächste Note.

–Ulrike Köllner, in der taz vom 20.8.11

Ich beobachte in meinem Studium häufig, dass Kommilitonen die Fähigkeit fehlt im engeren Sinne kreativ zu arbeiten: Sie können Dinge nicht hinterfragen oder aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln betrachten.

Unser Gesellschaftssystem ist nicht darauf ausgelegt kreative Menschen zu fördern. Das System belohnt Querdenker nicht. In der Schule wird etwa der Schüler belohnt, der fremdes Gedankengut möglichst originalgetreu wiedergibt und niederschreibt. Nicht derjenige, der sich eigene Gedanken macht oder den Stoff hinterfragt.

Nikola Tesla studierte erst Mathematik, dann unter anderem Physik und Philosophie. Er studierte über Jahre hinweg an verschiedenen Universitäten und wurde zwischendurch sogar exmatrikuliert. Tesla gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Ingenieure unserer Geschichte. Wechselstrom oder Radiotechnik etwa sind seine Verdienste. Heute würde er vermutlich als Langzeitstudent abgestempelt werden. Ihm würden Vorwürfe gemacht werden, weil er nicht rechtzeitig fertig geworden ist, die Regelstudienzeit überschritten hat oder noch nicht in einer Firma arbeitet.

Würde er wohl mit solch einer Vergangenheit noch einen Studienkredit oder BAföG bekommen?

Große Wissenschaftler und Ingenieure waren oft vielfältig gebildet und auf mehreren Gebieten tätig. Oft musikalisch begabt und künstlerisch tätig. Als Schriftsteller oder Maler. Der erste Philosoph, Pythagoras, war auch einer der größten Mathematiker. Im Zuge der Industrialisierung im 20. Jahrhundert fand eine Spezialisierung der Berufe statt. Wer früher ein ganzes Auto bauen musste, muss jetzt nur noch drei Schrauben anziehen können.

Wenn ich heute Leuten erzähle, dass ich Vorlesungen höre, die ich nicht anrechnen lassen kann, können die meisten Gesprächspartner das nicht nachvollziehen. Es macht auf sie einen seltsamen Eindruck.
Einige Kommilitonen von mir studieren inzwischen seit mehr als siebzehn Semestern. Ein anderer ist im neunten Bachelorsemester.

Wieso wird so etwas von einem nicht unbeträchtlichen Teil der Gesellschaft als seltsam und negativ angesehen?

In Diskussionen mit diesen Leuten habe ich immer den Eindruck, dass sie denken man würde die Gesellschaft aufhalten. Nicht zum Fortschritt beitragen. Faulenzen, nicht fleißig sein, nicht arbeiten. Den ganzen Tag irgendetwas machen, bloß nicht studieren. Meiner Ansicht nach ist diese Haltung enorm kurzsichtig! Für mich ist genau das Studium: Seine eigenen Interessen verfolgen, herausfinden was einen interessiert, fachfremde Vorlesungen hören, seinen Horizont erweitern, sich mit etwas auseinanderzusetzen ohne ein direktes kommerzielles Interesse zu verfolgen!
Letzlich ist Innovation eben nicht von jemandem zu erwarten, der nur das Nötigste lernt und das Studium überhaupt eigentlich nur hinter sich bringen will, weil er später mal ein Einkommen benötigt.

Unser Bildungssystem ist nicht darauf ausgelegt fähige Wissenschaftler, die selber nachdenken, hervorzubringen sondern Arbeitskräfte für die Wirtschaft, die nur das Nötigste zu wissen brauchen zu schaffen.

Dann wird eben nur gepaukt und nicht studiert.

Wieso fällt es vielen Leuten extrem schwer Dinge nicht nur herzustellen und zu kopieren, sondern komplett neu zu entwerfen. Sich neue Architekturen und Ansätze zu überlegen. Bestehendes über den Haufen zu werfen und einen komplett neuen Ansatz zu schaffen?

Weil sie es nie gelernt haben.

Flyer des Bildungsprotests, entdeckt an der Uni Ulm.
Ich finde ihn sehr passend zu diesem Beitrag.

Das Turbo-Abi macht unsere Kinder zu Lernrobotern - sie schaufeln den Stoff in sich hinein und spucken ihn für Noten wieder aus. Wir müssen Fächer streichen und die Lehrpläne auf ein Mindestmaß reduzieren. Notwendig ist das eigenständige Lernen in Projekten, in denen unsere Kinder die Kompetenz entwickeln, die sie für die Zukunft brauchen: Teamfähigkeit und ...

The CCCamp repeats every four years. It is organized by the german Chaos Computer Club and is basically a big get-together for Hackers from all around the world. The camp is placed in the german city Finowfurt, near Berlin. The Camp itself is on an old Sowjet airport. Lectures are held in the hangars and on the whole camping side you can find old airplanes. Pretty cool atmosphere!

I attended the camp with some friends and had an amazing time. I met many interesting people, attended a hell lot of talks. Did some very interesting workshops and learned a lot new stuff. Probably one of the better weeks .

Best talk: OpenLeaks
What to say? I think they are doing a great job, from seeing the stuff and talking to the people behind the platform I have a very good impression. Technically very competent people. Friendly and honest.

It makes me angry to see people talk them down! I was critical in some points and so I went to their tent and talked to them! This is why you go to such a camp! If you talk to people you get new insights and different points of view. In the end this helps you to make up your own judicious opinion.

How I see it, the exclusion of Daniel Domscheit-Berg from the CCC was clearly a mistake. Unrational, childish and in rage. This is an absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a club that advises our government in security issues.

Best workshop: Live Coding with Fluxus
(fluxus) is a framework for Live Coding. It uses OpenGL as a Backend and Scheme as a programming language. The workshop focused on the performance of a VJ and was very interesting. Within 2 or 3 hours cupe_cupe developed a pretty impressive music visualization. There was also a DJane at the workshop who did the music for the visualization . This is how a workshop should be!

For the awesome photos below I have to give credit to Seder.
You can download the High Resolution pics from his deviantART page.

We also used a soup for the time during the camp. There are some more photos we took.

Update: Best radio summary I found: 1 live Reportage (WDR) (Audio, Laufzeit 37:56)

The CCCamp repeats every four years. It is organized by the german Chaos Computer Club and is basically a big get-together for Hackers from all around the world. The camp is placed in the german city Finowfurt, near Berlin. The Camp itself is on an old Sowjet airport. Lectures are held in the hangars ...

There are some very good artists releasing music under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license out there. This means that you are free to download, share and remix the music, as long as you give credit and share derived work under a similar or the same license.

How do these artists make money from their music?

Giving your music away for free does not collide with making money from it!
I actually think most people are willing to pay, under three conditions:

• It just has to be really easy for them to pay. PayPal donations are not easy! Flattr for example is.
• They get to decide how much money they want to pay.This means that you don’t attach a price label to digital content. Flattr has the great concept where you always know: no matter how often I flattr this month, I won’t spend more than the money I put in it at the beginning. There is no way of loosing track about how much money you spent.
• They pay voluntarily. This includes of course that you are not restricted to first paying and then downloading a song but rather get a completely free song and pay whenever you want and only if you want.

I am pretty sure that there is no way of financing Britney Spears or Lady Gaga this way. But creative, independent music? Probably.

You can’t do anything against music getting illegaly distributed via torrent, usenet, etc.. I think it is a much better concept to take this as a fact and see the pros in it: It is very easy to share and distribute music today, which makes it very easy to get popular and get a large fanbase these days.

My utopian vision of the digital content future is that there is a “Pay/Flattr/Donate” button for the artist on last.fm, on youtube, in your torrent client, etc..

Actually there are several problems (at least in germany) right now: The GEMA forbids artists who are with them to license any of the work they do under a free license. It is also forbidden to double license work, with for example a commercial and a free license.

In my opinion the reason why most artists releasing free music are not very popular is simply because many people just don’t know them. So these are five completely free songs, which I wanted to share.

• Emerald Park — Ume
• My Bubba & Mi — Satisfied mind
• Brad Sucks — Understood by Your Dad
• Shearer — Say My Name
• nocreeps — R.I.P

If you want to read further on this topic you should check out these sources:

• Another blog post by me: Damn good free music
• Concept for the “Kulturwertmark” by the CCC
• Comment on the “Kulturwertmark” at Breitband Podcast

There are some very good artists releasing music under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license out there. This means that you are free to download, share and remix the music, as long as you give credit and share derived work under a similar or the same license. How do these artists make money from their ...