MICHA.ELMUELLER

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)

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

These are some of the things I found helpful for me or discovered in 2010.
It’s a very mixed up compilation and partly very techy :-).

The video I liked the most
Way back home (set to 1080p). Amazingly beautifully shot.

Most interesting websites I discovered
GitHub: For me social coding is a big thing, I like discovering new projects based on coders or projects I follow.
I like the concept of a whole community dedicated to develop open-source projects further and exploring ideas.
Having social interaction and a way to reputate yourself online fits perfectly with what Prof. Norbert Bolz calls “the age of recommendation and reputation” and “to brand yourself”.

Flattr: I think micropayment is a great concept and I hope it is going to change the way we see and think about content.

Twitter: I now use twitter on a daily basis, I found it very helpful in getting the information that I am interested in.
The best analogy I heard in 2010 was that twitter is like your personal radio station that plays information you are interested in. Of course you have to follow the right people.

Most interesting feed/newsletter
The cryptogram is a monthly newsletter by the legendary cryptography researcher Bruce Schneier. He writes mature thougts on current security topics and discussions. I found it really helpful in getting a reasonable opinion about topics and staying up-to-date.

Most interesting video lecture
JavaScript, the evil parts. Quite some interesting ideas.

Most surprising programming language
Haskell: Very clean design. I first got into contact with functional programming in 2010 and found it very intuitive and useful.
Since parallelization gets more and more important these days, languages that are inherently designed without side-effects have a great future.

Most helpful podcasts
Linux Reality: 100 episodes about linux related topics. Good for starters.
Chaosradio Express by Tim Pritlove: German podcast, I can recommand TeX, Coffee and Mobile Ad-hoc networks.

Most interesting projects I discovered
node.js: Server side javascript at it’s best.
Cinder: High performance creative coding framework for C++.
Ethersex: A project that enables network facilities like IPv6 or HTTP for microcontrollers.

Most used software
Bash: Maybe I will look into zsh in 2011, for now I am very happy.
Vim: Hands off, best text editor out there.
LaTeX: Just great.
Git: For me git made a big change in my coding workflow and the way I keep the development, staging and productive environment in sync.

Project I learned the most from
Setting up a company server from scratch (hardware, archlinux os, web-server, wiki, backup system, vpn, etc.).
Especially getting handy with Unix and Linux had some big insights for me.

Best article/paper/etc
Reading the famous RFC 2616 in it’s completeness was really helpful for understanding the concepts behind the world wide web.

Most interesting persons of 2010
Dr. Michael Schmidt-Salomon: German philosopher, if you are interested in faith, humanism, ethics and the “free will”-debate listen to this interview.

Daniel Domscheidt-Berg: I think this is pretty much ideally how one should present himself: Sophisticated and calm.

Robert Hodgin: Very inspiring. Co-founder of Cinder and the barbarian group. Big one in creative coding.

I had the luck to spend some days in Amsterdam during the summer, I have been there before and I think the city has some really beautiful sides. Especially with the many small canals Amsterdam has a very unique city architecture.

These are some pictures I took — I think they give a pretty good representation of the city.

I can recommend the café on the left – you can find detailed informations here. The café has some kind of “alternative” touch, all the furnitures are different from each other, the tables are made from big wooden cable wheels, etc. :). You can get great food and a great perspective on the harbour there!

It is a little bit tricky to find — I wouldn’t have known either, but a friend recommended it 🙂 .