Besides exams I participated in _a lot_ of projects. A lot is probably a heavy understatement. I am having so many ideas right now and I am actually realizing most of the stuff. Most of this stuff just needs a writeup or some days to finish. There will be a lot more posts in the next weeks.

Some notes on the last semester: I have been occupied as a student assistant for the lecture “Web Engineering” last semester. This was quite an interesting task. We thought it would be cool to have students work on a bit larger project. For this task we chose to develop a “Whistleblower platform” called UlmLeaks over the course of several assignments. Quite funny to look at student submissions. Somebody e.g. submitted a sneak preview list for a local cinema .

I also took part in the RTMI seminar. There were certain things I have taken from the seminar. Most of all how to give good presentations: I have been ZENified. As I told Florian later I will never be able to give a normal presentation again . I have deprecated the LaTeX beamer class for presentations and started using html5slides about half a year ago. Benjamin deserves credit for this, since I was quite skeptical at the beginning and had some discussions with him. But now, that I have spent the entire last semester using them, I am very much satisfied.

I also completed one bigger, paid project. Some people got notice of me because of the time lapse. However, I have decided not to get into such projects here. I don’t want to mess this stuff up with my personal views and opinions. Which takes me straight to the next point:

I have put some thoughts into how I see this blog. For me the purpose is to build kind of a timeline of things that are going on in my life or stuff that I want to publish. This is why some of the entries won’t probably make that much sense to you, but they do to me. For me it is quite interesting to look back on the entries and see how different things have affected and changed my life.
I also thought about what I want to publish and I decided to put more stuff on this blog. I think that if you are interested in changing something in society or on a technical note, you must give others the opportunity to access your ideas and take part.
I also think if you are really serious about an opinion, you should not be afraid to state it.

On another notice I got selected for the Nokia Hackcamp here in Ulm. Together with Juliane and Benjamin I developed an app called “OpenUlmApp” for the Nokia feature phone series within a week. The source code is freely available via GitHub.

Another side note: I’ve won a little photo competition by a local chair company. The challenge was to take a photo on a local trail which the company had built. Along the trail there are some chairs, cut out of wood. It seems like I was the only one who build a snowman on one of the chairs and took a photo of it . So, got a pretty exclusive chair now.

So this ist just a quick update on stuff. More to follow!

Think for yourself.
Question authority.

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities – the political, the religious, the educational authorities – who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing – forming in our minds – their view of reality.

To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

direct link to youtube

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 (right and left in the photo above) 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.

It get’s quite foggy here sometimes. Well “quite” is a little bit of an understatement: I haven’t seen the sun in weeks. Literally: I haven’t seen anything else than just a white sky and fog everywhere. Sometimes just a few meters sight. When walking to the university through the woods I sometimes think I am in some kind of “Sleepy Hollow” horror movie.

But: You can shoot some great pictures at nighttime. These photos have been shot around 3 or 4 in the morning some days ago. The scenery was so damn good that I just had to get out and take some photos.

I finally decided to give deviantART a try. I plan on doing some stuff that fits more on deviantART than on flickr. Here’s the link to the deviantART account with the full sized foggy pictures.

The photos were lighted by two flashes, placed left and right. The background is a big white photo tissue we mounted high.

I uploaded some photos to deviantART.