MICHA.ELMUELLER

Chaos macht Schule is a project by the german Chaos Computer Club, in which hackers with a technical credibility go into schools to hold presentations or conduct workshops.

This year the local Chaos Computer Club group has been invited two times to a school to give talks on privacy awareness and participate in a parents evening on the topic of data privacy related topics. Matou, Nico and I went there for the first event. We gave a presentation to two groups of about 50 pupils each, and one talk at the parents evening. Later this year, matou and I went back to the school to do the same event again. I am very satisfied with the whole event and before describing too much here: In February, straight after we were finished, we set up a voice recorder to capture our enthusiasm and remindings while driving home through the nightly, heavy snowfall.

We published this recording as part of the /dev/radio unstable program, which we have started a while ago. Unplanned, experimental podcasts, with completely different lengths and questionable quality, explicitly marked as unstable.

The events had a heavy focus on (data) privacy and we were (specifically) invited to shine some light on this topic. However, I would like to get more into inspiring people to do creative stuff, opposed to describing issues and problems. Just some ideas: The Little Bits project is a great project, which makes it easily possible to build interesting stuff without having to get too technical. Also, if someone would have showed me the endless possibilities of free operating systems when I was 14, I would probably have locked myself in forever. The fact that you can build your complete own system, replace each part of it, modify anything, would have just blown me away. The whole Creative Coding movement with projects like (fluxus) where you build a music visualization just-in-time, Context Free as an easy way to create amazing art, 3D printers and of course Arduinos.

The last two photos were shot by stk, who also wrote an article on the event.

To quote phil: “Isn’t it a little bit late to write about this?”. Yeah I know it is, I am just catching up with some stuff which I didn’t get around to write down so far.

About 1.5 years ago we founded the datalove group at university. In the meantime members of the group have met up with people from the city, created some projects and even participated in consultations with government representatives. datalove fellow stk has even participated in the writing of a book. The LiveMap, which we did create last year, has been shown at the CeBIT ’12 as part of OpenData initiatives within Germany.

In May our efforts culminated in the organization of a BarCamp around Open Data. One week before the BarCamp Benjamin and I were guests in the local radio program “Plattform” at Radio Free FM. We talked about Open Data in general, Open Data within Ulm and about the OpenCityCamp. The recording of the show is online and can be found here (in German).

The BarCamp itself was pretty interesting. We managed to get a pretty decent sponsoring which resulted in awesome Catering and a really nice event. We didn’t really know if people would show up to give a presentation, but in the end everything went fine. We were able to have two parallel sessions most of the time. The whole event had about 50-60 participants.

There were several things we did, which I haven’t seen on other BarCamps. Most notably: Etherpads for each session. Nowadays you can most certainly say that within each session of a BarCamp there is probably at least one person with a laptop. People attending the sessions started to note opinions, interesting stuff, links and questions there. This worked pretty good! Even now you can look the pads up (here).

Second most notably: Hanging a huge plain sheet of paper at the wall, so that people could note their thoughts there.

The whole event took place in the university. This enabled us to use the equipment there (to spontaneously bake apple pie for example :)).

The BarCamp was also a good opportunity for some people to push the development of a local Freifunk community. Visit http://ulm.freifunk.net for more information on that.

From April to June I have been occupied as a student assistant at an institute at university. My task was to help in moving the old website to the universities Typo3 instance (new website). While doing so I replaced the header photos with new ones. I took this as a chance and asked the administrators of the universities computing centre to take me with them to the local bwGrid node, a computing grid for scientific calculations. The photos came out pretty good and in the meantime have been reused by other people for all kinds of things.

I was also asked to take some photos for the website of another institute. I am quite satisfied with the photos, though they have been shot in a way that they look good as a small picture slice on those websites. So intentionally some of them won’t make good fullscreen photos.

To make those and the other photos I took/take online accessible I decided to set up a MediaGoblin instance. MediaGoblin is a GNU project that aims to build a flickr/deviantart/etc. alternative (see Wikipedia or the official website for a more detailed description). I have been sitting on the dev mailinglist since two or three months and silently been experimenting with the software. So time to publicly link it now: http://media.micha.elmueller.net/.

For now the instance has registration disabled, since I want to be able to adapt the installation to my own needs. I hope to be able to find some time in contributing something to the project.

Photo was shot on a more or less related occasion.
Fits this post surprisingly well.

Three years ago we started together. It has been an amazing time. We have created amazing things together, you helped me realize a lot of ideas. I have learned a lot of new stuff and I have been extremely satisfied by the way things are done here. Today I heavily wonder how I could have ever worked with anything else than Unix in those Windows days back then. I didn’t even know about Unix back then. I remember asking an advanced student in my first days at university “What is Unix?”. And now? I have much more knowledge about Unix. Discovered a whole philosophy, a whole new world which has been evolving out there since the seventies.

But now it is time to move on. Again. This is just the next logical step for me. There are a lot of reasons. For me to grow, for my skills to get better, I need to move on, need to move on to a system where I am God, where I can change everything, where I can look under the hood of anything. A system where I am completely unconstrained, where I am completely free to build my own working environment, fitting exactly to my needs. Where I can try completely new things and don’t have to go with the way millions of customers have to.

Additionally I am very unsatisfied with the politics of Apple. I dislike the extreme patent politic as enforced by Apple. I do not want to live in a future where the world, the innovation, is controlled by Mega-Corporations. Things like the censorship within the AppStore [1], due to American prudency and archaic concepts of morality, are steps in a direction towards a world where accessible content is no longer controlled by the governments but by corporations. Paranoid? I don’t think so [1] [2].

Instead I want to move to a working environment which is based upon free software. I believe in the idea that the goal of software should be to make the best solution possible and not the most profitable possible.
State today is that there are still many commercial products which are better than their free alternatives. Better in User Interfaces, comfortability and performance. This is due to, well, people like me. If I would only invest a little bit of time in making the free software products better this situation would change.

So what is the setup I am starting with? Well first: I got myself a new notebook, a Thinkpad, an X220. Due to some work I did for people who got notice of me because of the time lapse, I was able to invest some €s. As a main operating system I am running OpenBSD (following /current) on an i7 with an SSD. So far I didn’t really have any problems with drivers, a little issue with the backlight, but nothing serious. Especially the SSD is an amazing benefit. “Why OpenBSD?” you may ask. Well, I like the *BSD approach better than the Linux approach. I like the uncompromising, idealistic view towards software. I like the fact, that they don’t view security as an add-on which can be installed later, but rather as a fundamental issue.

As a second os I run an Ubuntu installation for hardware accelerated graphics stuff. At the moment the only thing I need this for is GLSL shading stuff and live coding environments.

Tools: I start on the bottom. I want to keep stuff simple, want to understand my tools and the reasons for using them. Hence vi, ksh and dwm. No vim, no zsh, no Gnome. So let’s see how this works out! Below are some screenshots of my current setup.

Login screen + window manager.