MICHA.ELMUELLER

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.

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.

… 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

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 my MediaGoblin instance. 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