MICHA.ELMUELLER

I have a significant stream of visitors looking for LaTeX invoice templates (my magento-on-latex post is probably good seo 😉 ).
When I started using LaTeX I had exactly the same need and wrote my own invoice template.

In the meantime I have created several other templates. I now packed them all up and put a repository latex-template-collection up on github. Currently there are templates for letters, timesheets (thanks to Dennis Mack!) and invoices. I am going to contiously add new templates.

The templates still have room for optimization (e.g. automatically increment the invoice position, etc.). Please feel free to contribute.

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.

A week ago a team of the University Ulm participated in the iCTF-Contest, held by the University of Santa Barbara.
The iCaptureTheFlag Contest is held every year. This year 72 universities (900 students!) participated in the worldwide contest.

All universities are connected in a closed network where a special contest scenario is set up. This year the scenario was that some dictator of a fictional world ‘Litya’ set up a worldwide botnet. The goal was to score points by attacking services of Litya while at the same time maintaining your bot. If your bot went down you were locked out of the botnet, which meant no access to the botnet-servers.

A team could lose points by attacking the wrong services at the wrong time or if the bot was not active. The bot itself was an virtual machine image of which every team got the same one.

Since it was legitimate to attack other teams there were several suspicious incidents like our server machine with the bot suddenly shutting down. Since all the teams had the same image (same ssh keys…) it makes the contest pretty interesting.
I also noticed that there was a suspicious Twitter-Account claiming to give hints, well the hints didn’t make any sense at all :).
Probably another team giving wrong informations.

 
Besides this there were so called side-challenges in which you could score money. The scenario implied that you could get locked out of the botnet if you attacked wrong services, so with money you could for example buy you back in.

There was a challenge on generating valid credit card numbers for a given owner or challenges on calculating private RSA keys for example. While solving some challenges I once more noticed how incredibly helpful it is to be fit in UNIX, Shell-Scripting and Scripting in general (python, ruby, etc.). It makes your life a whole lot easier!

 
In the end we managed to achieve place 9/73 — which is a great success!
I had a whole lot of fun and hope to participate next year again!

Thanks to the Prof. Giovanni Vigna and his team. They did a great job on setting up the environment. There were many great details (for example a site in the closed network ‘LityaLeaks’ that leaked informations about the botnet or a site ‘LityaBook’ enabling XSS attacks).

 
Related Links:

• Radio feature on /dev/radio about this years iCTF (german)
• Website of the Ulm Security Sparrows

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 🙂 .