BlaBlubbBlog - Leben

Not so lazy day

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:37:00 +0200

Well. I had planned to get some coding done today. But then, after a hearty breakfast at half past eight (don't ask), I got stuck on finally figuring out that orange Skype symbol that bothered me already the whole week. And in the end I really wasn't feeling like coding anyways this morning. Instead I was planning ahead for a proper tea time this afternoon. And for this I need short bread. One could buy the Walkers things, which are actually quite nice, but somehow they are really expensive. Fear no more, as with the right substances, it is actually easy to make your own:

620 g flour
290 g sugar
290 g starch
500 g (soft) butter
salt (quantity depending on your taste)

Put everything together and knead it until you have a smooth dough. Spread it on a baking tray with baking paper. Now use a fork to make holes in it and then bake it for 30-40 minutes at something like 150 Â°C. This yields:

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Kezboard Annozance

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:09:00 +0200

This drives me nuts... since the new laptop, dee, also has an American keyboard layout, as does the machine in the institute, I spent 95% of my computer time using the American layout. While jane (the old laptop) was still in use, it was more like 50/50 and switching between the German and the American layout was more or less easy. Well, not really. But much easier than I get along with the German layout of the keyboard attached to the desktop at the moment. Especially when programming. Hmpf. Maybe I should completely abandon the German layout, it doesn't do much anyways besides giving easier access to the special characters in the seldom events that I have to enter text in something else than Vim (side note: the spell checker complained about 'vim', it wants 'Vim'). sigh But what would a day be without the small, however persistent, annoyances of modern life.

...and the browser goes wooosh

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:43:20 +0200

After reading a news article on Golem, my browsing experience changed completely. Not only is it way nicer to use Google with a command line interface (CLI), it is also faster. But the real treat is vimperator, a plugin for Firefox (only 3.0, which is standard for Ubuntu 8.04). Takes a bit to get used to, but now I have a cryptic browser. Excellent.

Seriously, this is not that insane as it seems. Dunno whether I will stick with it, but for a few days I'll see how I get along with a decent interface. One stupid thing though: I am missing the digraph feature, one of the fastest ways to have access to most extra characters. A Ã° is just a ctrl-k d- away, Ã¦ gets conjured up with a quick ctrl-k ae, and so on. Nothing is more annoying than not having the special character you would need on the keyboard and then the darn search engine is not intelligent enough to understand that oe might also match Ã¶ (ctrl-k o:). And yes, I know that I can mod the key mapping, but that will always be something else on different machines anyways...

The joy of modern entertainment

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:10:29 +0200

DVDs are basically a great invention. Especially the DVD-Video. They do have their pitas, mostly the brain-dead invention of region codes and the copy protection stuff. And of course this unskipable commercials, trailers and big fat warnings that you must not even think about doing anything with this DVD besides maybe watching it (but please in your own house with closed curtains and preferably no one else there; slightly exaggerate). But generally, it is a great thing: Good quality, easy to use (remember rewinding the tapes?), added bonus features like multiple languages to choose from and so forth.

So for watching a movie on the 'big' home screen it works like a charm, throw the disc into the player, lean back and enjoy. But sometimes I would rather like to watch a movie on the laptop. And then it is really annoying to have the DVD drive spinning all the time. So actually, it would be much nicer to have the movies (not the bonus stuff, if I want that, I go to the TV and the stand-alone player) on the hard-drive instead. Thankfully this is a reasonably easy task, well, not really.
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Fun with tea

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:54:00 +0200

I like drinking tea. A lot. I tend to buy good tea at specific stores and do use two pots (or mugs) to brew it.

View on Darjeeling (via Wikipedia)

Only sometimes I revert to the big paper bags to fill in the tea leafs and tea-bags are only used in dire circumstances. My flat-mate is the same, so we do tend to have a good selection of different teas at hand. Our main source for the last months has been the Darjeelings from Teekampagne which has their office a few street from our flat. Added to this are the teas picked up during irregular visits to one of the chain-teastore like Gschwendner.

Preparation is easy: Take a sufficiently large pot, put the right amount of tea in, pour hot water on it, let it steep for x minutes, then pour the tea gently into another pot while sieving for leafs. Enjoy. Now there is of course a lot of magic and voodoo involved in the whole process and there are lots of descriptions and suggestions out there how to produce the best tea. Whatever works best.
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Stuff one does

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Sat, 19 May 2007 08:50:00 +0200

Even though I have been quite quiet in this realm in the last two months, a lot of things happened. Not a lot of noteworthy things, mostly work and being busy with my teaching assistant duties. It is part of the requirements of the PhD-programme at the University of Potsdam to do the exercises for a course once. Theoretically this is of course a good thing, practically it is really annoying. Not because of the teaching itself, that is actually fun, no, it is more because of the huge amount of time it costs. It is not only the two hours (that is, 90 minutes in the real world) the class lasts every Monday, it takes at least five hours to grade the exercise sheets and another five to ten hours to prepare an exercise. Luckily the latter is shared between all the people involved in the course on the organisational side.

And since I am anyway busy fulfilling the technical requirements, or at least some, for my PhD this semester, I also chose to do the seminar: Giving a talk of 45 minutes and being there for all the talks the others give. Luckily this is also on Monday, so I am not loosing one day per week. Unfortunately the university is on the other side, the west end, of the city, so a lot of traveling is involved: it does take forty minutes to get to the place where the class is and then the seminar is again at another campus.
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Tom Na H-iu

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:40:00 +0100

While increasing the caffeine level I was reading in a CERN newsletter lying on the table in the coffee room and found in there an interesting small article about the Singapore Biennale 2006, or, more specifically, an installation named 'Tom Na H-iu' by Mariko Mori (see pictures here, here and a video here). Its shape resembles the ancient Celtic megaliths, or standing stones, but is made of half transparent glass and illuminated from the inside by LEDs. Those are controlled by a <strangelovevoice> computer </strangelovevoice> hooked up to a detector at the Super-Kamiokande. Detected neutrinos – among them are some which belong to distant supernovae – are hence used to create, in a broader sense, new light. The name 'Tom Na H-iu' refers to the place where, according to Celtic lore, souls are waiting to pass into a new life. So, of course this is symbolic (death, rebirth, yaddayadda) but with the direct link to realtime data it actually becomes quite profound. Nice idea, indeed.

The thing is 3 metres tall, would actually fit in my room (height-wise), hmmm...

One

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:02:00 +0100

So, my first posting on this blog was exactly (to the minute, I used the timed publication for this post) one year ago. Wooohooo! And even though I agree that it is a bit cheesy: Happy Birthday, BlaBlubbBlog! I am somewhat surprised that I managed to more or less regularly post over the course of the year.

A few statistics: 115 articles (7 by Oleg, 108 by me) make 0.32 articles per day (that is 2.21 articles per week or 9.78 articles per month), 43 comments make 0.37 comments per article, 305800 written characters make 2659.13 character per article. The update to s9y 1.1 did something nasty to the visit counter, so I don't have any number on this, but this is anyway mostly search bots (Hi there!).

So, with a big Thanks to Mela for hosting the site (yes, I will buy the Geek Kochbuch! ^_^), Oleg for contributing a couple of articles+comments and everyone for reading and sometimes commenting, I'll venture in the next year. May there be a second birthday!

The bright side of flying

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:37:00 +0100

One good thing, maybe the only good thing, about flying is the option to go to duty-frees. Or at least close approximations thereof in terms of bottle sizes. Normally a bottle of whisky bought in a shop contains 700ml of the juice. The bottles in the duty-frees contain 1000ml. Clear advantage. So I paid 36,99Â£ for 1000ml of the Caol Ila (18yrs), which is roughly 56â‚¬ according to xe.com. The 0.7l bottle costs 53â‚¬ at Scoma, that equals 75â‚¬ per ~~liter~~ litre^a. I actually just checked that for the purpose of the posting and am now surprised that I saved that much, cool, wasn't expecting that. But okay, that propitiates me even more than just having a nice whisky with the hassle of flying: arguing for an exit seat – more space for the legs, or I should say, barely enough space compared to not enough space – security checks every two metres, popping ears... And of course the whisky helps relaxing after a long day of programming. Lets see if the bottle will last till the end of my stay.

^a: British spelling, since I am in the UK...

Seriously strong

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:32:00 +0100

It is already 10 days ago that I arrived in Edinburgh. And that also means that only 39 days are left for carrying out my project. Ah, well, yeah, why am I actually here? Well, there is a very interesting programme called HPC-Europa where one can propose a project that requires High-Performance-Computing. This project will be done at an institution – in collaboration with a group or a person there – which is located near one of the six European supercomputing centers. Actually you can only apply to those centers which are not situated in the country your are working in. So you have to travel.

Which is fine of course. Given that your project is deemed worthy, you can then work up to thirteen weeks at the host institution and you have access to the most potent computers in Europe. All paid, of course. This is a pretty neat thing and so I did apply for a seven week stay in Edinburgh, working directly at the EPCC on some aspects of parallelizing AMIGA.
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Weird...

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:14:51 +0100

You might have noticed, that the Blog tag line is chosen randomly. And the more regular visitors (there are some, I hope) might also have seen that since two days there is new one. Namely: "If it doesn't work, hit it. If it's in your way, knock it down.", which is a cite from one of the best Star Trek Voyager episodes, 'Faces', in which the resident Klingon-Human, B'Elanna Torres, is split up into a Klingon and a Human — so there are two B'Elannas in the episode, which is probably why it is one of the best^a.
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More light!

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 22:26:38 +0100

There was apparently this storm the other day. It was even left at our discretion if want to leave the office early in the afternoon, because of the storm warnings. Well, since I only have 20 minutes of walking, or 3 minutes bus and 6 minutes walking, I stayed longer in the office, getting some work done. Okay, it was raining and for a few moments even pouring down. But nothing really bad. So after this few moments of heavy rain I decided to go home at a ten to eight.

It had stopped raining and the sky was even partially clear. The bus didn't come though. But who cares, a bit more walking, can't be bad. The roads were slightly flooded, but well, the sidewalk is higher, so no problem. During the night the wind freshed up a bit, it was very soothing to sleep with the gentle swishing outside. Well, no frightening heavy evil storm then in Babelsberg.

But coming to the office next day, the building seemed to look different. It actually took me a few seconds to notice why:
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On the Wizardry of Translations

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:30:00 +0100

Last week an interesting challenge surfaced. We were looking for a nice motto for the christening plate of a RPG spaceship. Oleg found a good quote, which is perfectly fitting for that purpose: "...doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read." This is a shortened version of "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it."
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Visual effects

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 03:19:35 +0100

After having seen Casino Royale, we decided to walk from the Potsdamer Platz to the main station to catch the S-Bahn there. It is not that far and some fresh air was good after sitting in the cinema for over three hours. Anyhow, approaching the main station we noticed the visual effects:

There are also some stars on the other side, but they were not functioning. Will they have eggs for easter?

Christmas stuff

nospam@example.com (Steffen) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:54:00 +0100

We are in midst the pre-Christmas period. It's not actually feeling much like it weather-wise, but nonetheless, there will be this feasting under a coniferous tree, or at least close to it. A couple of things come with that: Thinking about presents – see e.g. Mela's series on present ideas, if you still need some – drinking mulled wine or preferably mead, writing Season's Greetings. Okay, the last thing I don't do, but if you do it and are wondering what cards to get, search no more: Hubblesite has a selection of wonderful cards for you to print out; either by yourself or at a photo shop. My favourite one is the leaved Hubble Ultra Deep Field.