Up-to-date

WordPress at last.

2010-12-13T03:54:00.000+01:00

Hello there for one last time from my Blogspot blog.

I have been thinking about using a WordPress Blog for a long time but I always knew it wasn't gonna become one of those Wordpress.com Blogs where you have limited functionalities due to its hosting structure. I have set up my Homepage on a new host recently and since this host makes it so easy to set up a full-featured WordPress.org Blog within minutes, the timing seemed right.

So feel free to check out both my Homepage and my new Blog and hopefully this transition won't cost me too many of my handful of readers. It's been a pleasant experience working on this blog, especially because the fact that it belongs to Google always made new Posts show up in their search engine instantly. (Something my Self-Hosted WordPress Blog might not be able to provide.) Still the profits of WordPress in functionality and Ease-of-Use heavily outweighed those of Google Blogger for quite some time now.

Squeeze Spotify through the Proxy Tube

2010-08-16T12:29:00.001+02:00

One or two years ago I was fortunate enough to register for a Spotify-Account while they could be registered for free from the UK. I grabbed myself a UK based Proxy and registered. Normally the only way to get an Account still is to be invited by existing users as far as I know.

For those who don’t know Spotify: Spotify is a music service connected to a Jukebox by the same name (downloadable for Windows and Mac so far), much like iTunes, the main difference however is that with Spotify the music inside this Jukebox doesn’t primarily come from your hard drive but from Spotify’s servers. So as a layman, just imagine the joy of being able to listen to millions of songs, on demand, for free, whenever you want to listen to them.

Of course this comes with a few downsides. Unless you have a Premium Account, Spotify is Ad-Supported. This includes both Banners inside the application and Sound clips that interrupt your music-experience for a few seconds. I personally still believe this offering is worth all the trouble, which lets me come to a second major downside: Spotify is only usable from a few select European countries so far. Once you log into the application from one of these countries you can use it from anywhere for 14 days, even with a non-Premium Account.

So yesterday after installing Spotify the login-screen told me, as expected, that my country of residence doesn’t match the one in my profile. (Updating the profile as suggested isn’t really an option at this point)

Solution: Part 1

So without going further into detail about the Tor-Project and what it does, I thought this could do the trick. One major difficulty about this, however, was that I didn’t really know a way to “choose” which identity from the Tor Network I wanted to use. But a little bit of googling around and reading the Tor documentation brought me an answer that would spare me the pain of having to use netcat to connect to the Tor Control Port (9051), having to learn and punch in some commands and so on. (Or even worse: Click “Use new Identity” over and over again and pray to god for the right IP Address)

All you have to do is download a complete Tor Package for your Operating System and follow these steps:

Find your torrc file. (If you use Vidalia, it is configured under Settings > Advanced)
Open it with the text editor of your choice.
In a new line, enter ExitNodes $fingerprint, $fingerprint, … where $fingerprint is the fingerprint of a Node from the Tor Network. These can be found and copied to the clipboard in Vidalia by clicking on “View the Network” and right-clicking on any Node.
(Re)Start Tor/Vidalia.

Unless you write StrictNodes 1 into the torrc file (which I don’t recommend) this declaration of Exit Nodes is just a list of preferred Nodes, it is still possible that your Tor Route will have its exit at another Node. Information about all the other possible entries for the torrc can be found in the Tor Manual.

Solution: Part 2

So now that we have found a way to guarantee almost 100% that we are able to surf through an IP in the country of our choice, all that is left is to log in to the Spotify application through this proxy. Tor in combination with Polipo offers us the possibility to surf through an HTTP(S) Proxy on Port 8118 or through a SOCKS Proxy on Port 9050 but of course you can use whichever proxy you prefer. However it doesn’t seem like the login screen of Spotify offers any ability to change the proxy settings (it would be a lot easier to change these settings as soon as we got past the login-screen of course).

But all is not lost. For the lazy ones this is the moment where you disconnect yourself from the internet. (I didn’t try it, but I guess it should work. If not, the lazy ones might as well jump over their dusty shadows for once.) Of course my rather “complicated” solution was to configure my firewall to block Spotify from accessing the internet, only later did I realize that unplugging my network cable for a few seconds could have done the same job. However, this is what you’ll find:

And the holy grail of configurability has been revealed. A click on “proxy settings” will show us what we wanted to see.

If you’ve successfully configured Tor to surf over an IP Adress that matches the country in your Spotify Profile, you should now be able to log into the application. Of course you can then deactivate the use of a proxy in Spotify again for 14 days so you can stream the music at full speed.

Conclusion

The main reason why I wanted to post this to my blog is that I didn’t find any tutorial on the internet that described to me what Part 1 of my solution contains. Going through the Tor Manual taught me this but hopefully I can assist someone else by not having to read through it in its entirety. And of course finding a good use for Tor beside its awesome possibilities of surfing the web anonymously gave this a very neat context.

Sick and twisted fruit

2010-06-30T20:10:00.001+02:00

To scratch the topic of Mobile Computing once again I want to take you through the processes of setting up an iPhone and a Nokia N97 Mini with a Bluetooth driven wireless Keyboard. The reason I’m doing this is of course due to recent events I experienced and - SPOILER ALERT - the iPhone fails miserably under almost all circumstances. Successful ones could unfortunately not be tested.

The Keyboard used can be seen on the following picture, accompanied by the successfully paired N97 Mini:

Why it’s a Bluetooth Keyboard designed by Apple themselves, just to make it a little less tough for the iPhone one might think. But I digress.

The step-by-step Instructions for the N97 Mini (or basically any Symbian S60 device) go as follows:

Download the free Bluetooth Keyboard Application from Nokia.com. Choosing the right one shouldn’t be too hard, I didn’t find one for Symbian S60 5th Edition so i just took the first one which popped up an incompatibility alert but still installed and worked fine.
After opening said Application, turn on your Keyboard and pair it with the Phone. In my case this included defining a Passkey like “123456” and then entering exactly that Passkey on the Keyboard. Pressing Return should finish the pairing process. I assume this works the same on all Bluetooth enabled Keyboards.
That’s it. You’re set to write some text messages or even emails with your Bluetooth Keyboard.

On the iPhone on the other hand, the situation looks as follows. (At least that’s all I found out on a jailbroken iPhone 3G with the latest jailbreakable iPhone OS 3 on it).
When you turn on Bluetooth and search for devices, the (Apple !!) Keyboard does not show up. So if I’m not wrong that takes care of our first approach. The second approach then would be taking advantage of the freedom of a jailbroken iPhone. Do some searching on Google/Youtube and what I found was a Video explaining how to use an App (namely BTStack Keyboard) from the Cydia Store (which of course comes with jailbreaking the device) to use Bluetooth Keyboards with your iPhone. The only catch you ask? It costs 5 Dollars and since I neither own an iPhone, nor a Cydia Store Account (or whatever is needed to buy their Apps) my trail to success stopped there.

If there is another approach, be it for jailbroken or non-jailbroken iPhones please let me know. Nothing would please me more than knowing that Apple isn’t having such a tight stranglehold on its customers after all. Smartphones set aside, I’m one of them as you can see from the picture.

Of course it’s not surprising that the Nokia Device works with an Apple Keyboard. The Bluetooth Standard is the same for everybody, also for Apple luckily. And of course it might not make perfect sense to everybody that I’m connecting a Keyboard to a Mobile Phone that has a QWERTZ Keyboard built-in. To be honest I’d know a lot more to do with such a keyboard on an iPhone than on this N97 Mini. Seems like it’s not supposed to happen.

Ubuntu 10.04: Lucid Lynx

2010-03-24T17:50:00.001+01:00

Now that the latest an greatest of current versions of Ubuntu is finally into its beta stage i thought i should give it a try. I heard and read a lot about it.So let’s see what’s true and what isn't.

As you can see the desktop is still familiar but the new “Computer” and “Trash” icon already look a lot more welcoming and are hopefully only a small taste of what’s to come until April 2010.

Many of the Menu-Icons are refreshed as well. What I like especially is the Wine-Icon.

Other than that the first impression doesn’t try to fool you into thinking that everything’s changed. It just seems like a worthy polish of what’s been there already.

Numerous services keep crashing on me all the time (and telling me so through an error-message) but I never realize what’s broken. Everything just works like I’d expect it to. The only thing that annoyed me was that the standard search provider of Firefox was now changed to Yahoo which I immediately had to change back to my own preference. Pidgin is once again the IM-client of choice for Canonical, which I welcome. I’ve been told that as of 10.04 the GIMP is no longer part of the standard Ubuntu installation, but since I only did an upgrade I cannot confirm that. If it’s true and there is no replacement for it I could understand that since not everybody needs a powerful photo manipulation software. As far as I know the GIMP binaries are pretty huge which doesn’t go well with an Ubuntu Installation-CD where size is still a factor.

Ubuntu 10.04 also has this nice Social Networking touch integrated into the Taskbar (or whatever the bar on top is called) now.

Networks like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (although not all of them fully functional yet) can be integrated into this new Broadcasting app seen below that allows you to access all of your social networks at once and see what’s happening.

Of course there haven’t been any huge promises for 10.04 concerning the look-and-feel so I’m rather pleased with what I’m seeing there, assuming that the improvements don’t stop there. But there have been promises about functionality like faster booting and I didn’t see any improvement there yet. Let’s hope for the best that Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx will become a worthy re-release of one of the best Linux distributions out there.

Windows Search Lamp going berserk

2010-02-26T05:48:00.000+01:00

Once upon a while my Internet Service Provider who i am very dissatisfied with "decides" to pull the plug on my internet connection for no reason whatsoever for a little while. So knowing that I have a HSDPA USB Modem laying around with a 3GB monthly dataplan i thought i could install its Hutchison 3G software on my Windows Server 2003 to have a backup internet connection at hand.

After some restarts the software still wouldn't recognize the Modem so I thought I could run it in Compatibility-Mode for Windows XP. This resulted in the program window not showing up at all while it would make the "explorer.exe" stop responding entirely. When I killed the "3DataManager.exe" however this happened:

So this Flashlight we all know from the XP-days seems to try to catch up on all the CPU cycles it missed while the Data Manager was open. It stopped pretty soon afterwards though as you can see.

Windows Server 2008 On-the-fly Memory Expansion

2010-01-31T22:35:00.001+01:00

Since I had a Windows Server 2008 x64 Virtual Machine configured in my VMware Workstation and a Product Key from MSDN that I didn’t use I decided to try one of the cool features Server 2008 brings to a wide variety of new and even some old motherboards out there. I’m talking about its “Hot-add-Memory” feature.

So as I start this Virtual Machine up I have it configured with 1024MB (or 1GB) of RAM (click on image for original):

And now I want to expand this Server’s RAM without having to restart the whole system. I honestly don’t know if that’s that common of a use case out there in the real world but nevertheless it’s something that’s possible technology-wise and I think Linux has had it far earlier than Windows so here goes:

Hot-Swapping RAM is something that’s also included in more expensive versions of Server 2008 (like Datacenter) but in the Enterprise version which we have here all we can do is expand the RAM, not reduce it (see red box). So I pull the slider up to 2048 MB (or 2GB) to double my RAM and click “OK”.

What happened then wasn’t entirely what I was hoping for. VMware Workstation saved the Virtual Machine’s state first, then the Screen went black for a second and then it came back immediately and everything was exactly as I left it, so I guess this was just a precaution of VMware rather than something that was absolutely necessary. Then it took another few seconds for Windows to recognize the additional RAM and this was what I ended up with:

As you can tell from the red boxes in the first and the last picture (and the immense drop of the blue curve in the last picture) the RAM has been added without any shutdown of the system.

For Companies who need this, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise is definitely not too expensive to buy although it could be cheaper of course. This feature is not exclusive to the latest and greatest hardware either so the additional cost in hardware shouldn’t be too high either. Contrary to a Linux Server it offers an Administrator the possibility of deploying Microsoft Exchange Services natively and it enables them to install the wide variety of Software that’s out there for Windows.

My Desktops

2010-01-24T04:41:00.001+01:00

Just something i’ve been wanting to share for some time now.

First up, Windows on a Core i7 with 6GB of RAM:

Next comes my beloved portable, an Aluminum MacBook:

And last a Sony VAIO TX i own since 2005 (Solo Core, 1 GB RAM):

Not included here is my Windows Server 2003. If i find any other computers laying around my house I might just refresh this article.

"Nao" from Aldebaran Robotics

2009-11-27T10:02:00.002+01:00

A few days ago some of my colleagues and I took the chance to attend a guest lecture on campus about a robot designed in France due to be released within the next months. His name is Nao and he's intentionally designed to have Manga-Character-like looks.
The entire Computer that does the necessary computations is inside its replaceable head and runs a custom Linux on an AMD Geode processor with 2 Gigabytes of Flash memory and 256 Megabytes of RAM. It is fully controllable over WiFi, yet it only boasts 802.11b which we know only has a theoretical speed of 11 MBit/s. Hopefully they will at least get the G-Standard in there before the final release. It has two Cameras with standard VGA Resolution, one that looks straight ahead and one that looks down to the ground so the robot can identify objects directly in front of him.

To be honest I wasn't impressed too much by what this robot can do but what did impress me was how easy Aldebaran Robotics made it for the end-user slash programmer to work with this robot. You have drag-and-drop based editing of any movements or actions, like talking or listening (or remote controlling something with his Infared-enabled eyes), you want the robot to do and you can then export your work into C++ or Python code so you can work with it natively and refine it for example. I think this is going to be a successful product among the people of its target group, but the question is how large this target group can be at a starting price of 12.000 Euros for one unit.

Chrome OS

2009-11-23T17:02:00.007+01:00

I've been one of those who were eagerly awaiting the first impressions of Google's Chrome OS since it was announced some time earlier this year. One positive remark right there can be made because they seem to have been quite eager to get it out there as well. Open Source, so much the better.

I knew that it was going to be a Browser-based OS like none has ever been before but judging by this first release I'm still a bit disappointed.

Chrome OS:

So to the right you see what the login-screen looks like. And "woohoo" you have to log in with your own Google Account. Internet Connection required of course. Pretty nice idea. But while that is handy because it enables you to log in to the same account on different computers you will see later why I dont think it's necessary for now.

Next up we have the Chrome Browser which shows up full-screen as soon as you've successfully logged in. The tabs I opened in the second screenshot aren't open at first Login. There's just the Google Calendar and an empty tab as far as I recall. Of course with every Google Service you use the Login-Information needed doesn't have to be entered separately every time. You can for example use Google Reader for RSS Reading, Google Mail for writing Emails and so on. So a colleague of mine dared me to write a Document on this thing and email it to her. Seems quite impossible on a Browser-Based OS with no desktop or additional applications. But in fact it's not that hard. Everybody who used Google Documents before should know that.

You just go to http://docs.google.com and have some basic possibilities of creating and editing Text Documents, Spreadsheets and so on. And as you can see you can then Email it as an attachment in a wide variety of file-formats. Since Chrome OS is only targeted towards Netbooks and those don't feature high resolution screens or highly capable hardware one can argue that this is already more than enough for the average netbook-user.

With the help of another colleague and trying out random combinations on the keyboard (banging my head against it for example) I found out how to get to the terminal. You just have to press Ctrl+Alt+T. The Concept of multiple Sessions like normal Linux Distributions have has been dropped. The Terminal goes full-screen and as you can see the "uname" command tells you absolutely nothing about this OS that you shouldn't already know as soon as you're enough of a freak to even bother searching for the Terminal. Other than that it's interesting that the "man" command suggested at the top isn't even available. And I was kind enough to give you a directory listing of the root directory just so this screenshot wouldn't use too little space.

Conclusion:

So while this is a nice Gadget to have it provides the user with absolutely no capabilities beyond what Web 2.0 (as we call it) has to offer. Some might say this is sufficient. I say it's not. Right now it isn't possible to change the Screen Resolution of Chrome OS over the menu and I didn't find any config-files i could edit to change it manually. Now that I "know" that Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu using Gnome (at least that's what I hear) I could try to find the config-file once more. But I'm just not that much of a geek. I feel I have enough of an idea right now of what Chrome OS is going to be as soon as it's finished. In the end it's just another tool for Google to grab its users by the chest and make them be part of their huge scheme of collecting information no matter if it's useful or not. So I think it would be cool to log into the OS without a Google Account. Other than that I have no requests towards the final product, probably because I won't be using it natively anyways.

What sucks Golf Balls through a Garden Hose?

2009-08-14T09:22:00.001+02:00

There’s a few things boggling my mind from time to time. For one I am a regular visitor of both thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com to watch their latest and greatest episodes which have been broadcasted on Comedy Central the day before. As a European Citizen I am not fortunate enough to be able to watch these shows live. On the other hand I read quite a lot of blogs regularly that attract my interest and among those are a few Apple/Mac related ones that show me what I should think about the company that assembled my beloved MacBook.

The 2 topics I want to go into in this post both apply to its title at least to some degree in my eyes. As someone who comes from a country where health care for everybody isn’t just a good idea but an applied concept I cannot possibly wrap my head around the issues this great nation called the United States of America is facing right now just to get a vague idea of what the future of 50 Million (!) Americans without Health Care is going to look like, let alone figuring out a real concept. And as someone who studies the matter this thing called iPhone wants to be a part of I want to provide my personal opinion on what has been happening around this product both since its release and recently.

Health Care:

I do have to say that my knowledge about the subject is solely based on many many Daily Show Episodes and a short documentary I’ve stumbled over on TV lately. I understand however that as much as this Comedy Central footage is supposed to be satire and entertainment it never fails to catch the essential and almost always disturbing truth behind its topics.

In the documentary I mentioned there was a woman who needed a liver transplant because of cancer but she just couldn’t afford one plus she was a single mother of three. Very touching story if someone from an equally structured society were to watch that. For me it was just enraging. Another person in this documentary was some cowboy-ish millionaire who was both a supporter of the Republican party and the US Health Care System, stating that it did not have any flaws at all and that it was necessary for at least some doctors to say “Hell yea, I want to get paid less than I’m worth just so I can help the poor free of charge by limiting my quality of service to the absolute minimum”. Of course he did not say that but I just did. Lots of people who struggle with health problems don’t have any option but to stand in line for free low-quality medical care in this country and to think that this can live up to any standard a rich nation like this one should provide their people is just bollocks.

The 2 “Points of Interest” I spin my thoughts around here are the Health Insurance Companies and the US Military Expenses.

If you want to get health insurance in the US it’s not much different from getting insurance for your car. You have to be perfectly healthy because the insurance has every right to turn you down if they think you won’t make them enough profit, meaning if you look like you could get sick anytime soon you won’t be insured. And if you get sick and they see any bit of proof that you could’ve been developing this medical condition before you got the insurance it’ll be called a “preexisting condition” and they won’t pay for you. Of course this doesn’t end your insurance. You’re still allowed to pay them money for not doing anything if you want to.

What I’m pretty sure had never been mentioned on any TV Station in all of the US though is how the Government’s Military Expenses could be redistributed so much better in this case. If you’re in the US you don’t talk shit about the wars they are fighting somewhere else. Just like you’re better off staying at home if you’re in Iran right now. I don’t remember the figures but those wars cost the US quite a bit of money every single day and to finish my rant about this topic I have to ask, is whining about how they have such huge money problems both concerning economy and health care an acceptable concept for the American people while they are fighting expensive questionable wars elsewhere?

iPhone:

As someone who specializes on Mobile Computing I have more than one reason to be against a purchase of this product. When the iPhone came it I have to admit I was all hyped up as well. I even pre-ordered the first generation iPod Touch when it got announced. I never regret that purchase but for a mobile phone there’s just too many flaws in its business plan.

The iPhone is the manifestation of what makes Apple’s fondness of Digital Rights Management (DRM) both work well and annoying at the same time. With products like the Palm Pre and various Android Devices coming out it raises the question whether it really is better to tell your users distinctively both what they are allowed and what they are not allowed to do. Apple sure does that and it sets boundaries that are often uncertain as to whether something you want to do can be done or not. For example a Software Developer who wants to get his piece of the App Store Cake can write a good piece of code hoping for an income from it but he will never know whether his App will make it into the App Store unless he spends the time on bringing out a working version of it and hope for the best as he submits it to Apple. If they turn it down, he might have wasted his time.

The most popular recent denial of an App was of course the official Google Talk iPhone App which was refused like many others because it provides functionality already inside the iPhone. And although these rejections are most probably rather thanks to Apples Partnership with AT&T than Apple itself it still does not make a bit of sense to me. Apple is a newbie in this market and they won’t have the courage of admitting that. The first generation iPhone was a technologic disaster by any measure and they used lame excuses like “battery life issues” for not using the 3G standard and going for the slower EDGE. They have quite a few guidelines for developers who want to write software for the App Store just because their phone is too slow to work smoothly with software that doesn’t follow these guidelines.

The iPhone OS which I get the chance of using through my iPod Touch has become a lot better since version 1.0 but it’s not necessarily better than any other mobile OS out there now. It finally got MMS capability, video capturing and the much needed Copy-Paste feature nearly any other Smartphone has.

What upsets me so much is that Apple can do all this seemingly without losing a single buck of stock market worth in the process. They can bring out a crappy phone to begin with but wrap it nicely and any fanboy will stand in line to buy it. They can upgrade it to a less crappy phone which implies admitting that the first one was crap and still more people will buy it. No matter how big they fail under the surface, what defines their success is how they present it on the surface and this is where I would like to advise people to take a look at things from a different angle before buying such a piece of hardware and literally trading it in for their soul and some cash.

There’s so many products out there that are both cheaper to buy and get you a better overall experience. Nokia would be my biggest recommendation for anybody seeking a phone right now. Falling for the advantages of the App Store is easy but the pressure under which others have to live because of those advantages is not worth it in my eyes. Apple needs to see that their current plan for a presence in the cellular market is not what people want. Or at least not what they should want.

It's called freedom and you can't have it. Period.

2009-08-03T16:20:00.003+02:00

After some stressful times with my 2nd term project at university, some time of doing nothing and a one-week holiday in croatia inbetween I have now started working for the Siemens VAI, which I will be doing for the next 4 weeks.

I wasn't really expecting it but now retrospective (i looked that word up) it still seems quite inevitable that every time I start a short-term job at this place nobody really knows what to do with me. Of course I also know for a fact that I'm not the only person to have this happen to them.
This time was still different though. The guy who is supposed to handle my workflow isn't even around right now (he's in China and afterwards will go straight to Russia and is not expected to come back until October) which is already funny enough to begin with.

However his colleague, who is a really nice guy (so far i've made out his name to be Gi Shen, I will of course try to get into detail about the spelling), tried to fill this hole by trying to find a Laptop and my User Account Information for me which then let him find out that his colleague (the guy who is in China) was by far not the only important person who was currently abroad.
Still they had some crappy HP Notebook laying around which I am currently writing this Post on.

What this led me to was finding out once again that the Siemens VAI restrictions on how employees are allowed to use both the Internet and their Computer itself are practically designed to not let you think or do anything out of the box. Of course I come from an IT playground where it would be unthinkable to not be able to do some command line testing or any weird stuff that doesn't really do anything but give you valuable information at times. Certainly I wouldn't want to break anything. But here I sit with a basic access only to internet sites which are absolutely positive about not containing any information that could break these rules.

Basically Siemens VAI employees can say: "We have Internet, but not the real one y'know."
There is one upside to this though: The guy who is in China right now has his own office which I can now sit in all by myself.

In my eyes nothing has changed about the Siemens VAI except that the guidelines and restrictions may have become even tighter overall. Of course after my first day I still didn't get anything to do, so as soon as that changes it hopefully won't seem all that bad. After all I'm not here to watch YouTube videos or go to Facebook (I guess).

Maybe I'll keep you updated about how my job goes on although I would much prefer posting some things about Personal- or Mobile Computing. Don't have any ideas yet.

see you

Federschachtel Schrägstrich Band

2009-07-07T17:37:00.001+02:00

Um diesen Blog wieder einmal mit Leben anzuhauchen stelle ich hier nur so nebenbei ein Geschenk meiner Freundin an mich zur Schau.

Auf den ersten Blick eine ganz normal aussehende Federschachtel mit Reißverschluss.

Spätestens hier sollte dies nicht mehr der Fall sein.

Und was hier nun endgültig wie ein nutzloser Streifen Stoff aussieht kann natürlich ohne Probleme wieder zu einer Federschachtel gemacht werden.

Dies sollte selbst Leuten wie mir beweisen, dass nicht alles, was cool ist, aus Schaltkreisen und Transistoren bestehen muss.

Facebook Madness

2009-06-14T20:07:00.001+02:00

Just wanted to share something with you quickly:

This is what i was presented with today while trying to add someone to my friends on Facebook. Normally I don’t mind having to prove that I am a human but seriously? Who wouldn’t think that this is stupid. A 9 figure number plus currency and separators!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

My Question: Does it make sense to be asked this over and over again when you have already passed this test numerous times before?

Stanley Cup Finals, Game 7 Fans going rogue

2009-06-14T01:30:00.001+02:00

After being spoiled the outcome of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals by the Facebook-Group “Hockey” before being able to get my hands on a decent quality video of the Game I did my best to watch it as if I hadn’t known.

Check out the links on the bottom to see where I get the Games in High Definition.

I don’t recall posting anything about hockey in particular on this blog before so to clear that up: I follow and watch the ongoings of the National Hockey League a lot throughout the seasons so it feels natural for me to post something about how this one ended.

The Final Series between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Detroit Red Wings was a quite exciting one to watch and definately worthy of its meaning to Hockey Players and Fans around the globe. I found that a lot of players from both teams rose to stardom in this series, for me at least, while some others who already had high expectations upon their shoulders disappointed. The one example that comes to my mind immediately is Evgeni Malkin from the Pittsburgh Penguins who took a very poor attempt at being a Difference Maker at some occasions. As a positive example I think of guys like Jordan Staal with the consistency he brought to the table as an offensive playmaker and Maxime Talbot especially in the last game with his scoring touch.

The Consmite Trophy for Most Valuable Player then went to previously mentioned Evgeni Malkin who I think doesn’t deserve this because he doesn’t provide leadership and isn’t someone young players should look up to with his aggressive behavior towards opposing players. What I also think is that he didn’t cherish being given the Trophy enough. No respect for the honor. If you look back at former MVPs like Mark Messier or Mario Lemieux you just don’t see any of those important aspects in Malkin that separate an MVP from the rest. Of course in all fairness I have to admit that he has been performing great for his team. But as I said, this should not be the only thing people look at when they look for an MVP.

This might sound like I was in favor of Sidney Crosby being given this award but that’s not the case. I wouldn’t give it to him either. To be honest I don’t know a better alternative in particular but I am sure that this Penguins Team has someone to offer who met the standards during the season and during the Playoffs.

What gave me the idea of writing this article in the first place is something entirely different. When I watched the game I noticed some Detroit Fans between the Sideview Camera and the Ice who behaved an awful lot like Soccer Fans. And I mean that in a bad way. There’s a difference between respectful confrontation with an opponent and pure hatred for an enemy. The latter might not have been exactly the case here but it is in many soccer games and it’s the big reason why a lot of people don’t like the sport of soccer or at least don’t like to attend its matchups. And I can’t help but see a trend of Hockey-Hooligans emerge.

As much as the sport itself is tough and as much as it enables the players to express their feelings physically I was always surprised how fearlessly people in favor of away-teams could attend NHL Games. And I think that it’s very important to not have to fear being threatened even verbally when attending something like a Sports event.

When the Pittsburgh Penguins were handed the Cup on Friday Night in Detroit there was little or no cheering. Instead there was booing and because of that I was surprised that so many people had stayed after the game in the first place.

So my basic thought here is that if Hockey Fans overall are moving towards loathing another team even if (and because) their team has just been beaten, I don’t see any reasons why there shouldn’t be the first Hooligans within a few years, given that the sport itself keeps gaining popularity like it did so far. Of course I hope that my speculations are wrong and that this has just been a bad example of how to handle a Stanley Cup Final situation.

To sum it all up I have to say that the NHL Season behind us was another one worth watching especially with all the post-season tension that showed the viewers how much better even the best players in the world can become when being given a goal like winning Lord Stanley’s Cup.

Links: nhl.com – nhltorrents.co.uk

Time Machine and Apple Multi-Touchpads

2009-05-08T12:07:00.001+02:00

Without finding nor providing an excuse for my absence around here I think I have gathered enough things to talk about to fill a blog entry once again after some weeks of hard work on multiple school projects.

Yesterday I came to the realization that I don’t even have to buy any additional hardware in order to be able to use the Time Machine feature of my MacBook. Since I bought my Network Attached Storage I had a 500GB USB Storage laying around with nothing to do. At first I tried to modify Time Machine in order to be able to use it as a Network Storage although it isn’t a Time Capsule from Apple. After a variety of weird Error Messages (which seem to be one of the reasons why Apple only supports their own Time Capsules) I decided to connect it via USB.

It works like a charm. Time Machine backs up to this Storage hourly whenever it is connected while the MacBook is not on battery operation. It keeps those hourly backups for the last 24 hours and lowers them to daily updates for the last 7 days accordingly. Furthermore it keeps weekly updates of my files until there is no storage left. So to retrieve a lost file or file-state one opens a Finder (=Explorer) Window and directs it to where you once had your file the way you want it to have now. You launch Time Machine and it takes the Finder Window on a journey to the past. You specify the Date you want to go back to and the contents of the Window will change to what they have been like at that time.

So whenever my MacBook is connected to the Storage those backups will be made regularly and I can make those journeys to the past.

To switch to another topic, something I wanted to talk about in my Blog for a long time now is how satisfied I am with the way the new Multi-Touch Trackpads from Apple work.

Since the introduction of the Multi-Touch concept by Apple with the iPhone this has proven to be a hit among customers looking for ways to interact with their hardware more intuitively. And it has proven my conviction wrong that touch-pads cannot be a tool for a serious workflow on a mobile computer.

With this Trackpad I do not feel the need of grabbing a hold of my Mouse on every occasion.

I do not feel hindered by technology when working with it. It has size and it doesn’t recognize the accidental touch as a click like many others do and it does not have a dedicated Click-Button since it itself is the button which you can press down on which I think is way more intuitive than having your own click-button when most people just want to click on the touchpad itself anyways.

Whenever someone uses it for the first time they stumble across the problem that clicking and holding down on the Trackpad while dragging a scrollbar across the screen can be rather annoying. What they do not know of course is that its primary intent isn’t that at all. Since it can receive multiple inputs you can for example right-click when clicking with two fingers or scroll while sliding across with two fingers. In supported applications the possibilities are even higher in number. You can pinch and zoom in iPhoto. You can use a 4-finger swipe to get to your desktop or to Exposé (a grid of all open windows). You can use 3 fingers to go through an iPhoto Album.

Of course every application can implement their own functionalities for these, which means that sooner or later there will be even more advantages for users of this Trackpad since they are now being built into every mobile Mac Apple ships.

So this entry has been very Apple-based but this should just go to show that although I believe to be very critical of what companies like Apple do these days (because I absolutely don’t think their philosophy is better than anyone else’s) I can’t help being astonished by their way of thinking once in a while.

Have a nice weekend

Apple User Accounts, iPhone Development

2009-04-24T13:34:00.001+02:00

So for my day off after yesterday’s “C# for Windows Mobile” exam I decided to join some colleagues of a higher semester as they start a brand-new course - which has its premiere here at University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg right now and maybe among all Univeristies of Austria - concerning iPhone Development.

When I entered the laboratory in which the entire course will be held, I encountered some new hardware which was acquired by the University some time in February already and obviously has found its primary use now. During the lecture I realised that all the students who are signed for the course could log in to the Mac Minis with their Active Directory Accounts the University provides them. As we all either know or can find out from the Link, Active Directory is a service by Microsoft that enables you to store user accounts including their files on a Windows Server so the respective users can log in from any computer and use them alike.

Prior to my research on the internet I did not know that Active Directory and Open Directory (from Apple) can interact with eachother at all. I was scared that some Administrator actually created those accounts one by one including their passwords, which would mean that I am not the only one who has legal access to my password (assuming that the Administrators of a System I use can do whatever they want with my data). My Research however showed at least some calming results. Active and Open Directory can be used in combination but there have to be both a Windows Server and a Mac OS X Server running on the network. It does seem to be very complicated to accomplish the wanted results though. What I also know is that others at University have already used Macintosh Computers for video cutting or other creativity related things, so it only seems logical that they have been using the possibility to log into their accounts from both Operating Systems all along.

When I tried it out myself the login went smoothly as you’d expect it. I still hope that no one has access to my password in plain-text but in the end I also know that I can be the only one held responsible for my own security, so how far I want to go with my paranoia defines how vulnerable my digital personality is.

And of course the conclusion of all this is that everyone who uses Computers without exception has to be aware of this.

have a nice weekend

Festplatten, Windows und ihre Unverträglichkeit

2009-04-20T13:31:00.001+02:00

Nachdem ich diesen Blog jetzt eine Zeit lang außen vorgelassen habe, habe ich mir gedacht es wäre wieder mal Zeit für einen Eintrag. Und als ob das nicht genug wäre habe ich mir auch gleich eingebildet wieder einmal einen deutschen Eintrag zu verfassen.

In gewisser Weise als Herausforderung an mich selbst, um zu sehen wie sehr ich der deutschen Grammatik und Rechtschreibung noch mächtig bin. Andere in der Hinsicht zu kritisieren beherrsche ich nach wie vor sehr gut.

Die Thematik würde zwar in gewisser Weise zu Mobile Computing passen, aber nichts desto trotz auf Deutsch: Ich hasse die Art und Weise wie Windows Server 2003 (oder Windows NT generell) mit Datenträgern umgeht.

Und das sage ich nun bereits fast eine Woche nachdem ich feststellen musste, dass mein Windows Server 2003 eine halbvolle 500 GB Festplatte datentechnisch gesehen beinahe unbrauchbar gemacht hat und ich mir bereits eine neue Festplatte in Form einer 1TB Buffalo LinkStation zugelegt habe, welche auf Linux läuft, und ich bereits alle wichtigen Daten in Sicherheit gebracht habe vor diesem Monster, welches wir ahnungslos mit dem Namen “Windows” verharmlosen. Dies soll quasi demonstrieren mit welch unmessbar grenzenloser (sowohl unmessbar als auch grenzenlos) Wut ich bereits genannter Feststellung vor knapp einer Woche entgegengetreten bin. Ich habe aus gutem Grund mit einem Blog-Eintrag darüber auf mich warten lassen.

Besagtes Betriebssystem hat die Angewohnheit Daten nicht so auf die Festplatte zu schreiben wie sie dann auch reproduzierbar bleiben. Ich weiß allerdings nicht ob das bereits beim Abspeichern passiert oder erst später. Natürlich ist es außerdem möglich, dass das rein an der Festplatte liegt, welche ich nutze (eine Maxtor OneTouch 500 GB). Nichts desto trotz ist dies in meinen Augen inakzeptabel. Gerade ein Server-Betriebssystem muss die Erwartung erfüllen können Datensicherheit zu garantieren. Mehr als jeder andere Typ Betriebssystem.

Ich habe vor dieser 500GB Festplatte bereits eine 300 GB Maxtor Netzwerkfestplatte (so wie es die Buffalo LinkStation ist, sprich eine Festplatte mit eigenem Betriebssystem) besessen die ich nun schon etwa 4 Jahre benutze und seit Monaten im Dauerbetrieb. Diese läuft ebenfalls auf Linux und hat mich noch nie der Möglichkeit beraubt auf Daten zuzugreifen, welche ich irgendwann zuvor dort abgespeichert habe.

Das Fazit aus dieser Erfahrung soll sein, dass es für mich persönlich zwar noch immer absolut nicht in Frage kommt Linux als Applikations-Server zu verwenden, weil ich mich dazu einfach nicht gut genug unter Linux zurechtfinde, allerdings werde ich die Sicherheit meiner Daten von nun an nie wieder einem nicht UNIX-basierten Betriebssystem überlassen und ich würde keinem, der diesen Eintrag liest etwas anderes ans Herz legen.

jetzt bleibt mir nur noch allen einen schönen Start in die Woche zu wünschen…

HP iPAQ Review – Part 3: Data Messenger

2009-04-03T23:44:00.000+02:00

The Data Messenger from HP is their newest flag-ship in Pocket PC Technology. At the moment you can only buy it from their website for none less than 599€ or 440 British Pounds (including VAT) and I myself am pretty sure that this amount of money is not worth it yet to own this device. As with most other devices the price will most certainly be lower with retailers and of course with carrier plans as soon as they’re introduced.

Why I wouldn’t pay 599 for this device:

Although it has a very nice optical appearance, just like its little brother, it is just another Windows Mobile device with its own little extras. Nothing really blew me away about the device. In Part 1 of my review I promised to go into detail about the buttons and connectors on the side. On the left hand side you have (from top to bottom) a Lock-Button (which is just as complicated to operate with this device), 2 Volume Buttons and a Voice Dial/Command Button. On the right hand side you have (from top to bottom) the micro-USB connector, the 2.5mm audio out (read previous post for details) and the Snapshot-Button for taking photographs which worked better with this device. On Top of course you again have the Mute-Switch which was the first positive factor I recognized about both devices. And that’s about it.

Furthermore the Screen has a very static and stale feel to it, especially when you operate it with the stylus. I’m used to having a Touch-Screen sink in when operating it with a stylus. It assures me that I just made a click.

The full QWERT-Keyboard seems quite OK concerning the layout. I didn’t work too much with it since I assumed it would work just like you’d expect it to.

Conclusion:

So I assume that the previous iPAQ device of this category didn’t lack any major feature of this one and I would just consider it a minor update to it. As soon as I see it for a reasonable price I might know some people I could suggest it to but not yet.

HP iPAQ Review – Part 2: Voice Messenger

2009-04-02T23:55:00.001+02:00

When I first saw the device I was pretty surprised by its slick design and the overall appearance. It’s got everything you’d expect from a Smartphone with Windows Mobile on it but because I don’t know too many details about past iPAQ devices it was very easy for me to point out a few flaws about this device. Things hardcore-iPAQ users might not be surprised by.

The Lock-System, in my eyes, is impossible to understand for someone who’s new to this. I locked the device with the Lock-Button (see picture 2) and it always took me forever to unlock it again because what the screen told me to do wasn’t understandable.
The Button for taking photographs was almost non-pressable. It did not move a bit. But I guess this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be shipped.
Finding out that the 2 “Buttons” next to the iPAQ Logo (see right) are in fact buttons might be hard to find out for some. Because they are Touch-Sensitive and do not move at all.
Turning the old numeric-keyboard system upside down by having just a few more buttons and arrange the letters on them in a QUERT-Layout might be a risky idea by HP because although you have 2 letters on most buttons it does not make a difference if you push the left or right half of a button.
Just like the Data Messenger this device has a micro-USB connector for both data-synchronization and recharging, and it has a 2.5mm rather than a 3.5mm audio-out which I see as much market for as the audio-connector of the first iPhone which required a converter for connecting regular headphones. micro-USB might be a standard of the future which might seem annoying for now but 2.5mm audio has been around for ages and it just never caught on. Why should it do so now?

Conclusion:

Of course all I’ve been talking about now were negative factors of this mobile device. It sure has its upsides as well. If someone asked me whether to buy this device I would ask them what they were looking for. If you want to listen to music on your mobile phone this sure isn’t the way to go. If you want your mobile phone to have a wide variety of installable programs and if you want it to look good this will surely do the job. Since I don’t know any specific facts about the pricing I can’t tell you how good your wallet might feel in the process of buying it.

The reason why I decided to concentrate on the negative aspects I experienced within 15 minutes of basic usage of the phone is because I think this is what others can get the most profit out of. If someone buys a device without knowing what he will be confronted with immediately after, they might turn out non-satisfied buyers.

For a Review of its big brother, the Data Messenger, stay tuned till tomorrow. I think I might go a little bit into more detail with this one since it’s a more complex device.

HP iPAQ Review – Part 1: Introduction & Similarities

2009-04-01T22:47:00.000+02:00

So I want to kick off my review with a short introduction to the devices and what they have in common. No personal opinion in this post.

The Voice Messenger (on the left in my last post) is a Smartphone in the shape of an ordinary mobile phone, so it is compact, yet with Windows Mobile it has a quite sophisticated Operating System on top of it for a rather small device.

The Data Messenger is a full-featured Pocket PC with a QUERT-Keyboard for landscape-operation and a touch-screen which can either be used with your finger or the included Stylus.

The things they have in common at first and second sight would be the following:

Both have the exact same Status-LED to the upper left of their screens.
The navigation is handled by a circular Hard-Button with a tiny Trackball in the middle.
The Buttons and connectors on the sides are the same. Read my next posts for details.
On top they have a Mute-Switch.
They both have a 3.1 Megapixel autofocus camera with LED-flash.
Furthermore you can of course see that they both have the same optical appearance concerning their enclosure and design.

Stay tuned some more for detailed Reviews of each device and a personal opinion. Hope I didn’t miss any similarities.

Preview: HP iPAQ Voice & Data Messenger

2009-04-01T16:35:00.001+02:00

Just a little taste of the 2 new (and I think yet unreleased) HP iPAQ Devices I’m going to review for you either today or tomorrow.

So stay tuned…

My Mac OS X Dock reviewed

2009-04-01T15:13:00.001+02:00

So after a weekend break and a stressful start into a new one I could finally think of a topic for another blog-entry. So here’s a list of Programs that reside in the Dock of my MacBook and some more i regularly depend on:

Finder – Who would’ve thought.
Firefox – It’s my browser of choice and a good one at that. I know my way around Internet Explorer/Safari and they both do not meet my expectations and the only other one worth mentioning in my eyes is Opera which i have also tried numerous times but it just doesn’t offer the same allaround solution.
Mail – With the ability to work with multiple Mail Accounts (IMAP of my university and Gmail in this case) intuitively it already provides everything I’m used to from Windows. Smart Folders, RSS functionality and Notes are just very useful additions to that.
iCal – After trying unsuccessfully to sync my Outlook-World (which is synced with my Mobile Phone) with the Apple-side of the pond i decided to just sync my Phone redundantly over Bluetooth with iSync as well until Nokia Ovi for Mac comes along. So I’m not satisfied by its syncability but very much by its usability.
iTunes – Another very guessable Application I use. The only alternative i tried so far is Songbird and although i liked it i didn’t see any reason to not stick with iTunes since I don’t listen to music on my MacBook too much anyway.
SimplifyMedia – So this is where my list might become interesting for some. For those who don’t know it. SimplifyMedia provides me with the ability to stream music from any of my computers that also have SimflifyMedia running on it. It integrates into iTunes (or Winamp for Windows) very neatly. Very recommendable application.
Picasa – Although it hasn’t been out for Macs for long yet I sure made up for lost time already. It’s the best Picture Manager I know of and none works better when you have your Collections in a network-folder.
Adium – Without a doubt the most advanced Instant Messaging client out there for Mac OS X. It’s got it all. It’s that simple.
Cyberduck – When it comes to foreign file-protocols like FTP, WebDAV and so on, I’ve always been satisfied with the way the Finder itself handles them but I still hold this app dear for its ease of use, should I ever need it.
Activity Monitor – Since I often want to know what’s happening inside my computer i could not live without some Application of this kind. Although it cannot even begin to keep up with Process Explorer for Windows it still features everything I need.

Other Applications I regularly use:

VMware Fusion – This Application sure has made it easier for me to use Windows on my MacBook from time to time. It’s so much simpler to be able to have Mac OS X and Windows running side by side when the performance penalty is almost not present at all.
InsomniaX – Sitting in the MenuBar this Application makes sure my MacBook doesn’t go to sleep when I close the lid of my MacBook. I don’t like that standard behavior.

Maybe some of you can profit from this blog-entry. The others might as well just wait for another one. I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

cheers

Thoughts on Facebook and more…

2009-03-27T20:22:00.001+01:00

So I’ve been thinking about possible contents for another Blog Entry all day without getting any good ideas. Still I went home from school having achieved something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. I rearranged the folder structure of my Homepage so I could give it a sort-of Splash Screen Startpage, giving the user the choice to either continue to my Homepage, or hop over to my Blog.

The Result can be seen here: http://desentizised.gotdns.com/

So coming home I didn’t have any specific idea for a blog entry yet but after some surfing around it got to me. Considering how many people I know are on Facebook, plus all their Facebook-Friends and the Facebook-friends of those, you come to ask yourself: How many Users are there on Facebook? I knew this wouldn’t be something to ask Google but rather Ask.com. Didn’t get me the answer immediately, but still I found what I wanted. Which was the Press Release Section on Facebook and before linking the interested ones to it I’d like to give you a brief overview of the Facebook Community:

Facebook has more than 175 million active users. OK, so that’s a very high number but I thought that has to be taken into perspective by learning a little more about those 175 million.
More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide). Still not the kind of perspective I wanted since it would take a lot of calculating to get to the amount of minutes an average user spends on Facebook, which would still not tell us anything about the number of users Facebook sees each day.
More than 18 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Alright, so that’s the kind of information we need. When I think in millions I always think of population. Austria and New York City for example both have about 8 Million. (strange comparison I know) So roughly NYC and Austria combined update their Facebook Status every single day. Which tells me that 175 million might be a bit generous but on the other hand, who would you expect to write a script that gave you an accurate number over a certain amount of time?
More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month. So this was when I asked myself where they store all the data which is submitted to them each day. Let’s say an average picture on Facebook is 50KB in size, not much right? 850 million a month makes roughly 28 million photos a day. Therefore, 50KB times 28 million makes 1,400,000,000 KB which would be way more than one Terabyte a day. A DAY. I know Google among others must be way more space-consuming but when you see the actual numbers it just blows you away.

(Any errors among my calculations can of course be critizised in the comment-section below)

I’m sure I could come up with more to talk about but I think this is enough for now.

Here’s the Link to the Press Release Infos of Facebook by the way.

yours truly

My first Windows Mobile Project

2009-03-26T17:07:00.004+01:00

So i just finished writing my first very basic Application for the Windows Mobile Platform.

It's basically a Calculator which supports the 4 Standard Operations and has a few additional features:

1. You have a history of your previous calculations included. (Screenshot 2)

2. You can choose any of your previous calculations and press the button "Ans" in order to include the result of that calculation in your next one. (Screenshot 2)

3. When you start typing into one of the Boxes or change the Operation type (Screenshot 1) the Application waits a certain amount of time before using your inputs for a new calculation. So you always have enough time to enter your desired values before the calculation fires.

4. And although not a feature I still included a Screenshot (3) of the "About" page with a working link to my Homepage which starts the Internet Explorer bundled with Windows Mobile.

Now I'm only looking forward to the Implementation-Phase of my own Project for this Semester which I will tell you about sometime in the future.

Lock your Mac tight

2009-03-25T14:02:00.003+01:00

Just a quick update on something I found for my precious Aluminum MacBook in order to get a beloved Windows function over to my Mac.

LockTight is a Preference Pane for Mac OS X that enables you to press a specific Key-Combination in order to lock your Mac so it can only be reactivated with your password.
Previously to that I have been using "Fast User Switching" to get to the Login-Window quickly but there were 2 major problems to that.

1. Network Connections are interrupted. So no Background Downloading while you're away.
2. iTunes Music stops playing.

With LockTight I have worked that out and I like its behavior very much since the Screen doesn't just go black but starts displaying the screensaver of your choice.

regards