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Mon, 24 Mar 2008

General update

.:. posted: 24.03.2008-1612 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

I just noticed that I did not write anything here for a long time. So here's a brief update on how things are going, if anyone cares...

First of all, for everybody who doesn't know it yet:

Stargate SG-1: The Ark Of Truth 1 is out!!

Stunning story and lots of effects and images lots more like a movie made for the cinemas, in comparison to the usual series of the seasons. And finally the programming language in which the replicators basecode is written was revealed: JavaScript!

Next: today it snowed in cologne. Given, I'm not living here very long yet, but it's the first time here it snowes and the snow didn't melt away immediately, at least until 2:30pm:

www.flickr.com

Project flat is progressing slightly behind schedule, I've bought some new items for my kitchen and if everything works out a friend helps me switch my living room with my sleeping room somewhen this week, which will be a big step towards finishing up finally. I still miss some small wardrobes or bureaus, but it's getting better day by day.

Work is also fine, we've finished the first prototype of the application we want to migrate, and the preliminary performance figures we took look promising. In the next weeks the QA guy will take a look and run some more performance tests on a separate environment, and we're eager to see his figures in comparison to the PHP application, and whether they reflect our own figures or not.

Besides this, Tradingbird is finally in the closed beta, inviting more and more preregistered users every day. I myself haven't had the time to check in there lately, but my colleages tell me it's running smoothly. So if you're interested in financial markets check it out and preregister for your own Tradingbird account.

Recently I visited a quite interesting talk by Dr. Neil Gafter, developer of Google Calendar, who is right now proposing a language change to the Java Programming Language which includes nice features like closures and control abstraction. You might find more about this, and 2 cents from me, here.

Good night, and good luck.

Thu, 19 Jul 2007

The Voyage: Cologne (2)

.:. posted: 19.07.2007-2237 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

Ok, another part of my relocation story.

After everything was OK so far in the new flat, I had, of course, to renovate the old one. Worked out pretty well, as some Friends (Martin and Jackie), as well as my parents, helped painting the walls. Almost everything was tidied up in three days, with one exception. At last my lessor mentioned I've to remove the kitchen i took over from the former lodger. So there was more to do.

I finally sold the old kitchen last sunday and, if everything works out, I can hand over the keys to my lessor day after tomorrow.

Since yesterday my car has a new registration plate:

my car with it's new number plate

After some horror stories of one of my colleagues, which were rather exaggerated, I wondered if i'll ever return from the admission office ("There are always 90 people waiting!", "You better get there an hour before the office opens up!"). But after calling the office before lunch the other guy told me there were just nine others waiting in the hall. So I went there and the whole thing was through within the hour. :-)

Mon, 16 Jul 2007

The Voyage: Cologne

.:. posted: 16.07.2007-2129 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

OK, again there was no entry here for a long time, partially due to my relocation to Cologne. Well, most is settled now. The relocation was, as I commissioned it to a professional relocation company, named Ritter Möbeltransporte. These guys were really fast, I went to get some coffee from the bakery and all 25 packing cases were already in the lorry. Everything disjointed and packed in two hours and a half. Then, on the road to Cologne, there was a traffic jam near Würzburg, and we were one our late. But everything was fixed up and in my flat at half past six.

Till now I'm really happy with my new flat: Parquet floor all over the place, dish washer, balcony, cellar, basement garage. Maybe there'll be some photos next time. Right now it's still a bit of a mess, as I need some more boards to get all my stuff on here. Was pretty packed in the old flat and somehow there's more room in the kitchen and sleeping room now.

Well, enough for today, I'll get some supper now. See ya!

Tue, 13 Mar 2007

Long Time - No See

.:. posted: 13.03.2007-1603 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

Recent weeks were pretty stressful, I even don't know where to start...

First of all, every single desktop box at home went down, one due to an broken motherboard, and the other one I haven't figured out yet. So I only have my Laptop. I don't know whether I'll replace them, and if so, with what. I thought about buying an Mac Mini. It's pretty good hardware everybody says and they look pretty cute. And after all it's running BSD and there are pretty much sources for additional software, also open source, for example the Fink Project provides apt-* and debian packages for OS X. This nice thing joined with a nice big LCD TV should do the trick to a nice media center :o)

Next big item is the upcomming release of our new middleware software at the office. Currently the release date is planned in a few weeks, also if there are unfinished issues currently, but fortunately not in our part. So it's likely we have to postpone the release. Let's see what happens here.

After all that the planning for the next Linux event started. It will take place in the JuZe in Schwabach. On thursday we plan to fix up the schedule for presentations and workshops, as soon as they will be finished we will put them on the Schwabacher Linux Tage 2007 page on our homepage. The poster is also finished yet. At least almost, a typo is still to fix:

Schwabacher Linux Tage 2007 Plakat
Sun, 19 Nov 2006

Howdy

.:. posted: 19.11.2006-2021 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

In letzter Zeit hab ich ja mal wieder ehr seltener gebloggt. Tja. Im Büro geht's zur Zeit hoch her, demnächst steht wieder ein grosses Release an, und dann hab ich jetzt noch eine Auszubildende die ich unterweisen darf. Sie macht sich aber alles andere als schlecht :-)

Seit wenigen Wochen bin ich stolzer Besitzer eines MINI im Cortalconsors Design. Und schon flattert der erste Strafzettel ins Haus! Fotos gibt's in nächster Zeit mal nachdem ich mit dem Gerät in der Waschstrasse war.

Ansonsten gab's nicht viel neues. Für nen Kumpel der Kneipenbesitzer ist soll ich das Design für seine neue Homepage machen, bin bisher aber noch nicht wirklich dazu gekommen. Zum Üben um in das ganze HTML- und CSS-Zeug wieder reinzukommen hab ich erstmal das Design meiner Homepage neu und XHTML-1.0 konform gemacht. Jetzt geht's also ans eingemachte.

Soviel für heute abend, bis zum nächsten mal auf diesem Sendeplatz, Good night, and good luck!

Fri, 28 Jul 2006

This blog is **NOT** dead

.:. posted: 28.07.2006-1347 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

Having not blogged in a long time I thought it might be time for yet another update, so here it is

For the Job, I'm currently involved in a project named eAT, doing some stuff using JMS/IBM MQ in conjunction with Message driven beans. As this topic currently still slightly political here, maybe later more on this.

Recently more or less was going on around here in Nuremberg, I visitend Rock im Park, only on fryday, but it was worth it. The lineup on the center stage on friday afternoon was:

After all it was a pretty stunning event: The gleeman of Franz Ferdinand didn't strike the right note very often, Sportfreunde rocked as usual, and the Placebo show was good as usual, but didn't burn the house the last time I saw them. Well, the new disc is a little slower, so this may be the reason.

Not enough, this big fishes were followed by some kind of the Godfathers of electronic music, Depeche Mode. The show was extraordinary, with 3 display panels instead of a banner, showing videos made by cameras in front of the stage. They came up with a good mixture of old and new songs, so something for everyone.

Sat, 10 Jun 2006

Soccer world cup

.:. posted: 10.06.2006-1533 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

These days I don't like livin' in Nuremberg here, as everything, everywhere is around the soccer WC. The whole Hauptmarkt was transformed in some kind of soccer ground, with a beer garden and silver screens on it, the Volksfestplatz alike.

If I would not have to work so much on the new eAT project I'd have taken all my leave to spend all the time on a remote island where no TV is near to me. But as usually...

Anyway, on IRC I just stumbled over a pretty neat way for geeks to watch the soccer WC: http://ascii-wm.net/ provides a live stream of soccer WC games as ASCII. Maybe I'm still watching some games there, also if you don't recognize much on the huge surveys througout the stadium, on closer views you see ball and players... So, to try out:

$ telnet ascii-wm.net 2006
Sat, 29 Apr 2006

Laptop

.:. posted: 29.04.2006-2318 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

As some of you might know already I bought a new laptop recently. My choice was the Samsung X20. And what was the first I did with it? Put Debian on it. Currently it runs Sarge using the 2.6.8 kernel build by nobse (I think, at least ;-> )

Samsung tells me it may run up to 5 hours unwired, but (using Linux) my acpi tells me something about 2:20h after unplugging it from power with a full battery. I did not check up to know if it's estimate is accurate, I'll tell you so if/when I've done.

Linux works pretty nice on it, there are plenty of howtos/tutorials out there on the net. Thanks to tokkee for helping me with the IPW2200 to get wlan up and running. The things I didn't check up to now are the card reader, firewire, the external screen/beamer connector, as well as composite tv and the S/PDIF auido features.

One point why I decided for this X20 is the graphics card is an ATI X600, which has its own memory and doesn't steal me RAM (which is actually 1GB). It gets pretty funny when starting glxgears after activating the OpenGLOverlay option in the X-config: it goes nuts and tells me something about avg. 2300 FPS... %-)

Thu, 16 Mar 2006

New Phone- and Internet-Provider

.:. posted: 16.03.2006-0238 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

OK, this week I switched to an new Phone- and Internet-Provider. NEFKoms maxi-dsl was my choice. I took an analog Phone line and the 6 MBit DSL Flat.

The switch itself worked pretty seamless: Telekom cut the line in the morning, and as I came home in the evening at about 10 to 8 pm with the new Splitter, DSL Modem and phone everything was working out of the box. I love it when things just work :-) .

Anyway I think I'll put the packet with the DSL-Modem in the corner just as it is, as my Linksys WRT54G includes a modem and just kept working after inserting the new login credentials for the NEFKom Flat. Here the new status report:

New DSL Bandwith status

Before I had a Telekom ISDN line, but almost never took advantage of its features, so I downgraded to a POTS line. As I already got all the other hardware, and don't want to get one of this cute Fitzbox all-in-wonder boxes providing a ISDN s0 bus even if you got POTS, I need a new Phone. I took this one:

My new Phone: Motorola ME 4052-1

The Issues important to me:

  • Cordless
  • Cool looking
  • Takes default AA or AAA accus/batteries
  • May have a plug socket for headset

Usually I like to try out new toys by trial and error. But this time a look in the manual was worth it:

connection schema
in the phone manual

Shouldn't this be the outher way round? ;-)

Fri, 13 Jan 2006

Another month, another blog entry...

.:. posted: 13.01.2006-1917 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

Ok, some month past, and here's another blog entry from me. As you may have noticed, I set up another layout of this homepage. IMO the old one was a little overloaded, with all these image boxes and stuff... this one is pretty neat and stolen from a coppermine gallery theme called "IPodLounge". Some time soon I want to move this page including the blog from this box next to my couch to my webspace on www.makii.de.

When just started a personal entry I can continue what was up the last few weeks. A friend of mine whom lives in Berlin few years now got married and celebrated this givin' a party. Here's the Link to the pictures Carina and I took. Unfortunately I just could take 4 Pictures, then my digital camera corrupted and I had to continue using mi lousy Phone cam... :-(

But after all there were enough folks with cams around. Here are the photos from Michael and or Silkes' (the bride!!) brother Holger took.

A voice against Cellphone Ringtones & Ads for 'em

.:. posted: 13.01.2006-1917 h .:. category: /personal .:. permanent link .:.

Today i found an interesting blog article about the company Jamba! and their slightly missleading tv >spots running on MTV and Viva advertising cellphone rintong abos for EUR >3,99 or 4,99 / month.

My opinion is to tar and feather these guys as first, the spots are so annoying I switch channel each time I see it, and second, most young kids simply just don't think this is an abo, as they just want to get this fu***** ringtone.

This is a vote associated with the ringtone-tv-spot topic, worth to sign, imo:

Unterschriftenaktion gegen Fernsehen ohne Werbung für kostenpflichte
Mobiltelefondienste

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