Blog

So, what's going on that does not really fit into one of my diary-like posts?

• It has been getting cold and wet during the last weeks. And I missed some ultimate frisbee training sessions because of not having the right clothes. I should really go shopping. Our mixed team from ultimate frisbee is the german champion for the second time in a row. Congratulations to all of them. They are going to some tournament in London on one of the next weekends.


• After trying to learn a lot for my probability theory exam I finally started to get productive. Yay!


• I get two computer magazines sent to my house: IX and Linux Magazin. Usually I have enoughe time to read the most interesting articles before the next edition comes out, but I bought a CT some weeks ago and now I am completely out of schedule.


• My computer starts to do funny things. I get a message about some accessibility feature not being present at every boot. If I am at the computer at around half past 10 (or half past 9?) in the morning, it hangs and I have to reboot it. The clock applet in Gnome does not work anymore. The computer hangs from time to time, but only when doing lots of stuff (compiling, email, webbrowser and probably more, all at the same time). Since some time ago another RAM bar died, I definitely have not enough RAM. Less than a GB at the moment. So I'm thinking about getting rid of this complicated Gentoo stuff and installing Fedora. But my machine is some years old and I want a new one. I only need the core parts, motherboard, CPU, fan, RAM, graphics adapter (if it is not onboard). So I'm thinking about buying some 4-core CPU and 4 GB of RAM and some cheap board with integrated graphics adapter (I can upgrade later). But I'll do at least one exam before.


• I read this news item about a guy (or actually more than one) building a $150 balloon with camera and GPS and taking pictures of space (the area around earth). I want to do that, too.


• I' thinking of getting rid of categories in this blog. They only make sense when they are used consistently, and I don't do that.


• I started using F-Spot for organizing my pictures. I also started hating pictures without embedded timestamps. Scans from old photographes, pictures from mobile phone cameras, pictures edited with a tool that removes that stuff. New tools, new restrictions. That's life.

The picture was taken at the beer event at last years FOSDEM. Yes, there were lots and lots of people. And the beer was really good.

• Did not get up as early as I wanted (as usual), did some stuff here and there.


• Juern invited the theoretical computer science tutors for dinner (since we work for him). Lots and lots of very good food, watched some excerpts of Religulous. I think I'll buy the DVD and show it to all teh people I know "who believe".


• Got home around midnight, was not tired enough so I established a new settlement in Travian. Been building settlers all day.


• As you might notice, I'll try to change the style of this blog. I always wanted to write "important" stuff, but well, either there is not enough of it or I'm too lazy to preprocess it for that blog. So... short sentences and real life stuff from now on. Until I change my mind in probably less than two weeks.


• About the picture: The date for next years FOSDEM was released: "6 and 7 February 2010". Hope to be able to attend and meet lots of strange people there. What about you?

Did some nice things today. Went playing ultimate with friends. After that some icecream. Got some (non-important) computer stuff done. Mostly on the blog: New template (theme, skin, whatever), imported posts from old blog the wrong way, imported them again the right way, deleted all the wrong entries. Fixed some old posts, pictures, whatever. But there's more to do, just not for today. The old posts are of questionable quality and in german. I also added some "friends" to my blogroll. If they write strange stuff, I don't know them. Anyway, good night.

First a clarification: I wanted to call this blog "plans and memories" and then called it "dreams and memories". So... everything in the category "Dreams" is either a dream or something more like a plan.

Some time ago I bought 100 green LEDs and 2 circuit boards, some resistors and some more stuff. I wanted to build something like the LED cube from mrmcd but that's far too much work for the first time. So i decided to build something easy, something 2-dimensional. Today I had the idea to build a digital clock. I looked up some low resolution bitmap fonts and created my own one:



The yellow dots are not needed LED positions, seperators or how you might call them. The black dots are LEDs or switched on LEDs and the white dots are positions of LEDs I need for other digits. I als have a picture of an example time. You can see it below, the dot colors are the same as in the first picture:



Some "hardware":



As you can see, the circuit boards are too small. I need to buy bigger ones. Also, I don't have enough LEDs. For the black and white dots only I would need 21x4+2=86 LEDs, but to fill the yellow dots, too, I need 27x7=189. I think. So I need to order more parts first.

I want to connect this board to an ATmega microcontroller. If I use it as an interface to the serial port or if it has an internal clock which is easily usable is something, I did not look up yet. First some soldering.

I just have one problem: I want to make it elegant. It shoud be possible to send a binary number on some ATmega pins to the LEDs and then do all the complicated stuff in hardware. This would be great, but using that method I only reach 86 of the189 LEDs I want to have on the circuit board (for other fun stuff). So I need 2 ways to control the LEDs. At least for 86 of them.

But does that mean that I need 86 logical ORs? That would be 22 ICs and about 3,30 Euros more. That's almost no money, but i care about the space I need for 22 ICs (these are "QUAD 2-INPUT OR GATE"s).

And for the pixel-wise control, how do I do it? 1 column at a time? Do I want to use buffers, which would be something like another 29 ICs? Or is it ok to be able to power 1 column (or $n columns) at a time? I'll have to look into that and it would be nice to know some more before ordering this stuff.

BTW, Simon wants to join me. That's great.

I never wanted this blog to be like that post. I mean, the post really sucks. I wrote about features I added, which I either did not use (Geshi) or which simply don't work (the LaTeX stuff) or which don't really interest the reader. I think. I will try not to write stuff like that again.

I also don't really like the way blogs work. Usually it's about writing articles (or posts), then you put them there and everythign is fine. If there is something wrong, you correct the article or you write another one correcting the first one. But things could be so much easier. I imagine the following: there are different kinds of texts you write for the blog. Let's call them news and articles. I use both. But blogs only support what I call news.

A news item is something that you write once ant then it exists. Fire and forget. If you find spelling errors in there, you can correct them. No big deal, nobody needs to know.

An article is something more complex. Maybe it's even a series of articles. Maybe you begin it today, continue writing in a week and finish it in a month. So, what do you do? Do you have it as a draft for a month? Maybe the introduction is already good today. So why not post it? What about changes? If you rewrite somethign or add something? At the moment, I split loger articles up and on the second and third one and so on, I write somethign like "You might also be interested in $article1 and $article2 and with the help of trackbacs readers can find follow ups to the first article in the trackback section. But that's too complicated. I'd like somthing like a merge between a blog, a wiki and a todo list system. I want the following:

The blog is like a simple blog, where you can post fire-and-forget news items and stuff.

The wiki is for articles. With every save you can tell the wiki what to do. It can automatically create a news item for the blog (with he first paragraph of the text or the first changes one or whatever. In my example it would post something like "$title - In this article I want to write about..." or whatever I wrote in the wiki. Two days later, I correct some spelling and I disable the creation of a new news item. A week later, I add another part of the article and the news item is created from the first new paragraph I added: "$title (Update) - [...] To add another point of view to this topic, I want to start with the following example:...". One month later I finish the article. I do some reordering, whatever and I enter some special news item text, which is not part of the article but is posted as news item: "$title - Today i finished my article about foo and bar. You may already have read some parts of it. What I did today is rewrite the section about generall foos, added some pictures about bars and finally wrote a conclusion about pink elephants...". So this would be the connection between the parts I want.

If I write complex articles, I want some control that they are still valid when they are read. Therefore I want expiration dates. With every news item or article I add an expiration date. The default fo news items is something like 5 years, or forever. Articles have a default about 1 year. If i write how I did something with the Gentoo Linux which enables me to do some crazy stuff, who guarantees me that it will still be valid after a year? Therefore I would get a reminder to update the article 2 weeks before the expiration date and after the article expired, there would be ome standard header stating "The author did not update this article in the last $whatever days/weeks/months/years. This article is most likely outdated and should be read with care. If you have some questions or want the author to update it, please ask so in a comment." I could, of course, add some more specific text like this on my own, add an "outdated" flag to the article (which might add some red warning sign or color somewhere) and then the article would be something like this: "I wrote this article $foo years ago. Back then I ustd $this hardware and $that software. I don't own this hardware anymore/don't use this software anymore/don't need this functionality anymore. You can still try to do the same with the information I give here, but please make sure, that you know what you are doing. $original_article".

Since I would use this application to write about projects, it would be nice to have a non-public list of projects I want to do, which can be edited comfortably. This feature could also be used for articles I want to write (if you don't call that projects). Also other fancy stuff like VCS, a ticket system or a bug tracker could be added or integrated. That I can write stuff like "I looked into [bug#123] today and updated [project] to [svn:project_name:$revision]. I hope this fixes it, if not, please comment on [bug#123]".

[Update:]
In a way, this is based on the same philosophy as my article about metadata.

It's more than 12 hours since I got home from mrmcd. I had a really nice journey home, a short walk through Darmstadt, a short shopping trip to the newspaper kiosk where I got the latest Linux Magazin (german edition, really great topics, hopefully in one of my blog posts soon) and then reading for 1 1/2 hours in the train. But back to mrmcd and what I did on the last day.

On saturday I was sitting around some more. I attended one more session, a football match with these dog-like robots. The german team (this years world champion, I think) against last years world champion from USA. The big problem about the match was, that these robots need to be calibrated and nobody knew how to do it for the american software. also nobody there was reachable, so it was a 7:0 or something for Germany and the american robots had not done too much during the match. After it they made another short match, Germany against Germany (no problem, since all the robots are the same except for color and software). This was a quite interesting one. Since I was tired, I went to bed early, read some more in my hackers book and the got to sleep while listening to very loud electronical beats from the floor beneath my sleeping area. Sorry, I mixed that up. I id not sleep, of course not. It's not allowed at the university. I just rested for some hours. And I really rested well that night. I get used to those camp beds.

The next day I attended the last few minutes of the session "building a hacker space". It was about the hacker rooms/flate of some local groups, how they look, what they do there and all that kind of stuff. also, what you have to take care of. Really interesting. I listened to this talk last year, back then it was quite good but this year lots and lots of groups were showing pictures and explainign stuff. Really great.

After that was a session about IPv6. It should just have been a repetition for me, since i wrote an exam aout the topic last year in Finland, but I learned some things I had never heard before. Or at least i cannot remember. Did you know, that the smallest IPv6 subnet is a /64? This means, there can be as many hosts in the smallest subnet as there can be subnets of that size. Wait, there can even be more hosts, since some parts of the address space is not for general use. I wrote down some details and already improved my IPv6 setup at home. Hopefully one day it will be ready so that I can write an article about it.

The next session was about OpenXPKI, a CA software. sounds quite nice. I want to look into it and use it at home and for Bawue.Net, although ixs said it's not ready for use, yet. Well, that's open source: Never ready.

I could not attend too many more lectures, since i had to play with IPv6 and bind, but I listened to the "breaking cryptographic codes" session for some minutes (I knew more than most of the people there, I think. Basics, that is. I should make my hands dirty more often). It was quite good. The closing talk was also nice, with lots of pictures ("what, there have some events outdoor?"). After that, mrmcd was officially over, there was free food and free beer. Yay. Hope to be there next year. Hopefully with dirtier hands.

There is also my post about the first day of mrmcd and my post about the second day of mrmcd.

I just installed some more plugins for s9y:

• GeSHi should enable me to create nice code snippets:
  
  with Ada.Text_IO;
  use Ada.Text_IO;
  
  procedure Hello_World is
  begin
     Put_Line("Hello, world!");
  end Hello_World;
   
  Line numbers seem to be messed up, somehow. I'll have to look into that.
  


• Since I tend to write longer articles from time to time, autosave could be usefull for me. But there's nothign to see here, unfortunately.


• There's also some LaTeX interpreter plugin for s9y:
  [tex]\sum_{i=0}^\infty (\frac{1}{2})^i = 42[/tex]
  But, as you can see, this does not work at the moment since there is neither MimeTeX nor dvips on the webserver.
  

When I configured this blog, or how you call this process, I also added some links. And since I like colored pictures so much, I added one to every link. The favicon files from the sites i was linking to. But today a friend asked me to host this graphic myself instead of using the one from the linked page. We talked a little about the why's and stuff. I think, it is somehow not ok to host pictures of other people without their ok. On the other hand, if my site is very popular, I'm kind of stealing their traffic. So lots of people seem to really dislike it. So the question is: Stealing pictures or stealing traffic? Of course, asking is too much effort. But frankly, who would complain if I used their favicon to make their link look nicer? And if somebody complained, would it be a problem or can I just change it, then?

What do you think/know?

Addition:

I talked to a friend about this. Basically, I'm thinking too much, I think. It should be enough to fix such stuff, once you are told that it is wrong. This is such a small thing...

So, it looks like i have a new blog. This time powered by serendipity. And the only reason is, that some strange guy told me to do so. Almost. Well, i'll see how long i will use it. There were aso some other people involved in this, probably without knowing. Ixs told me about serendipity and Tomcat motivated me to do it in english.

BTW, i moved the old blog to www.stoile.name/old/blog/ and hopefully disabled all exploitable parts of it. We'll see... hopefully not.