University

• Started reading a new book, "Our Man in Havana" by Graham Greene. My favourite quote so far: 'You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.'


• Attila showed me a nice website, Instructables - Make, How To, and DIY. Maybe after my next exam I will find the time and energy to build something nice.


• Lunch was great. Souerkraut with sausages and mashed potatoes. Pistachio pudding for desert.


• Later today there will be dancing lessons. REally looking forward to it. Last week we did... no idea, but it was fun.


• After that I'll be meeting Vodi. We have to discuss some stuff and I'm really curious about his views of the current situation.

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.

Today's pictures are related to today's post. They are taken with my mobile phone camera, therefore the incredible quality.

• Another learning day at the university this time with Attila.


• We went to our math professor to get a date for our spoken exam, but he was not there.


• After that we went to the student organization of the mathematics students and got copies of some earlier exams in probability theory. The professor seems to be quite ok, the questions are almost all about examples and from there he starts talking about theory. A little more to learn because the examples seem to be that important, but a nice style, actually.


• We were sitting in some seminar room and learning when we suddenly heard the noise of sirens. A firemen truck was coming and four firemen were running down to the subway station. Then another truck came, then the police, then the ambulance. After about 10 minutes I saw roughly 15 firemen trucks, 2-3 ambulance cars and another 3-5 police cars. We went outside, took some pictures and decided to take a short break. We went to the supermarket and passed the other exit of the subway station. There are lots of ventilation grids there (the big ones on the ground, where you an walk on) and it smelled like burned iron or some fire where there is electricity involved. After about 1-2 hours everybody was gone and it was back to normal. I found the following article about what had happened (in German, unfortunately):
  

  Rauchentwicklung in S-Bahn-Zug
  
  18.09.2009, 14:13 Uhr
  Brand in unterirdischer Verkehrsanlage
  Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Haltestelle Universität
  
  Fahrgäste haben den Lokführer auf der Fahrt zwischen den Haltestellen Schwabstraße und Universität auf eine leichte Rauchentwicklung im Zug aufmerksam gemacht. Der Lokführer stoppte daraufhin den Zug in der Haltestelle Universität und forderte alle Fahrgäste zum Verlassen des Zuges auf. Die ersten Einsatzkräfte der Feuerwehr und des Rettungsdienstes trafen um 14:22 an der Einsatzstelle ein.
  
  Gemeinsam mit den anwesenden Polizeibeamten wurde die Haltestelle unverzüglich geräumt. Einsatztrupps der Feuerwehr suchten den Zug und die Bahnsteige nach verletzten Personen ab. Der bereits erloschene Schwelbrand im Bereich eines Drehgestells erforderte keine weiteren Löschmaßnahmen. Umfangreiche Kräfte der Feuerwehr und des Rettungsdienstes betreuten die zahlreichen betroffenen Fahrgäste. 14 Personen wurden durch den anwesenden Leitenden Notarzt im Großraumrettungswagen der Berufsfeuerwehr untersucht. Der Rettungsdienst verbrachte eine 45jährige Frau und einen sechsjährigen Jungen in Stuttgarter Kliniken. Beide erlitten eine leichte Rauchvergiftung. Einige Personen wurden psychologisch betreut.
  
  Kräfte Berufsfeuerwehr:
  62 Feuerwehrbeamte mit insgesamt 20 Fahrzeugen
  
  Kräfte Freiwillige Feuerwehr:
  Abteilungen Vaihingen und Birkach mit insgesamt 25 Einsatzkräften und 3 Fahrzeugen
  
  Kräfte Rettungsdienst:
  4 Rettungswagen, 1 Großraumrettungswagen, 1 Notarzt, 1 Leitender Notarzt, 1 Organisatorischer Leiter, 1 Schnelleinsatzgruppe, 1 Kriseninterventionsteam (insg. 12 Fahrzeuge, 24 Einsatzkräfte)
  
  This article is taken from http://www.feuerwehr-stuttgart.de/

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?

What's going on in university?

Well, I'm attending two lectures this semester: Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie (proability theory) and algorithmische und kombinatorische Gruppentheorie (algorithmic and combinatoric group theory). Quite nice, actually.

I'm doing my two little jobs: Cluster administration combined with administration of the literature database and I'm a tutor for Theorie 2 (theory of computer science 2).

I could and should write much more, and hopefully I will do so soon. But at the moment my concentration is gone, I don't want to write more.

Some days ago I read an article (probably golem.de, I'm too lazy to find the link) about some Mozilla guy trying out new user interfaces. He stated, that a lot of the current interfaces are bad (which is definitely true) and if I understand is correctly, there are basically two directions in which research can go:

1. One can design/create a user interface which is easier to use. Examples are theMozillas mobile webbrowser, that shows the page in fullscreen and you can move this fullscreen size page to the, let's say, left side to have address bar and all the other stuff on the right side. This is totally non-intuitive, but easier to use once you learn it.


2. The second way is to design intuitive interfaces. This is also quite an interesting field, since it's exactly what makes lots of users decide whether to use your application or another one.

Some more things I have to say about the first direction: It's maybe the same as using keyboard shortcuts. You don't know them when you start using the application, but if you get to know them you can boost your productivity. Somwhere in the article they stated, that keyboard shortcuts and context menus and stuff are bad, but I forgot why.

Another example is TrekBuddy, a GPS appliation for mobbile phones. I used it some time ago with a Siemens mobile phone to have GPS. I thought, it was configured wrong or something because I did not get any usefull information from it (just a world map, a dot for the waypoint on it and an arrow for the position where I was to the waypoint). I called the friend from whom I had borrowed the phone and who had put the software on it for me, and he explained to me the most important things: You have to anter the menu using the key above the "1" (ok, i knew that), if you press start there, GPS is switched on (interesting way of switching on and off this whole system of the phone, I had looked for the switch outside of the Java application) and you can press '#' to move from one display to another (who would have guessed that?). With that I could enter the next waypoint, start gps, switch to the display that shows me the current signal quality and the direction in which I had to go.

Another thing this guy mentioned in his article were the "Do you really want to do that?"-popups. Basically, they are not too bad, because if you accidently hit the "close" keyboard shortcut for your webbrowser and lose lots of open tabs and stuff? Recently you can work around this all with plugins, but not for Safari, as far as I know. These popups are bad, because you get used to them and click them away automatically. What would be a much better user interface is if there were no popups but this plugin like thing, just for everything. Either a global "undo", or something like "restart the application so that it looks like before you closed it", restart the application normally and have a "restore last session" button or whatever. Don't prevent things, correct them.

Today I missed this feature a lot. I wanted to search something in an IMAP mail folder in Evolution, wanted to clear the search (I do Ctrl+A Del for that) but the focus was not on the search bar (never trust the focus. It moves from window to window and there is no way of controlling it. How often have you typed a password into the wrong window just because another window was jumping in front of the one you were working with at the monent?) but on the mail folder. I deleted every email. I could restore it from teh trash of course, but there were about 60 unread mails from the last two months, very important emails, and no I have to reread every email and check, it I already read it (or in my case, if I already entered the data from the mail into the database).

I'll go back to work. Lots of mails to read.

Yesterday, some new guy at the CCCS Mailinglist introduced himself to the list and asked, if somebody has an USRP or SSRP at home. Well, I did not know what he was talking about, but it sounded interesting, so I googled:

USRP is short for Universal Software Radio Peripheral. It is a USB (or GE, for the USRP2) connected board with some hardware on it that can receive radio signals (the full band, not just tuned to 1 channel), converts them to digital and sends it to the computer. The other way around works, too, you can send stuff. It is a nice tool, since it enables you to do lots and lots of things, starting from receiving FM radio, to receiving HDTV movies from the air, to GSM, GPS and WLAN. It's testing equipment, therefore you don't need a license to buy it. It's just, well, illegal to do some stuff with it.

The software tool used with that peripheral is GNU Radioand there's a wiki page about the USRP with all the stuff you need to build it on your own (software and hardware are GPL licensed) on that website. And did I mention, that there's an FPGA on that board? Really nice stuff.

If you are interested in this, I would recommend you to read the Wired article about GNU Radio.

The guy who designed this board is called Matt Ettus, and on his website he sells ready-to-use USRPs. But the price is quite high (at least for a hobbyist like me who only sees the new toy): The USRP is $700 and the USRP2 is twice that price.

That's where the SSRP project starts: SSRP stands for Simple Software Radio Peripheral ans seems to be an USRP, just simpler. That sounds good, but the USRP seems to be much more mature, developed or how you call it. It is used in lots of applications (like locating mobile phones in supermarkets, see the Wired article) and I did not find that much about the SSRP. Only that the first version works and he's working on the second one, where the hardware is trady but not the firmware or software.

So, if maybe one day I get my amateur radio license, I will look this projects up again and maybe get some cool stuff done. There's also an amateur radio group at my university. Unfortunately I did not know this before, I did not look into this and 1 year before I make my diploma neither does it make sense to start this new hobby and get to know the group nor do I have the time. So.... someday/later it is.

One month without a blog post. So, let's write something...

This monday started as a quite normal monday. I tried to get up early, slept too long, got up, ate something in fromt of the TV and went to university. I had a meeting with Hiwi job boss and some sys admin. We talked about what OS we want to instal on the cluster. The frontend was still running some 5 (well, probably much more) year old Red Hat linux. The nodes were running SuSE 9.1. So, the easiest thing would be to put SuSE 9.1 on the frontend, but there are no more security updates for it. Quite bad. A newer SuSE would be a lot of work, and, well, it's SuSE and I don't like it. I never had to say that, because they proposed Scientific Linux. I supported this and asked them if they would also like CentOS. They did not really care, but thought the support for scientific stuff would be better in scientific linux. Well, I don't know, but the only thing they need (and use a the moment) is some MPI, OpenMPI or whatever, and that should be available with RHEL and therefore with CentOS. So I spent the afternoon swiching off the nodes and backing up the frontend. I also mirrored the stuff of CentOS I thought I would need. It was quite fun and felt really good to be back working, after four weeks or whatever.

After that I went to frisbee training. I was quite early, so I got a nice sandwich and a banana on the way. Really good food. When I arrived there, I met Hannes and after putting on my sports clothes, Flo arrived. They both were half an hour earlier, like me, to throw some disks. So we threw some disks for half an hour, made some nice drills and finally started playing. It was horribly hot and I had to refill my one liter water bottle after half of the training. During the game the opponent team made a sport of getting me tired, the one I had to defend was always running like crazy, no matter if it made sese or not. So after the trainign i felt really tired and really really good. Thanks to all my personal trainers from the second open team in Stuttgart.

We decided to drink some beer and went to Boddschamber. It was really nice there, although they destroyed one of the three pizza baguettes we ordered and I burned my tongue on a not-destroyed one. That was my fault, I guess. We sat and talked and some people proposed to go to the sneak preview, wo we went to the cinema.

While we waited in line we got one important information and we heared one rumor: There were 2 different movies (like always), movie A in english and movie B in german. I would have opted for the english one from the start, but the rumor that it would be The Dark Knight. So we got in there, got some coke and popcorn, hated the guy who sold it because for just 30 ct ore we would have gotten a menu with coke and the next bigger popcorn but he did not tell us, waited some more, wiated some more, waited some more... well, the film was supposed to start at 22:30 and we were in the cinema at 23:15. After the guy came in, welcomed us all, threw around some merchandise and whatever, he told us the movie would last 153 minutes and went away. Well, I knew I would not get home by public transportation by then. Starting 45 minues late and showing a movie with more than 2 1/2 hours... WTF?

So we were watching the movie. I could tell stories and stories but you should watch it on your own. It's a really good one. Sometimes strange. And it has some similarities to "Spieltrieb" by Juli Zeh. Not the story, but how it felt. Really really good.

After that I decided to walk home. I took the Königsstrasse to Rotebühlplatz, from there I followed the Tübinger Strasse to Marienplatz, Alte Weinsteige, 100m next to B27, Epplestrasse, Keidelstrasse, Steinbronnerstrasse, Kleine Falterstrasse, Nebelhöhlenweg and home I was. A little less than one hour (if it was 55 minutes or less, I would have said so). Well, you can imagine how good I slept.

Today is big blogging day, because I need to get some things done. I first wanted to get some work done for my job at the iws but I did not find the people I needed to talk to and they moved the database which I need access to to a new server and did not send me the new addresses and login data yet. So I will use the time to talk about my hiwi jobs. I'll start with the iws one:

My job there consists of 2 parts: First I have to take care of the literature database. This is a database with an incredibly ugly design and phpmyadmin (they have a new homepage design? wtf?) as a frontend. You have to take care of 100s of things because there are no "NOT NULL"s set and integers are used instead of foreign keys. This database contains all the information about the people working there, the lectures, the diploma theses and things like that, the papers written there, the papers used there, the presentations hold by people from there... lots of stuff. You have 2-3 tables containing places (cities, addresses), a table used for information about books and conferences (at least I guess so, since I usually put conferences in there and it is called "booktitle"), one table with about 100 colums where no more than 20 are NOT NULL per row, I guess, and lots of things like that. When people want some new publications in there, they write it in a web interface. Then an email is sent to the secretary of the institute and she forwards it to me, if everything is alright. This has the nice side effect, that the text only email is converted to html and I don't get line brakes. Really ugly stuff. If you want to insert somethign new which is not a publication or want to change something, you use the web interface and the email is sent directly to me. So most of what i do is check, if it is already in the database and then do a lot of copy and paste. That sucks.

I send them some emails from time to time about things they can improve, but they don't pay anybody to do it so it is not done. They asked me if I want to redesign it in "nice" and and then implement it. I should just drop them a line how much time I need and then they make sure I get paid for it, something like 8 Euros per hour, but I don't have the time and I have never done something like that so i cannot predict how much work it will be.

The second part of my job there is to take care of their cluster. Their old cluster, how it should be called now. It consists of a bunch of AMD Athlon boxes in mini towers (no 19" stuff, just cheap ugly cases) and a master in a big tower. I worked there about 2 years ago when they wanted to have new software on it. It was runnign some very old Red Hat linux with 2.4 kernels, and they wanted SuSE linux and 2.6 kernels. I did it during half a year, I think. Getting familiar with SuSE, the cluster, autoyast, fixing some bugs, doing lots of tests, getting to know score (some cluster software),...

I was not working there for a year and during that time they changes the nodes to a diskless configuration, at least for some of them. When i came back, they told me that lots of mainboards need to be changed, because lots of them have died. But there should be no more money spent for the cluster, since they are getting a new one (blades, with AMD quad cores, part of a bigger cluster at the HLRS and managed by them), so I only needed to fix about 10 nodes until the spare parts were out. Since then I put defect nodes to the trash, added more RAM in most of them, fixed bugs and other problems. Last week one node died. It was the node running the nfs server for the other nodes (this was not on the frontend, because it is still running the very old Red Hat linux, because there are non-cluster services running there which nobody moved somewhere else yet). So I moved the nfs shares to the frontend (I hope the "nfs server older than client"-warnings are not important), rebootet all the nodes, removed some more harddrivers that the configuration will be more easy. One node was quite "fun", there was smoke coming from it when I switched it on. I decided to trash it without checking which parts are still usable. Well, I will put out the RAM and harddisk before. So what needs to be done there is: Make sure all nodes boot without problems, switch them off (so that they can be switched on when needed), wait for the other admins to move the services from the frontend to their brand-new-and-too-big-for-our-rack server and reinstall it. If I have spare time then (if I finnish before my work contract finnishes), I might have to help the other admins with some stuff or look into the literature database redesign thing.

My other job is to be a tutor in a lecture. It's "Theoretical Computerscience I", really nice. They do all the interesting stuff like grammars, automata (DFAs, NFAs, DPDAs, NPDAs, stuff like that) and all the other things connected to that. I have to hold an exercise every week, where I tell them how they could have solved the homework and them help them with the 1-2 assignments they have to do during the exercise. I also have to correct the homework. My boss is really ok and looks better in RL than on todays picture. And I'm not gay. Just to make sure.

So, this job has almost ended. I only have to attend 2 more exercises, have to correct one more exercise sheet and the exam they have to write. That will be much fun, I'm randomly throwing phrases like "barbecue", "pizza" or "cookies" when we discuss about the day and time for this correction session.

So much about that, it's already lunch time here.

So, last semester I did 1 exam consisting of 2 lectures: "Introduction to Operating Systems" and "Introduction to Compilers and Programming Languages". The course names were in german, maybe a better translation would be "Basic Course on...". My plan was to do this exam this semester, because the second lecture was held this semester and I wanted to attend it. But a friend asked me to do it earlier. He said somehting like "I have not attended one of the lectures but they are really easy. Let's just take 4 weeks, 2 for each of them and then we'll make it." So both of us had to learn everything from scratch, I thought. I got to know some weeks later, that he had already done this exam the semester before, so he should know the stuff. But it worked out really good. I enjoyed learning and working with him, we had some social events like drinking beer or making waffles (is this the same in $your_place as in germany?) and joking about his flat mates. In the end I passed the exam and with only half a credit more I would have had the best possible grade.

So this semester I thought "you like operating systems and programming languages, why don't you continue with that?" I decided to attend the lecture "Embedded Programming", but decided to do it the same way as with the exam before just some days later. I stopped visiting the lecture. It was just not interesting. Not only, that the lecturer had a very monotonous voice and the lecture hall was quite dark so that I got tired, he also told the exactly same things that i learned for my exam the semester before. That's just a waste of time.

Back in my first year at university we had about the same with binary numbers (the mathematical ones and the ones used inside the computer, signed and unsigned). We learned it in abotu every lectuer we had: Mathematics, logic, introduction to electrical engineering, introduction to computer science... everywhere they told us about the same things.

So, one thing universities really have to learn is working together, talking to each other and improving the way of lecturing things. They could safe much time and the students would be more successful. The thing is, if you go to a lecture and learn new things from the start you are concentrated and work from the beginning. If they tell you unimportant stufr you already know for 2 weeks, you don't have to work the first 2 weeks and then really have to take care to start working after that. What if the lecturer tells something new in the embedded class? I will miss it. Because he lost me 2 months before.