History at your fingertips

With January 2006 and Chirac's announcement of a change in French nuclear policy, i.e. to reserve the right of first strike, the world has changed quite a bit since the times of the Iraq war. (As one column from Die Zeit put it, belligerent Chirac now looks a lot like Bush did three years ago. Unfortunately, Bush now looks like Chirac did back then.)

vs.

In any case, if you want to stage that cultural and political showdown on your desktop, one of your options might be to get yourself an NDI Polaris localizer camera and ask me for a copy of this program, which allows you to motion capture a Star Wars Light Sabre fight between those two titans of politics:

"Um, ..."

"Um, yes, sir, I would have finished my doctoral thesis on time, but the compiler was just too slow..."

(courtesy of one of my colleagues; all similarities to actual present or past persons or incidents are purely coincidental)

"orchestriertes Land"

Amy Millan, Sängerin bei den beiden Bands Stars und Broken Social Scene:

»Kanada fühlt sich wie ein orchestriertes Land an. Es gibt so viel Raum für Musik, es ist so kalt im Winter, dass du melancholisch wirst beim Gedanken, vor die Tür zu treten. Wie ein Kind, das denkt, wenn ich jetzt rausgehe, fällt mir mein Kopf ab.«

http://www.zeit.de/2005/50/M-Kanada?page=all

Selection Day

Choke

"A good plan [...]"

"A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow" Robert De Niro said in "Wag the dog".
This is certainly true for crisis management but we doubt the same applies for scientific software development.

(quote from The Matrix Template Library homepage)

The Man From The Cold

Hello everybody!

I returned from skiing holidays... planned by MC, he directed us to the Stubaier Gletscher area, which is a huge skiing resort located on a glacier in central Austria at 2500...3200 m above sea level.

What this means in the end of December is - very cold.
What we're talking about here is not the average run-of-the-mill type of cold, no, it's the biting oh-gosh-my-hand-falls-off kind of cold that creeps into little nooks you forgot to close in your clothing. It means that for the first time, I felt the cold seeping through my woolen cap and my long hairs and hurting my brains. Yes indeed. (How many brains do I have?) It means -22°C and strong winds, so including windchill this can safely be claimed to be -9000°C.

As you can see in the following, planning anything under these adverse conditions is not a piece of cake:






The mountains are great:



They are dangerous:



And since this is basically a central European country, they are very tidy, too:



And safe:



More to follow...