Praktikant bei Vodafone

Welcher enddämliche Praktikant bei Vodafone kann so etwas verbrechen? Einen so wirrbabylonischen Erguß von Sprachen, Groß-, Klein- und CamelCase-Schreibung und Leerzeichen oder keinen muss man sogar im weltweiten Rechnerverbund, dem sogenannten Internetz lange suchen:

KombiTarife
MinutenPakete
WochenendPakete
Vodafone Zuhause
ZuhauseOption & ZuhauseFlatrate
ZuhauseAnschluss
Zuhause Web

Zuhause Talk&Web
Fragen & Antworten
Happy-Optionen
SMS-Pakete
ZweitKarte
Simply
Weitere Tarife
Datentarifoptionen
Preise für Dienste
Kunde werden

Ist es nicht auffällig, daß ausgerechnet die seriösen preisrelevanten Einträge als Einzige richtig geschrieben sind?

Design Your World

My external hard disk has failed me several times, with partial to complete data loss. Possibly due to thermal issues, as the hard disk itself got very hot.
Thus, I built a DIY external hard disk case, complete with fan and easy to open:

Quality of Research

Today, suddenly, my robot started suffering from massive network packet losses. Since this very same issue happened a year ago and was solved by a better-shielded cable, we immediately homed in on the explanation "broken shielding" (in whatever way this might come about).
Now marvel at this hand-made solution from aluminium foil and scotch tape:

Exkulpation, oderDie Entdeckung der Einfachheit

"Neonazismus galt in der DDR als spätkapitalistisches Problem der Bourgeoisie. Von der Schuldfrage exkulpiert waren kleine Mitläufer, über jeden Faschismusverdacht erhaben war die »revolutionäre Klasse« des Proletariats. Wer solche ideologisch geleiteten Fehlschlüsse heute unter umgekehrten Vorzeichen zieht, wird den Fremdenhass im Osten nicht bekämpfen können, sondern ihn stets nur als spätsozialistisches Proletarisierungsphänomen bestaunen, das von einer demokratieunfähigen »Unterschicht« getragen wird und naturwüchsig in den einstigen Trabantenstädten siedelt.

So einfach ist es aber leider nicht."

excerpted from Wunsiedel ist überall by Evelyn Finger
(© DIE ZEIT 01.06.2006 Nr.23)

Breake of Day

Must businesse thee from hence remove?
Oh, that's the worst disease of love,
The poore, the foule, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath businesse, and makes love, doth doe
Such wrong, as when a married man doth wooe.

- John Donne, Breake of Day

Antelope, v2

Sabotage (Random Happenstance)

Ever wondered where this term comes from... sabotage? I did not.

Until yesterday, when reading my current pastime (Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson), I stumbled across it. I'd never have remembered the mere occurrence of that word, but Stephenson - as is his habit, which endears his books so much to me - cleverly inlined an explanation into the storyline (a historical account of how the introduction of horizontal windmill wheels for silver mining was attempted in the late 17th century) without disrupting it.

And guess what, today upon opening my browser, the starting page (Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day) presents this:

The Word of the Day for June 3 is:

sabot • \sa-BOH\ Audio icon • noun
1 *a : a wooden shoe worn in various European countries b (1) : a strap across the instep in a shoe especially of the sandal type (2) : a shoe having a sabot strap
2 : a thrust-transmitting carrier that positions a missile in a gun barrel or launching tube and that prevents the escape of gas ahead of the missile
3 : a dealing box designed to hold several decks of playing cards

Example sentence:
"All her kind, at least in the countryside, wore . . . sabots, well past the century's end." (Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle)

Did you know?
The term "sabot" may have first been introduced into English in a 1607 translation from French: "Wooden shoes," readers were informed, are "properly called sabots." The gun-related sense appeared in the mid-1800s with the invention of a wooden gizmo that kept gun shells from shifting in the gun barrel. Apparently, someone thought the device resembled a wooden shoe and named it "sabot" (with later generations of this device carrying on the name). Another kind of French sabot—a metal "shoe" used to secure rails to railway ties—is said to be the origin of the word "sabotage," from workers destroying the sabots during a French railway strike in the early 1900s. The word "sabot" is probably related to "savate," a Middle French word for an old shoe.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

This deservedly climbs to one of the top places in my personal Random-Happenstance-Which-Is-Very-Improbable list.

Kernel Oops/Panic

Although I don't know whether the following should be properly referred to as a kernel panic or merely a kernel oops, it's been just the other day that I successfully made the (certified for surgical use) industrial robot controller from Adept (running an installation of the V+ OS) hang and display this red-on-black-screen-of-death:

IROS 2006

Dear Mr. Philipp J. Stolka:

Congratulations!
On behalf of the Program Committee of IROS 2006, we are very pleased to inform you the acceptance of your paper:

"Improving Navigation Precision of Milling Operations in Surgical Robotics"

for presentation at the conference and for inclusion in the conference DVD proceedings.

IROS 2006 received 2166 paper submissions from over 50 countries, which is a new record in IROS history. The Program Committee worked very hard to thoroughly review all the submitted papers, and your paper is one of the 1002 accepted papers, which represent a acceptance rate of about 46%.

[...]

Thank you again for your contribution to the IROS 2006. Please visit our conference website often for future updates. All of us on the Program Committee and the Organizing Committee are looking forward to seeing you in Beijing and your participation in a very successful IROS 2006!

Less productive

The last few days at work were neither productive nor effective.
I kept staying in lab until late, get some dinner in the city or fast food at home, go to bed, wake up, go to work.
There are experiments planned in the upcoming weeks, and all the stuff needs to be operative by then. It's lots of little ends to make meet, and the rotating coordinate systems, matrices, ZY'Z'' and yawspitchesrolls between robot, camera, control program, and files are making me dizzy.
On top of that, I start noticing that my concentration is slipping - nothing happened yet, the robot didn't crash yet, but lack of free time at home obviously makes me less focused.