In Hiding

This amazing thing has been hiding in one of the kidney phantoms I built the other day.

Kunst am Bau / Architectural Art (?)

The new Computing Science building our research group has moved to is nearing completion. Recently, the mandatory "Kunst am Bau" or architectural art was installed.

It's a huge text installation circling the main entrance hall, with XML code lines crawling along the walls. They are a textual representation of an SVG-format CAD blueprint drawing of the building. While there might be some disagreement about the extent, coloration, or obviousness of this piece, it is undeniably computer-scientific.

Ku Klux Penguins

Acre Hat

Yesterday we bid Acre farewell, as he had his doctoral thesis defense. His work centered around camera-based contact state detection of deformable linear objects, his private life consisted of travels into highly uncivilized parts of the world, so he got an appropriate hat.





This voodoo doll can be made into some pretty stunning look-alikes.

Someday robots will rule the world

One day on campus:




Yesterday's news: A Smørebrød look-alike and ShabuShabu.


Still life at the bedside:

The New One: DianHua, PingGuo, QiLin

On a totally other note: The new notebook.
After something like four-and-a-half years, I got fed up with DianHua. There were a few irksome peculiarities about it that made me more and more unhappy (like its battery-hoggishness, its weight, but most of all its lack of standby mode... what.... S2, and S4? Standby and Hibernate, in any case. They both disappeared after an upgrade to a 160GB hard disk, in exchange for keeping DMA transfer capability. Losing that seemed an even worse option. However, why those three things - 160GB, DMA, and standby - need to exclude each other is a mystery to me.) Even though I don't know if there'll be many more opportunities to actually make use of this, but having a computer without standby in a conference setting is a severe no-go reason to look for a replacement. In those (conference, or just any general presentation) settings, a snappy response to sleep/wakeup requests to your own computer is a must.

Anyway, many years of experience with different operating systems (Windows and Linux) on many computers (desktop and portable, networked and standalone, personal and office) instilled a deep, gutsy feeling of utter revulsion towards those. The constant need to reconfigure stuff at the smallest change (as in Windows) or the total lack of any usability (as in Linux) made me look for alternatives. Where do you *not* have to choose between speed and size, DMA and GB, as in Windows, and where do you not have to bother to *restart* your computer to use a simple USB stick a second time, as in Linux?

The choice was clear: The mother of all operating systems, Mac OS X. Some drumrolls please.



Finally I settled for (okay, I was driven into this choice) a mid-sized MacBook. The comparatively good deal I got inspired me to pimp it to da max ASAP, together with a general sluggishness under the god-damn-power-user load conditions I subjected it to. The 10MP picture editing, virtual machines, and software development gained a lot from upgrading it well nigh near to the physical limits of computing power a confined region in time-space can bear. And confined it is, fellas - a smaller, sleeker, and generally more attractive notebook this world ain't seen yet. Oh, small and light I mentioned, right. The one bad part is... all the stickers adorning the bottom side of DianHua are gone now. All the time, all the effort, collecting travel and other stickers during all those years... all gone!

Having a truly mobile computer leaves a print on your lifestyle, too. Bulky DianHua was too large, heavy, and power-addicted to be carried around. The new one... okay, let's face it, it's got no fixed name yet. There are a few competitors shortlisted already:

• DianHua:
  The incumbent. This name's been around for ages for PJS' computers (all of them, forever), and man, it sticks.


• PingGuo:
  The lifestyle choice. Meaning "Apple" in Chinese (and thus being hilariously funny), it both gains and loses on account of its phonetic similarity to penguin, which in turn reminds one of Linux. And man, that OS sucks.


• QiLin:
  The runner-up. An immensely powerful animal in Chinese mythology, it symbolizes the motherlode of kick-ass impressiveness and sovereignty. Unfortunately, it's difficult to explain to outsiders.

Mac OS X being the end point of the evolution of graphical user interfaces, there are still some... quirks in the Mac OS user interface. Like, no mouseless use. Maybe it's possible to use the system without a mouse, but it's either highly improbable or highly impractical. There is a humongous number of shortcut key combinations; no even halfway consistent (not to mention logical) way to group them; and gosh it takes time to get used to different keyboard layout. The iLife program suited, totally hyped (by Apple) for multimedia tasks, is basically useless when it comes to importing large collections of existing music or photos. Are all Apple users dummies? Somewhat improbable. So am I the only guy who wants those applications have some at least partly transparent way of handling data, instead of gobbling it all up and stuffing it away in some huge opaque archive file? What's wrong with using pre-existing, user-provided hints for data layout?
On the other hand, stuff like WiFi (aka "AirPort"), printing (even over a LAN), and hooking up to the Internet with Mac OS X works like a charm. "Instant-On" gets a whole new meaning. That's what a user interface should be all about.
Still, file system navigation and window navigation suck badly. There's some additional program to iron out the worst mistakes of the interface design, but that's not the way it should be.
On the (final) up side (at least from a CS/developer point of view), there is a whole lot of "frameworks" (OpenGL, Java, X11, Qt, ...), RDP clients, virtual machines, emulators, and all kinds of other stuff available for that system, making it probably one of the most versatile and extensible systems around. And when factoring in the general ease of use, it wins hands down.

Top 10 (2nd runner-ups, ever)

Of course, selecting a set of "Top 10" pictures wasn't easy.
While cutting down from 240 to 80 was still easy, the last 10 (or the last few 10s) were more based on the story to go with it during presentation. Therefore, there is this second set of "almost-Top 10" pictures which got sidetracked only in the very last iteration.

However, my dear blog readers, you won't be left out of the loop, and what was ours during the initial presentation at Techno's, is yours to behold now.



My then-gf, Hi-Khan, and me in Hamburg, Germany. Younger, too.


The first summer in Bayreuth, there was an antique car exhibition in the pedestrian zone.


My dad and me, and several passersby, competely absorbed by everything else, in Bamberg, Germany.


Me.


A model of mine, in a sketch I like very much.


A morning impression, looking out over the moat around the Forbidden City, aka Palace Museum, in Beijing, China.


A group of officers parading in Beijing, China.


Dad and son, alone on a lake near Whistler, Canada.


Two other people, alone on Emerald Lake, Canada.


A huge fish, probably completely unaware of being watched, in the Biodôme, Montreal, Canada.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Top 10 (ever)

Recently, we've held a "Top 10 Pictures" presentation over at Techno's, with a bunch of colleagues showing off a selection of their best (ever) photographies.
Since "best" is a non-operational qualifier (or at least is difficult to operationalize), everybody applied his own criterion for selection. Here's what made it past my own personal filter.

Enjoy.



A panda in the Schönbrunn zoo in Vienna, still sleepy but happily chewing away at a bunch of bamboo just an arm length away, seen through only a glass pane.


Sunset view of Vancouver Bay, behind the Anthropological museum.


A child feeding a flurry flock of birds in Hamburg near the Binnenalster. This was a carefree time before avian flu.


Another kid, half a world away, dreamily gazing from the top of the Great Wall at Huairong.


Time and haste on a Hongkong pedestrian overpass.


Time and haste again, looking down at the crowd from the second deck of a Hongkong bus.


An old man dutifully guarding an entrance to a mosque side room in Kairouan, Tunisia, sitting in the shade.


The Niagara Falls with a Maid of the Mist barge in the center.


My family, having crêpes at the Christmas market in Karlsruhe, Germany.


Stefan and me, without braking the summer toboggan near Waischenfeld, Germany.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Feathers

A display of new feathers... on the university lab website.



Click above for more.

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:

Antelope, v2

kwakfish!

Sticky

Today I haven't gotten out of my combined sleepwear-workwear at all.

I spent most of the day outdoors with a big tin of synthetic resin, trying to spread it evenly over the new set of wooden kois which are supposed to end up high in the tree next to my parents' place front gate... which made me end up with sticky fingers, which could be saved by a very generous scoop of Jade nail polish remover. The kois ended up all feathered by those little airborne plant seeds, which make them look somewhat less like fish and more like a badly plucked mutant chicken. Kwak.

hu 唬

Hail the hu!






(BTW, the relevant name here is Duchamp, not Champollion.)

El Condor Pasa

Sometimes, beauty springs up in the most unexpected places.
And sometimes, something unexpected sprouts, from shells opening... like antennae.