Five Os and a Zero

1. Cockroaches
2. Microsoft Windows
3. Politicians

This thought occurred to me after the cable cut in the Middle East. Apparently an anchor ripped through the cable. So the internet won’t survive an atomic war.

But whatever is left, it will probably have an overbearing government(s). Since nearly every form of government — in every country — have their own bunker, there will be a lot of government. The question is why? Why do politicians think that anyone wants to have them around after a atomic war? They were probably the reason, in the first place, for an atomic war! And why do they want to be around after an atomic war? What are the expecting? A wonder land? Who knows and as someone said: I’d rather die together with the people who love me than survive a few days longer with people who just want to suppress me.

As for Windows: it will always survive! The worlds best piece of software can’t die. It will probably get better after an atom war since there would be no one around to use it (or write viruses for it). I was surprised to read that instead of beaming Windows out into space, NASA will beam a Beatles song out to celebrate 50 years of NASA. Why not the worlds best piece of software? Millions of people have used it and thousands of people have worked on it! The pinnacle of intelligent software by the pinnacle of intelligent live?!?

Thank god this blog won’t be around either …

where even the mirror is broken. Or may be it’s trying to tell us something?

René Magritte taken from http://huehueteotl.wordpress.com.

Found a great toy for the refrigerator today: Frigits. Let marbles roll down the fridge … what a great way to spend more time in the kitchen! Will have to buy it now

On the way there, I found an even better T-Shirt:

Now I even know what I’m going to after I’ve set up the Frigits … (ok, I admit it’s someone for geeks).

In a previous life, I developed some Python code that uses the Ming to generate Flash animation on the fly. Ever since I’ve been looking for useful applications of the code The example page has a couple of things, but now I’ve got the perfect application:

Ok, displaying the solutions to a puzzle is not that exciting! Interestingly the most effort was getting the representation of the pieces right. I wanted to be able to represent every solution using the pieces and not just the complete solution. This allows me to add some animation, for example moving the piece from one solution position to the other (at the moment I’ve not done that!) solution position. Each piece needs to be mirrorable and rotatable so that it can be placed correctly into the puzzle-solution.

A more useful example is the tracing of routes on top of maps.

This example used InkScape to define paths over a map. These paths are then traced and drawn by Flash code. This example uses svg2flash to convert the InkScape SVG to Python, which in turn is used by a Python script to generate the Flash.

The background image was taken from Stadtplandienst.de.

in german but the message is clear — everywhere you are you are leaving digital breads crumbs. Shhhhh! Be very quiet, I’m hunting Rabbits …

A nice piece of street art.

As found in berlin f’hain, just around the corner from bersarinplatz. Which reminds me of a possible project: the conservation of street art. The german research funding agency (DFG) has is sponsoring projects that conserve cultural good … well street art is a definite cultural good –> time to apply for funding!

Link to DFG.

It seems that street art is even making money in the auction houses of london. Street art is gaining relevance everywhere across the global. This is a good thing, since represents one of the few remaining unfiltered and uncensored sources of public opinion that this society possesses.

A bio on Banksy.

PS: Conservation of street art is already under way in london, with council workers being trained as art conservators! Here are some views on the matter.

the business class network has the aim of providing business accommodation for freelancers across the entire planet. I.e. you rent office space (usually a desk with internet, phone and fax) for a week, two or three … however long you need. The benefit (and hence the name) is that you are set up immediately with a new network in that city. Eventually, I assume, anyway with an office will be able to rent parts of it out on BCN. At this stage they’ve only got Berlin covered.

It reminds me a little of fon where you can earn money with your internet connection by hanging a fon router onto it. Correspondingly there is the free version of fon (although it actually outdates fon) called frei-funk (no not free funk but free wireless).

The only question that remains is when (is it already possible?) will i be able to rent out my washing machine on a time share basis? That would be really cool! Then my washing machine (and my dishwasher, of course) will start earning money for me! Ideally one would also have an ebay-like platform for obtaining the best deals for ones washing. I can see it now: sending my dirty underwear per overnight courier to moscow because i have an important meeting the next day!

Of course, in the spirit of web 2.0, I would be able to combine the services and send my washing on ahead before arriving in moscow to a rented desk, with the washing neatly stacked on my desk.

well mine was good! i converted all my cvs repositories to svns, including feedbunnys. They can all be viewed under viewcvs.5o0.de but access is required. I did the conversion using the latest version of cvs2svn, which did wonders. The only issue was svnadmin which doesn’t allow using network or ssh URLs as repos path (that and the fact that cvs2svn does not like having its tmpdir on NFS mount).

To deal with that minor inconvince: svnadmin dump cvs2svn_repo > /path/to/somewhere followed by a svnadmin load /path/to/another/repo < dump_file. Having got cvs2svn fill a newly created svn repository from the cvs repository.

The setup was a little tricky (being on a macbook and all) but FinkCommander came to the rescue (the Mac had python2.3!). In the end, the initial stuffing around with fink and python cost more time than using cvs2svn and svnadmin (also had to install anydbm module but that is part of python2.5).

Having import feedbunny into subversion, i thought i would try my hand at trac. Well that was even easier (admittedly i’m using sqllite and not mysql)! I had a good read through trac install, missed the bit about clear silver but managed to get the done as well Trac can now be marveled at trac.5o0.de. Here, again, the most time was spent with apache and getting the access rights right — difference between location, directory and virtualhost.

Setting up a project with trac is real easy: trac-admin /path/to/myproject initenv. Having said that, svn is also incredible easy to use. I refactored the entire source structure maintaining all versions and releases … something would have been a complete headache (or better said: lots of mv’s directly in the CVS repository).

So now i’m ready to trac the bunny …

Had the pleasure of discovery those old pair of jeans from fatboy slim. Absolutely fabulous piece of music and the video aint bad either!

Taken from a special report from The Economist:

The ones worth paying attention to are a special type of entrepreneur who embraces new ideas. These are the people who are able to carry out the “creative destruction” that Schumpeter marvelled at. In Europe they are thin on the ground: too many Europeans opt for comfortable jobs working for Siemens or Electricité de France than the risk and bother of starting speculative new companies.

How true is that?

At the same time, the distribution of geeks throughout europe: