Monday, November 19, 2007

How Apple updates

I recently updated my MacOS X installation on my "living-room" MacMini. While now FrontRow is finally usable (not counting the weirdly acting podcast part of it), the update attitude of Apple is unclear to me. Instead of leaving my configuration untouched (especially where I manually changed configuration file as for the samba server), it replaced my config with its own one without even telling me that. I expected better from Apple (even I am none of the Apple-fanatics)...

Monday, October 22, 2007

Back in the USA

So I am back in the USA, this time for two weeks including a full week in San Francisco. I really like this city and I explore a lot of it (which results in really bad sore feet for me).

I also started adding some new blog entries to my (German) Inside-USA Blog.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

New on earth

Say "Hello" to Lilja, a new citizen of our earth and daughter of my dear friends Eva & Oliver. It was a touching moment today to see her for the first time. God bless her.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Wine saved the day

The main reason to use emulation software is to run applications that are not available for your operating system inside your operating system. I recently had a slightly different motivation.

While tidying up, I found this old adventure computer game I loved to play while being in school (yes, it is really old ;) ). Suffering some nostalgic feelings, I installed it (Windows of course), just to find out that it only runs on Windows 95. OK, that's bad. But then I tried running it with wine on my Linux desktop and guess what: It works perfectly :)

Wine saves the day (OK, this is ambiguous ;) ).

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Cuppa as you like it

Michael found this really nice mug design that especially helps our English friends to put exact the right amount of milk in their tea.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Gotcha

After a lot of hard work, it is finally there: My second publication and - even more important - my first publication as a first author at this years Internet Measurement Conference. I am really proud of this!

Full speed ahead

My DSL line was recently upgraded to 14MBit/s. My first thought was that this is somewhat unnecessary, the 6 MBit/s was pretty much fine before. On the other hand, downloading an ISO-image with 1.5MB/s is really cool :)

Friday, July 06, 2007

English Summer

Man, it is July and instead of a decent German summer we experience a weather more like the English (Cambridge 2004) spring: In the morning, it is gray and rainy, in the evening, the sky is blue and the sun is shining - however, it is still way to chilly for July. So where's the German summer? No global warming here ;)

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Puncture

5 minutes after I left work today I ended up with a flat tire on my bike. I had to walk home carrying the bike.

While repairing it I found a small puncture, easy to fix. But I still wonder: What caused the puncture? And thinking back: From all the punctures I had so far I can explain only two (one being my brother hitting my tire with a dart ;) ). All the others are total mysteries to me. Are there small dwarfs sabotaging our bikes?

Sunday, June 17, 2007

A week without TV

Is TV in any way necessary for your life? My claim was always: No, you do not need TV, but sometimes it is really nice to relax. And after many news shows nowadays also allow you to watch online (like the really great service of Tagesschau in Germany), staying up to date is easy and convenient even without a TV set (and I really have/want to watch a news show).



After a week of ignoring my TV - which was a combination of "I do not have time to watch anyway" or "I just do not switch it on now and do something else with my time" - I came to the conclusion that it is really not that big a deal. Maybe that's also a result of me mostly using the TV as a type of background noise which was now replaced by music, so I was not missing TV at all.



And OK, once in a while I was still watching a video on my computer. Sometimes you need distraction from this world and your life in particular...

Monday, June 11, 2007

Culinary Tour

Well, the kayak trip was rather short, being generous it lasted just one hour. A paddle broke and we were unable to lent another one somewhere. Anyway, we did a pretty good job in still having an awesome trip. Afterwards, i would call it a Culinary Tour.

Instead of "walking on water" we enjoyed nature (including a very nice lake), had very good talks, and awesome food (this includes great wine!). 4 days of vacation that feel like a whole week. I am relaxed and energized, ready to take the excitements of this new week.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Walking on Water

I am really looking forward to a short kayak-trip with my best friend in the south of Germany later this week. It's been a while since we did such a trip, but it was always great and full of joy. It is one of these trips I really love: Having some adventures during the day and ending it with a nice bottle of wine :)

Monday, April 16, 2007

Bigger

I am just back from a conference trip to Cambridge, MA.
Coming back into a really nice spring in Germany (> 20°C), it is hard to believe that I needed a winter coat and gloves in Cambridge.

As I have big troubles sleeping on a plane, I tried various strategies so far. This time, I skipped my have-a-beer-before-take-off strategy in favor for a eat-as-much-as-you-can strategy. And I swear that the McFlurry at the US McD is somewhat like double size as you get it in German McD's (it was a hard fight, but I won! :) ).

And hey, this time I really slept many hours on the plane. However, I still have to fight the jetlag at the moment...

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Porto

I just came back from a very good short-trip (4 days) to Porto (Portugal). Porto has both, great beaches and a really nice Old Town facing a river. This together with the nice company I had ;) made it an awesome vacation.

The 4 days were just right to walk the city including its beaches and the beautiful river valley, visiting the museum of modern art and the most important tourist sites (mainly churches), and even attend a port wine tasting. Also the people there are really nice. If you are looking for a place to go, maybe it is worth considering Porto...

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Can we change?

Global warming has been a hot topic lately (this is an unintended word joke). While the EU started talking with big words what to change (which will surely end in small actions) with especially Germany resisting against strict rules for car companies (my government is again embarrassing, sorry),
New Zealand wants to take the lead in reducing CO2. Thank you! I hope they really do it and that others follow.

It's not about big words, it's the actions that make a difference.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

How different is a Mac?

My exploration of the Mac world goes on and the longer I do this, the less impressed I am.
OK, the hardware is clearly cool designed (while a little overpriced), clear point for the Mac.

But what's about the rest? It's a lot about advertising which is clearly just marketing. Still waiting for the day when virus programmers start conquering the Mac - or Linux - to blast away those "I am a Mac, I am totally secure" (see also this German conclussion of the MOAB). And still waiting for the first bug-free (thus secure) operating system, too.

I recently discovered an old feature which is so popular in the Windows world in OS X: The reboot-after-update feature. I was even more surprised when this happened after a simple quicktime update. At least Windows let you delay the reboot...

Still, MacOS X feels a little weired: it has this BSD foundation but when I finally try to claim my freedom I have trouble finding the config files to edit by hand - e.g. to replace this stupid Mac keyboard layout with the correct one.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Truth on index cards

The life von index cards, represented by just graphs. Some of them are really great!

Friday, January 12, 2007

Computer science == magic

Arthur C. Clarke, author of e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey, has some very fine quotes as I just found out. Some of them are collected on Wikiquote. Especially Clarke's Three Laws are very interesting!

Friday, January 05, 2007

Back from the road

I just came back from an awesome US-East-Coast road-trip. It was a lot of fun and we saw a lot of the east coast (at least of the upper half). Stay tuned for photos in my photo gallery...