Archive for September, 2006

BarCamp Nuernberg

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Ever heard of “BarCamp“?

In case you are uninformed and not up to date (like me a few days ago) let me explaing and enlighten you: It’s an international network of conferences (or should I say unconferences?). The specialty about BarCamps is that they basically take the open source idea and expand it into tech conferences. (more…)

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Radio Stations

Monday, September 25th, 2006

Today I present three great (Internet) radio stations. One is located in Munich, Germany, one in Paris, France and one in Vienna, Austria. They all play the newest alternative and independent Rock-, Pop-, Electro, and Dancemusic. As they are located in different places in Europe one can hear a wide variety of music.

(more…)

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(Semiprofessional) Space Travel

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Slashdot recently had an item about “Space On a Shoestring” reporting about three engineering students at Cambridge University who have planned to put a rocket into space for only Ã?â??Ã?£1000. They have sent their first space ship already to an altitude of 32km with the help of a helium balloon.Althoughh people argue, that that’s exactly what helium balloons are for (so whats special about it?), I think what they did is pretty cool. Not only because they have brought back those beautiful pictures but also because I’m sure they have learned quite a lot while preparing and realizing their mission.
What’s interesting is that in connection with this project, people are mentioning a lot other similar projects. I was quite impressed by all of them:

  • The “High Altitude Glider Project” launched 5 times from 2001 to 2003. And they are planning to do it again: A Canadian Boffin – It’s not quite flying, closer to falling with style.
  • The Stabilo Project, a professional European science project to create a “suborbital manned system”. They are using a solar balloon to overcome the first 22.000m. Then they launch the “hydrogen peroxide (85%) monopropellant rocket engine” to travel the rest of the way.
  • Another project is the STRAPLEX project. It’s a program by the University of Porto that “offers students the possibility to send experiments for educational purposes into the stratosphere using balloons filled with Helium”.

Further information on the topic of high altitude balloons is provided here (Designing a High Altitude Balloon) and here (AMSAT & High Altitude Balloons), as Cherita Chen mentioned on slashdot.
And on the topic of “layers of atmosphere”, check out this wikipedia article. And there you can also read something about the difference between sub-orbital and orbital spaceflights.

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Linux Desktop

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I don’t know about the world’s current opinion about Linux on the Desktop. Chances are that mentoning those two words on a popular website causes a flame war and whatnot. There’s even the possibility that some people react bored and irritated when they stumble over yet another of those news items:

I recently took upon me the endeavour of installing Linux on my temporary workstation. The reason is simply that there was no Windows CD arround. So I went to a friend to grab a NetInstall CD of Debian, my favourite distribution. With about 112MB it only takes a few minutes to download. I had installed Linux quite a few times before and tested various distributions (RedHat, Gentoo, Suse) but Debian always appealed to me the most (there actually was a time when I loved Gentoo, but that’s another topic). As I had some experience in installing Linux I prepared myself for a rather long, painfull procedure, and did not expect to come any close to starting X, using the mouse and starting a web browser within the first session (which I limited to three hours). Well what can I tell you. I was done after 1.5 hours! Up and running a nice Debian with X server and Gnome. And I am not taking credit for this, but I’m giving credit to the Debian project and probably all Linux distributions, hardware autodetection developers, kernel developers and so forth. Appart from that I really love apt-get, and the Debian package management system. I needed an ftp-client, so I typed “apt-get install gftp” and voilat. 3 minutes later I could run “Applications -> Internet -> gFTP”. It “just worked”! The same with GIMP btw.

In case you never tried it, or in case you had the same feeling about it to be a long and painfull process, give it another try. It’s really worth it. Although I never used it myself, many use Ubuntu nowadays, which is sayed to provide an even better user experience. So check it out.

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First post.

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
This is the first post to this blog.
Considering how many blogs there are already out there I’m sort of late. I’m going to pursue this anyway – for now. I’m not quite sure what it will be about, I’m not even sure in what language it will be. I’m focusing on English right now, however I might switch to German as I would like to post links to German sites as well.
The topics of this blog will be computer and internet technology, including those cool new Ajax and Web 2.0 things. And of course it shall be about my big plan to create a browsergame, just like the many others out there. But it shall also be about political and social topics when they are connected to the technology stuff and where I find it to be appropriate.

That’s it for now.

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