echelon

A Free Music page was added to the echelon blog. It’s a site to satisfy my need for posting songs I personally like very much to the blog.
All songs so far are from the Bavarian Open Source website. A very cool page where one can download songs from many known and unknown bands. Among the known being “Adam Green”, “The Kaiser Chiefs”, “Mediengruppe Telekomander” and “Deichkind”. Among the unknown being for example “Miwon” and “Lagoon”. It’s a very cool page and a very cool idea. They also have a Top20 list.

On another note, the complete Mozart works are now freely available on the Internet. The International Mozart Foundation apparently “aquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work” (from slashdot). Cool!

In conjunction with a physics lecture I am attending this semester a fellow student and I had to create a measurement report of an experiment we did. Working on that report I realized that I had never before felt the need for plotting measured data with a computer. Therefore I naturally did not know what freely available tool could help me with that task. Another fellow student then pointet out gnuplot to me and I gave it a try. And what can I say. I was able to create the desired plot very fast and it was pretty too.

About gnuplot:
“Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility for UNIX, IBM OS/2, MS Windows, DOS, Macintosh, VMS, Atari and many other platforms.”

One of our final results looked like this:

This illustrates of course only the very basic features of the tool. It’s much more powerfull than our example shows.

Some usefull commands I used to customize the plot:
As I wanted a double logarithmic scale I typed
set logscale xy
I also wanted to see the scale in my plot so I typed
set grid xtics mxtics ytics mytics
I set the lables of the axes with
set xlabel “x name” and set ylabel “y name”
(btw this labeling can also be enhanced with LaTeX style formula expressions)
and I defined the axes’ ranges with
set xrange [1:100] and set yrange [1:100]
the smoothing (interpolation) of the curve can be accomplished by specifying
smooth csplines or smooth bezier
within the plot command.

Some Wallpapers created from self-made pictures.

“Paris at night” & “Street light at railroad station”
The first one is a wallpaper made from 4 pictures that were taken from the Tour Monparnasse in Paris. It’s called “Paris at night”. (more…)

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…)