(o^^)o Worufu » diary

What would it have been

worufu — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:36:08 +0000

What year would it have been if there have not at least a handful mayor events been taking place. The top event of 2008 was – without a question – the birth of our first son. The second mayor change in my life this year took it’s time until the very end. Since last Friday I am no CEO of Pulpmedia anymore. I will continue to be share holder of the company and continue to contribute my manpower to existing and hopefully new web projects. There is not any conflict or combat going on but it just was time for change again. As my contribution to Pulpmedia projects will be of a somehow limited nature there hopefully is enough time to realize my own projects. All about the near future plans on 1/1/2009. Same blog. Same place.

So what are the news?

worufu — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:30:51 +0000

Last Thursday I was really looking forward to spend some days in the north italian region “alto adige”. It was really great but even though Monday was a holiday the week hit in quite unpleasantly on Tuesday.
After moving the last couple of sites from the old server to the new high availability cluster in a 16 hrs shift the stress level kept up pretty high. At least this week only has two more days full of surprises left.
This is one of the few times in my life where I don’t even find time to work on my own online projects.

At the moment all of the few minutes left are going into my new blog in japanese gaijin.desu.at and my daily webjourneys at gfrast.com. I have many new features for those sites trapped mentally already and I hope I can release them within the next month. As for this site do not expect too many news. But hey… that was the situation already for the last month.. no?

日本語でどうぞ

worufu — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:48:45 +0000

わたしのにほんごまだよくないです。それでもがんばります。
今日からわたしの日本語のサイトがあります：
http://gaijin.desu.atです。
よんでくださいとコメントかけてをおねがいします。

The new year has arrived

worufu — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 01:11:35 +0000

And again time seems to pass by faster than ever before. Already in the middle of January I am happy to announce that my mindmap of 2008 is almost done and many nice projects are in the pipe. In the first months I’ll focus on updating and extending old projects. But you surely can expect two or three smaller projects to be announced and published before Euro2008 starts.

If 2008 continues like it started I am looking forward to see more of it. After a short trip to Switzerland right before New Year we came back just in time to watch the famous Four Hills Tournament (Ski Jumping). As there were heavy winds the contest in Bergisel (Innsbruck, Austria) was cancelled for the first time in history and rescheduled for the next day in Bischofshofen, Austria. Thomas Morgenstern (current worldcup leader) finished second in this competition. The atmosphere was overwhelming. Although Gregor Schlierenzauer was able to set a new Hill Record (145 m) during qualification he finished 5th. Overall Thomas and Gregor are still leading the world cup with Janne Ahonen chasing them closely.

Another fun event was the Audi Driving Experience in Saalbach, Austria. Driving the 265PS A4 3.2 in the ice arena surely is fun. Hardly any chance to go faster than 60 to 70 km/h though. Even with spike tires it takes forever to come to a halt.

The next big event is scheduled for June. When we are visiting the previously mentioned Euro2008.
Another “once in a lifetime” higlight is scheduled for 29th of August. Announcement will follow soon I guess.

Workwise I found time to finally switch the blog database to pure UTF-8 (which was not easy at all). Still some bad characters in old entries but I’ll just leave them like they are. Also the gallery got a facelift and many new functions. Now an album can have any amount of subalbums. The structure is still a bit mixed up as I still have to move the travelling albums from root into the travelling album.
The blog now also supports login via OpenID. If you don’t have an OpenID yet stay tuned fot the soon to appear OpenID provider platform announcement. Also code.pulpmedia.at will get some new clothes soon.

Now it’s time to head for some sleep… we’re moving our main servers contents to a new HA (High Availability) cluster tomorrow night. Wish us luck.

Okaerinasai.

worufu — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:17:25 +0000

We are back in Japan. This time for a little less than three weeks and we already enjoyed some days of that long awaited period.

The picture above was shot today when I had some time to play around with the camera while I was waiting for the new haircut of my wife to get completed (about 4 hours). It is a small square with some benches, artistic water installations and some shadow (where I had to hide to protect myself of the burning sun). The place is located between the Imperial Palace (right in the opposite direction from the presented view) and the Tokyo Station (which is behind the big buildings).

As we have internet connection right in the room I already have uploaded some photos of the first days which can be found in the photo gallery Tokyo 2007 album.

Our journey has taken us to many places already: Tokyo Disneyland, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Akihabara, Ueno (where we are staying), Saitama, etc. etc. and there is still some time left. Hooray.
The images in the gallery are just a teaser. Many great shots to follow soon.

Goodbye privacy

worufu — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:05:46 +0000

“Goodbye privacy” is the motto of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. The festival is held by the Ars Electronica Center which is the most famous technology institute in Austria with many young programmers and artists who collaborate with programmers and artists from all around the world. The main goal seems to be to explore new ways of how to use modern technologies and often artistic usage.
This year the size of the festival is incredible. There is a street where all the empty buildings are occupied with special exhibitions. The main theme seems to be second life as you can see many connections to the virtual world. For me “Goodbye privacy” affects me somehow twice as hard as other visitors as the whole Pfarrplatz (the big place in front of our flat) is rebuilt within Second Life and re-connected to the real life. If you have a conversation in second life you can hear it from speakers within the real world. On the other hand you can watch the virtual world on several screens around the Pfarrplatz beach area.
Today I’ve quickly walked through “Marienstraße” and I will be back tomorrow to see all the cool exhibitions. It really is worth seeing. The festival will end on Sept. 11th. So there is still some time left. I’ve also been to both Pfarrplätze (in the virtual and the real world) and here are the images. Maybe we’ll meet in the next days…

Lomo fisheye

worufu — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:47:06 +0000

GlobeAir project

worufu — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:03:32 +0000

Last week we finally were able to publish our latest project. Thanks to the trust of the customer we were able to create the full promotional range of products: The Logo, all the print products (business cards, writing paper, folders, etc.), and last but not least the website globeair.com.
It is all about a new airline starting from spring 2008 with bases in Central Europe. Don’t know the exact starting date yet but the homepage is now online which gives some information in advance. They start with two different types of airplanes. The Eclipse500 which is able to transport four passengers and the Grob spn (up to 9 passengers) which can even land on unpaved (grass) runways. I am really looking forward to see the planes taking off. Maybe we can provide some nice pictures some time.
Maybe in the meantime you would like to find out if you are a fractional or full airplane owner with the GlobeAir Indicator.

MPX – the Multi-Pointer (and now Multi-Touch) X Server

worufu — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:18:53 +0000

Have I ever told you about that crazy day when a friend of mine made it onto slashdot (with a news submitted by me)? It is all about a modified X server implementation on which who-t is working for years already. Basically his version of the X server supports multiple input devices interacting at the same time. That alone was worthy the news but today he pointed me on the current state of development:

MPX now supports Multi-Touch! Watch this video and see what he means…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I can’t wait until the new features have found their way into the core X server. It might take some more months but I think they are already working on that. Let’s hope for the best.

As a sidenote: This piece of software was developed on a Ubuntu machine but I know that he also likes to work on MacBooks. Maybe we will see some Mac OS or Windows port some day too. I myself currently operate on three different platforms (windows sometimes for work, mac and gnu/linux at work and home) and it is so great to have most of the everyday applications on all of the three platforms. That is why I want to thank all those ingenious developers out there who make such great software which enables us (the not so ingenious people) to focus on our tasks in our convenient working environments.

Update: …and he did it again. This time right at the front page (and on digg and gizmodo and …..).

Help minimizing the cost of digital music devices: Play Ogg Vorbis

worufu — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:49:28 +0000

As you can read on playogg.org:

Ogg Vorbis is a professional-grade media format. It’s like MP3 but better—and it respects your freedom. When you see a file with the Ogg extension – musicfile.ogg – Play it!

Now you might think why should you switch to Ogg Vorbis if you are already so familiar with MP3?

The use of MP3 is restricted by patents, while Ogg Vorbis is not. Unlike MP3, there are never any licensing costs for using Ogg Vorbis, and you do not have to worry about anyone suing you for using it without a license. You might have heard about Microsoft’s recent loss in a $1.5 billion suit over their use of MP3.

These patent lawsuits might never affect you directly, but they create a culture where creative and skilled individuals cannot develop multimedia software without fear of being legally attacked. Using Ogg is one way to support them in their efforts and to encourage a better culture.

Most of my digital music files are in the MP3 format at the moment but I can assure you that the usage of Ogg is not different than using MP3. You simply use your favourite music player and add the files to your playlists. The difference for you is that the file does not end with .mp3 but with .ogg.
On my GNU/Linux system Ogg-Support is already pre-installed so I simply can play the files without any additional effort. On older Windows Systems you might want to go to playogg.org and download the VLC mediaplayer which is able to play Ogg files. Or you might download a plugin for your favourite mediaplayer software (e.g. a Plugin for WinAmp mediaplayer).
Eventually you have done a similar procedure already when you taught your workstation to play DIVx video files. After installing the Plugin/Codec you enabled your PC to play Ogg Vorbis constantly.

This is also a way to contribute to the open source community. You do not have to be a programmer or experienced PC user. It is enough if you demand open source alternatives to be used in standard products. That is already enough. Every additional help is very appreciated but this supports already a change. If you are ready to try something new you also can look out for music devices which are Ogg enabled. There are lots of them out there and they are not more or less expensive than anything else. It also is OK if the device play MP3 and OGG. That way it is an easy transition which does not force you to convert your existing music collection to the free standard.