“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…

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.

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…

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 …..).