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 …..).

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.

With the whole world connected the internet brings us many interesting possibilities in cultural exchange. There are many platforms to experience things from places away in written, visual or acoustic ways. Especially music is nice during working as it does not steal your concentration while working like videos and texts do.
For some time I was listening to pandora.com which allowed you to enter keywords and interprets which musical style you liked and the platform would create a playlist containing similar music. Sadly due to the stupid american licensing and copyright issues which hopefully may end one day the site was forced to restrict their service to US users only.
When moving on I encountered this fabulous service which I want to recommend to everybody who is looking for new music: last.fm There exists the audioscrobbler.net plugin which gathers data from users hearing habits and which transmits the data to a statistics server. All this collected data is then analyzed and a huge relational database is available. Last.fm is using this data and other technologies (such as tagging, etc.) to make it easy for users to find new music. You will also find an endless number of free available MP3s. What I like best is the very good collection of japanese music (even very cool indie bands).

Direct access to the panorama gallery. For more technical information read on.

Recently I got excited over panorama images. As my cameras lack fisheye lenses and image stitching software I am using an open source cross-platform solution called hugin. I use hugin as frontend which allows me to use auto pano and pano tools and finally create nice tif images which can be easily used with enblend to create the final stitched image. Then as a last step I use gimp to crop the image and adjust levels, brightness, contrast, etc. At the beginning (as hugin and tools seemed quite troubling and complicated) I used the pandora combine plugin for gimp which worked nicely but as I was looking for more precision I finally figured out how to use the more advanced solution.

To celebrate hugin and tools I created a new page dedicated to panorama views where I will put the newest panorama views from time to time. The gallery uses some JavaScript (tested in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera) to present the images nicely. The raw files of the images can be found here.