From December 27th to 29th, I’ve been in Karlsruhe-Durlach and attended The Ultimate Meeting 2006. It was again an awesome (and quite successful :) party, although the number and quality of the entries was somewhat below expectations. Read more …

For the following two weeks, a little guest is living here in my apartment: Karl-Friedrich. He is a small (20 cm) and cuddly plush penguin, and he’s here »on vacation« from his two owners, schrd and drosera. He seems to like traveling around in Germany: After he’s been in various places in Chemnitz and Leipzig, he was in Halle and at the Baltic Sea. Now he’s coming to my place and, of course, blogs about it:

K.-F. bei KJ (German)

Today’s long-awaited release of Ubuntu 6.10 »Edgy Eft« was a good opportunity for me to restore the inactive Linux installation on my main workstation. This computer mainly runs Windows and since the installation of Vista RC1, the experimental Linux installation there was inaccessible. In my distribution tests carried out for the LinuxTag, Ubuntu always was among the top three distros, so installing the newest and coolest fresh release seemed like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the installer is so severely broken that I didn’t even manage to get the thing on my hard disk …
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Almost no one actually reads my blog, but spammers seem to like it anyway – I get from 10 to 50 spam comments each day. It could be worse, you might say, but nevertheless I grew tired of moderating all these comments and decided to do something about it. So I implemented a captcha – but a special one. The normal »type the text that is contained in this image« class of captchas IMHO is broken by design – either it’s so simple that OCR bots will easily get past it, or it’s hard to implement and even harder to read, so that regular human visitors will have problems recognizing the badly twisted letters. Also, an image-based captcha won’t work for blind people. Audio captchas are even worse, because it requires the user to active Flash or some other dubious plugin or even download a file and listen to it, which may be a problem if there are no speakers connected to the PC or you are in an environment that requires silent operation (e.g. a library). In other words, captchas suck.
This is why I chose another approach: A text captcha. It poses a simple, plain-text English question about basic common knowledge things that should be sufficiently easy to answer. Or, to put it another way: If you are able to read and understand the post and write a comment on it, you are surely able to answer the captcha question, too.
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In the last two months, there has been a fair (but not overwhelming) amount of media awareness around the Evoke Alternative Platform winner demo, »nano«. I’ve been interviewed for a minor German internet portal and for a major German Mac magazine and received almost exclusively good ratings on pouët.net. Finally, a few weeks ago, Gasman (a well-respected scener) started a thread about it in the iPodLinux forums. There were numerous people wondering about how it’s possible to do real-time 3D graphics on the iPod nano. To answer these questions once and for all, I’ve taken much time to write this very long post that really should contain all relevant information.
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Last week, I read a paper on how to partially encrypt MPEG Audio data. That is, modify an existing audio file that it is still syntactically correct, but sounds more or less broken. For example, imagine an online music shop that offers free, but partially encrypted music downloads: The files are in bad quality, and you have to pay to restore the full fidelity. But I digress.
The point is: that paper was inspiring. I decided to try the presented method using MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (»MP2«) as a basis. I chose this format because it’s the simplest audio compression scheme that is still in broad use today (for example VCD/SVCD, DAB and most prominently DVB). Layer III (»MP3«), AAC and Vorbis are considerably more complex. And, it just so happened that I got a copy of ISO 11172-3 (MPEG-1 Audio) on my hard disk :)
While working on the project, I thought that it’d be cooler to write a full decoder instead of this mere proof-of-concept »look what I can do to my MP2 files« hack. So I developed a small MPEG-1 Audio Layer II decoding library called kjmp2 which eventually evolved into a less-than-4k MP2 player application …
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Not even three months after the Beta 2 version, Microsoft released the first Release Candidate of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system to the public. My Beta 2 test lasted only one week, because Vista simply wasn’t ready for everyday use back then. But according to numerous other reviews on the net, RC1 made much progress since. I was a bit sceptical about that – how far could they have come in just twelve weeks? So it was time to do another test with the current public pre-release version. The bottom line this time: Vista has indeed become a somewhat usable system. I’m not going to ditch XP in favour of Vista soon (simply because I’ve already installed too much applications on the »old« system), but in a year or so, I think that will be an option.
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There has been quite some hype about this movie: Having a title that is both straightforward and funny (because »snakes on a plane« seems to be some American proverb whose true meaning I haven’t found out yet), it gained very much popularity in the Internet. The huge fan response even made New Line Cinema re-shoot some scenes so that it got a R rating instead of a modest PG-13. There were even some dialogue lines written by the movie’s fans.
All in all, »SoaP« is said to be a B-Movie with an »A« budget. I expected exactly that when I entered the cinema, but the movie turned out to be completely different – in a positive sense.
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Summer is the traditional demoscene party time: Assembly, Evoke, Buenzli and over half a dozen others take place in only about two months of time. While I only watched Assembly on AssemblyTV last weekend, I’ll attend Evoke 2006 in person. Instead of writing a lame post-party report as usual, I’m going to do a live report and write about stuff as it happens (given that the Internet connection works). So stay tuned and watch this post grow over time …
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Today I received a blogging questionnaire again, so this time I’ll directly start answering without too much introductory text :)
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