Is it time to leave? Again? Yup. The final days of my stay in Pittsburgh have come: My master’s thesis is more or less complete (by the way, it has the nice name “Transaction Management Challenges for Cross-Organizational, Workflow-Based SOA Applications” and spans 104 pages total), so it is time for me to take it back to Germany and finally wrap up that “Diplom” of mine.
It was a fun time in the “Steel City”, I’ve learned a lot both professionally as well as personally and I have met great people who I will really miss. Thanks for making my time in Pittsburgh great, you know who you are!
But I am not quite flying home yet: Before diving back into the “frozen tundra” of Germany, I shall visit warmer parts of this country. I promise I’ll feel a little bad for you, snowed-in readers, while I sit by the pool sipping margaritas!
(Pittsburgh skyline photo CC by-sa licensed by Ronald C. Yochum, Jr. on Wikimedia Commons.)
The yellow line denoting the current 10-yard “target” is one of the most impressive things for me about football coverage on television. In fact, it gives viewers at home an interesting advantage over both the fans in the stadium and the referees. Even in situations where the distance needs to be measured exactly on the field, the people at home already know if it was or was not enough to make the 10 yards—so they can relax and enjoy the refs’ effort to confirm it. In addition to these little moments of superiority, the sheer awesomeness of mashing up live video with a smooth overlay—while not painting over players’ legs etc.—is some seerious geekness I find deeply fascinating.
Now of course, just to be fair, European television channels do similar things in the mean time. For example in soccer, they show the distance to the goal line for free kicks. Still, due to the different objective of American Football, the advantage is much more striking there than in the European sports I know.
Have a fun Super Bowl with your friends and—of course—root for the Steelers!
Leaving my wi-fi router in the house when moving out, I am about to put it in a central place and wanted to make sure the reception is decent enough for everybody to enjoy. So I read up on the topic a little bit and found a nice little explanation why 200 milliwatt TX power will not make your access point better, faster, or more awesome than your friend’s. No matter how much the average script kiddie wishes it did…
Is a 200 mW access point a good thing?
The answer is normally, “No.” A notebook computer or PDA using a standard PCMCIA (or built-in Wi-Fi) adapter transmits with a power level of 100 mW (or less). If an access point puts out a 200 mW signal then the access point will be capable of transmitting to a distance from which the notebook computer can’t transmit back. The Wi-Fi client (the notebook computer) “hears” the access point. Unfortunately, the access point has no way to “hear” the client. The client connection fails, even though the signal level seen from the access point may be stronger than other, lower power, access points. The advantage of a 200 mW access point is that they can be used with a 50-foot length of low-loss antenna cable to attach a remote external antenna. The cable attenuates the 200 mW signal down to a 100 mW level at the point where the signal enters the antenna. Now the access point antenna and the client are both operating with a 100 mW signal, and they can hear each other properly. The output power from an access point should never exceed the output power from the clients that are attaching to it.
A top doctor has admitted her part in hoodwinking a leading medical journal after inventing a medical condition called “cello scrotum”.
The spoof was inspired by a similar report of a phenomenon called “guitar nipple”, which happened when the edge of the guitar was pressed against the breast, causing irritation.
“Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim. Somewhat to our astonishment, the letter was published.”
I am sure cellists across the globe will be glad to hear their manhood is not at risk. I, for my part, will keep on playing the trumpet instead, just to be on the safe side
Today I looked at this blog’s usage statistics and as it turns out, a whopping 54 percent of my visitors use Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer, then Safari, Opera, Chrome.
It’s interesting to see how much difference the “clientele” of a page makes for its statistics. The overall market share of Firefox has topped 20% a few months ago, but since this blog has a lot of tech content, a higher number of Firefox users is probably not surprising.
By the way, almost 80% of my Firefox visitors surf with Firefox 3.0.5, followed by only 5% of 2.0.0.20 users and a long tail of various other, outdated, browser versions.
I am unsure what happened, but today my BBC News RSS feed seems to be showing when an abstract was updated by the authors after its initial release.
While I have not found anything too exciting or revealing among the affected posts, it is interesting to see how the journalists refine their work to make it both concise and informative. In this case, Obama’s “middle east envoy”‘s name apparently went away in favor of “friendship with the muslim world”, and the authors realized that more than one country has a “president”.
“[Wir haben festgestellt], dass während des Gaza-Krieges die Zahl der Hass-Mails an den Zentralrat um 40 Prozent auf 200 bis 300 pro Woche zugenommen hat.”
200-300 Hass-Mails pro Woche? Also man kann ja über die Politik des Staates Israel denken was man möchte — aber den Vertretungen jüdischer Gemeinden in Deutschland Hass-Mails zu schreiben, noch dazu viele hundert, das ist schon erbärmlich.
Recently, I got the following fortune cookie. How “nice”!
I find it highly ironic and amusing that a fortune cookie–of all things man-made, yes, the same kind of fortune cookie that has been “sticking its nose” in other people’s business ever since its inception–dumps its opinion about talking of things you don’t understand on me.
But I guess it’s better than this one of unknown origin (which has been floating around on the internet for about a million years and is most likely photoshopped):
(Yeah, I played with iPhoto there to give the photo up there the look it has now — a simple pic looked too boring.)
