So ähnlich habe ich zwar schonmal gebloggt, aber das ist für mich als friedlebenden Deutschen dann doch ein bisschen komisch: Vor zwei Tagen war die (riesengroße) USA-Flagge vor dem lokalen WinCo (Supermarkt) auf Halbmast. Warum, habe ich nicht herausgefunden. Schien auch nicht so, als würde es einen jucken.
Wal-Mart wirft das Handtuch
Soso, Wal-Mart gibt sein Geschäft in Deutschland auf. Mit Tränen in den Augen (bei Milliardenverlusten wird man gemeinhin sentimental) schiebt die amerikanische Supermarktkette seine 85 Warenhäuser in Deutschland an einen seiner größten Konkurrenten, die Metro Group, ab. Dort jubelt man (Management und Shareholder gleichermaßen) über den Sieg gegen den Erzfeind.
Greetings from OSCON
So, here we are at OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR. The first day of booth action is over, all t-shirts have been handed out to people, and I already got to meet a lot of very nice and interesting people.
Even though OSCON is not the biggest free software conference in the world, it seems to be one of the most important ones.
We are having a blast here, talking to big business as well as community people, handing out a lot of coasters etc (want some? Come see us at booth 810!) and socializing with some of the finest people in the Open Source community.
Yesterday's Beerforge party (sponsored by the OSL, Jive Software and OTBC) in a fine bar here in Portland was a full success too. We really rocked the place and were having a lot of fun. Thanks for stepping by, all of you!
Tomorrow, the OSL is going to have an invitational event at its own facilities in Corvallis, OR where our friends and clients can take a look at our offices and data centers, chat about things and maybe pet their servers a little. I expect it to be a really exciting event too.
You see, that's how cool Open Source can be. If you are at OSCON, make sure you meet us at our booth. We'll be happy to meet you.
Der groÃe Apfel in Bildern
So, vorbei ist der Urlaub in New York City. Ich habe so sehr geurlaubt, dass ich ganz das Bloggen vergaß ;)
Bulk changing of JPEG EXIF header data
Last week, I was on vacation in New York City where I met a German friend of mine. Both of us brought digital cameras and we got, let's say, pretty trigger happy.
It wasn't till after the vacation that we realized that both of our cameras had mentally stayed where they came from: My camera's time zone was set to Pacific Daylight Time, his to Middle European Summer Time. All in all, this adds up to a difference of 3 or 6 hours respectively to the actual time the picture was taken, and 9 hours between the two cameras. Perfect to find the morning pics between the evening ones and vice versa.
When putting the photos together into a gallery software, this results in a totally messed up order and a pain in the arm to fix it for more than 1.2 gigabytes of pictures.
Searching the internet for a remedy (for the pictures and the headache they made me), I stumbled across a fabulous little tool called jhead. It is an EXIF header and thumbnail manipulator that flawlessly works also on bigger amounts of files.
Not only is the syntax quite straightforward and easy to understand, it also has an armada of neat little options for fixing numerous ugly things that may happen to JPEG header files when taking digital photos.
This is what I did:
jhead -ta-6:00 nyc/p.jpg # friend's pics
jhead -ta+3:00 nyc/cimg.jpg # mine
jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S nyc/*.jpg # rename uniformly
Besides the time zone issue, I was also able to automatically rename the files according to the (now correct) timestamp so that the pictures taken by different cameras now have uniform file names and can easily be sorted by name.
Thank you for saving a few hours of my life, jhead.
NYC: Unmengen an Menschen und Ka-Bumm
Wow, das ist der Hammer hier. Überall unglaublich viele Menschen und sooo viele lustige Gesellen. Das erste, was ich bei meiner Ankunft hören durfte, waren jubelnde, hupende Italienere, die sich über den WM-Sieg ihrer Favoriten gefreut haben... Zudem handytelefonierende Rabbis, hässliche Hunde, und "original deutsches Maibock-Bier", das nach Ingwer schmeckt...
Auf dem Weg zum groÃen Apfel
So, morgen ist es also so weit, ich genehmige mir einen Trip nach New York, dem Big Apple :)
Doktor Z wirbt für Deutsche Wertarbeit
Na sowas: Da kocht der Chef noch selbst. Nachdem DaimlerChrysler in den USA in letzter Zeit nicht gerade seine besten Zeiten erlebt hat, und man immer damit rechnen muss, bei den Amerikanischen Kunden in Ungnade zu fallen, wenn man als Ausländer bei "ihren" Marken mitmischt, hat sich DaimlerChrysler-Chef Dieter Zetsche höchstpersönlich vor die Kamera gestellt und Werbespots für die Automarke Chrysler gedreht.
Everybody's Crazy About Something
Monday, the OSU Beavers won the national championship in NCAA college baseball. That's pretty much awesome, and to watch the game, most rightly people left early from work, the coffee place in the library closed in the middle of the afternoon, and almost everybody but me freaked all out about it. Especially when the game was over and the championship was ours, Monroe street (right next to campus) was crowded with celebrating, drunk, orange people and the whole city was proud of "their" beavers.
Strange, strange. As a European, I will probably never understand how people can be insane about a game the rules of which in not even remotely understand. (I am proud of the Beavers, anyway!)
And, oh well, when it comes to soccer, people probably shrug at me, too. Sometimes I even think I am the only one here knowing what offside is ;)
Update:
That is how it has to look like downtown when a good soccer game is on :)!
My university city, Karlsruhe, Germany during the game Germany-Ecuador.
Physikstunde
Gedankliche Notiz: Wenn man ein Glas aus der gerade fertig gewordenen Spülmaschine nimmt und mit kaltem Wasser füllt, kann das sprunghaften Erfolg haben.