Wireless Noise

Carnegie Mellon's wireless network makes me sad: I get about 20 KB/s of constant noise (all day, every day) from, mostly, Windows computers announcing their presence to the outside world via broadcast packets.

In the "network" window, this looks like that:

If this is a secret ploy with the intention to empty everybody's laptop batteries as fast as possible, it's working! :) Then again, unlike University of Karlsruhe, CMU puts power outlets into every seat when they drop a bucket of money to renovate a lecture hall. At my home university--with the exception of the new library--laptops have to be mostly powered with their owners' love and respect: Places with appropriate power connections are rare.

October 13, 2008Fred Wenzel

Screwed, Either Way

Today's xkcd comic boils down the Digital Restrictions Management dilemma to its core:

The latest Wal-Mart example--switching off their DRM servers (in spite of their later decision not to do it after all)--has shown that companies are not willing to stand by their self-imposed duties of providing a DRM framework for many decades to come. Instead, they are taking away the technical possibility to play your files at their sole discretion, leaving you as a customer with no choice other than throw away your media collection--or violate the law.

This is why DRM is so bad: While it is understandable that companies want to protect their income sources, by demanding payment for the media they produced, DRM is making promises the companies do not want to hold, or in some cases (read: bankrupcy) can't hold. This is why I prefer, at least at the moment, Amazon MP3 over the DRMed part of iTunes any day of the week.

And while Wal-Mart does not exactly have a great reputation as a whole, there's one thing they've thoroughly understood: The concept of capitalism. So it comes to no surprise that they (along with Amazon, for example) exert pressure on the music industry to be able to sell DRM-free music. The market demands DRM-free digital media that can be owned like a record or a CD and slowly, very slowly, content providers are forced to acknowledge that.

I can't help but wonder, though, is this development going to include digital video as well, any time?

October 11, 2008Fred Wenzel

Firefox Needs Content-Aware Image Resizing

The new feature called "content-aware image resizing" in Photoshop is amazing. There is a promotional video up on the Adobe site that's really fun to watch. For example, they make a Volkswagen bus more "economical" (mind you, while keeping the wheels round):

The technology behind it is based on research from an Isreali research group. That group put a video up on youtube in 2007 already:

It's a little more technical, but no less impressive, so all of you geeks who wonder how it actually works should watch this as well.

I can tell you one thing: I want this in Firefox's page resizing code. Sadly, I assume it is strictly patented and Adobe will probably have made sure to have some sort of exclusive deal on it.

Update: A commenter points out, there is an open source plugin for the GIMP that does content-aware resizing--already since 2007. Thank you, Gandalf!

October 10, 2008Fred Wenzel

Pictureless

An unfortunate typo in a configuration file left this blog completely without images for a little while. Apologies to the readers who may have been confused by that.

Now, fredericiana is back in all it's glory :)

On a side note, I am actually glad how nice my blog still looks with images "disabled". Still, I am glad everything is back to normal now.

September 25, 2008Fred Wenzel

Blog Redesign

As only the most attentive readers may have noticed by now, I redesigned my blog. It's been a while since I have done that, and the former layout started to bore me a little.

So I went ahead, got myself a template from freecsstemplates and tweaked away. It wasn't a Wordpress template, so there was quite a lot of work to do, but I am quite pleased with the outcome.

Gone: The old design.

There are a few advantages of the old vs. the new layout. First, more room for more awesomeness: The articles used to be only 500 pixels wide (and that was already stretched from how the old layout came out of the box). This one has 575 pixels, plenty of space even for bigger pictures.

"New car" scent not included.

Second, due to the famfamfam icons I built in it should all look a little neater and be hopefully quite intuitive. Just for fun, I also added "magazine-style" quotes, just like the one you see on the right.

At last, my comments now differ visually from everybody else's:

I hope you like it. Oh, and if you find anything out of the ordinary, let me know!

September 21, 2008Fred Wenzel

Downloading a Complete Picasa Web Album (Without Installing Picasa)

Google's Picasa Web Album supports downloading an entire album, however, it requires the Picasa software to do so. Bummer if you are on a Mac, or don't want to (or can't) install Picasa on your computer.

There's another tutorial online that suggests using a Greasemonkey script to surface the download links, then use the DownThemAll Firefox extension to grab the links.

Sadly, the Greasemonkey script in question stopped working after a recent code change on the picasa website. I was able to easily fix it, but due to the lack of an open license, I am unable to share the script with you :(

However, I found an alternative solution: The album's RSS feed! Along with the aforementioned DownThemAll extension, you can easily download a complete album off Picasa Web. Here is how:

Go to the desired Album, and click the "RSS" link on the right hand side:

Firefox will show you the RSS feed in a more or less appealing way. Note that each of the pictures shown has an "attached" JPEG file underneath:

The only thing we need to do is download all of these with DownThemAll. For that, right-click, and choose "DownThemAll". In the "links" tab, it'll automatically grab all pictures for you:

Just hit "start" and let it load!

Hope this helps!

September 10, 2008Fred Wenzel

How Much Is That In Big Macs Per Second?

So there is this guy, who says he has eaten 23.000 big macs over the course of 36 years and obviously, kept all the receipts.

If these were the presidential elections, I would demand a recount, but in dubio pro reo and all, let's assume he is right. Of course I wanted to know how many big macs that totals per day, so I entered into Google:

23 000 / (36 years)

and what did I get back? Obviously, big macs per second:

By the way: Using more conventional units, this totals between 1 and 2 big macs a day.

PS: Random fact I am sure none of you wanted to know, Heinrich Hertz, the guy whose name became the unit of frequency "hertz", was a professor at University of Karlsruhe (my home uni), where he discovered the electromagnetic waves.

September 10, 2008Fred Wenzel

Fail Whale Meets Awesomebar

As I signed up for twitter during a period of "high maintenance" (that's polite for almost-constant brokenness), I encountered the fail whale quite often---and learned to like it, in its own way, because it had become a tradition of sorts, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

Twitter's Charming "mascot", the Fail Whale

And funnily, every time I visit the page in my Firefox instance, the Awesomebar keeps reminding me of the times when the whale was ubiquitous:

How nice: Nostalgia 2.0.

August 29, 2008Fred Wenzel

Server Migration Complete

The server migration I announced earlier should be complete now.

The DNS entries may still be a little wonky (if you had trouble reaching my web page or even sending me an email for a little while, that's probably why), but apart from that all should be peachy. The new box is quite snappy, so that's good!

Oh, of course the new server has a new name, too: Rest in peace, Aurora, and welcome to the family, Luna!

August 29, 2008Fred Wenzel

Server Migration

Later tonight, the webserver this blog (and a bunch of other sites) runs on will be migrated to a new, bigger server.

The main reason is that the old box ran out of RAM quite frequently lately (it is a virtual machine that has a flexible RAM limit). The cause of this was mainly the ever-increasing amount of spam, and in spite of the most recent counter-measures, the little VM wasn't able to cope with it any longer. The new server has a bigger CPU, twice as much RAM guaranteed, and other improved features that make me confident that the change is the right step.

For you, dear readers, this means you may experience a few problems loading our websites while we are performing the migration (sorry) but we'll try to keep it to a minimum. You'll be rewarded with an even faster, nicer, and obviously awesomer fredericiana.com later. Thanks for your patience!