Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

Back on track.

Tuesday, January 13th, 2004

I have now fully recovered myself from the illness and took same as an excuse to get involved in some playing of Neverwinter Nights ;-) Today has been a day of work, although it has been hampered somewhat by problems of my system harddisk which made booting the machine not work anymore. I did not want to fiddle around with the file system because the install that I am currently running is not at all fresh (I think I just updated incrementally from OS X 10.1 to 10.3.2 – which surprisingly worked without problems). So I took this as an ocassion to reformat the disk, and reinstall the system plus all needed apps. Myth would have that everything should now be Snappier™, only I don’t perceive any special snappiness. Well, whatever. At least I got rid of some really old apps and files and not-used-anymore settings. Feels good too. (And leaves me with an additional 12 GB of harddisk space.)

The rocket: a movie clip.

Saturday, January 10th, 2004

Kerstin has posted a movie on her site. It seems that the Free University’s web server does not know the .mp4 ending of the movie file and sends it as plain text. If that happens to you and you see garbled text in your browser window instead of a movie or a dialogue asking you to save the file, you can either save the garbled text to disk and then open it with the movie player of your choice (VLC or QuickTime should do the job) or you go back and then right click on the link and select to save it to your disk. Complicated, I know. I just send a “bug report” to the webmaster requesting correct configuration of the web server. We’ll see if that helps.

Postscript: 53 minutes after I sent the e-mail to the zedat’s (FU Berlin computer dept.) support address I got the following reply:

Hallo Herr Frers
* Lars Frers <frers@web.de> [09.01.04 15:37]:
> Meine Vermutung ist, das der Apache Server der zedat mit der
> Dateiendung .mp4 nichts anzufangen weiss und die Dateien deshalb mit
Ihr Vermutung war richtig, wir haben den entsprechenden MIME-Type nachgetragen.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen,
Philipp Grau

I must say I am impressed by the speed with which the dealt with this problem. Kudos!

Tada!

Friday, January 9th, 2004

Kerstin has made her own website. The URL is http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~kborn – on this page you will find a link to the photos she took in Finland. Enjoy!

Attention: be prepared for crazy layout experiments on the site linked in this entry! ;-)

My first multimedia presentation.

Thursday, December 4th, 2003

At the end of the last semester I gave an oral presentation in the seminar “Space, Place, Power” offered by Helmuth Berking and Martina Löw – today I put the presentation file that I used on this server in form of a QuickTime movie file. (Of course I made the presentation with Apple’s Keynote, not with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, therefore the export to QuickTime’s .mov format is no hassle; if you cannot install the QuickTime Player on your machine or .mov don’t work for some other reason you should contact me.) It may be a bit spartanic and not too informative without an audio commentary. However, I want to wait until the college gets the microphones we ordered recently before I record the audio. Otherwise I would have to rely on the internal microphone of my PowerBook or the tacky headset that I have at home and there would be a lot of noise in the recording. So, if you’re interested take a look at it, otherwise it might be wise to wait a bit until I have done the audio (at that point I might also use a different format such as .mp4 or some such thing). As soon as that is done I will reannounce it here and then post links to the file on my static pages concerning my dissertation.

The presentation itself was intended to be a methodological and theoretical statement or manifesto. It succeeded, and we had a very lively discussion in the seminar, which helped me to orient myself and my project.

Getting an RSS feed of my blog.

Sunday, November 23rd, 2003

I reposted the link to the RSS feed of this site. With this link you can use the RSS client of your choice to be informed when a new entry for my blog has been written. You don’t use RSS yet and have no idea which client to use? For those of you using a Mac, I can recommend two freeware apps: SlashDock or NetNewsWire Lite. If you are a windows person, you might want to try Feedreader – it has been put on an internet software collection CD-ROM by the German computer magazine c’t and it is a sourceforge project, both being good recommendations. I have no information about RSS readers on Linux… :-(>

Do the XHTML.

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Hah. I did it. After reading an encouraging article in the c’t (issue number 23) two weeks ago, I decided to update my website to the XHTML 1.1 standard as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium. I also changed my own pages to relative size definitions (no px sizes anymore, instead I am now using ems and percentages all over the place). I am quite proud of this. I did not update my start page since I really like the layout and I do not want de-table and change it yet…

It’s about technology, isn’t it?

Wednesday, November 12th, 2003

Many people would say that an institution that is concerned with technology and research should represent itself in a technologically adequate way. I agree. That is the explanation I like to present for what I did yesterday and the day before: changing the code of our post-graduate college’s website to be based on the current W3C standard and successor of HTML, XHTML version 1.1.

Another explanation would be: I want to avoid getting into my own project by doctoring around with other stuff…

Moving pictures.

Thursday, October 30th, 2003

Yay! Yesterday I finally got the camera which I need for my dissertation project. I am going to make short video cuts in ferry passenger terminals and train stations and will then analyze them in detail. As the camera wasn’t delivered with a FireWire cable I can’t yet transfer the video recordings from camera to Mac, but as soon as I am back home I will be able to do this and perhaps present you with a few neat clips to awe at.

If you are wondering what camera I chose: it is a Canon MVX100i.

Improved layout.

Wednesday, October 29th, 2003

That was a surprisingly easy solution: On the Post-Graduate College’s homepage that I coded one sometimes had more than one scrollbar to navigate the contents of a page – which was pretty confusing. After setting up the page and doing the initial corrections and adaptations I was not especially eager to do even more work on this page so this issue has been lingering for some time. But not anymore! It was an easy fix, I just had to change the overflow attribute of the div elements that I was using to format the layout: I had set them to auto, putting trust into the browser’s abilities to do the right thing; now I changed it to visible and the additional scrollbars disappeared.

Sorting screws.

Sunday, October 26th, 2003

The last days I made some slow progress in the sorting-of-screws-project. Sorting-of-screws-project? Kerstin and I are currently tidying up our small storage room and a multitude of screws showed up during this tidying up. I think I have now about 20 different categories of screws lying at the table besides the keyboard I am typing on right now. Some of these categories should be merged, I think. Especially those with less than five specimen total. At the end of this process, the world will be a much better place.

Significant growth in Linux share.

Tuesday, September 30th, 2003

Hear, hear: in the course of the last weeks my web server log service (SiteMeter) reports a growing amount of visitors using Linux… How could that be? ;-)

That was quite a bit of work.

Wednesday, September 24th, 2003

A few minutes ago I put the new official website of my post-graduate college online. Take a look – I hope you like it. If have a moment of spare time you could check the site with different browsers and tell me if you encounter particular problems. One disclaimer: the layout does not work well with 4.x versions of Netscape. I would recommend updating to a browser using the Gecko engine, i.e. a Mozilla related browser.

I will get better again.

Sunday, September 21st, 2003

Sorry about the lack of updates to my blog during the last two weeks. Updates will come out more regularly as the start of the next semester draws closer, weather gets worse again and I reduce the online gaming time with Neverwinter Nights.

New homepage for the Graduiertenkolleg.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2003

Soon I will change the layout of our post-graduate college’s homepage – it is utterly ugly and confusing now. You should take a look and try to navigate a bit. It’s embarassing. I hope you’ll like the new layout: it will have no tables, it will be W3C conform, more accessible for handicapped people, no frames – but, it doesn’t work well with Netscape 4.x …
A test page will go online in a few days, I would appreciate any feedback then.

Neverwinternightabsorbiert

Wednesday, September 10th, 2003

Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,
ich wollte nur kurz mitteilen, dass Lars hier anscheinend nichts mehr Neues schreibt, weil er ununterbrochen seit Tagen schon vollkommen in der virtuellen Realität gefangen ist und dort neue Freundinnen und Freunde gefunden zu haben scheint, mit denen er spricht, Geschenke austauscht und sich verabredet. Also los, wer von Euch vermag ihn zu befreien?

Exploring the online realm.

Monday, September 8th, 2003

Yesterday I played Neverwinter Nights for the first time on an online, guild hosted server. It has been a very good and interesting experience. People there (there are usually about 3-10 people online in the setting I am playing in) are quite eloquent, funny and charming. Of course they are, because they are all Mac users! The guild (the Avengers of Coramir) recruits itself from the Mac Neverwinter Nights forum, where I have lurked for the last year or so.

If anything virtually interesting happens, I’ll inform you through the virtual hyperspace. Allez les Internautes!

Zwischenbericht jetzt online.

Thursday, September 4th, 2003

Mittlerweile bin ich hochzufrieden mit meinen HTML-Vorlagen – das Einarbeiten neuer Texte geht recht flott. Viel Spaß beim Lesen.

Habe die URL ganz vergessen… peinlich. http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~frers/dissbericht.html

Updated to Blosxom 2.0.

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2003

Today I updated from version 2.0rc5 to version number 2.0. Not a lot of code was changed, so I guess there shouldn’t be any trouble for you. If something is not working correctly on your browser/machine, please tell me.

There’s another minor technical detail to report: finally this blog actually validates as correct HTML 4.01 Transitional. As inquiring minds might have found out there was one incorrectly tagged post at the end of the queue which falls out with the posting of this entry. Yay!

Archive added.

Tuesday, July 15th, 2003

Since a significant part of the entries that I made is not visible anymore I added an archive in the column to the right. Just click on the links to see the entries that were posted during the respective month.

Less entries visible.

Thursday, July 10th, 2003

To make access to the blog a bit faster again, I reduced the number of entries that will be shown on this page from 40 to 30. If you think I should keep the entry list longer, even if it has a negative impact on the time it takes for this page to appear on your screen, say so.