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15.11.03

Dead Trolls talk

For a very funny five minutes break- the flashing 12 am phänomen explained

From Tom I got the link to a highly hilarious movie. If you are a mac fan you want to watch it to the end. :)
Even if you are not you oughta check this guy out :)

http://www.deadtroll.com/index2.html?/video/livehelldesk.html~content

there is more funny stuff to be seen on this site....

11.11.03

Discussion the OSX for Realtime Performance on ArsTechnicaForums

There is a discussion going on about my document in the Arstechnica.com forum.


I was quite surprised to see my dokument discussed on arstechnica.com, my absolute favorite tech site on the net. So I was quite sad that all that is there is bashing and no constructive criticism. I do need feedback for this document as I want to advance this further and the more technical advanced people give me more scoop on what is going on inside this system and where we could get some more juice out of it.

arstechnica.infopop.net

as for some of the objections raised in the thread until now:

the font: This is not a GOTHIK font it is a Fraktur Font. and firstly I am an artist if I want to put out a dokument with a fraktur its my thing you can just copy paste the text and give it any font you like. Secondly I explained why I used this and I have emails sitting here telling me that this works quite well. Up to 50 years ago ALL written word was in this style so it must be readable don´t ya think? maybe your reading has degenerated into something that is not worth called reading? maybe you do not care for detail anymore?

the chmod 7777: There was no other way to make this script run on a friends computer as he run into permission problems, this was a problem with filevault and totally unrelated with the script. Yes it needs to be only 755 sorry about this...

apache is not using resources: that might be, but I tried to slim it down as much as I could, WITH EVERYTHING removed that MIGHT be causing trouble making the bootprocess slower etc. Apache I do not need in a realtime environment.

there might be problem with other stuff I removed:If you would have read the document I said explicitly: This system is only there for running this single Application. If you plan to do other stuff you will run into problems sooner or later. I know that deleting the cron jobs is not a smart thing to do on a heavy used system. I personally have seen the cron jobs kick in the middle of the night when I was standing in fron of 8000 people and this slowed down my computer. there was no way I could have stopped them manually. This document is for the lesser computer literate and I have a hard time to explain how to move the cron jobs to a time when there is no chance you have a performance. Besides I can never tell when I have a performance, sometimes I do gig during the day for a presentation or during the week during a festival or on sunday to monday night. So for me deleting the cron jobs was a good way to get around this problem. I try to eliminate ALL disk access from the system and cron jobs surely have diskactivity.

I don´t believe the 20% performance increase: Have you tried it? I did not believe it myself. I do have two system running side by side and I can clearly see this difference... Maybe I really need to do benchmarking thing. I hate benchmarks they are so far out of reach in a working environment. I have top and top tells me that I have up to 22% processing time free when running VDMXX under certain circumstances and under the same circumstances I have no processor free (0%) when running it under the non optimized system.

So if you have constructive criticism I like to hear it. Bashing is not in place except if you have something better to offer which then I would love to hear.

10.11.03

Adding Comment Function and Statistic

Static Blog you thought? not anymore... give me feedback :)


I am very happy to report that I managed to add feedback function through HaloScans.com free comment service. So if you want to share a thought with me you can now do so directly in my Blog.

I also added a Statistic Service to the Blog to see how well it is recieved out there. This is provided by the freeextremetracking.com service. There might be more functions in the near future that I will add, if I have the time to do so.

UPDATE: this entry stems from my old iBlog that was static in nature. I moved on to movable type and this brings all the above functionality (and much more). Anyways great links if you ever need a comment function or a tracking service and do not want to implement any cgi/perl whatever.

UPDATEII: I do follow.
"Do Follow" Blog Directory

Visible at Night through Light

Luminex introduces Light Emitting Fibre


The coolest thing on earth today have to be light emitting clothes. No not the glow in the dark style paint of the early 90´s I am talking about real light emission. Apparently the fibre can be woven into normal cloth and then used for making about everything you can do with cloth. Pants, sweater, skirts, bags or whatever you can think of. Cool stuff that will surely be overused not before to long me thinks.

http://www.luminex.it/

9.11.03

The Matrix goes online ---- 2004

apparently the Triology was only a commercial for an upcoming online game!?


What do you do when you have no budget but a great plan for an online game? You make a good Triology before the game start and make the audience pay for the advertisement and the game development.

What first started out with a glorious concept and story soon became only a money making machine. I am talking about the Matrix. I did not see the third part of the Triology yet but from what I heard it is even more out of touch with the original story then the second one and this was so bad that it was almost unbelievable. They made a movie that could have changed the way we think about the future but it all ended up in the usual kungfu fast cut action we all have seen so often over the last year (with KillBill as a highlight far better then Matrix). They almost got me back with the Animatrix which I thought was brilliant, but the most brilliant parts of this where the ones that where not directed by the brothers especially the last one that really had me twisting my brain again.

Do not get me wrong. I love the 3d animations and the Action but I loved much more the foundation: the storyline. And this almost ceased to exist in the second part already. Action had taken over 80% of the movie. Now that they have finished off the Triology they want to milk the cow even more and putting up a PC ONLY online role playing game for the masses. And again the focus is on action rather then story. The Wachowski brothers are in charge of the game play but seeing the degeneration of their thoughts it will propably end as another end of the world game with lots of killing shooting and jumping. The games "story"line will be put after the Revolution and you are about to save the earth again. Great. Lets move on to something interesting.

http://thematrixonline.warnerbros.com/

8.11.03

s it real or rendered? Beans Magic 3D renderings

Via TimPritloves Weblog comes the a question if we are up to the task of creating real looking Human Characters out of 3d programs.

girl-headphone.png

With the advent of Radiosity (reflection of light of non mirroring surfaces - for example put a red wooden ball on a white piece of paper and the white piece of paper will shine red around the ball) there was a huge jump of perceived reality in 3D animations. Todays all major 3D rendering application have an option to render in Radiosity mode so with a huge render time penalty that makes this almost not feasible for movie production yet. For stills nonetheless this rendering mode together with HDR(i) (high definition range imaging and lightning) has enabled some great 3D artist to make outstanding picture that come very close to reality. Tim who is not a graphic expert is already asking the question if one of the pictures on BeansMagic Website is real or not. As a close look has revealed it is of course not real. There are still problems with the Radiosity beeing to strong also there are still not 100% perfect shaders for skin that makes the skin look to flat (translucency in our skin is not a solved mystery yet). Also the material of her headphones is just to perfect. There should be subconscious scratches or imperfects (slight bumps) to make it look more real. Overall so this is a ultra lovely picture pointing in the right direction and with the new renderers on the market (brazil) we will see more and more of pics in this quality. Now they have to develop some better animation technics to also make the facial movements with its 1000 muscles more real as moving all this with hand is a pain and has failed in about every movie that I have seen that utilizes 3d characters that wanted to mimic real persons.

Nanowire Displays

After Polymer and E-Paper Displays goes the way of the newest hype on the block - all things Nano

A Harvard Uni team has come up with a way to put premade nanowire films onto plastic sheets or glas at room temperatures. This tech has the potential to make flexible HIGHresolution displays. According to a story on /. (slashdot.org) this might be even used to produced contact lenses with displays on them. Imagine a club where you get handed out contact lenses on entrance and all the visuals come up right in the eyes of the punters. For the near future I would love to see this technology to be used to produce 1200 dpi reusable displays making the need for print absolute. Get the full scope:

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/07/130238.shtml?tid=137&tid=196

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-11/acs-fb110603.php

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/11/07.html


nanowires (picture from: Nanosys Inc.)


(picture: NanoLetters)

Computer Control with Brain Implant

Cyberkinetics Inc. asks for permission to test a brain computer interface for paralyzed people


The Boston Globe via way of Slashdot is reporting that Cyberkinetics Inc. wants to test a brain implant that would enable paralyzed people to control computer directly with their brain. The talk is about controling cursors on the screen or play video games or even moves their limbs again - all through the same interface. Neuron to Computer Interfaces (NCI) first started to surface 3 years ago with a self experiment of a crazy scientist and have made great steps towards usability since then. Cyborgs anyone?

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/biotechnology/articles/2003/11/06/approval_sought_to_test_brain_implant/

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/07/1756256.shtml?tid=134

Miss Digital World

A contest to find the most beautiful DIGITAL girl in the world

Just in time Ars Technica is presenting a piece on an Italian contest for the digital beauties whose mother is Lara Croft. Its a contest that is open to any fully digital girl but the models are not allowed to enter the contest if they have shown up in any pr0n movie or still or if they have spoken out in a polical context (censoring in Italy yadayada). So what is the case with digital womans nowadays will they replace the real ones for the geeks in time before the geeks become extinct? Will they be able to have children? What about cloning them and adjusting them for your personal taste? Will they be open source to enhance them with new kernels? Will RealLife Models have a chance to pose on Posters and will Actors go distinct soon with the digitial creatures that seem to be almost perfect and exactly what a human needs. What will the perception of our real life beauties be? The advent of Digital Beings in our "Real Life" will for sure cause great concerns. What is different from a Britney Spears and one of Renes HyperModels? Brintey is real and altered to be surreal and the Hypermodels are surreal altered to be real. They meet in the middle and none is better then the other to give the unaltered versions in our life something to look after. They all want to be perfect. Hey we all want to be perfect but some have settled with what they are. Its a question of our time and a glimpse in the future. Some woman would do EVERYTHING to look like the Bittis (That is what I call the Digitial Creations). Now most of the persons surrounding me do not believe that we will eventually "emerge" into machine. My thought is that this is the path of evolution and we are not far from it and maybe some of the girls will lead this evolutions as first fully perfect cyborgs inside our society - I would even go so far to say that current "altered" girls are already a form of bio-chemical-cyborgs. Who says that cyborgs need to incorporate steel and wires. Maybe silicon is already a form in this direction? The next thing maybe a color adjustable iris? Or what about self building muscles that also absorb fat cells? All bio altering but maybe those muscles or controlled by a little chip implant. I could go on should I? Maybe this chip is tunable from the outside. Oh you still think its not a cyborg?

What has this to do with the contest you may ask? Well I guess that in the very very near future our Entertainment Industry will be swamped with Bittis. There is no weight problem no aging noa attitude and no salary to pay. Its a convenient way for the producers to get retro bands for real cheap. Right now they are not up to the task to make them as real as to be believed but this will go away very very soon and the contest is a first sign of this as they apparently have become close enough that the distinction between real and virtual (surreal) is fading.

At one time then maybe the real life girls/boys that want to be superstars alter themself to play in the same "perfection" level as the Bittis and with this point reached there is a whole economy behind the evolutionary transformation of the human race. If our current economic model will not change in the near future this will one route that some might go.

The most interesting thing that I have not mentioned is that the Bittis want to get more real (right now its their creators who want to make them more real but I guess if they were able to think they would be on the same track) by adding imperfections. They probably at one point will want to walk around next to you and me or be on stage and be perceived as real adding to the coming emergence of the two worlds.

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1068240062.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3207462.stm

http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/_d10/_v10/__show_article/_a000010-000918.htm

6.11.03

Bluejacking

is bluejacking really a new form of hackerdom?


The newest hype around the block is bluejacking. Basically you send a contact to a phone nearby with the name of the contact being the message you want to transmit. All this works without the receivers end ever giving you a password or their number and its free. The only real prerequisite is that the receiver has bluetooth turned on. So when you are in a train or waiting for a bus and that hot chick nearby makes the SMS craze then you might be able to send her an anonymous text telling her she should get her nose down (or the such). Pretty lame to be called a hack but cool anyways :)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3237755.stm

Wavelan in Belize part II - more photos

As you all already know I am observing the wavelan net in Hopkins/Belize that my friend 5T3PH4N and oli try to install there. They have send over some more cool pictures.


the access point antenna


the sky dsl uplink

5.11.03

RoboDrive LA - LasVegas

106 teams take the challange of unmanned robotic vehicles driving from LA to LasVegas without HumanInterception

If you thought robotics are a thing of the future I have to tell you the future has already started. The DARPA (Defense Advance Research Project Agency) has called for the yearly event and this time they have a record of participants

from zdnet:
"DARPA will award $1 million to the team of inventors that comes up with a robotic car that can drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on an off-road course in 10 hours. DARPA, ideally, will then be able to cull ideas tried in the race for its own purposes."

The drive will go through mud, sand, dunes, mountains and barbed wire and only those will win who complete the whole race without any human interference. Why does this remind me of the motorcycle race in "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas"? Maybe I should be a reporter on this :P

Please relieve human kind from driving.

WaveLan in Belize

You have a helping hand? ;)


5T3PH4N and his brother Oli try to install a wavelan in Hopkins/ Belize. Oli runs the Olis Surfomat surf school there. They have a SkyDSL uplink to some Texan ISP with 1,5 Mbit. They want to make the network available to the villagers as well. If you have a hand to spare to hold the antenna or have any other usefull information on how install a wavelan net in the jungle please contact them

Oli@windsurfing-belize.com

5T3PH4N holding the antenna :)

4.11.03

Deep from the proto.lab - Optimizing OSX 10.3 for RealTimePerformance

or how to make the BigBlackKitty run


Deep from inside our green laboratory comes this first release of dirty knowledge. It puts some fire under the BigBlackKitty released by Apple Computer Inc. two weeks ago. It is intended for those who crave for the last bit of performance and can live without gadgets and juices of this OS. It disables all services leaving only those running that are important to Realtime AudioVisual Performance (and number crunching). In preliminary tests I have seen an performance increase up to 20%. Talk about modern multithreaded operating system :/ The startup time is under 5 seconds after the kernel loaded. And before you complain NO I WILL NOT CHANGE THE FONT of the document. IT IS THERE ON PURPOSE explained in chapter one line one! Please submit it any additional setups. Any information regarding your (not)running systems is really needed as there was no outside lab testing and I would like to add a list of supported systems. I hope you enjoy this document.

OptimizingOSX103Realtimev2.pdf

Update: I forgot to put the appendixes in. If you already downloaded please get version 2 as there are some additions to security and the RamDisk that might be of interest to you.

3.11.03

Professional WaveLan Antennas

In the search for better antennas to support a WaveLan net in Belize

Wimo is one of the best resources I have yet found - with the help from TimPritlove - in regards of professional antennas for extending WaveLan networks and creating hotspots for your neighborhood. They have some good background information on what antenna to choose as well. The site is in german.

http://www.wimo.de/

AVIT Uk Brighton Photos

There are some insightfull photos from AVIT Uk available at the avit.info site

if you want to get a visual scope on AVIT Uk 2003 you can head over to the avit.info site to get some cool, funny, lovely photos.
http://www.avit.info/media/gallery/AVIT-UK03

falk-protobeamz.jpg

This photo shows fRED (the redghost on the left side) and me
performing with 5T3PH4N aka mo-greens at the Brighton TikiRiks on saturday night.

Thanks to Johnny DeKam from www.vidvox.net for shooting and forwarding this to us.

2.11.03

Poll shows that European inhabitans belief Israel is the worst problem toworld peace

not Israel but Isreali government is seen as a threat so there is no antisemitc thoughts found here even if they want you make belief.


Normally I try to avoid getting in to the debate of Israel and the Palestina Terretorries but an article in the guardian did sent a shudder down my spines. I have been to Israel for a very short time in the year 2001. This was the year where the current intifada started - this was the year with the worst attacks on Israel by Palestinien fighters - boys and girls. I went to Israel because I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to talk to the people on both sides I wanted to see the conditions in where people live I wanted to get a scope beyond newspaper publications and biased opinions. I am in no way a nazi nor am I anti-semitic in the sense that I dam all jews. I think its not about religion and not about right or left wing opinion. The Israelis have their nose high up in the air control every river in the region control all good land for crop harvesting control most connections to the mediterrian sea. the people of palestina do have close to nothing they are scattered across the globe, they live in terrible conditions in dry rocky dessert have to ask for each drop of water. After beeing to jerusalem I got the notion that its both sides fault to this crisis, but looking around longer and longer I see more and more that the state of israel is doing something that looks like a bad joke when seen in a historic context: they try to get rid of the people in palestina. they would like to wipe them out. They have enough reason to be arrogant in this regard because they have 100% unquestioned support from the US who would do everything to "protect" Israel. So the state of Israel with Mr. Sharon at its head tries to make the world believe that they are an endangered species and the sentence "look at history" seems to be enough to justify just about anything. Killing lots and lots of people without reason. The world media is not paying lot of attention to the people in palestina, only showing its leaders and its "suspected terrorists". I have seen the people of palestina and they are like you and me - normal people who want to have a normal life. They are very very well educated you can have conservation with them in english if you like and they have philosophical thoughts about things some of my "western friends" would not even dare to think about. The girls are beautiful and they can smile. So what about the crazy suicide bombers posing a threat to the Israely state? Well these are normal people who have lost half their family or homes or land or water and simply see no future with israel taking away more and more land from them. They have no other way to fight then putting bombs on themself and blow themself up. If you are on the crossroad of living and dying I am sure it is not an easy choice and they ought to have a good reason for going into death and the Islam is just a protection for their souls rather then the cause of their action. Also I never got the feeling that the young palestinensians want to see the state of Israel fail. They just want FREEDOM and PROTECTION inside the boundaries of their own land. Now to the other side. What about the Israeli population. I meet some young Israeli people. And they are like us. They want to go out have a good party and an easy life. They hate war and they hate weapons. The are forced to go to the army though and there is no way around it when you are a member of the Israeli State. They train for 2 years with weapons and even those who did not choose to go to the army and are in their 2 years of mandatory service will need to take part of raids into the Palestinension Territories and kill unarmed people. So they are trained to kill. Now this is all not the cause. The cause is much more problematic as in Israel are some very very right wing religious leaders. Its that religious group that does not even recognize the staate of Israel before their profet comes down the olive oil mountain. These are the people with the most influence in this country. These are the militant settlers wanting more and more land for themself and those are the people that do nothing all day then read their religious book and debate about it all day in and out.

Now back to the poll. The Israeli government is in no way shy to make the world remember what the world has done to them in the past. They make connections to events in the past that are in no way related. The poll just showed that people do think that the way the current government of Israel is handling the situation is getting the whole world into trouble and I know few people around me who would disagree. They are in the middle of a oiltank and the wrong spark and the whole region explodes into a world war. Israel has Nuclear Weapons - the only country in the region that has. Israel has not signed a nuclear weapon treaty and I doubt they would hesitate a second to use them if they see Iran or Syria is supporting the palestinians with military. So by saying that Israel with its current government is a threat to world peace is a opinion that in no way antisemitic it is just fear among people who live on territories that have seen the worst war in history. We the people of the European Union oppose miltary actions and our leaders belief that there are peacefull way out of crises the world is in. Neither the war in Iraq nor the war against the Palestinians is justified. And if they would have asked me I would have put the US government and the Israeli government on the top of the list. And I say government NOT people. So I am not antisemitic or antiamerican I just disagree with the way the leaders in those countries handle their vision of a world living in peace.
Calming down resetting the borders of Israel to those that have been set and acknowledged in VARIOUS treaties (Oslo) and opening ALL boarders in the region would be the ONLY option to get the peace in the region back. Every bullet fired will multiply and multiply and multiply and at one point it will be to late and millions of people could die. I doubt that this time Israel will do as good as in the 60s even when they use the bomb......
What really makes me shudder is that Israel calls for history and now attacks the European Union. This is a VERY dangerous game and if that Stupid White Man in the white house in the land far away is getting a reelection we might start to see a strong diversification of Israel and the US toward the EU and the EU will find new allies in the Near, Middle and Far East. A third world war is not out of question and for sure it might be the last war.

I urge EVERY ONE to see the dangers of this. Make your voice heard. Put articles in your local newspaper in your Blog wiki in your VJ sets. It goes beyond you and me it is the future of our society of our planet and its time to stop thinking for themself its the time to speak up before it might be to late. From today on I do have fear again - fear that this all gets totally out of hand. This is HIGHLY dangerous. Read the article at the guardian to get the full scope:

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metadata and geo url

I have added some meta data to my Blog for those that might want to know where I live. If you want to get information on who is near me you can go to:

http://geourl.org/near/?p=http://homepage.mac.com/falk/iblog/

for more information on geourl go to:

http://geourl.org