Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Oh no I said both words in one sentence. Eric S. Raymond has a written a piece on his homepage about his experience of trying to configure cups. Beeing in the cups "interface" myself ones in my life I can clearly see where he is coming from. Yes the command line is fast. Yes the command line is beautiful, IF you have no girl and if all you do your whole life is trying to figure out how stuff works. If you want to get stuff done sometimes there goes nothing over a single mouseclick.

He writes:

The point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS people — it's also to beat up on every other open-source designer who does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI. Watch and learn...

Seeing that the new Gimp(2.0) has a somewhat improved interface I think there is more and more awareness in the Opensource field that this might be an important point to bring the non geeks to the Opensoftware movement. I do not say that the movement should look at Microsoft, Adobe and co. they do have the power to do things differently, but remember always ALWAYS have the user in mind when creating an interface. It does not have to be flashy hip it just needs to work fast and reliable just like the command line. I have friends with PCs that hate Microsoft some tried out Linux, they are not unintelligent people (in their field they are quite good) they are just no geeks and they throw out Linux after a couple of days figuring out only the most fundamental stuff and not getting anything done.
The constant ignorance in the opensource movement in regards to interface has to stop if they want to succeed in the long term.

Posted by fALk at 11:57 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In an article on wired about all things goooooogle there is a section that interviews a couple of interface designers about how they would redisgn the google interface. They are "interface designers". I wish they will never ever get a job. No wonder that most of the interfaces that I use daily suck so bad when I see that. They must have mistaken interface design with abstrakt art or something. Gosh is that bad, espicially the alleged "propagandist" a little way page down. Why not make google only work with flash, then its all blinky blinky.

Posted by fALk at 10:19 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After a bit of fizzling I have now fully functioning 700GB G5 under my table. That is with a 500GB Serial ATA Stripe Raid (6Y250MO and 7Y250MO Maxtor) and a 200 GB ATA (6Y200PO Maxtor). I have not done full benchmarking but can report that the Raid is a beast, I had peak out yesterday at 112MB/s read performance. Benchmarking and Pictures will follow.
I just want to say that I hate Apple for not using the room that is available. There is so much space above the optical drive that not only could I put the drive there I could even elevate it with some plastic screws about one cm from the optical, giving me enough safety room for cooling and a way for the wind blowing through the drive fan.
The cable mess is less then expected even with a much too long IDE cable. I had some problems with the optical beeing slave so I reversed it again and it works beautiful with the optical drive (Superdrive) as master.

Posted by fALk at 19:08 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone thinking robots will be off another 100 years NEEDS to have a look at these movies. They are moving fluently, standing on one leg. punshing each other in da face like real man would do. The whole ROBOlympics really knocked my sock off. Read through the contests, its worth to see how far we really are already. Exciting <->Frightening. Interesting for sure.

Posted by fALk at 0:45 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is a sad day. The only real change presidential candidate that really had a chance of winning is not campaigning any more in the race for the democratic nomination. He stays on the ballot and is not dropping out completely but will focus more on "changing american politics through grassroots" then on becoming a president. Very sad indeed when you see that the two remaining candidates are - well - not much better then bush in my not so humble opinion. Mr. I am part of the Skullz and Bones Society Kerry will probably get a home run now and take in all the remaining delegates with Edwards there just because he needs to be there (slimy lawyer who will be delighted to support any measure to help lawyers get in more lawsuits, record industry, movie industry SCO you know where I wanna go?).
So my take? You really want my take? Well the Republicans will get their dream candidate Kerry who is already stumbling in early attacks and the attacks have not yet mounted to full scale. I wish the unenlightened american population another 4 years of bush, truly deeply from my heart. Just because then at least the world does not fall again for a liar (which Mr. Kerry would be from the beginning on - it will be all the same things over again, and the governments of the world will fall for it - just as they have fallen for Mr. Bush in the beginning, and still until recently). Then they will see that their system is flawed, truly flawed then there will be a real seeding ground for a revolution - it seems it really needs to get a lot worse before it gets better. Otherwise it will just go on and on and on and get worse and worse and worse all over the world. Yes you the people of America get full credit for continue to mess up the balance of this beauty that we once called our earth.

Dean out. Peace out. Viva la Revolution.

Posted by fALk at 22:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kuro5hin is examining the comment style in the windows source code. my favorite code snippet:

* CallProc32W is insane. It's a variadic function that uses
* the pascal calling convention. (It probably makes more sense
* when you're stoned.)

Posted by fALk at 11:48 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well if you are up for some eyecandy without a story head over to the official Dronez Website to watch a short "film" rendered in 3d with some russian style robot taking over Siberia. Not very creative but fast pace and nice to look at. I hope some day people understand that message is king so - and that divx sucks.

http://www.dronez.de/

Posted by fALk at 12:47 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There I trip over a website with a link to an special DJ VJ Live Act Insurance Company. If you are in the ClubArtBussiness you know how hard it can be to find a insurance that covers your stuff, in the studio on the way to your gig, covers the gig payment in case something gets stolen or lost. Well now there is CaseGuard.de that specialises exactly on this kind of problems.

Posted by fALk at 17:43 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tim has found a way to to remove the pictures smileys from iChat. If there is one thing I hate over everything else its the force use of pictures smileys. I for one LOVE ASCII smileys in all their incarnation, not having the problem as tim to chat much about code where a 8) could be a problem but I actually really like smileys the ASCII way. The interesting thing about the picture smileys is that for instance you use iChat on one side and AIM chat client on the other side and put in the :/ then the actual "feel" is much different on both sides. One looks rather sad the other looks as if it was thinking without a real expression. Both differ completely from the original ASCII version feel.

Under the mac get rid of them now:

sudo rm /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/InstantMessage.framework/Versions/A/Resources/*.lproj/SmileyTable.plist

Posted by fALk at 17:26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those who care: I will be video performing at the Valentines Vandit Night at Casino Berlin tomorrow night Friday the 13th of February 2004. For you audio pleasure Paul van Dyk (Vandit rec, Berlin) and Gabriel & Dresden (SanFransisco US) will be there and make you smile with hit prone tranzed beatz and soundz. If you happen to like this kind of music its sure to be a good night, I will show some special "heart" sequences and and new footage for valentines day. Little world critical as always.

www.vandit.de www.paulvanddyk.de http://www.gabrielanddresden.com

Posted by fALk at 15:03 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No not the Customer BetaTest (seed programm) I am talking about the movie. As fan of anime the new upcoming cinema release of the great Appleseed series is something to be happy about. Go watch da trailer on Apples Japan website. (appleconfused yet?). Stunning 3d in the all lovely Appleseed anime style. Good vs. Evil. Weapons of Mass Destruction against anime beauties.

http://www.apple.co.jp/quicktime/trailers/appleseed_large.html

Posted by fALk at 14:51 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever wondered how you can deform the face of an actor as much as Neo did to Agent Smith in the battle sequenz of the matrix? Learn from a PDF.

http://www.virtualcinematography.org/

Posted by fALk at 14:48 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That our loved baby the internet is at danger we all hopefully know by now. Many to many communication is something the no current government wants as it parts them from controlling message and information at large. So its clear they are all out searching for the holy grail that could put the internet under control. This heise.de article shows us a new stragedy. Teach the kids how the governments of this world would like all of us to use the internet: Trusted computing. Verisign (the company that holds very close ties to the bush admininstration and the pentagon) is at it and introduces a trusted Computing platform called i-SAFE. The Trustee is the school. You get a "USB dongle" handed out. This is the nightmare starting. First the US kids then the US population, then the world. Kids watch out the school could take your dongle away for visiting 2600.com or www.islam.com or similar. This is the worst case scenario starting and there is nothing that will stop that if the schools will be forced to introduce the system to all kids - a very likely thing.
Smart for sure, its sneaking in under the radar like all the horror visions predicted and there seems to be no outcry nothing only silence. Oh I forgot we gotta save our kids from the horror of the anarchic internet...

Posted by fALk at 13:08 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its always nice to find like minded people on the net. No not through those hip social networks (orkut) where you need to be a nerd among geeks to have friends. I mean stumbling across a webpage and think "hey this person has some of the same thoughts as you". As happened with Mr. John Walker from Switzerland and founder of Autodesk, Inc - an internet activist. Lovely thoughts to be found on his site.

Posted by fALk at 12:10 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)