So this has been the third day of 27C3 and as such three fourth of the conference have passed. Absolutely a pity on the one side, on the other i am looking forward to catch up with my sleep demand. At least i have not too much blood in my caffeinstream. Today, i enqueued to the people who toppled down one or two times Mate bottles, which causes the famous and original hacker conference background sound. The talks I attended this day were unlike the day before more society related. But read for yourself:

A look on 2010

The first appearance today made Constanze Kurz, Frank Rieger, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Andreas Bogk from CCC in giving a retrospect of 2010. When they presented the development of member numbers as first thing by tradition, they welcomed the CCC's (basically a German club) first member from India. It followed a long, but entertaining report of the months, including (besides other)

So, today I reexperienced that picking out talks that are more or less above my skill level in combination with a lack of sleep is not an ideal situation here. Nevertheless i am sure i can draw a picture of what has happened, even if not too extensively.

Number crunching with FPGAs

I made it just in time to this talk (problem: with only one consumed cup of coffee). I was rather curious on how things go ("for the masses" in the title gave that impression), but if you have no real knowledge in electro-technics it is a bit like magic. So, what Felix Domke did was to show how a DES cipher could be brute forced in a certain time (~1 week) with a certain budget (~1k €). Usual ways of doing so (e.g. with CPUs, GPUs) are too expensive as loads of them are used to achieve the goal in the specified time. So, what he did was to buy some used boards with FPGAs on ebay and program them. Therefore he made use of the project Copacobana - short for cost-optimized parallel code breaker. Furthermore he is interested in sharing the calculation power. An opportunity is the Dreambox receiver which is fitted with FPGAs and can be used while on standby.

In Berlin's winter the 27th Chaos Communication Congress started again at the bcc, next to Alexanderplatz. Hence the available amount of tickets was a lot higher than demand i am happy that i got a full ticket in the presale. And luckily, i made it through the unusual strong winter from my family, where i spent christmas, back to Berlin in time, thanks to two guys from Duisburg, who offered me a ride.

Just like last year, I want to sum up what i have heard and seen at 27C3 each day.

Last weekend I hat some nice chats as well at Ubuntu Release Party in Berlin, as well as something like a talk circle. Out of those I like to share some application tipps with you:

• style

  style is a command line utility that can analyse German and English texts and gives out a whole lot of statistics. Style differs among the parts readability, sentence info and sentence beginnings. From Camilla's point of view, who introduced this tool to us, the Flesch-value, which ranges from 0 to 100 (except for C language ;) ). This, some other rates and statistic information like number of long and short sentences are given and are useful to stylecheck your documents.
  

Ein kurzer programmatischer Rückblick auf das letzte Wochenende und eine kurze Vorschau und Einladung zum kommenden Wochenende.

Ubucon 2010

Am letzten, für mich nur auf den Samstag reduziert, fand die Ubuntu Anwenderkonferenz Ubucon in Leipzig statt. Mit über 250 Besuchern und einem breiten Vortragsprogramm ist diese wohl ganz erfolgreich verlaufen. Von daher ist es schön, mit dem Vortrag zum KDE Plasma Desktop Teil des Programmes gewesen zu sein, als auch natürlich vor Ort gewesen zu sein. Nächstes Jahr schaffe ich es hoffentlich auch wieder über alle Veranstaltungstage da zu sein. Nicht nur wegen der Torte... Dazu möchte ich hier noch kurz meine Vortragsfolien zum Download anbieten. Durch die primäre Erstellung in HTML (es sollte unbedingt auf einer Aktivität im Webbrowser Widget laufen ;) ), brauchte der PDF Export etwas Überredung. Wunderhübsch sind sie so nicht, erfüllen aber Ihren Zweck. Sie sind auch den Ubucon-Organisatoren zur Verfügung gestellt und werden demnächst sicher auch über Vortragsseite zu haben sein.

Mister Wong, ein deutschstämmiger Social Bookmarking Dienst (altdeutsch: eine Online Lesezeichenverwaltung mit sozialen Funktionen), hat bereits vor einigen vielen Wochen (das war so Mitte/Ende Juni) eine neue Version seiner Firefox Toolbar veröffentlicht. Auf Netzwertig werden die neuen Funktionen genauer beschrieben, im Prinzip ist sie um Bewertungs-, Stöber- und Verteilfunktionen ergänzt worden. In einem Absatz eines aktuellen Blogposts wird zudem fast beiläufig ein größerer Relaunch angekündigt.

Zurück zur Toolbar. Unter anderem kann man per Klick einen neuen Tweet erstellen, bei dem Titel und ggf. gekürzte URL voreingetragen werden. Genau, Tweet, Twitter... da fehlt doch was. Zum Glück sind Firefox Extensions letztlich nur Archive und der Code wurde hier nicht unleserlich gemacht. So ward es leicht möglich, dieses Funktion für die OpenSource Alternative identi.ca zu ergänzen: tatsächlich habe ich das bereits kurz nach der Veröffentlichung gemacht, nur das drüber reden hat auf sich warten lassen ;) Die modifizierte Variante stelle ich aber erst jetzt hier bereit: Wong Toolbar Identi.ca Edition herunterladen.

For the fifth time, FrOSCon took place. I think i have been there now for four years now and is has always been a fun and interesting conference. Just like this weekend. Completed with Monika and mcas, we ran the Kubuntu booth, next to our friends from KDE and Amarok.

But a little fraction we distributed all of our Kubuntu CDs, the local user group TroLUG and also KDE took over also good amounts for further sharing. Thus and because of the good conversations, FrOSCon has been a success for the German Kubuntu Community.

Vor kurzem bin ich durch Markey zufällig auf einen Artikel gestoßen, der sich mit der Arbeit des Biologen Anthony Cashmore auseinandersetzt. Er vertritt die Ansicht, dass es den freien Willen nicht gibt. Jede Entscheidung und Handlung basiert auf der Genetik, das Umfeld sowie einer Portion Stochastik. Das Bewusstsein ist die Wahrnehmung bzw. Reflektion des unbewusst gesteuerten Handelns. Dabei werden noch weitere Aspekte verknüpft: Das Bewusstsein sei eine evolutionäre Entwicklung, die uns den freien Willen vorgaukelt, um Verantwortung zu fühlen und somit das Leben in einer Gemeinschaft als auch als Individuum führen zu können.

When I started in SEO business almost have a year ago, I have been shunt into Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team. Reading his blog articles, i did not only get insights into Google, but also in his person. I got to know, that he starts challenges which would endure 30 days, usually. For one of those, he decided to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, and he eventually he kept using it. The latest challenge was to replace his iPhone with Android based Nexus One, and he does not seem to roll back, too.

In our time, when everything is, goes and is going to be more and more web based, my impression is that many users do not think about where they put their data, how secure the provider is and which control they have. Especially with the rise of software-as-a-service models you need to be sure to know what happens with your data, somewhere in the cloudy somewhat. Who is you email provider and who can read your mails? Are there Backdoors? Should i upload my pictures to flickr? Where can i safely send private and possibly sensitive messages?

Meanwhile it is the day before yesterday, when the KDE Community released KDE SC 4.4 and yesterday, when Kubuntu published the packages. It is great to see how the desktop environment matures and still getting new and terrific features. One of the finest features – i think – is window tabbing. It is as simply as that: you pick some single applications and group them in one window. Actually, i enabled it only few hours ago, but generally i am thinking of grouping applications for a certain, specific task, but also grouping applications for a superordinate purpose. Like communication. In the following screenshot i arranged all real-time and micro-message programs, which are Konversation (IRC), Choqok (Identi.ca), and Kopete (Jabber and stuff). Great thing is that if I open a chat window in Kopete it is sorted automatically (like JR).