technozid

There are a few sites who managed to sneak around Firefox’ popup blocker. While checking out Yahoo Mail the other day, I got this popup:

I’m reluctant to admit that I have no clue. I heard of Shakira, but as far as I know she’s a Latina and the woman on the pic doesn’t look like one (let’s put aside Michael Jackson for deceiving looks on that matter..). Mariah is most likely Mariah Carey, but who is Britaney? Or is it a typo and they meant Britney? Not that I would recognize her any better – I always mistake her for that Hilton girl. And isn’t Mariah Carey something for older people like – erm – me? I guess if I would show this pic to my intern, she would immediately know who the woman is. And I was soooo looking forward to that free ringtone

Thanks to Xeni of BoingBoing I spent a wonderful weekend walking down memory lane. On two recent postst Xeni told about her first time viewing of Raumpatrouille Orion episodes:

This is so awesome. I grew up the child of a trekkie, and have a genetically-ingrained fondness for scifi teevee of this era — but I’d never heard of “Raumpatroille” before this week.

Xeni was kind enough to publish two comments by myself to her articles. Inspired by the topic, I shuffled through those old VHS tapes and found one titled “Orion”. During this chokingly hot weekend this gave me a couple of hours of sweet memory entertainment. I’m supposed to have the vinyl disc with the soundtrack somewhere. Guess I need to make a trip to the attic.

Thanks, Xeni!

heise.de reports that the University of California , San Diego (UCSD) has released the sourcecode of their UCSD-Pascal to the public to be used for educational purposes.

UCSD-Pascal was the first programming language I got taught – the first I learned on my own was Commodore Basic. I was in the first age-group ever who was offered courses in information technology at my school. We were a selected group of 12 pupils, and we had – tadaaaa!! – 2 (two!) Apple ][ computers to our disposal. Well, disposal is not the right word – they were jealously guarded, and one of them had to be borrowed from the principal’s office prior to each course. They had two floppy drives – one for the operating system, with the floppy always inserted, and the second for the Pascal environment and for saved files. The floppies stored 180 KBytes if I recall it right…
Our Math teacher struggled hard to stay ahead of us knowledgewise – about half of the kids in the course had Comodore VIC 20 or Commodore C64 computers at home. Nevertheless she managed to teach us the Pascal programming language with the UCSD environment, and I became quite fond of it.

Actually I considered the structures inside of Pascal as far superior compared to the Basic daialect on my Commodore C64 that I actively looked into a Pascal compiler for the C64. Some while later, the German software company Data Becker(they still exist as an outlet for cheap software and books) released such a piece of software. Unfortunately it could in no way be compared to UCSD Pascal, so I started to re-design the UCSD toolbox with its look and feel for the C64, using the Data Becker Pascal compiler as its core. Today I probably would get sued for such a task, but back in the early 1980ies I participated at the Jugend Forscht competition and came in as runner up for my whole province. My career choice for Information Technology however has to a very large extend been shaped by UCSD Pascal.

Enough walking down memory lane for today.

On a sidenote: This is actually a funny coincidence. Jona came to my office the other day and during the initial smalltalk to “break the ice” (little breaking was necessary) I enquired about their IT lessons at school. Once he finished, I more or less told him the above story, and later I thought that would make a nice blog entry…

We now have Battlestar Galactica on TV. Since I kinda liked the original series when I was a teenager, I had a look at the pilot and the first sequel. The idea for the new series is nice: the new plot is 40 years after the original one. The ship itself is about to be taken out of service and to be transformed into a museum. But there are quite some inconsistencies which annoy me a bit. Not that I am a hardcore fan of the old movies, but still it is a bit annoying. Here is my list:

1. The battlestar got a makeover. It is more soft, with rounded edges. The original battlestar was more bulky and angular. Though the new ship looks nice, it’s inconsistent with the “taken out of service after 40 years” setting.
2. Commander Adama was an old man already in the original series. Now he is an old man again, but (perceived) 55 years + 40 years makes – uhm – 95 years. The new Adama is again maybe 55 years old… Or did I miss a generation change in Adama too?
3. Though the succession of battle names is a nice idea, I still don’t feel comfortable with Starbuck being a woman (Katee Sackhoff). And a “butchy” woman too. Starbuck was always the pretty boy, but not Brigitte Nielsen on steroids!
4. The sexual innuendo. Not that I’m against it as such – but it is sort of disturbing. This might eventually work out in the long run – we’ll see.
5. They did an extremly poor job on the walking animation of the Cylons. I know enough about 3D computer animation to spot that this is a poor job. Also the compositing into the footage is often done poorly.
6. Atomic missiles hit the ships (with impressive smoke tails in SPACE!) and – so what? Nothing! Refugees walk through green, sunlit landscapes with several mushroom clouds in the background – so what? Nothing! Helo flees through fallout rain and – injects himself a shot of “anti radiation”. COME ON!
7. The cast. Hmm. I am positively surprised that they chose – well – “ugly” actors. Of course they are not ugly, but they are neither supermodels. I tend to think that this is actually a smart move. They look “normal”. They look like my mates around the office. Especially the technical staff in the hangars (Aaron Douglas and Nicki Clyne). You’ll never see them on a fashion advertising, but they are the kind of people who hang out at your local bar. Maybe it is meant as a contrast to the I’m-almost-showing-my-breasts-in-every-epsiode-Cylon (Tricia Helfer) and the I-could-have-done-Hugo-Boss-adverts-Scientist (James Callis). But I like the idea of “normal” people. Still it is annoying.

Ok, folks over at the production studio: you have one more episode to convince me…

Sidenote: Get a good laugh and access the site with Flash disabled – they have “Lorem Ipsum” text on it

P.S. I like Boomer (Grace Park) best.

Update: OK, we might be a bit behind the moon (pun intended) in Germany… I just learned that it is actually not a continuation of the old series, but a reenactment. Oh well… Wired has a pretty good article covering most of what I wrote above.

Many years ago, I moved to this town to start studies in Electrical Engineering. My parents weren’t the richest ones, so rather early I needed to get a student’s job to earn some money. I ended up with a company whose boss was a visioneer. Back then, he postualted that it makes more sense to REPAIR things, instead of throwing them away. And he wanted to develop a database which guides engineers step-by-step through schematics of machinery and electronics to repair. Mind you, it was IBM-PC with DOS 2.2 times back then!
Later, he learned that German and European politicians planned on passing legislative that actually manufacturers need to take old and broken equipment back so that it gets disassembled, recycled if possible, and properly disposed. This law – dubbed by him the “Elektronikschrottverordnung” – was “imminent any time now”. I stayed with the company for almost 4 years, and always the legislative was “imminent”, and he envisioned that he might be the forerunner offering recycling services as well.

His company is long out of business. In later years he at least managed to get some repair contracts for desktop laser printers. Still, the company did not survive. However, a few days ago I got a message from an old friend with questions regarding how to get a website indexed by search engines. What is so strange about this is that he has the domain www.elektrogesetz.de and tries to set up an information portal for end customers and businesses about the new law for – well – return/recycling of electronic goods. Finally, there IS a law – almost 20 years after I first heard about it being “imminent”. My old boss would have need a reaaaaly long breath…