Sperrobjekt Weblog - English Articles

Knowee, a social address book and more

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:48:00 +0100

Two days ago, Benjamin Nowack announced the re-release of Knowee, a distributed social web address book. Knowee started out as a project supported by the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group and will also available for download soon. This means you can install it on your own server, if you like.

Knowee is somewhat similar to NoseRub as it aggregates many of your profiles from popular social networks and applications like Twitter, Identi.ca, or Delicious. But Knowee adds a lot of semantic wizardry to all the data its bots collect over time. Among the technologies employed are FOAF, RDF, Microformats, OpenID, Google's Social Graph API, and SPARQL. The latter makes it easy to re-use the aggregated information in other applications. Without digging too deep into all these formats and APIs, let me say this seems to evolve into a very powerful tool, far more than a simple address book. For more info, read the introductory blog post, or simply take a shot at it.

That being said, I'm a little irritated about how little buzz Knowee has created so far (only 4[!] hits on Technorati?). Is everyone simply fed up with yet another social network aggregator? Or am I just a little bit too impatient? I don't know, but I know that Knowee deserves more attention even if it's still in an early stage. Especially since I'm sure that Benjamin will add more useful features soon, e.g. the integration of MyBlogLog.

My public Knowee profile can be found here.

2008 Draws To a Close

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 23:26:00 +0100

So, it's been ages since I blogged something here. I won't promise it'll be any better next year, but I will at least try to update my blog more frequently. My other blog requires a lot of attention most of the time, and time is what it's all about, right? The year 2008 is almost over now, and I've been spending some time with my family - well, my parents, that is. My sister is currently working in development collaboration in Sudan, and I am there right now to pay her a visit and see and learn more about this country that has been put on the so-called "axis of evil" by the Bush administration.

I've spent a couple of days in Khartoum now and I am really enjoying it. Not only are the weather conditions so much more comfortable than in Germany, but people are friendly and helpful, too. Some even speak German and are happy to have conversations with us. Of course, the political situation is very tense with the conflicts in western and southern Sudan, the looming decision of the ICC, and the US boycott of the country (for the US attitude towards Sudan please check yesterday's article in the NYT). But, as a visitor and tourist, it's quite an experience to be here.

We already drove over the Nile to Khartoum's twin town Omdurman where we admired the Mahdi's tomb, some of the last traditional boat builders, and some other sights. In Khartoum, we also visited some interesting places and enjoyed the hospitality of the very good cafes and restaurants that can be found in the capital. I'm not going into more details here and now, but I promise to post at least a wrap-up of my week in Sudan. And I wish I had brought a GPS device to be able to contribute more data to the OpenStreetMap project - which already covers large parts of the city in great detail.

For further information I recommend the blogs of Bake Evans-Pritchard and, in case you understand Italian, Violetta Polese, who also wrote the most up-to-date guide book to Khartoum and Sudan. So much for now, I'm going to crawl under my mosquito net and try to find some sleep. Salaam!

BarCamp Berlin 3 Review

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:19:00 +0100

Now that the third Barcamp Berlin is officially over, it's time for me to take a look back at the event that took place at the Hauptstadtrepräsentanz der Deutschen Telekom. As prestigious as the building itself is, it's only partly fit for a Barcamp. While the atrium was the perfect place to meet people, to have a chat or two, and to simply relax between sessions, the session rooms just weren't rooms yet mere compartments, divided by foldable room divider. That brought the noise level up way too high, with the result that many participants had a hard time understanding what they were being told - not to mention discussions that would have been possible. Apart from that, however, it was an excellent Barcamp. I met lots of old and some new friends, had a great time at the after-hour at St. Oberholz, and was tired but happy after eleven hours of sessions and chit-chat.

I was especially pleased that most of the session more demanding, on a higher level than those at BarCamp Munich the week before. It's always a matter of luck to find the right sessions because, too often, you just don't know what to expect after the session slotting. But, as I said, this time I attended six interesting sessions which I will summarize here in chronological order.

The first session I attended was by Ole Begemann who introduced us to the Strobist approach to photography which is basically about how to use off-camera flash lights to improve the quality of one's photos. Ole published some notes about his talk. Thanks, Ole, it was an enlightening session in every resprect, especially because I bought a digital SLR this year and still have a lot to learn.

Petar Djekic then showed us mufin, a new service that seeks to make up for the shortcomings of conventional music recommendation services. While users of last.fm, Amazon, or other popular sites and services are often faced with inconclusive, uninteresting or even wrong recommendations that are direct results of their respective approaches - user generated recommendations, automatic matching of any kind - a new, better strategy should add one more important information: It analyzes the actual music files. Of course, other tools do that, too, but mufin aims to integrate all known methods and thus generate better recommendations. Inspiring.

Next up was a session by our hosts, Deutsche Telekom, who have launched a developer portal some time ago. The German telecommunications giant read the signs of the times and obviously realized that they need to open up their products to developers. In short, there's an Open API for interested developers who want to play around with voice call services, VoIP, and sending short messages over the net. I don't want to go into details here, but I must admit that they realized that they have problems there and honestly asked third-party developers for help. This seems to be quiet an achievement for this huge corporation that - in the eyes of most geeks - ranks not much behind M$ on the unpopulariry scale. We'll have to wait and see, however, how this endeavor turns out in the long run.

Far more interesting in terms of practical use was Konstantins session on Advanced JS. He could have skipped the introductory parts, though, and skipped straight to closures and prototypes, but it's all in his slides. Very interesting stuff that gave me a lot to think about, and he also recommended a couple of interesting books on the topic. Since JavaScript has become so ubiquitous, it might well be worth reading one of those.

Equally instructive was Jan and Volker's talk about CouchDB, a document-oriented database written in Erlang that seems to be very useful for a variety of diverse applications. It demands an almost completely new way of thinking from someone who usually developes for relational databases, but it seems to be lightning fast if you know how to use it right. Definitely worth a closer look. You can find links to further presentations on CouchDB on the wiki.

Although tired and to the brim filled with information, I stayed for the last round of sessions and attended Ian Forrester's talk on Boxee and XBMC. Unusual stuff, but we heard and talked about a lot of tools that I will try out for sure. Building my own media center for watching TV, recorded video, and everything else has been on my list for a long time. I set up a MythTV box once on Fedora, and it worked, but the hardware was to old, cranky and loud. Maybe I try to find an old X-Box and fiddle with it a little more. Anyhow, the next time I got a couple of hours left, I will give Boxee a shot.

All in all, I really enjoyed my day at this BarCamp, and I also enjoyed relaxing on Sunday, with no BarCampers around, just a long breakfast, strolling around Görli, taking a walk through some other parts of the city and thinking about anything but computers

BarCamp Berlin 3 started

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:09:00 +0200

Finally, here we go. BarCamp Berlin 3 has just started at the Hauptstadtrepräsentanz der Deutschen Telekom. I already met lots of old and new friends here. The organisation team hast just declared the BC opend Now session slotting begins. Some of the topics: Internet television, opening up Deutsche Telekom, map of accessible places in the real world, visualize the taste of wine, the science of sleep, Netvibes, web2.0 for theaters, failures of web projects, Drupal, the wisdom of crowds/Krauts, addiction to TV shows, software as a service/cloud computing, getting things written, learning languages via Twitter, virus hunting, photography with strobes, user recommendations/collective intelligence, internet in Armenia, Android development, interactive vector graphics in the browser, personalized feeds, Erlang, CouchDB, music recommendation, YAML, beer " sauna, finding things again in the web, new media in Central Asia, screencasting.

Ok, almost an hour to go until the first session starts. Check the live coverage at http://live.barcampberlin.org/.

Creative Vista webcam on Ubuntu Hardy

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:01:00 +0200

A while ago, I succeeded in getting my Creative Vista webcam to work on Ubuntu Gutsy. I didn't use it for quite a while, then upgraded to Hardy, and as a result the webcam did not work anymore. I'm writing this partly as a reminder to myself so I get it up and running more quicky the next time

So here's what you need to do if your webcam stops working:

Remove any old ov51x-jpeg-modules-x.xx.xx-xx (using Synaptic or the like)
Check rastageeks for any updates, i.e. the latest version of the ov51x-jpeg driver
Usually there already is a .deb-package for convenient installation on Ubuntu: install it, ignoring any warning by gdebi
Follow the installation instructions, especially:sudo module-assistant a-i ov51x-jpeg
Now you can sudo modprobe ov51x-jpeg; if that fails, check dmesg for any error message, there may be options set in /etc/modprobe.de/options and/or /etc/modprobe.de/ov51x-jpeg
Enjoy!

Update: Using the webcam with Skype didn't prove that easy. There is a bug (in Skype, as I'm told) that prevents the ov51x-jpeg driver to work with its video function. There's a patch floating around in the Skype forums (ov51x-jpeg-core.noblock.patch.txt). Downloading this, however, requires one to sign up to the Skype forums :O( Then, I couldn't simply apply the patch to ov51x-jpeg-core.c because it seems to be for version 1.5.5 or so. That's why I had to manually add a couple of lines to ov51x-jpeg-core.c and then recompile it. Finally, I had to add options ov51x-jpeg forceblock=1 to /etc/modprobe.d/options. And now it works.

Google Gadgets for Linux

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:54:00 +0200

Half an hour ago, I read the news that there is now a beta version of Google Gadgets available for Linux. Since I've been plaing around with Google Gadgets for a while, I decided to give it a try. And, although I'm usually a KDE user, right now I'm a little bit dissatisfied with KDE since I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.04 a while ago; so I switched to Gnome to see if the bugs appear only with KDE (they don't).

Anyway, I followed the instructions, installed some extra libs that are needed (actually, I've got the feeling that I installed a couple more libs that aren't really required), went through the configure-make-make install routine, and voila:

Webmontag Frankfurt

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:37:00 +0200

Yesterday, the regional web crowd got together at the Brotfabrik in Frankfurt for the 13th edition(?) of the famous Webmontag. After the last web mondays' attendance figures were relatively low, Andreas and Darren had been very active in inviting lots of people and advertising the event. Accordingly, the number of participants was significantly higher than before, which was a good thing apparently.

Contentwise, the session covered topics as diverse as presentation zen, Google Web Toolkit, Selenium IDE, OSGi, and MySQL Proxy. Pretty technical, one must admit, but mostly interesting nonetheless. I can say that I enjoyed it. As usual, socializing began immediately after the last presentation ended. Some interesting conversations ensued with other participants, I had a delicious chickpea-cilantro soup, and the WiFi was free. What more to expect from a Webmonday? Thanks to Andreas and Darren for organizing the event, and to Harry for kindly hosting the event.

CHDK firmware on my Canon IXUS 800 IS

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:05:00 +0200

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled over the CHDK project where some fine people develop additional firmware for a wide range of Canon digital cameras. Since I call a Canon IXUS 800 IS - also known as Canon SD700 in other parts of the world - my own, I was instantly captivated by the amount of additional features that can be added by means of loading an small piece of software onto my cam. Yesterday, I tried to get it to work and was set up within a couple of minutes.

Some of the new choices I am given are that I can now save pictures in RAW image format (one of the reasons I got myself a Canon EOS350D on ebay a couple of weeks ago), a live histogram appears on the display, the state of charge of my battery is shown, and I can download and apply a large number of user scripts that combine batches of actions and permit to trigger them with a single button. And the best thing: The original firmware does not get overwritten!

Ever since I installed Rockbox on a Sansa digital audio player, I'm a big fan of user-contributed, open source alternative firmware. And this one is no exception, it's simply a glorious extension to my digicam. Let me show you a couple of pics of CHDK's new menu and display options:

The new, alternative main menu

One of the new submenus

The display in capture mode with some new features

The display with the additional histogram

Firefox 3 beta 4, Prism 0.2, and the perfect feed reader

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:42:00 +0100

I just installed the recent beta 4 release of Firefox 3 (Firefox Portable, to be exact, thus making it run alongside my trusty Firefox 2). Firefox 3 is blazing fast, but this may be due to the fact that I've got almost no add-ons installed. My Firefox 2 has to carry the burden of 27 active extensions that may or may not slow down the whole applicaton, who knows. All in all, Firefox 3 seems to be very stable already, but I need my add-ons for web development and so on. That's why I've been looking for other things to do with the new beta. When I found out that Mozilla Labs released a new version of Prism, their stand-alone XULRunner applicication slash Site Specific Browser. If you install Prism 0.2 as add-on to Firefox 3, it allows you to create and export new applicatons from within the browser. The new apps then use the browser's rendering enginge, it seems (I'm not exactly sure how it works). Yet, again, the resulting app feels considerably faster than the old Prism. I'm using an installation of tt-rss on my server as web based feed reader. Now that it's running as a Prism app, it seems to respond so much faster than before - which reduces the amount of time I need to read all my feeds. Great!

Trust SC-5500p and Ubuntu

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:09:00 +0100

Today, I got myself an external USB sound card and tried to install it on my notebook running Ubuntu Studio. It's a Trust SC-5500p because that's the only affordable model my retailer had in stock. To cut a long story short: I didn't work as I hoped it would. I could get heavily distorted sound out of its front speaker output jack, but the rear as well as the center outputs remained silent. I thought the days of insufficient support for hardware on Linux were over, but: FAIL! Since I swore to myself that I wouldn't spent hours and hours an installing packages and hacking config files anymore, I returned the device, and I will start to look for another affordable solution. Suggestions anyone?