So what happened in the last few weeks and months? To be honest, mostly work and not much play. My day job as graphic designer has become very busy approaching the end of the year. Not only is it the biggest season for sales and advertising with Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and New Year, but everybody is trying to tie up their loose ends before the new year. And this crashes down onto my desk like an avalanche.

In addition to my regular day job I have done some freelance graphic design work and also taken on some programming work again: some osCommerce customizations for one client, two custom Wordpress plugins for another. I hope this work will eventually lead to a full-time role as web-developer again.

Will 2010 become a new year as a web-developer? I really hope so, it’s been much too long to be out of touch with technology. :)

I haven’t posted any pictures yet, but I did carve a movie-themed pumpkin again last Halloween. This year it was based on Pan’s Labyrinth. I wasn’t able to carve more during the week. And I have to admit that I never got into the right Halloween mood this year. I think next year I should start thinking about pumpkins a bit earlier.

In the little spare time I found I started to knit! It’s the perfect way to relax and forget about the work and computers after a long day. Slowly but surely I managed to complete my first scarf. Next I will work on a hat, then a simple sweater, and eventually I would like to attempt an Icelandic sweater.

I also started playing with a NerdKit to learn about practical electronics, microcontrollers and how to program them. In the near future I plan to share more posts about this as well, including photos, diagrams, perhaps also a few videos and screencasts. I would like to add more technical and educational content during the next year. While it feels good to share some impressions and thoughts with the world, it’s even more rewarding if I’m able to help somebody with an article.

My bicycling and fitness journey has moved a bit into the background. I still ride my bike every day (rain or shine) for transportation and commute, but I didn’t have the right mindset for an extensive exercise regimen in addition to my daily rides. I did complete the 100 (consecutive) push-up challenge. I actually enjoyed and appreciated the little time required to do them. I plan to start another round of Power 90 again next week, first with a focus on weekends and my free days between Christmas and New Year, then continue daily again, probably in February.

In the beginning of next year I want to finish my workout area in the basement and add a power cage. Our ceiling is lower than the ones I have seen, so I will have to see how to set it up. But before this happens I also want to make sure no water can come through from our neighbor’s wall. It has been a problem when ever we had long and lasting rainfalls. As soon as this is resolved and I have a space for a power cage, I plan to start P90X in spring of next year. I’m curious about this program, and I’m sure it will be fun as I enjoyed Tony Horton in the other videos I have seen. It’s not only motivating, but more importantly, a very solid workout, less expensive and much less annoying than going to the overcrowded gym and having to fight for a free spot at one of the machines. I also plan to do some Spinervals again as they really did help me to get stronger on the bicycle. I will have to see how to schedule it with the other workouts. Oh man, how can anyone do all this after an 8-6 day and freelance in the evening? I will have to find a solution. :)

I also plan to learn a new language, but first I want to find out where I want to retire one day. Hahaha.. more about this later.

So this is a brief summary of what has moved my world for the last few months and what will come up on my blog very soon. If you are interested in PHP, Wordpress, osCommerce, Java, Javascript and some C/C++ development, Ubuntu Linux, hardware-/software, electronics, graphic design, music, film, photography, knitting, bicycling, and fitness, or just in a bit more about me personally… this space will hopefully not disappoint you. Stay tuned for more in the next few weeks! :)

Armée des Ombres by Jean-Pierre Melville

Chatte à Deux Têtes by Jacques Nolot

Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran by François Dupeyron

Les Quatre cents coups by François Truffaut

Les Triplettes de Belleville by Sylvain Chomet

Les chansons d’amour by Christophe Honoré

Une affaire de femmes by Claude Chabrol

De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté by Jacques Audiard

Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux by Jean-Luc Godard

Later, when the first few warmer days arrived in spring I was happy, but I still struggled to recover from the injury and the overall exhaustion from my winter rides. Quite pitiful considering I didn’t ride any long routes for two, three or more hours but only my daily commute to work. In June, I finally began to feel up and ready for a few longer rides again and started to work on it again.

Last week I started to record my rides and workouts again, inspired by the MapMyRide.com Tour de France challenge, and I will continue this until later in fall or winter. Next winter I plan to walk more, especially on bad-weather days, and perhaps keep the rides for the less ugly days. I’m not sure if I can keep myself off the bike yet, but I will try. Hopefully I can get through the cold months without doing that damage to myself again.

Today I went out for a 50-something minute ride to Druid Hill Lake, passing the Baltimore Zoo, continuing on the Jones Falls Trail through Woodberry and back to the Hopkins campus on Clipper Mill Road, Falls Road, Wyman Park Drive. I totally forgot how pleasant and relaxing a ride can very early on a Sunday morning and not having to deal with rush-hour traffic, maniacal motorists, bus-drivers, trash trucks and filthy alleys. I had a hard time motivating myself, but as usual, I didn’t regret getting out of the house around 6am and riding on calm and quiet streets and through a beautifully smelling green of the park. What a contrast to the weekdays! It was just what I needed after a long week. Perfection.

My condition was surprisingly good, too. Usually I struggle my way up/down to work, but I didn’t have this problem today. Even on the uphill segments I managed to keep my calm and climb it without much pain. The mindset, unforced and stress-free mental state and the quiet, calming roads without any doubt have a huge impact on my own condition. Something to keep in mind whenever I don’t feel very motivated! Some stats:

Date/Time:

07/12/2009 06:16 AM

Route:

Homestead, Charles St, Hopkins Campus, Druid Hill Lake, passing the Baltimore Zoo, continuing on the Jones Falls Trail through Woodberry and back to Hopkins Campus on Clipper Mill Road, Falls Road, Wyman Park Drive, and back to Homestead.

Length:

Approx. 9.7 miles

Traffic:

Easy going most of the way.

Weather:

Warm and a bit humid, but still pleasant enough.

Bike:

Jamis Durango Hardtail Mod. with 26×2.2 Maxxis Holy Roller

Heartrate/Elevation:

(Heartrate recording didn’t work properly during the second half of the route.)

If you do man nano, you’ll see there’s a /etc/nanorc config file. Edit this to comment out #set historylog.

This will prevent sudo nano commands from creating the root users .nano_history in your home directory, which nano can’t read when called by your user account. After commenting it out, then delete it with sudo rm .nano_history.

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=204307

Prokudin-Gorskii 1906

Last week I read an article about Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii who was responsible for those remarkable color-photographs taken a hundred years ago. He was a chemist born in Russia in 1863 who studied in St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris.

He developed a process in which three black and white pictures were taken of an object in quick succession. One picture was taken with a red-filter, one with a blue, and another with a green filter. These three black and white pictures where arranged as a glass plate negative. With a projector he could later add these three components to a full color representation. He wasn’t able to make a paper print in color at the time, but he was the first to make use of a technology that has remained pretty much unchanged, and is still used today in digital cameras which capture and store light in RGB components, or computer screens that reproduce a color image by illuminating three R, G and B components to render a color pixel with LCD cells or phosphors of a classic tube monitor. The principle really hasn’t changed in more than 100 years.

It was first discovered by physicist James Clerk Maxwell who created the first permanent color photograph in 1861.

In 1909, Prokudin-Gorskii started to document the Russian empire in color, completing his project in 1915. The pictures were intended to be used in education to inform children about the history, past, present, and future of the Russian empire. In 1948 his color photographs were purchased by the Library of Congress. His pictures are some of the most important documents about Russia before World War I, and also a significant document of technological history.

Prokudin-Gorskii 1915

Tolstoy 1908

His subjects include medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, railroad tracks, factories of the then modern Russian industry, portraits of workers, important personalities as well as people from other areas of life. The Library of Congress has made the complete collection available to the public.

Glassplate Negative

I downloaded a scan of the photograph Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii took in 1909, a century ago, of 84-year-old Pinkhus Karlinskii, the supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, and attempted to reconstruct the color photo myself. The Library of Congress reproduction number for this picture is LC-P87-5006 and can be found in the online catalog. The glass negative is available in three file versions: higher resolution JPEG version (78 KB), uncompressed archival TIFF version (70 MB) and the highest resolution TIFF version (70 MB).

The process is actually very simple. First, the three black and white frames of the glass negative need to be separated and aligned. I copied and pasted them on three layers. The first frame on top is the blue component, the middle frame is the green component, and red at the bottom. I stacked them on top of each other and aligned them with the help of the Difference layer mode.

In Photoshop it was very easy to transform the layers into red, green and blue slides that add up to a complete color picture. In Layer Style/Blending Options, section ‘Advanced Blending’ you can specify the R,G,B channels. If you don’t have these options you can also work with solid color layers and the appropriate layer modes. It’s a bit more work, but the result should be the same. I set the Blending channel to R for the red frame, G for the green, and B for the blue. Then I duplicated and flattened the image and was ready to fix some of the spots and scratches. The final result, a colored view of an era I only knew in black and white before:

RGB Components

Pinkhus Karlinskii Cropped

I still find it unbelievable that this photo is 100 years old. More amazing pictures can be found at the Library of Congress.

Links:

• Library of Congress – The Empire That Was Russia
• Library of Congress – Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
• William Wedler – Colorizing the Prokudin-Gorskii photo collection (Matlab)
• A Collection of Prokudin-Gorskii Images

So I entered a url like smb://username:password@ip-address/path/ which worked in other situations before, but Nautilus the file browser showed me a new dialog to enter a domain (Windows) and password. No matter what I entered there, it didn’t appear to work. And I’m not sure how to remove this dialog box.

One way to work around this behavior is to mount the Samba/CIFS share on the command line. (CIFS is the Common Internet File System and replaces sambafs.) First I had to make sure that a non-root user has the permissions to mount a file system. I created a new group ’samba’ and added myself to it.

sudo groupadd samba
sudo adduser gerrit samba
sudo visudo

And added a new line in the “group” section:

## Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
%samba   ALL=(ALL) /bin/mount,/bin/umount,/sbin/mount.cifs,/sbin/umount.cifs

All set, now I could create a folder for my Samba share mkdir ~/mnt and mount:

sudo mount -t cifs //ip-address/path ~/mnt -o username=gerrit,password=xxxxxx,noexec

More details can be found in the Ubuntu help on Setting up Samba.

Today I’m trying to setup a server that makes my music available to any of my computers and operating systems in the LAN, and possibly even outside the local network. At the same time I would like to add last.fm again, however, not linked to each individual player, but only once, to the music server.

I stored my music files on an external network drive. This music folder is a Samba share and accessible from other computers on the network.

VLC is known for its network streaming features and I wrote a little about it back in May. While I use it occasionally to stream videos from one computer to another I was looking for a solution that could work better as a permanent configuration, well-suited as a music library. That’s how I stumbled upon the X-platform Music Multiplexing System 2, XMMS2.

XMMS2

XMMS2 is a client-server music platform which can be controlled via command line but also through a variety of other interfaces available on Linux, Windows as well as Mac. It allows you to play and manage your music collection on a local server or across the network. It is free, open-source and extensible with a growing number of plugins.

On my Ubuntu system, it was just a matter of seconds to install XMMS2. Ubuntu’s repositories already include everything you might need. I browsed the Synaptic package manager for…

• xmms2, the core application with server and command line client interface.
• xmms2-plugin-smb, a Samba transport extension I needed to get access to my music share.
• xmms2-scrobbler, used to submit data to Last.fm
• esperanza, a simple player, xmms2-client and graphical user interface
• xmms2-plugin-flac, to support the flac-format
• xmms2-plugin-mp4, to support the mp4-format

XMMS2’s command line interface is very easy to use thanks to its legible commands and parameters, just to mention a few:

• To start the server: xmms2-launcher
• To quit the server: xmms2 quit
• To add some music: xmms2 add /home/gerrit/Music/track.mp3
• To add a folder recursively: xmms2 radd /home/gerrit/Music/electronic/
• To add some music from my samba-share: xmms2 add smb://username:password@edmini/music/electronic/track.mp3
• To list the contents of the current playlist: xmms2 list
• To play: xmms2 play
• To stop playback: xmms2 stop

If the server is already running and you install new plugins, you may have to restart it before you can use the plugin. You can stop the server with xmms2 quit, or if that doesn’t work for some reason:

1. find the process-id with ps aux | grep xmms2d and
2. kill the process with sudo kill processid.

XMMS2 makes it easy to organize music in playlists:

• xmms2 playlist list lists all available playlists
• xmms2 playlist create myplaylistname creates a new playlist
• xmms2 playlist load myplaylistname loads an existing playlist
• xmms2 playlist active shows which playlist is currently active

With a separate set of media library commands you can also keep track of your artists, track and album titles, cover images, etc. To display a list of related commands: xmms2 mlib. To search for an artist: xmms2 mlib search artist:"Boards*". Standard wildcard characters like ‘*’ and ‘?’ are supported, too. It’s probably easier to use these mlib functions from an XMMS2 client software other than the command line. With a player like Esperanza you will find an easy-to-use graphical user interface for command line parameters.

To make the XMMS2 daemon reachable from other computers I added a tcp-socket to the configuration nano ~/.config/xmms2/xmms2.conf

unix:///tmp/xmms-ipc-gerrit;tcp://

More details on remote machines can be found in the FAQ. The default port is 9667. After restarting the xmms2d daemon I was ready to test my configuration from the other computer, a Windows system.

I installed the Windows built of XMMS2 and Esperanza which I found here, puzzle’s win32 folder. I had to make sure to use the version that matches the version of my server, in this example it was XMMS2-DrLecter.

I defined the following environment variable XMMS_PATH = tcp://192.168.1.43:9667 to let XMMS2 know where to find my music server.

The command-line version of XMMS2 works great on Windows, but I was still experiencing some problems with Esperanza (downloaded Esperanza-0.3.exe) which exited with a runtime error. Whenever I tried to launch Esperanza on Windows, the server responded with “Client ‘Esperanza’ with bad protocol version (1, not 11) connected”.

This looked like a similar conflict I experienced with the wrong XMMS2 version before, so I looked for another version. I found the DrLecter built Esperanza4-DrL.7z here. This version works great.

Now I was ready to play, stop, and control my XMMS2 daemon from my remote computers, may it run Windows or Ubuntu. However, this configuration didn’t actually stream music from my server to the remote machine. It only served as a channel to remote control the server’s playlist. The music was still played nowhere but on the server system.

Icecast2

Icecast2 is a streaming server, a package that will allow you to setup a simple Internet radio station. It, too, is readily available in Ubuntu’s repository and can be installed via Synaptic. After installation I updated two configuration files: sudo nano /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml

There I defined some passwords where the default was marked with ‘hackme‘. I also changed the ports to 9600/9601. No particular reason, other than having the Icecast2 ports relatively close to the XMMS2 default port. You can choose any port there. More details in the basic setup help. I left all the other settings alone and edited sudo nano /etc/default/icecast2 to set ENABLE=true. After that I could start Icecast2 with /etc/init.d/icecast2 start.

The Icecast admin-page should now show up with the url http://localhost:9600. But there still is no music to stream. In the next step I linked XMMS2 to Icecast, using the…

xmms2-plugin-ices

As part of the Ubuntu repository it was installed in a matter of a few seconds. It needed to be configured in the ices section of nano ~/.config/xmms2/xmms2.conf.

Make sure you stop the daemon before you make any changes, otherwise they might not be visible next time you restart. If you can’t find an ices section after a fresh installation, you can let XMMS2 and the plugin set a default section up for you. Try restarting the daemon. In the ices section I just set the password and portnumber (9600) to match what I defined for Icecast2 earlier. See also the XMMS2 wiki.

This didn’t want to work in the beginning. I received error messages about insufficient permissions. I think this was caused by the fact that XMMS2 and the plugin both ran as gerrit, Icecast2, however, as root. To solve this problem I copied the Icecast configuration (icecast.xml and admin, web-folders) to my home-folder, and changed the owner of all these files.

chown -hR gerrit ~/.icecast
sudo nano /etc/default/icecast2

Now I had to point the daemon to the new folder:

CONFIGFILE="/home/gerrit/.icecast/icecast.xml"

# Name or ID of the user and group the daemon should run under
USERID=gerrit
GROUPID=gerrit

Almost done. There still was a warning about the error- and access logfiles in /var/log/icecast2/. To solve this I had to change the owner of the log-files chown gerrit /var/log/icecast2/* and restart Icecast2 /etc/init.d/icecast2 start

Now I could set the output plugin to ices and start the playback with

xmms2 config output.plugin ices
xmms2 play

The radio stream is reachable with the following address for favorite media player: http://localhost:9600/stream.ogg.m3u, or http://192.168.1.43:9600/stream.ogg.m3u

Having turned the output to Icecast, you won’t be able to hear any music on the server, unless you open the stream. If you want to return to the standard sound output, use the following command:

xmms2 config output.plugin alsa

At this time, both output plugins can’t be activated together to hear music both on server and remote computer. You can only hear music if you connect to the Icecast server. The XMMS2 FAQ explains:

The possibility of multiple outputs involves a nontrivial solution. The biggest problem is keeping all of the outputs in sync with each other. Each output must pull audio data from a buffer following the last decoder or effect plugin in the xform chain at a rate determined by the samplerate of the underlying device. For example, streaming audio will have an exact bitrate since no actual audio hardware is used for obtaining audio data, but a soundcard’s samplerate may vary by a few Hertz with temperature, components, and voltage. We end up with an ever growing buffer (if the buffer holds data longer for slower outputs) or dropped samples (if the data is destroyed after the faster output has read it).

There are also smaller issues like that the xmms2 daemon takes into account the delays caused by the output plugin when showing the current playtime, but if there are multiple outputs these delays can vary. So one of them would have to be defined as a primary output to keep this feature in use.

Current plan to resolve the aforementioned problem with concurrent output and stream sourcing is to make it possible for effect plugins to keep a constant input format and stay alive through song changes. That way they can draw the data from the stream itself and it won’t have synchronizing problems because the whole chain is still simple and one-dimensional.

The current configuration works great now. I have a server that provides a stream of music. This stream is accessible from all other computers, and I am able to control this Internet radio stream using XMMS2 and Esperanza if needed, from any other computer running Linux or Windows.

At this point I could probably stop and let it be, but I want to integrate some web-services and social media tools. While I’m mostly just experimenting with a new range of Internet applications, I’m also interested in sharing my music favorites and creating some personal charts of my highlights, the most frequently played tracks, the most important artists, etc. A great tool to link my local music adventures to the web 2.0 world is last.fm.

Last.fm

To make my XMMS2/Icecast2 server talk with Last.fm I installed the xmms2-scrobbler plugin…as usual, from the standard Ubuntu repository. To configure this plugin I followed the instructions I found at sudosys.

The XMMS2 configuration is stored in ~/.config/xmms2, but the plugin tries to read it in ~/.xmms2. To work around this, I created a symlink ln -s ~/.config/xmms2 ~/.xmms2

Next, I created a new directory for the plugin configuration and created a config file with my credentials:

mkdir -p ~/.config/xmms2/clients/xmms2-scrobbler
nano ~/.config/xmms2/clients/xmms2-scrobbler/config

added

user: MY_LASTFM_USER
password: MY_LASTFM_PASS

I created another symlink for the actual xmms2-scrobbler script, so it gets executed when I launch XMMS2.

ln -s /usr/bin/xmms2-scrobbler ~/.config/xmms2/startup.d/

After restarting XMMS2 your music will show up on your last.fm profile.

Continuing from there you can expand your network by adding other services that access last.fm for your music statistics. On Facebook you can use a last.fm application to display your charts on your page or profile.

You can also integrate your last.fm data into your Wordpress site with the LiveStream plugin. There is much more you can do, especially if you write your own applications, but this is how far my own configuration goes right now.

I hope you found any of these notes use- or helpful. As usual, please let me know if I forgot something or made a mistake somewhere. :]

Part 1…

Part 2…

Part 3…

When I was younger I smiled at old people who skipped through the newspaper just to read the obituaries. Today, I am very glad my mother saw and forwarded this one to me.

Wilhelm Schöngen was my math and physics teacher in high-school. He not only was my favorite teacher for those five years at the “Mat.Nat.”, but also one of the most important influences outside of my own family.

I still remember how disappointed (and upset) he was when I decided to switch to another school with a focus in electronics. I will never forget the last time I met him. This moment has haunted me quite often in all the following years growing up, being a student, employee, or just a human.

I always hoped I could meet him again, just to catch up on how all these years treated us. Every time I was in Mönchengladbach I wanted to visit my old school again and find out if he was still teaching there. But time has always been too short, and I have to confess I was also worried about possibly awkward moments.

I don’t know if he would have remembered me after these years, but I would like to express my sincere gratitude. He was one of the very few teachers and professors I have met in my life who were tough but fair, who not only understood to teach, but also lived and breathed his specialties and managed to share all his passion and excitement, leaving a lasting, unforgettable impression.

Thank you.

Beyond his martial arts and acting abilities, Bruce Lee’s physical appearance and strength were truly astounding. He achieved this through an intensive and ever-evolving conditioning regime that is being revealed for the first time in this book. Drawing on Lee’s own notes, letters, diaries and training logs, bodybuilding expert John Little presents the full extent of Lee’s unique training methods including nutrition, aerobics, isometrics, stretching and weight training.