"Christoph Derndofer" makes it into the OLPC community-news

What's less than 15 minutes of fame?

Half a second of fame.

And today I had that second. Or rather a certain Christoph Derndofer (my name minus an r) did. As previously mentioned I'm part of OLPC Austria and one of our current projects is to write a so-called "activity handbook" for people who want to write software for the OLPC X0 (more commonly known as the "$100 laptop"). Documentation is definitely one of the areas where the OLPC project is still lacking and therefore we decided it was time to write something ourselves. I'm not going into more details here but you can expect me to talk more about this writing project over the coming weeks and months.

For now it's good to see that OLPC really picked up on the current documentation efforts and that lead to the following paragraph in the latest edition of the OLPC community-news:

26. How-tos/documentation: A few groups have independently developed their own "how-tos" about using Sugar and the XOs. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva each took a stab at how-tos for using activities and Todd Kelsey and Val Scarlatta worked on updating the 542 Demo Notes with more detailed information from the wiki and updates for recent builds. John Gilmore wrote in with his own ideas for help files. There is a group discussion planned for next Saturday to bring these similar works together.

I hope that I can still convince them to change that meeting to Friday or something because next Saturday I'll be celebrating the birthday of one of my best friends (and my own birthday) with a party!

For now I'm happy with my split-second of fame... :)

A Vision of Students Today

Last week I discovered a great little video called "A Vision of Students Today" over on Paul Stamatiou's blog (a very interesting blog by a 21-year old computer-science student at Georgia Tech). The video was created earlier this year by a certain Prof Wesch and 200 Kansas State University's students during their "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology" course. I think it's an extremely powerful video and there's really not much to add to it, except to say that from personal experience I can attest that the observations about student life couldn't be more true!



If you liked this video then I'd suggest you also look at the famous "Did you know" video for a broader perspective of how technology influences our lives...

OLPC Austria @ "Software Engineering - Best Practices" Podcast

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Alexander Schatten, a professor at the Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems at my university (Vienna University of Technology) runs a blog called "Software Engineering - Best Practices". Apart from writing about current trends in SE he also has a podcast that focuses on software engineering.

After a recent presentation of Aaron Kaplan and myself as members of OLPC Austria - a group of people that contributes to the overall OLPC effort in whatever way deemed useful and is currently the largest OLPC group here in Europe - at the university he approached us and asked whether we'd be interested in talking about the OLPC project on his podcast. So today started very early for a Monday morning as I got out of bed at 7.30 a.m...

To cut a long story short, the podcast (mind you, it's in German!) is available over here with the accompanying blog-entry being there (also in German).

Enjoy! :-)

Matrix Goggles (must see video!)

Check out the video of what this Russian artist did:



Needless to say that I'm especially fond of the ascii mode (e.g. 0min 21sec)... ;-)

Best regards,
Thomas A. Anderson

Today was the first time...

...that I used an iPhone. I know, I know, two Apple related posts in a row make me sound like a fanboy. But trust me, that couldn't be further from the truth. But first things first:

While sitting in a lecture in the afternoon I noticed that the guy in front of me was toying around with an iPhone. Being the geek I am I couldn't stop thinking about it for the remaining (boring) hour of that lecture. This is the first time I saw anyone use an iPhone and I definitely wanted to play around with it. After the lecture I asked the guy whether I could take a closer look at his baby. And I have to say, I was a bit underwhelmed.

Yes, it has a great design. Yes, the display is stunning. Yes, the touch-capabilities are much better than anything I've ever seen.

But still, I wasn't impressed. I guess that's mainly due to Apple's marketing machine working overtime on convincing everyone just how great that product is. Once you listen to all the bullshit, the fanboy reviews and everyone else raving about a product you start believing it, no matter how sceptical you are. And if you really believe that it's a revolutionary phone and a breakthrough internet device then of course your expectations are quite high. And it's bad when the product can't fulfill those expectations afterwards.

So: No, the iPhone is not as cool as I had expected it to be. No, it doesn't even come close to the top of my "hardware I want to buy"-list. And definitely no, I won't part with €300+ of my cash especially since Apple has been treating its customers like shit lately.

As previously indicated I'm still waiting for the rollout of the FIC Neo 1973 product models which should happen over the next 2 to 3 weeks. That phone might not look as sexy as an iPhone but overall it seems to be much closer to my vision of a good mobile phone.

iPod nano is too nano

I guess most of you have heard about Apple releasing a new set of iPods the other day. So after looking through the specs and information on Apple's website I went out to a store on Saturday to check them out in person. Unfortunately the iPod touch - one that I would have been most interested in because of the UI - wasn't there as it's apparently not going to be available for a couple more weeks.

Anyway, I spent some time with an iPod nano and I have to say that it's becoming a bit too nano for me. I don't know whether I'm just clumsy or have big fingers or whatever, but these things are freakin' hard to use. I've been using an old iPod mini for the past year and in terms of its size it's just right. It could be a tad slimmer but in terms of its width and height its perfect. I really don't see how making the enclosure's dimension and, more importantly, the clickwheel smaller is improving this device. The main argument that people will have is that it's a move to accomodate the bigger screen.

Yeah, like I'm ever going to watch a video on a 2" screen! I mean, come on, who seriously spends any significant time watching videos on those thingies? Nobody? I thought so. Even the iPod classic's 2.5" screen isn't going to cut it for any serious video watching. It's only when you start moving above 3" (such as with the iPod touch and it's 3.5"480 x 320 pixel screen) can I see myself spending more than painful 2 minutes looking at a video clip or something. The only time I ever watched anything on an iPod was during a winter vaccation two years ago where I looked at an episode of Joey during a long car-ride. And that was it, been there done that.

In my opinion the only reason for making the screen larger (and sacrificing the clickwheel size) would be to allow for a better interface. Unfortunately the much marketed "Cover Flow" on that latest generation of iPods isn't anything to call home about. So you get to see your covers, big deal...

All in all, I'm going to stick with my iPod mini until it dies or something significantly better comes along. And sometimes, even in technology, size does matter and smaller isn't always better.

First 12 photos from Mongolia @ Flickr

So I finally sat down and really started to look through all the photos I took during the journey. To make the whole task a bit more managable I basically split the photos into three folders, one for each country I visited. Given that most people have been asking for photos of Mongolia I started working on those...

And I gave up after an hour because right now my head is spinning after seeing all those photos and I simply can't decide anymore which ones to include in the "best of" selection. So I decided to call it a day but not before at least selecting 12 photos as sort of a teaser for what's to come. These photos might not be the best ones, hell, they might not even be the most representative selection. But they are the ones that caught my eye and where I thought nice.

You can find my current "best of" nice selection by clicking on this link or in case that should not work just search for my photos which are tagged "TransSib" as I unfortunately can't add more photo sets at Flickr without "going pro". Which I'll probably do once I have some money in my account after my birthday later this month.

Edit: And here's one shot for the people who are too lazy to click that link above...