Erst in letzter Zeit scheint einiges Licht aus einer ganz unerwarteten Ecke zu kommen, nämlich der Spielerei mit Computern, bei der jeder auch ohne große Vorkenntnisse fundamental Neues entdecken kann, falls er genügend Spürsinn und Geduld hat.
H. Vogel, Gerthsen Physik, Kap. 3.3.10 - Turbulenz, S. 129, 20. Auflage, Springer-Verlag, 1999
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In two weeks, the traditional spring meeting of the german physical society, the DPG, is going to take place. It is already possible to browse the program on their website and to combine a personal list of session. However, the provided export utility lacks usability: Solely a list of Talks as PDF, but no schedule can be generated. Therefore, I wrote a short (and certainly dirty) perl script that generates an iCal type calendar out of the selection made on the website. This iCal file can then be imported in iCal, Google Calendar or your iPod.
You can download this script, which is released under the GPL, here.
Use at your own risk!
Basic Usage:
First build an “online” program here and the save it with the functions provided in here. Unfortunately, the resulting XML file will only contain the session’s abbreviation, but no info about time, location and so on is provided in this file. Therefore, this script first parses the file $FILEIN, then retrieves the relevant data and eventually exports everything as an iCal File.
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This week I participated at a really nice get-together, where listeners of the Chaosradio Express podcast met with its producer Tim Pritlove in Ulm. Beside some random iTunes & WordPress rants, the main discussion topic was podcasting. Although certainly not complete, here comes a list of the podcasts mentioned during the meeting:
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Apparently, two Spiegel Online journalists have spent their holiday season in my hometown and now came up with a series of articles about it:
In my humble opinion, they are both worth reading, although they are also both a touch too flattering. Still, the latter seems to walk the line in between sarcasm & appreciation better.
P.S.: In this context, you might be interested in the discussion that evolves around the first article here.
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Finally, three years of Ph. D. research pay off: One week ago the paper
Fingerprints for spin-selection rules in the interaction dynamics of O2 at Al(111)
by
C. Carbogno, J. Behler, A. Groß, and K. Reuter
was accepted for publication by the prestigious Journal Physical Review Letters.
Enjoy the preprint!
Update: Read the published Version: Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 096104 (2008)
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As a computer admin you often encounter annoying curious problems, especially if you deal with different hardware & OS configurations. This week I managed to get a WPA-PSK secured WLAN connection to work on a 500 MHz - 64 Mb Ram Pentium III running Windows 98 SE. Since the machine does just support USB 1.0, I did not dare to try my luck with a USB WLAN stick and went for a PCI Card, the ASUS WL-138g v2, which is misleadingly advertised as supporting both WPA & Win98SE and is offered for a reasonable price. [Read more →]
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This morning in office I had to laugh out loud as I discovered this comic, while I was in a hurry to prepare the math class that I have to hold on wednesday afternoons. Sometimes I feel as lost as in this pic—just stuck in between the depicted physicist and the mathematician. As a theoretician I know enough to be aware of the shortcomings that “our” mathematical model of reality exhibits: I deal with them every single day. However, my topics of interest are neither fancy enough to fascinate a mathematician, nor relevant enough in every day life to attract applied physicists. As you see we theoreticians do not even appear in this comic: Thus the gap in between physics and maths shall be hence known as the “theoretician’s deserts”, at least in my imagination…
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As promised, now a post about extending Mac OS X multimedia features. Actually, iTunes & Quicktime are rather well-configured out-of-the-box. Still, some features always lack: [Read more →]
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Lately, I bought myself a Macbook. And yes, I am completely satisfied. However, I have been working with various Linux distributions in the last years, but I have no experience with Mac OS X. In fact my biggest fear was not to find the applications I am used to. Actually, I have to admit that I found a solution for everything I need and now I want to share some of my experiences in this “Must Have” Software list: [Read more →]
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New Content coming soon: Actually, I just updated to the new Wordpress Version. In future more science and tech stuff shall populate the blog. At least, that is what I plan.
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