carbogno.net

Zitat zur Hydrodynamik

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:58:45 +0000

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

DPG spring meeting ‘09 iCal importer

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:47:04 +0000

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.

Podcast list

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:44:25 +0000

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:

Norm Augustinus - I hate your family and I hate your friends
Ragan Fox - Fox and the city
Stratfor - Stratfor daily podcast
Laura Dierking - J!Cast
Küchenradio Team - Küchenradio
Undsoversum - Bits und So

Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan in the headlines

admin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:09:10 +0000

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.

Fingerprints for spin-selection rules in the interaction dynamics of O2 at Al(111)

admin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:01:29 +0000

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)

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)

WPA & Windows 98 SE

admin — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:02:23 +0000

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.

Most surprisingly, there was no possibility to activate WPA after installing the card: A short electronic search in the PDF manual brought a sentence in the Glossary Section to my attention:

For earlier Windows Operating systems, a WPA capable supplicant is required such as Funk Software’s Odyssey Client.

(N.B. Earlier means earlier than Windows XP in this context.)

Please notice, that Funk Software’s Odyssey Client beside being a formidable application for all kind of encryptions is also rather pricey. While my customer satisfaction level was drowning more and more, I started some online research on how to get WPA to work with Windows 98 SE: Actually, Microsoft introduced WPA support for Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (SP1), but never ever for Windows 98. Some old forum posts suggested the use of WSC Guard from Wireless Security Corporation, a free WPA supplicant for Windows 98, but all the links to the company’s website were down. Indeed, they were bought already in June 2005 by McAfee and their WSC Guard was incorporated into McAfee’s Internet Security Suite that costs around 40€.

However, McAfee still allows to download a 30 days trial version and—here comes the clue—still allows to install the WSC Guard for free as long as one clicks the “Install only free software part” checkbox during installation.

So, thumbs up to McAfee, and thumbs down to Asus!

P.S.: You additionally have to install this Windows 98 SE hotfix to make WSC Guard work. Anyway the installer will check this on his own and, as the case arises, remind you.

Theory

admin — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:36:52 +0000

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…

Mac OS X goes Multimedia

admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:16:44 +0000

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:

Movie Codecs:

Perian:
Support plugins for Quicktime: Huge List!
Flip4Mac:
WMV support for Quicktime
VLC:
A–in my humble opinion–superior alternative to the Quicktime Player

iPod & iTunes related stuff:

iSquint:
Encodes your Videos to an iPod compatible format within a clic
iScrobbler:
Synchronizes your iTunes & iPod stats with LastFM
iTunes LAME support:
High Quality Encoding & iTunes Comfort all at once

Dashboard Widgets:

Sing That Itune!
Automatically searches for Lyrics on the Web and stores them in the iTunes library
Amazon Album Art:
Forget about missing album covers: Search (international) Amazon stores with these little tool!

Did I forget something?

Mac OS X Must Have Applications

admin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:37:58 +0000

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:

TextWrangler:
A text editor with every feature you want: Code Highlighting & Folding, massive support of programming and scripting languages, Visual Diff. It is not vi, but it gets as close as you can get. Finally, its native support of Apple’s Dictionary allows direct use of the system wide spell check and its thesaurus.
Cyberduck:
A FTP/SFTP/WebDAV client: Beside the usual Upload/Download possibility, it can also sync directories. Direct editing of files is also possible.
Adium:
The instant messenger on Mac OS X: It supports a variety of protocols (MSN, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, Facebook…) and is extremely configurable by plugins (features) and themes (look&feel).
NeoOffice:
Basically OpenOffice for Mac OS X. In contrast to the official version it succeeds in integrating the OpenOffice functionality with the Mac’s usual Look & Feel. However, I experienced some instabilities-as I experienced in OpenOffice under Linux as well.

More to come soon: A special post will cover the “Multimedia” apps, i. e. how to extend iTunes’s & Quicktime’s abilities. How to install and use native Linux applications will also be addressed in near future.

Update…

admin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:51:13 +0000

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.