GMX listed on SORBS again

Today, mail.npw.net rejected mails from GMX users. This was because the GMX servers are (again) listed in the SORBS database. The mail server con­fig­ur­a­tion was revised so that this issue should be resolved, effective now (20:26, 2013-01-21).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Carpe Notcem

It’s been quite a while since I really wrote blog posts other than “oh, look, a thingy!”. But maybe I somehow manage to reanimate my blogging habits. I’ll try to start with a small one.

Some years ago, back in 2005, the Carpe Noctem Robotic Soccer team was estab­lished at the Uni­ver­sity of Kassel’s Dis­trib­uted Systems Group. My close friend Roland and I, both quite long-term Rob­oCup­pers who joined the global ini­ti­at­ive in 2001, founded the team to, on the one hand have a starting point for our research. And true, on the other hand it’s just great fun to build and program robots and to attend real com­pet­i­tions :) Not only for us but also for (pro­spect­ive) students.

Today, most of our former students got PhD students con­duct­ing their own research. Some took over the team lead and continued what we started back then: offering a platform for under­grads and graduate students where they can play, research, and sharpen their profile. To be honest I’m quite a bit proud of what we’ve achieved :)

For such a project, press coverage always is something that may attract external sup­port­ers or sponsors. In a sense, it also allows the public to take part in the devel­op­ment and progress. This is why I want to share two press releases of the current progress of the team, even though I’m not involved at all in the devel­op­ment any more. The first one is a newspaper article, the second one a YouTube video:

Great done guys and good luck in the Netherlands! :)

Gnome Shell and Multi-Monitor Support

The default behaviour of Gnome Shell for the (quite popular) multi-monitor setup was to move only the primary workspace when switching work­spaces. That means that the second monitor and so the addi­tion­al space was kind of wasted. That behaviour could be modified so that both monitor work­spaces are switched (using ctrl-alt-up/down, for instance) by setting the workspaces_only_on_primary gconf entry to false.

With Gnome 3.3/3.4, the gconf backend was appar­ently replaced by the gsettings backend and dconf. So now the new command reads:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides workspaces-only-on-primary false

Just a note to myself.

“Get nominated for MBA and Dr.”

Why should I want to have an MBA? Btw, the numbers for inside and outside the US are the same. That’s kind of a bad service, no? :)

Hello Baer,
You have a perfect qual­i­fic­a­tion but there is no uni­ver­sity diploma?
You can become a Doctor and receive all the benefits and admir­a­tion that comes with it! Acknow­ledge­ment — the Uni­ver­sity diploma
Get the Job, Promotion, Business Oppor­tun­ity and Social Advance­ment you Desire!

Well, quickly and Con­fid­en­ti­al­ity assured! Bachelors, Masters, MBA and/or Doctorate (PhD)
Please call to us right now, we will be engaged in your business very quickly. Con­fid­en­ti­al­ity assured!

Your calls are accepted round the clock Inside USA: 1‑xxx-xxx-xxxx. Call Outside USA.: +1‑xxx-xxx-xxxx

Firefox Colour Management

Yesterday, I finally uploaded some pictures to my gallery again. After quite some time (the jf Smugmug plugin is not that fast when talking about uploading; at least compared to the Smugmug native upload via the web browser as it seems to be single-threaded), I browsed through the gallery in order to check the quality. I really was shocked with what I saw: bleeding colours and far too extreme colour contrasts, the sat­ur­a­tion of some pictures seemingly was far too high.

As I have a (more or less) quite typical monitor con­fig­ur­a­tion (i.e. a laptop and a bigger screen for working with pictures and other colour-sensitive stuff), I dragged the browser window to the laptop’s screen to check the colours on another screen. And guess what: the colours looked great again. Ok, admit­tedly “great” should read “better” here as the laptop’s screen’s quality is far from great (Lenovo X200s). When looking back, I remember some strange redraw behaviour when dis­play­ing the pictures in Firefox, exactly for the areas in the image where colours went crazy. That was a hint I silently ignored.

What could be the reason? Linux’ colour man­age­ment? No, all right in that respect. Windows’s (running in a VM) colour managent? No, also no problem. I also could have wiped the ICC inform­a­tion from my pictures but that would not have been a solution but a tweak. To make a long story short: this is when I firs dis­covered Firefox’ colour man­age­ment cap­ab­il­it­ies [moz­illazine, gballard]. After disabling all that stuff, my pictures’ colours returned to normal again. Also not the best solution but the only one that works. Other browsers (such as Chromium) do not have colour man­age­ment built-in anyway.

To disable the colour man­age­ment in Firefox, simply go to about:config and set:

gfx.color_management.mode=0

Maybe it doesn’t behave sane because of my monitor con­fig­ur­a­tion? Don’t really known. Maybe I’ll invest some more time to dig into that phe­nomen­on. Regard­less of that, I really should colour calibrate my monitors :)

Sonnplatzlhütte

Sonnplatzlhütte, Buchen, Tirol, Austria. Too sad that it's closed.
Son­nplatzl­hütte, Buchen, Tirol, Austria. Too sad that it’s closed.
Published
Categorised as PhotoBlog

A Trip to İYTE, Part V

This will be the last post con­cern­ing my trip to Turkey this year. During the next days, I’ll only try to update the previous posts and this one in order to add some pictures or correct typos.

Even though I probably don’t need to stress it again, the tem­per­at­ure didn’t change again. We’ve had a strong breeze from time to time which greatly influ­enced the felt air tem­per­at­ure, though. That was indeed very welcome as walking through the bazaar can be quite exhaust­ing at times, the most tedious part being con­stantly rejecting the tourist hunters who want you to eat döner or lahmacun, drink beer, or visit their shops just a few meters away. This time we even managed to not get jumped. At least we think so or didn’t notice.

As for today it’s worth noting that we visited Konak Pier, a Turkish high society shopping mall. The prices are com­par­able to that ones in Germany plus a bonus for the peer and the sea around it on top. Then, by reducing the price by 20–50% because of sales, you might reach a price more realistic than the one presented. Taking photos within that peer is not allowed, at least that is what we were told by the security standing next to the metal detector at the entrance. Konak Pier is, in my opinion, only worth visiting to see that place from inside. I per­son­ally wouldn’t spend a cent or kuruş in the shops.

Having been to that place made us keep walking along the water front before returning to the bazaar. Back there, I wanted to buy some small stuff which, after virtually walking through the whole area, took again some time. As I also wanted to buy some Turkish sweets in a shop just next to the bazaar and because it already was quite late, we had to hurry up a bit. Having started to walk in that direction a bit more speedy, a pidgin hit the ground in a not-so-nice manner just about two meters away from us. The pidgin’s right leg only shrug once after the impact. That is at least what we were able to see any. Looking above the rooftops, a quite large seagull with some feathers left in its beak looked down a bit detached. For­tu­nately, it was a direct flight without an inter­me­di­ate stop on my head.

After having spent quite some Turkish Lira on sweets, the day seemed over and about to be ter­min­ated suc­cess­fully with all tasks finished.

It was a really nice and also a quite hot week in Turkey with even some free time and a visit to Izmir. Next time I’ll be prepared and have organised the trip more thoroughly :)