Peter's Site

Midnatsløbet Frederiksberg 2009

On Friday the first Frederiksberg night run took place and Rahul and myself participated in the 5km distance. The race track was really nice, leading the runners through the Copenhagen zoo - the first time for me to see it from the inside, although I hadn't much time to look around. But now I think, I will come back there and see it during daylight. Unfortunately the weather was bad and it was raining the whole time, but it was still a fun event. Also my legs slowly stop hurting now ...
The plot shows the distribution of the Men's 5 km results. The red line indicates my time of 30m28s, 10 seconds less than the mean time of the 478 runners.

Update:

Looking at the age vs time scatter plot including the fitted Lowess nonlinear regression line (some outliers removed), my result (red dot) in my age group doesn't look that good anymore.. but still I am happy with it

Top 10 Spam e-mail subject lines

While cleaning my email inbox today, I thought it might be funny to look at some spam mails.. It was funny indeed. And some of those spam mails are strange enough to really be considered as art
Here are ten of the funniest subject lines:

Woman with artificial butt
We offer the best alarm-clocks for your small buddy down there
Your bedroom doesn't smell like love anymore? Change it.
Powder for custard launcher
We have drugs to cure any illness you suffer from
Look like a million dollars
Deutsche Filme können auch begeistern!
She won't need a magnifying glass from now to find your tool.
Women will be funk when they see your trunk.
Crazy Korean eats dogs alive!

Wahl-o-mat Europawahl 2009

Keine Ahnung wie repräsentativ das ist, aber lustig ist der Wahl(versprechen)-o-mat allemal..
Aber warum überrascht mich das Ergebnis nicht?

Night time at the slaughterhouse

Geht man nichtsahnend zu später Stunde ins Schlachthaus nebenan und siehe da.. hier ist also das Rhino gelandet, das letztes Jahr im Zoo gestorben ist.. hat nen bissel Gewicht verloren

Oh wait.. something is inside..

Holi

These days the Holi festival is taking place in India and obviously it's really funny... So the Indian guys here couldn't resist to paint our faces with some red colors imported from India. Looks very bloody.. Funny thing: Walking defaced like that alone on the street, people here in CPH will gracefully ignore you -- probably like in the rest of Europe.

Night time at the institute

What could three PhD students do during night time when they are bored? Right, visit the local collection of formalin-conserved animals. I really think, one of the creatures moved while we didn't look at it..

A historic moment..

... needs to be celebrated, of course!

Happy Xmas

Schon wieder ein Jahr rum. Damn. Trotzdem wünsche ich euch ein schönes Weihnachten und viel ~~Glück~~ Freude beim Geschenke auspacken.

Erdbeben reißt Blogger aus dem Schlaf

Heute ~~Nacht~~ am frühen Morgen gab es ein Erdbeben der Stärke 4.7 mit Epizentrum in Südschweden. Auch in Dänemark war es deutlich zu vernehmen und ich wurde aus meinem wohlverdienten Schlaf gerissen. Der Schaden bleibt zumindest in Kopenhagen im überschaubaren Rahmen, ein paar Säcke Reis dürften aber dennoch umgefallen sein.

Danish language collapsed into meaningless guttural sounds

I am still unsure about learning Danish.

Purple dragon is watching you procrastinate

Today I built this tiny paper dragon which follows all my moves with great curiosity

Make your own!

Shared libs in /usr/local/lib

Just a quick note to myself:
In Linux, shared C object libraries (.so) are usually found in /usr/lib which is also in the default linker search path. A problem arises when compiling programs requiring shared libraries located in /usr/local/lib, the directory for non-system libraries. The resulting binary can usually not be executed, since the shared object files are not found during runtime. Common hacks are setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable (linker search path) to include /usr/local/lib or editing /ect/ld.so.conf to include this path.

A more portable solution is to include /usr/local/lib in the run path of the binary file with the ld option -R. When using g++ for linking, use the option -Wl,-rpath,/usr/local/lib. The resulting binary can now run without extra hacks.

More info.

Invertebrate astronauts need no space suit

Some invertebrates are able to survive the harsh conditions of outer space. Water bears (phylum Tardigrada) have been known to survive extreme temperatures and radiation, but now astronauts aboard the International Space Station tested their ability to survive in the vacuum of space and the exposure to solar radiation. Some of the tiny eight-legged creatures survived and were also able to reproduce just normally after returning to their home planet.

Who (else) uses Twitter?

After using Twitter for a some weeks now and finding it very entertaining, I wanted to investigate a little bit more in all the possible use cases and applications of this novel medium of communication.

First of all, the apparently huge constraint of limiting messages to 140 characters - which has nothing to do with SMS length - effectively turns out to be a great advantage. Authors are forced to write short and intelligible tweets, but in return, they can expect full attention by their readers - similar to news paper headlines.

My first contact with Twitter was during the landing of NASA's space probe Mars Phoenix on the Martian arctic surface. The Phoenix team had the great idea of using Twitter for writing updates during the landing - from the lander's point of view. Soon Phoenix' Twitter feed got more than 30k followers and it happily continues reporting on its experiments and discoveries. Now many people use Twitter to interact with the science team and ask all sort of questions about the mission and Mars, which Phoenix bravely answers. Probably surprised by the big interest in Phoenix' tweets, NASA set up many more Twitter accounts for other space crafts and experiments, probably hoping to achieve more public awareness and enthusiasm for NASA missions.
Public awareness is not only important for NASA - which continuously needs to justify its existence to American tax payers, but for basically every organization which depends on fund raising from the public. With Twitter's growing user base and thus many potential followers, I think we will see more and more organizations expanding to this new marketing channel, like the American Red Cross already does.
It's no surprise that Barrack Obama's campaign team makes heavy use of Twitter too and has most followers of all Twitter accounts - according to the ranking provided by Twitterholic .

Micro-blogging is also interesting for companies announcing new products or performing tech support - like Comcast is experimenting with. Users of open-source software can stay in contact with the developers and receive instant news about the software, e.g. Adium. Microformats.org is also twittering and keeps followers updated on the Microformats world. Fans of some fancy web companies can have a look behind the scenes of their dream employer.

Another big leap of innovation is Twitter's painless simple integration of SMS messages. Subscribers can choose if they want to receive SMS updates for each of the Twitter accounts they are following. Combined with several APIs and applications for publishing to Twitter, it becomes really simple to quickly send SMS messages to whatever intended audience.
This is particularly interesting for breaking news or for writing software agents. Since the availability of Twitter is pretty much unpredictable, it is certainly not suited for mission critical applications, i.e. you don't want to rely on receiving a Twitter SMS warning you of an imminent warp core breach. But there are many use cases for rather "informative" messages, like weather reports, earthquakes or even simple doorlocks.

So besides being an interesting tool for social connections, party announcements and Epeens, there are many uses out there for Twitter or micro-blogging in general and I am curious about that development in the near future.

The Bad News

Unfortunately, as of today Twitter discontinued sending SMS via their European number. They didn't manage to make reasonable contracts with the cell phone companies here and thus cannot afford sending SMS anymore. This is really disturbing, since one of Twitter's main features is lost, burying many use cases. Some users already lost all faith in Twitter. So we can only hope, this is only temporary and Twitter manages to get agreements with Europe's phone companies soon.

Blog und Twitter feeds kombinieren

Eben hatte ich die tolle Idee, mal die Yahoo Pipes zu benutzen, um den RSS Feed jenes Blogs hier mit meinem Twitter RSS Feed zu einem einzigen Feed zu verbandeln. Prinzipiell könnten auch noch mehr Feeds einer Person (flickr, del.icio.us,..) eingefügt werden und man hätte quasi einen Feed pro Web 2.0 Entität (gibt's da schon nen ontologisch korrekten Ausdruck?).
Also habe ich fix eine neue Pipe angelegt, beide Feeds mit dem Union-Operator verbunden und zum Pipe Output geschickt (Pipe output RSS Feed). Das ist quasi der most basic Anwendungsfall für Pipes.. nur das es nicht funktioniert. Aus irgendeinem Grund antwortet Twitter auf den Request von Yahoo mit einem 406 HTTP Fehler. Naja, das wird sicherlich bald behoben werden, ich bin ja (hoffentlich) nicht der erste mit dem Problem.

Eigentlich wollte ich mit dem Post hier auch darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass meine letzte Blogaktivität schon etwas länger zurückliegt und ich atm mehr per Twitter schreibe und man das auch in seinem Feedreader lesen kann.