So ITER will be built in Europe! That's really good news. A big organization for scientists and engineers to work at for the next years, or better: decades. Actually I would have liked Germany to apply for a site as well, but they feared the costs (there were some serious plans for Greifswald AFAIR).

Anyway, I'm really interested what becomes of fusion as energy resource. I'm working on fuel cell systems, so it's more or less a competitor, but maybe with fusion power plant there'd be a way for a hydrogen economy...? OK, a hydrogen economy is not important to me, because in the company I'm working in we're using SOFCs (high temperature fuel cells) and can use almost any hydrocarbon fuel and therefor I even think that biodiesel and similar fuels are more interesting than hydrogen anyway.

Further on I'm not sure if a fusion power plant will be feasible in the next decades (I don't know about “ever”). Just some years ago I heard a pretty interesting, but devestating lecture about material problems due to ion sputtering e.g. And then it seemed, that possible solutions are far away.

So let's just suppose fusion is controlled and a commercial power plant could be erected. Who would do it and who could afford it? I expect this to be a task of a nation or even of the European Union and I can't imagine any company taking the risk. Further with such a power plant you get an huge amount of power in just one installation, or can a fusion power plant be modulated easily? So what happens, if you don't need the power: is it shut down for some few hours? You could convert the electricity to hydrogen and then use fuel cells, but a hydrogen infrastructure is far into the future as well. And finally what happens if a fusion power plant has to be shut down because of some problem? I expect that a fusion power plant will have a power output so high, that it won't be easy to have a backup at hand.

Don't take me wrong: I'm not against working on fusion power plant. I'm just think about using it practically sometime in the future. I think even if it won't be used ever, the development on the problems right now, will yield to many interesting results and materials for other applications as well.

An online survey I really like taking part. I found it on Moe's blog (I just read Martin's main blog, but not his newsfeed).

Just found Dracula blogged in PlasticThinking: Moe's Blog. I think that's a very interesting idea. I just don't know if I'll read. I remember that I got stuck when I tried to read Bram Stoker's Dracula…

Before I completely forget to mention it: for three weeks now I have a Hidamari no Tami rocking its head from side to side on my desk. It is so nice and calming looking at it for some minutes if there's too much stress… I got it from a friend who just visited Japan recently (and I looked after his appartment, mail, and plants).

Yes, I became a fan of it. ;-)

Just after writing about not liking Stoiber as foreign minister of Germany at all (and Mrs. Merkel isn't a better choice as chancellor in this respect as well), I found this blog entry: Flash Vizualization of Iraq War Fatalities | Nick Lewis: The Blog. Here's the flash directly.

Him presenting Germany to the outside. How moronic. The European Union will get another four hard years then, without any progress towards solving the problems there're now.

At least for the US it will be good: a chancellor and a foreign minister who will be following willing into any war (just remember the discussion about the war in Iraq, when Mrs. Merkel stated, she would have supported Bush, if she would have been chancellor than!).

I decided to buy a MP3 player finally. I wanted a small one: so iPod or any other harddisk based player. It shouldn't be too expensive: that settled to go for 512 MB (1 GB is compared to the difference between 256 MB and 512 MB a large step). And finally I like a nice design.

First try: Sony NW-E405

This one looked really nice. It was a bit over my initial limit, but as all the cheaper ones looked less stylish, I decided to take it.

Went home, did have a look at it (nice interface), connected it to my computer. So far so good: it's remembered as USB flash disc. So I copy some MP3s to the device.

And I try to play them…

No data found… What the hell?

OK, play around a bit. Nothing works. Connect to the internet and start googling…

Not so many relevant entries looking for some connection to using this gadget with Linux. But then I found the most stupid thing Sony could do: you need their special software to copy MP3s to this gadget! And it gets even worse. They change the MP3s to un-MP3s: they strip the header and put some Sony header in the file, so that it is no MP3 anylonger (it seems you can't copy any MP3 off the device and play it on another computer anymore, so it aren't real MP3s to me stored on the device).

Luckily I didn't buy this thing on the net (were it definitely would have been cheaper), but in a local electronics store. So I returned it…

The guy there told me that they know this. But I was aware Apple is doing something similar on their iPod (maybe I'd play a Linux on) but I didn't expect to do someone other doing something similar stupid (Apple gets away with something like that more easily). And I think it's misleading to say the gadget is MP3 compatible: it isn't, just the included software (only available for Microsofts Windows) is compatible to MP3s!

So at the electronic market they told me, that with any other player I could just copy the files to the device (but Apple's and Sony's). Because of the looking for the reason of the nonfunctioning of the NW-E405 I learned, that for the irivers I need a special program to build their database, but they'd play the copied files just fine and there's some program for Linux available.

Unfortunately they had the iriver FP-890 just as 256 MB version and the 512 MB was very expensive anyway. So the shopman showed me a just arrived Trekstor i.beat organix.

Second try: Trekstor i.beat organix

Definitely a very nice device too. It even plays Ogg Vorbis as well and has an integrated radio (don't care about that too much, because in my region you can't really listen to the radio on air too long anyway). Well, it's costs some Euro more, but I already decied to spent more money. And he assured me, that just copying the files to the device would work.

So back at home I unpacked it and connected it to my computer. Copied some Ogg files to it and all works! Well almost everything. I think they could enhance their firmware a bit: right now they just show the artists name from the ID3 tags and additional the file name. There I'd wish they'd show the track title from the ID3 tags (maybe even the tracks number). As this device does play the file in a sorted way out of a folder as it seems, it's a good idea to precede the filename with the track number anyway if you want to play an album in correct order (which I want mostly). And I even got it to crash once: just pressed the A-B button too fast and too often in a row.

Being at home I even found in the net, that this gadget was on first place in some tests of at least four magazines… The praise the good sound and the good included earplugs which are from Sennheiser (a well known name for headphones).

And finally I really like the design even as the OLED display is not as good to read in very bright sunlight as the advertising tries to make you belief it. The navigation is pretty easy and the amount of buttons is perfect.

Conclusion

So I can recommend buying a Trekstor i.beat organix if you're looking for a MP3/Ogg player but don't buy a Sony Network Walkman. You won't be able to use the gadget as you want.

I think I won't buy anything of Sony next time…

As we're about to clean up our shared directory structure I'm looking into some way to manage all the photos, graphics, and other images in a nice centralized way.

Right now we're just storing them in a directory structure which got a bit cluttered with the time. To look for pictures and to manage them there're some nice client side tools around, but that's the problem: it's client side so any user has to do the management for himself. So I'm looking for some server side solution and thought about something web based. The requirement to load new images up to the server could even lead to some more reasonable selection of what to store. Right now there're to many doublettes on the server, because someone had to do a photo of one thing or another and tried with different settings, different light, and so on. But to choose two or three of the best images all 20 or more are saved…

So I did look around on the net a bit and decided to look further into Coppermine Photo Gallery and Gallery. Right now I think Gallery will do better what I want.

As you may have noticed, I switched to tagging of my blog entries and abandoned the category system of nucleus. This way it's very easy to add more than one topic to an entry.

The software

To implement this I used the nucleus plugins for tagging support of anand in the version of 2005-05-28. Following his documentation (which is still a bit rudimentary at the time of writing) it was pretty easy to get the system up. But as often I had to make some changes to the code to fit my needs.

My changes to the code

There're some things I needed to change because I didn't like the way they worked before or didn't work like they're supposed to work on my system.

• I didn't like the page bar. So I implemeted the one I used before with NP_ShowBlogs. Further on I added a blog specific option for the location of the page bar. There's still a bit to do. Right now the style is hard coded (there should be some versions to choose from or a free way to define the look), as well as the number of pages to show without interupting the list (10 right now).
• While testing the page bar code I saw that the original code didn't return the number of items per page as requested. It just worked on the first page. By looking a bit at the query code and comparing it to the query code of NP_ShowBlogs I found a difference in the usage of LIMIT. The tags code used LIMIT first, last but NP_ShowBlogs LIMIT first, number of items. So I changed this in NP_ItemsInTag accordingly and this seems to work so far.
• As I want to use tags with spaces in it, I added a rawurlencode of the tags in the URL generation code. In Firefox it works without this actually but it breaks the standard compliance of the XHTML code.
• To support Technorati better, I added the possibility to add a rel property to links of tags. This is used to add an rel="tag" to the tag links of an item (but not to the tag cloud). I did this because I have the impression that Technorati has problem getting the tags out off the RSS.
• The tag cloud got some changes too:
  • distingish 1 post and x posts (with x > 1) in the title,
  • separate the tags using commas (I think this should become an option),
  • round the font sizes showing how often a tag exists to one digit after the period. The approach of rakaz to use a logical markup is very interesting too and for the long run to be prefered (but maybe better using <em> with some classes but this heavy nesting—I'd like to distinguish 5 to 7 levels at least).

If you would like to test these changes, download the gzipped diff to anands version of 2005-05-28 (2.3 kB).

Future enhancements

Working on the code I have some ideas what would be nice to change. Most important are some changes to the tag cloud, I think.

• Make it possible to show all tags and not only the tags of the last or a random selection of x posts.
• To make this easier I could think about a change to the tag cloud caching system. As I'm not firm with SQL and performance and so on this is just a rudimentary idea.
  • I think adding a new table plugin_tags_cloud would help for this. Besides an id field this would include a tag_name, blogid (there is an entry for every tag per every blog it occurs in), count (number of occurence of this tag in blog blogid), last entry (timestamp). The timestamp is a bit of a problem (what to do if an entry is deleted?), but with it you could even get a tag cloud sorted by time easily.
  • The tag cloud table should be updated on adding, editing, and deleting an entry. Doing this the tag cloud is always up to date and the table is only updated when neeeded.
  • There should be an additional option to update the tag cloud table in the admin area, because this might be useful if you replay (partial) backups.
  I think this could be useful, as I suppose that the number of tags will be more or less constant over a long time (or increase slowly) compared to the number of blog entries.
• There should be some style options. For instance it would be nice to show the number of posts after the tag and it could even be interesting to show the tag cloud as a list.

I don't know yet, whether I'll work on some of these things or not. That depends on how urgently I “need” a feature. ;-)

I've been to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy together with a friend yesterday. Here in Germany the film is running for the first week and fortunately it's even shown as OV in one cinema here in Dresden. Unfortunately they had problems with the sound once. Suddenly the soundtrack was in German and it took sometime to switch to English again and there was no sound at all for a short time while the operator was working on this problem.

Some words about the film.

First, I really like the books and I think the film is pretty good too. In the end I accepted as just another version (authorized by Douglas) of the story (more or less).

But there're some things that have been changed and I don't see a reason why (because I don't see any reason for coherence of the story). For instance, why is the Heart of Gold not shown as the sleek white running shoe? That's really a detail I do miss. But that's not the worst—the worst change they made are the two heads of Zaphod. There's much fun lost…

All in all I really like the film so I don't want to take it apart more here. The end is even made for a sequel, but then they'll likely run into inconsitencies to the books more and more as the story started to drift away towards the end…

Just added another Cyanotype to my gallery:

I did add it to my flickr pool as well…

This song is just running on the radio again and as anytime when I hear it, it's reminding me of a song of “Die Art”…

So it's the second vote for No

Why

There's much speculation about the “Why” all over Europe. I think, there're some different reasons.

In my eyes, this treaty is too complex to be accepted as a constitution by people. I think if I'd read the German consitution I'd get the idea of it, but I doubt I'd understand much about this treaty which is called “EU constitution”. So if we would have a vote in Germany, I wouldn't have any reason to vote for or against this treaty but listening to the reasoning of the politicians.

So the actual mood about goverment gets very important. (This includes all which is talked about right now: high unemployment, Turkey, too much bureaucracy, price increases because of the Euro, and so on…)

But there's something other. This is one of the very few times that the people in some countries can say something directly to the EU.

What would happen if anyone says Yes?

People wouldn't be heard…

Politicians would say what fine people they are and go on and forget. But by saying “No” the politicians have to react somehow. And even if all the still missing ballots and parliamental votings will still be carried out, the constitution couldn't (and shouldn't) be inured.

Are these votes really bad?

No. This is what democracy is about: you can say “No” and don't have to follow everything the legislature wants.

More theses votes are good. Not because I'm basically against this treaty but because I hate the way the politicians worked on it. What I'm really angry about is, that they didn't have any plan in mind if this happened. They just seemed to expect every country to vote with “Yes”. But they should have known, that there'd be ballots in some of the countries and not just a vote in the parliament…

What to do?

I'd whish a constitution stripped down to the neccessary basics which will be understood by people. This should include some basic rules about the EU parliament, the EU commision and some special postions like an EU foreign minister. And it should be short!