Having live streams of common german news radio handy when in other countries is essential. Here’s a good offer (not made by the radios :-))
Source 1: http://www.drad.io/
the ocean in your browser
It’s impressive what these browsers started to become these days. Here you have a quite convincing wave simulation right in your browser with some knobs to play with:
Source: http://david.li/waves/
the Google Cultural Institute
A very interesting find that I wanted to blog about for a while now – loads of stuff to read and watch through – let it be art or history.
“Google has partnered with hundreds of museums, cultural institutions, and archives to host the world’s cultural treasures online.
With a team of dedicated Googlers, we are building tools that allow the cultural sector to display more of its diverse heritage online, making it accessible to all.
Here you can find artworks, landmarks and world heritage sites, as well as digital exhibitions that tell the stories behind the archives of cultural institutions across the globe.”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzMXbvBsALo[/youtube]
Source 1: http://www.google.com/intl/en/culturalinstitute/about/
Source 2: D-Day
a kilobyte of javascript – js1k
What do you think can you do with 1 kilobyte of javascript? Not a lot you might think. In fact it’s quite a lot!
Similar to the 4k and 64k demo awards now there is a 1k javascript competition:
“This is a competition about JavaScript scripts no larger than 1k. Starting out as a joke, the first version ended with a serious amount of submissions, prizes and quality.”
So what can you do with 1k of javascript? A lot! Click your way through the demos on the js1k.com site and find a lot like this:
Source 1: http://js1k.com/
Source 2: http://scene.org/
Source 3: http://awards.scene.org/nominees.php?cat=9
a virtual network inside your machine
Did you ever start a horde of virtual machines and a complicated vm-only network set-up just to simulate a medium complex network and the interaction of nodes in that network? Well that’s a tiresome, error-prone and labour intensive process. Fear no more, there’s a tool to the rescue.
“Mininet creates a realistic virtual network, running real kernel, switch and application code, on a single machine (VM, cloud or native), in seconds, with a single command:”
“Because you can easily interact with your network using the Mininet CLI (and API), customize it, share it with others, or deploy it on real hardware, Mininet is useful for development, teaching, and research. Mininet is also a great way to develop, share, and experiment with OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networking systems.
Mininet is actively developed and supported, and is released under a permissive BSD Open Source license. We encourage contribution of code, bug reports/fixes, documentation, and anything else that can improve the system!”
Source: http://mininet.github.com/
A lot of Whisky videos – and a tutorial how to cut videos on the command line
For just shy of 2 years I am a fan of whisky. After I got the hang of the processes, tastes and smells around this spirit I started collecting them – collecting to drink them eventually.
Now there are a number of shops you can buy good quality whisky from anywhere in the world. One of which happens to be located in germany. This shop is not only offering a huge choice but also a cross-sellers dream: tasting and explanation videos beneath many of the whiskys in which a very talented Mr. Horst Lüning tastes and explains all things whisky.
Now this shop hosts all videos on YouTube. Since I am a big fan of podcasting and internet based entertainment it’s a great thing that because if my little tool called “YouTubeFeast” all new episodes and tasting videos get downloaded automatically. Till today this way I’ve got well over 650 whisky tasting and explanation videos downloaded.
As a matter of fact this is a really entertaining and educating series I even would pay to get access to. But that aside every video which got automatically downloaded usually looks like this (german audio):
As you can see there’s a short intro (8 seconds) and an outro (29 seconds) which every single video starts and ends with. Under normal circumstances there are two occasions when I have those videos played.
- When I want to look for a particular whisky and get an overview of how it’s going to be like.
- For over 12 years I happen to have a “nights playlist” – a playlist of things that are played back during the night – every night. For this it’s important that it’s mainly speech, very normalized audio and of course it needs to be interesting.
So for the second reason it’s important that there are not too many audio bumps and breaks. Unfortunately as much as I like the intro and outro music it’s actually very bass heavy and as such sleep interrupting sometimes… So just like when a good newmake spirit is distilled the start and end run need to be separated by the heart that makes up the spirit.
Every 4-6 months I take all newly added videos and cut them down and add them to the nights playlist folders. The process is like this:
- Rename them: Remove the following things from the filenames
“Whiskey Verkostung – “, “Whiskey Likör Verkostung “, “Whiskygläser “, “Whisky-Verkostung – “, “Whisky Vorstellung “, “Whisky Verkostung “, “Whisky Verkosten “, “Whisky Tasting – “, “Whisky Tasting “, “Whisky Likör Verkostung “, “Whiskey-Verkostung – “, “Whiskey Verkostung “, “Whiskey Tasting – “, “- ”To rename the files I am usually using the freeware tool Rename Master – it’s awesome!
- Cut the intro away.
This best done with a simple ffmpeg command:ffmpeg -i $inputfile -ss 00:00:08.0 -acodec copy -vcodec copy $output
- Cut the outro away.
Using a little shell script it’s fairly easy to first get the full length of each video file and then using another tool to substract 29 seconds from each length and cut the heart out until that length is reached.To get the length the following short line is doing a great job:
ffmpeg -i “$1” 2>&1 |grep Duration | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 4 | sed s/,//In order to then cut the video before the outro starts it basically is a another call to ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i $infile -t $calculatedlength -acodec copy -vcodec copy $output
That way you get just the tasting videos without intro and outro – ready to be enjoyed. For the end of this article I want to stress the fact how awesome I think those whisky videos from Mr. Lüning are. It’s awesome to watch and learn. I hope that those videos will be available for more years to come! Cheers!
Source 1: http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/108/
Source 2: http://www.whisky.de
a good source of all things javascript libraries
Choosing the right javascript library is one of the key elements to create a good prototype in very short times – productive applications even. If you want to get new impressions, hints and links to those javascript libraries that will render your next project a success look no further:
Source 1: http://pinterest.com/0x0/webdev/
HTTP/2 RFC draft is out
Progress is showing in regards of the next incarnation of the famous Hypertext transport protocol aka http. Despite the fact that those 4 letters got banned from modern browser adress bars it’s still the cornerstone of everything your browser does with the network.
Based upon the work of Google and their SPDY implementation it comes with a lot of things that come in handy when thinking about modern demands for security, performance and multi-channel-data-transport.
Source 1: http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00.html
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY
History Lessons: Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
History was one of my favourite classes at school – I liked it so much that I even wrote one of my final examinations at the A levels in history. I like to know how stuff happened and I like to know what people got from it.
Being a german there’s a lot of history in the last 100 years guiding the interest. You can imagine that the darkest parts of those 100 years are the first and the second world war. Thankfully my generation never had to suffer through such a terrifiying time.
So for the equally interested reader of this article I have good news. In times of the internet we get access to documents that were previously hard or expensive (or both) to get. Like the original documents of the so called Nuremberg Trial – the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
You can get them in english, over 16.000 pages of PDFs, packed into 42 PDF files. Or in the official translation in German on Zeno.org.
That will keep me reading for a while – but there’s even more. With the progression of scan projects more and more original sources are becoming available for everyone.
Source 1: http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_major-war-criminals.html
Source 2: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/imt.asp
Source 3: http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/docs_swi.php?DI=1&text=overview
Source 4: http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/M/Der%20N%FCrnberger%20Proze%DF
home automation example: domotica
For several years now I am interested in this home automation thing – I even got a little bit of my own home automation going. But with websites like domotica you can get an idea of what is achieveable and how it might look for the people actually using it every day.
automation to the people: download YouTube videos automatically
You know that: You have just stumbled upon a great and informative YouTube channel. It’s full of videos you would like to watch but to do that you need to have internet access in any case. And of course that internet access needs to be as fast as possible to cope with the video quality you would like to watch.
If only it would be possible to download a video from YouTube, store it locally and watch it whenever you got the time. Maybe you want to take that video with you on that great, internetless self-awareness trip…
Now there are a lot of tools that allow you to download YouTube clips manually. I used BYTubeD for that purpose. It is a nice and easy to use Firefox Add-On which can be started whenever a YouTube video appears in any page.
After you’ve started into BYTubeD you can select which of the videos on the page you would like to download and what quality you would like to get.
All this works very well if you only want to download something once every while. Problems come up if you want to download regular postings…
I’ve subscribed to several – to me – very interesting YouTube channels. These get updated almost every day. The only option for me to keep track with them is to take the time, surf YouTube and use BYTubeD to download manually if there is anything new. Now this was a waste of time for me so I automated it.
I wrote a small tool I call “YouTubeFeast” – because it allows you to feast on YouTube… yeah I know. Now this tool is designed to run on a linux or windows machine in the background and scan in configurable intervals for new videos. If it finds new videos it downloads them in the quality you pre-configured to a folder you configured. It couldn’t be easier.
It’s open-source (GPLv2) and I’ve made it publicly available on GitHub. You can even find a pre-compiled binary version there which is ready-to-run.
The configuration file “YouTubeFeast.configuration” is a plain and simple text file. Use your favourite text editor and obey some simple rules:
- any line beginning with # is a comment
- any line not beginning with a # is a download-job
- any download job consists of the following, tabulator separated parameters:
- the URL of the video page / channel homepage / overview
- the desired quality (360p, 720p, 1080p)
- the path to store the videos
- the interval (in hours) to check for new stuff
- don’t forget: tabulator separates parameters (take a look into the example configuration file…)
After configuring the only thing you need to do is to start YouTubeFeast. It will then go through all the jobs and download video files – as soon as it comes across an already downloaded file it stops that specific job.
That’s all about it. If you got any comment or suggestions for improvement please let me know.
Source 1: https://github.com/bietiekay/YouTubeFeast
Source 2: Download YouTubeFeast-March2013
downloading the whole Jamendo catalog
Yesterday @simcup wrote on twitter about that he is currently downloading the whole Jamendo catalog of Creative Commons music. 
Although I already knew Jamendo it never occurred to be to download their whole catalog. Since I am a fan of choice I immediately thought about how I could download the catalog too. Since the only clue was a cryptic uri-like text how to achieve that it suddenly sounded like a great idea to write a universal tool and release it as open-source. This tool should allow users to download the whole catalog and keep their local jamendo mirror in sync with the server. So anytime new artists, albums or tracks are added the user does not need to download them all again.
So the only thing I had as a starting point was that cryptic uri pointing me to something I’ve never heard of called Rythmbox. Turns out that this is a GNOME music player application which has Jamendo integration. After some clueless poking around I decided to take a look at the source of Rythmbox, especially the Jamendo module.
This module is written in python and quite clean to read. And just by looking at the first lines I came across the interesting fact that there is a almost daily updated XML dump of the Jamendo catalog available from Jamendo. Hurray! Since Jamendo wants developers to interact with the platform they decided to put a documentation online which allows anyone to write tools and stream and download tracks. After all the clues I found I finally ended up on this page.
So there are the catalog download, track stream and torrent uris necessary to download the catalog. Now the only thing that is needed is a tool which parses the XML and creates a nice folder structure for us.
Parsing XML in C# (my prefered programming language) is easy. Basically you can use a tool called XSD.exe and let it generate first the XSD from the XML and then ready-to-use C# classes from that XSD.
After doing all that actually reading the whole catalog into a useable form breaks down to just three lines of code:
Isn’t it great how modern frameworks take away the complexity of such tasks. At this point I’ve already parsed the whole catalog into my tool and only wrote three lines of code. The rest was generated automatically for me. The best of all – this also works on non-windows operating systems when you use mono.
When the XML data is parsed and available in a nice data structure it’s easy to iterate through all artists, all albums and all tracks and then download the actual mp3 or ogg. And that’s basically what my tool does. It takes the XML, parses it, and downloads. It will check before downloading if the track already exists and will only download those added since the last run.
Additionally since I am deeply involved into the development of the GraphDB graph database at sones I want to make use of the Jamendo data and the graph structure it poses. Since the directory structure my tool is generating is only one aspect how you could possibly look at the data it’s quite interesting to demonstrate the capabilities of GraphDB based on that data.
The idea behind the graph representation of the data is that you could start from almost any starting point imaginable. No matter if you you start from a single track and drill up into genre and artists, or if you start at a location and drill down to tracks.
So what the Downloader does in matters of GraphDB integration is that it outputs a GraphQL script which can be imported into an instance of GraphDB.
The sourcecode of my tool is available on github and released unter the BSD license – feel free to play with it and to contribute.
Source 1: http://www.jamendo.com
Source 2: https://github.com/bietiekay/JAMENDOwnloader
der letzte Flug des Space Shuttle Endeavour
Am kommenden Freitag soll das Space Shuttle Endeavour zum letzen Mal und ein Space Shuttle zum vorletzten Mal abheben. Da will man dabei sein :-)
Ich habe glücklicherweise gerade die Herren (und Damen?) von SpaceLiveCast entdeckt. Offenbar machen die schon eine ganze Weile Livestreams zu den verschiedenen Raumfahrt-Events.
P.S.: Wenn ich einen Wunsch frei hätte, wäre das, dass die Seite einen Video Podcast Feed anbietet….(wird Hilfe benötigt?)
Source 1: http://spacelivecast.de/
Source 2: http://www.raumfahrer.net
Source 3: http://spacelivecast.de/2011/04/29-04-ab-1900-uhr-sts-134-letzter-endeavour-flug/
type to win
In the dusk of Flash it’s nice to see that HTML 5 and JavaScript are here to bring small and fun games to our browsers.
“Z-Type was specifically created for Mozilla’s Game On. I immediately wanted to participate in the competition when I first heard of it, but the deadline seemed so far away that I didn’t bother to begin working on a game back then. Fast forward to this tweet announcing that the deadline was only one week away – it took me by surprise. I still hadn’t even began working on anything. The thought of just submitting my earlier game Biolab Disaster crossed my mind but was immediately dismissed again.”
Great sound, great graphics and in the higher levels quite difficult.
Source 1: http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/
great SIP Softphone for Linux and Windows
Thank goodness I can uninstall X-Lite! At sones we are using a SIP based telephony solution. And therefore some times a SIP softphone application is needed along with the obligatory hardware SIP telephones. Till today the only half-working software I knew for that task was X-Lite. But a colleague told me today that there is a better software which not even looks better but also works better than X-Lite.
It’s called “Ekiga” and it’s a GTK based open source application which can run on Windows and Linux. It looks clean and therefore nice and works great.
A special tip from me: Abort the Welcome Wizard because the only thing it does is registering you with ekigas’ own services.
Source: http://ekiga.org/
Sintel:
After the last Open Movie Project “Bug Buck Bunny” – Sintel is the next short movie available for free download. Get it here.
“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
“Sintel” commenced in May 2009, with producer Ton Roosendaal establishing a core team consisting of Colin Levy (director), David Revoy (concept art), Martin Lodewijk (story) and Jan Morgenstern (composer). In August script writer Esther Wouda was approached as a consultant, which resulted in her taking the responsibility for the entire screenplay. Esther then worked in close cooperation with Colin, David and Ton to deliver the final script early November. Meanwhile, Colin and David realized the first storyboards.
Based on a public call for artists – with over 150 respondents – the Durian artist team got established in July 2009. They first met in a pre-production week in Amsterdam in August, and all decided to join the project per October 1st. With the final movie budget still unknown, the target then still was to finish the film within 7 months, with a team of 6 artists and 2 developers. At that time the team still had the hopes to be able to realize the script in a 6-8 minute film.
In november, the Netherlands Film Fund approved on a substantial subsidy for Sintel, enough to extend the project to 10 months, with possible 1 or 2 extra artist seats in the final months. It was also by this time that breakdowns and animatic edits showed that the script had to be revised to become more compact, with a story structure using a flashback.
In the months after, Colin’s work on the Director’s Layout – 3D animatic shots – and final designs on the grand finale gradually made the movie longer, from 9 minutes in november, to almost 12 in May. Proper story telling, to absorb an audience with convincing characters and action just takes time!
With the highly anticipated extra funding from the Amsterdam Cinegrid – also funding a 4k resolution version – Ton finally could extend the team with 5 artists and a developer in March 2010. With 14 people the film then was completed for a first screening on July 18th in cinema Studio K in Amsterdam.
Three artists then stayed in Amsterdam working on final shot edits, lighting design, compositing, and on the impressive 2 minute film credits. The movie ended up with a total duration of 14m:48s, 888 seconds!
Watch it now:
Sintel
Source 1: Elephants Dream
Source 2: Big Buck Bunny
Source 3: Sintel
Source 3: Sintel Download
Still 9 days to go till SXSW 2010
Since there are still 9 days to go till SXSW 2010 it’s a pleasure to give out a link to the completely unofficial torrents which old all mp3 files of almost all songs which are to be presented at this years SXSW:
“The SXSW® Music and Media Conference showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW® Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.”
Source 1: http://www.sxsw.com/music
Source 2: http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/2010
How to unleash the “Virtual WiFi” feature in Windows 7 in C#
Great stuff ahead – this is just the thing I would want to write if it’s not been written already. This tool is free and open source and it’s the perfect workaround for those usual cases when you want to download a podcast in your holiday and your apple branded device tells you “You can only download files up to 10 Megabyte over 3G connections” – You take your notebook, log into 3G, create a WiFi Hotspot with this tool and off you go.
“Over the last week some of you may have heard about Connectify. It’s an app that unleashes the “Virtual WiFi” and Wireless Hosted Network features of Windows 7 to turn a PC into a Wireless Access Point or Hot Spot. Well, I looked into what it would take to build such an app, and it really wasn’t that difficult since Windows 7 has all the API’s built in to do it. After some time of looking things up and referencing the “Wireless Hosted Network” C++ sample within the WIndows 7 SDK, I now have a nice working version of the application to release. I’m calling this project “Virtual Router” since it essentially allows you to host a software based wireless router from your laptop or other PC with a Wifi card. Oh, and did I mention that this is FREE and OPEN SOURCE!”
“The Wireless Network create/shared with Virtual Router uses WPA2 Encryption, and there is not way to turn off that encryption. This is actually a feature of the Wireless Hosted Network API’s built into Windows 7 and 2008 R2 to ensure the best security possible.
You can give your "virtual" wireless network any name you want, and also set the password to anything. Just make sure the password is at least 8 characters.”
what would you do with 1 million frames per second?
This is just beautiful:
maybe I should…
…switch this website to another weblog software in the future. The dasBlog development isn’t exactly what I would call fast-paced. It even seems that there was no movement at all for the last year at all regarding new features.
I took a short look at a current WordPress installation we did for our Developer Website at sones – and I have to admit that feature-wise this WordPress is way beyond anything I could achieve in dasBlog anytime soon.
Additionally the fact that the skin of this site seems to be broken (especially for older browsers) I would have to do a skin-redesign – turns out that this is way easier in WordPress than it is in dasBlog.
making things up…
While trying out the new Mozilla Weave I came across the nice interface the guys built into their sync service. Funny messages included.
Source: http://labs.mozilla.com/weave/
Plain-Text Username Password Authentification with WCF
If you got it, it’s easy. If you’re starting from scratch it ain’t as easy. We were in need of such a Username+Password Authentification so I started googling around.
I found several articles but had to mash it all together in a trial-and-error session. Now that I am enlightened I want to share my knowledge:
Step 1: Implement an UserNamePasswordValidator class and override the Validate method.
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IdentityModel.Tokens; using System.IdentityModel.Selectors; namespace sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting { public class UserNamePasswordAuthentification: UserNamePasswordValidator { public override void Validate(string userName, string password) { if ((userName != "Username") || (password != "Password")) { throw new SecurityTokenException("Validation Failed!"); } } } }
Step 2: Edit the App.config file to enable the previously implemented UsernamePasswordValidator.
<bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="CustomAuthentication"> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> <transport clientCredentialType="Basic" proxyCredentialType="Basic"/> security> binding> basicHttpBinding> bindings> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="SecurityBehavior"> <serviceCredentials> <userNameAuthentication userNamePasswordValidationMode="Custom" customUserNamePasswordValidatorType="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.UserNamePasswordAuthentification, PandoraDB_WebServiceHost_UsernamePasswordAuth"/> serviceCredentials> behavior> serviceBehaviors> behaviors> <services> <service behaviorConfiguration="SecurityBehavior" name="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.PandoraDatabaseHost"> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomAuthentication" name="ep1" contract="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.IPandoraDatabaseHost" /> service> services>
In this example the ServiceHost will use no server SSL certificate and therefor allow normal http access instead of just using https ssl. You can configure that behavior with the <security mode=”TransportCredentialOnly”> line. Just change there and define an apropriate certificate and you’re good to go with https / ssl.
Google Copy-Wave
Oh dear. Another hyped protocol/platform from Google… oh wait. It’s not from Google. It’ all started in Xerox PARC…
There are several papers that describe what Google now claims to have developed…
left: Xerox PARC Paper; right: Google Wave
Conclusion: Go and read old Papers. As it turns out almost all newly hyped things have been described in papers from years ago.
Source 1: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform
Source 2: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/215585.215706
small and reliable SFTP server for Windows
I had to transfer some data the last days and I wanted to do it fast, encrypted and using only one tcp port. SFTP is one of those protocols that come in handy in these cases.
Since the machine that would host the SFTP service is a Windows machine I reached out to find a free, reliable and easy to install and use SFTP Server.
I found Core FTP mini-sftp-server. It’s a small download of just one .exe file. When you start it up it’ll show the dialog above. You can configure username, password, port and path. Click “Start” and off you go. Works as advertised.
Source: http://www.coreftp.com/server/