CCCamp 2019 – 21. – 25. August 2019
The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. It provides a relaxed atmosphere for free exchange of technical, social, and political ideas. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. Bring your tent and participate!
CCCamp 2019 Wiki
It has been 2005 that I had the time and chance to attend an international open-air meeting of normal people. Of course I am talking about the 2005 What-the-hack I wrote about back then.
This year it’s time again for the Chaos Communication Camp in Germany. Sadly still I won’t be attending. Clearly that needs to change with one of the next iterations. With the CCC events becoming highly valuable also for families maybe it’s a chance in the future to meet up with old and valued friends (wink-wink Andreas Heil).
The Chaos Communication Camp (also known as CCCamp) is an international meeting of hackers that takes place every four years, organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). So far all CCCamps have been held near Berlin, Germany.
The camp is an event for providing information about technical and societal issues, such as privacy, freedom of information and data security. Hosted speeches are held in big tents and conducted in English as well as German. Each participant may pitch a tent and connect to a fast internet connection and power.
Enjoy the intro-movie that has just been made available to us, alongside the whole design material:
31st Chaos Communication Congress
Like every year the Chaos Communication Congress gathered thousands of people in one place between the Christmas-Holidays and NewYears.
Since I was out-of-order this year to attend I’ve opted for the Attending-by-Stream option. All Lectures are live-streamed by the awesome CCC Video Operations Center (C3VOC) and made available as recordings afterwards.
Since the choice of topics is enormous here are some I can recommend:
- Inside Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg
- Beyond PNR: Exploring airline systems
- Fnord News Show
- 10 Jahre OpenStreetMap
- “Wir beteiligen uns aktiv an den Diskussionen”
- Uncaging Microchips
- Fernvale: An Open Hardware and Software Platform, Based on the (nominally) Closed-Source MT6260 SoC
- Hard Drive Punch
- Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gefälscht hast
- Ich sehe, also bin ich … Du
- Forging the USB memory
- Rocket science – how hard can it be?
Source 1: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/wiki/Static:Main_Page
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress
Source 3: http://c3voc.de/
Source 4: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/
Tokyo Trip ahead
Stay tuned here for at least some coverage of this years Japan trip.
when in Japan – get free Wifi
On a trip in Japan and feeling disconnected? There’s a lot of Wifi around and some of it is free:
Source 1: http://flets.com/freewifi/service.html
I will be speaking at Open Source Data Center conference 2013
I plan to speak at a couple of conferences this year – first in the line will be the Open Source Data Center conference in Nuremberg.
“The Open Source Data Center Conference, with a changing focus from year to year, offers you the unique possibility to meet international OS-experts, to benefit from their comprehensive experience and to gain the latest know-how for the daily practice. The conference is especially adapted to experienced administrators and architects.”
The topic I will be talking about (in german though) is our fully virtualized data center testing environment at Rakuten Germany.
When you want to change things from “testing in production” to “testing in a test environment” it’s usually a very hard way to go. In this case we chose the way to virtualize whatever service was in the datacenter, with all the same configurations and even network settings. We called that “Ignition” and it allows us to test almost any aspect of our production environment without interfereing with it. My talk will cover the thoughts and technologies behind that.
I also want to stress the fact that there are a lot more interesting talks than mine. Go to the OSDC 2013 homepage and find out for yourself.
Source 1: http://www.netways.de/osdc
N.O-T/MY-D/E.PA/R.T-ME
Every year between Christmas and New Years the hackers of the (mostly european) world gather for the Chaos Communication Congress. This year for the 29th time. The 29c3 takes place where it all started – in Hamburg. This years subtitle is:
Since the reports are already in that the fairydust has landed successfully in Hamburg there’s even a proof picture for it:
Since FeM is already preparing it will be great to ‘attend’ the congress via live streams of all lectures.
Source 1: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/wiki/Main_Page
Source 2: http://blog.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/archives/836-Reisetagebuch-Mal-kurz-Hamburg.html
second Tokyo Trip 2012 – Rakuten Technology Conference 2012
This October I had the pleasure to fly to Tokyo for the second time in 2012.
The development unit of Rakuten Japan was hosting the 7th Rakuten Technology Conference in Rakuten Tower 1 in Tokyo.
The schedule was packed with up to 6 tracks in parallel. From research to grass-roots-development a lot of interesting topics.
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Source 1: http://tech.rakuten.co.jp/rtc2012/
Source 2: Recorded Lectures
Entwickler in Hamburg – die Developer Conference 2012 in Hamburg
Der Freitag der vergangenen Woche begann sehr sehr früh. Es ging nach Nürnberg um den Flug nach Hamburg zu erwischen. Erstaunlich wie günstig die heutzutage sind: der Flug nach Hamburg (50 Minuten in der Luft) sollte nur 10 Euro teurer als die Zugfahrt zurück (4 Stunden auf Schienen) sein…
Jedenfalls war es ein schön kurzer Flug und schwupps stand ich vor der Otto Versand Zentrale in Hamburg… Es war Zeit für die…
… Developer Conference Hamburg 2012.
Es war meine erste DevCon-HH und dementsprechend kann ich keine Vergleiche zum letzten Jahr ziehen. Die Räumlichkeiten – direkt bei Otto – waren jedenfalls sehr ordentlich aufgebaut, alles sehr bequem. Kurze Wege zwischen Kaffee und Vortragsstuhl. Die 2 der Vortragssäle waren leider nur über den Hauptsaal zu erreichen. Was ein-zweimal dazu führte dass Vortrage in den kleineren Sälen bereits beendet waren und die Menschenmengen durch den Hauptsaal Richtung Kaffee strömten während die Zuhörer im Hauptsaal noch versuchten zuzuhören. Hier mal im Bild erklärt: Rechts der große Hauptsaal und Links ein kleinerer Vortragssaal. Ich stand beim fotografieren direkt im Türrahmen.
Es ging für mich mit zwei sehr guten und interessanten Vorträgen los. Die Keynote des ersten Tages gibt es mittlerweile auch, wie es sich gehört, auf Slideshare:
Insgesamt war die Qualität der Vorträge sehr hoch. Ich fand die Mischung zwischen harten und soften Themen rund um die Software-Entwicklung mehr als gelungen und sicherlich werde ich versuchen nächstes Jahr wieder zu kommen.
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Source 1: http://www.developer-conference-hh.de/
Adventures in e-Commerce and technology
Oh dear. I just thought about the fact that I never really announced or talked about the fact that I changed my employee and moved to a (old) new place.
Yes that’s right, I am not with sones anymore. I am since January 1st the CTO of Rakuten Germany. When I signed the contract the company was called Tradoria – one of the first big projects I had the opportunity to work on was the so called brandchange.
A humongeous japanese based company called Rakuten bought Tradoria in the middle of 2011 and after half a year it was time to switch the brand.
As you can imagine these were busy weeks since January 1st. I had to digest a lot of existing technology and products. I met and got to know a lot of interesting people – first and foremost a great team of developers that went through almost all imagineable pains and parties to come up with a marketplace and shop system that is a perfect base for take-off.
A short word on the business-model of Rakuten – If you’re a merchant you gotta love it: Think of Rakuten as a full service provider for a merchant and customer. You as a Rakuten merchant get all the frontend and backend bliss to present and manage your products and orders. Rakuten takes care of all the nasty bits and pieces like hosting, development, telephone orders, invoicing, payment. The only thing that you as a Rakuten merchant need to do is to put in great products, gather orders and send out packages. Since Rakuten isn’t selling products on it’s own it won’t be competing with the merchants like other marketplace providers do these days.
On top of that Rakuten cares for the merchant and the customer. Just a week after that successful brandchange I attended (and spoke) at the Tradoria Live! 2012. That’s basically the merchant get-together. This year over 500 people attended this one-day conference. Think of it as a hands-on conference with features, plans, summaries of the last year and the upcoming one – every merchant is invited to come and talk to the people in person that work hard everyday to make the marketplace and shop system better.
click on it to see it bigJust 24 hours later standing on that stage I found myself here:
東京Yep. That’s Tokyo (東京). After a very long flight we had the chance to attend a all-embracing tokyo tour before the meetings and talks would start for our team. It was an awesome and exhausting week – just about 120 hours later I was back in Germany – I must have slept for two days :-)
Back in germany I had a lot of stuff to learn and work through. We had already moved to a wonderful house near Bamberg – it was pretty much big luck to find it. It’s actually ridiculously huge for a couple and two cats but we love it. Imagine the contrast: moving from an apartment next to a four-lane city street to the countryside just a 15 minute drive away from work with philosophical quietness all around.
Now after about half a year I am well into the process. I met a lot of high profile techies and things seem to take up speed in regards of teamplay in germany and with all the other countries. It’s a bliss to work for a group of companies that actually go through a lot of transitions while transforming from start-ups to an enterprise.
Ready for a family picture? Ready. Steady. Go!
That’s all Rakuten – that’s all on one mission: Shopping is entertainment! Empower the merchants!
Beside all that I even started to learn japanese. ただいま :-)
first conference for about a year: Berlin Buzzwords 2012
It’s been a while since I attended a technology conference. But it’s going to change. This week I attended the Berlin Buzzword 2012 conference in Berlin.
Search.Store.Scale is the headline under which this awesome conference takes place and after a very slow start there were a lot of great talks about current technologies regarding databases, data processing and storage. From great overviews to some very in-depth talks… like the one called “Searching Japanese with Lucene and Solr”. Since I am currently in the process of getting to know the japanese language better this talk in particular had interesting insights into how to handle the japanese language. Very impressive and a bit frightening how complicated language processing can be.
And out gets something like this:
TechEd Europe 2010–if you’re there we could meet!
After 5 years of TechEd abstinence it’s time to visit the conference again. This years TechEd will be held in Berlin which is quite nice since traveling will be reduced to a minimum. Since the session schedule is already available I’ve already filled my calendar for TechEd week.
Okay it’s impressive to see that so many interesting sessions can be held in one week’ – the bad thing is that I need do decide which to go and which to watch on video later.
On later notice: Since I will be there it would be a great opportunity to meet. Let me know if you are there and want to meet.