Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Backups!
All the world: Backup! Backup everything that some stupid error may bust. Especially if you hack some edit code for your blog way after midnight while keeping the eyes open with some matches...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Impressive
Here is something that I forgot to blog. About two weeks ago on my trip from home to Aachen during the stop in Düsseldorf I saw a photo exhibition. Since I had about 20 minutes to wait I decided to have a look. Before I saw the photos I was surprised about a mother being in a hurry to get her child out of sight of the photos... When I saw the photos I understood. It was the World Press Photo touring exhibition. This is the contest for the best photos in a couple of categories for a given year - this specific was for 2003.
The world press photo of the year 2003 was indeed impressive! Of course it was pretty big in dimensions there so it was even more shocking. You can see some of the cruelty that has been done to the Iraqi people.
The spot news story winner was another eye opener. Seeing the fifth picture in full size was - no word. This is not from one of those movies...
I finished seeing some nicer pictures which was good. But these are not the pictures I remember....
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
A couple of days
I'm sitting close to the Rhine at the Hohenzollern bridge, the sun is shining and some guys are climbing on the bridges end. Great day!
I yet have to write some lines about the MechRob results: We crunched the AIS Volksbots in two games. Each ended 5 to 0 goals for us. Yes! A funny details is, that we shot seven goals in each game, 2 not rewarded (fouls before goal like pushing the goal keeper with the ball into the goal...). It were really fair games. So a nice event, we thought. Of course we expected to be invited to the dinner on Wednesday. I had not feasable dressing for this in Aachen so in about one hour I had to buy an outfit that was OK for this event... I ended up with a black jeans and a shirt, which should have been sufficient. But standing at the door they told us that we were not invited. That's a great "Thank you" to us being there to fill the breaks and entertain the people...
The IT and sport conference was pretty good. Yesterday we did the setup and I found out how to configure the path plan program that can cruise the robot around in the location. The location was easy since I could do everything in one map. Today we had a short demo of the robots with some information about the localization and let some people drive around with the joystick using the laser beams for location information so that one may see that it is not trivial to localize from just some laser beams. After that we let the robot drive around with the path plan program and talked to the people. AIS was also there, but they refused another game since they could not bring a field to the location. When the conference ended Andreas, Carsten and me had some time left. So we went to Cologne city. Carsten and I first had a look at some outdoor stuff in the "Sport Check" shop. Pretty interesting stuff over there, but so expensive... After some time Andreas pulled us away from all the things shouting for our money :-) We ended up sitting in the "Früh Brauhaus" in Cologne and we had some Kölsch (local beer). A must if you visit Cologne.
So now I'm waiting for Anne and here is no WLAN. Damnit. So I hope I get to post this tonight. Now she's here and gotta go :-)
OK, I didn't make it online the day before yesterday. Yesterday we went to Bonn to the local Globetrotter store. For the first tour we see tremendous costs coming for equipment (we have almost nothing yet). Now I'm home and preparing the next exam. The last one for this semester...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
MechRob 2004
The AllemaniACs team is attending MechRob 2004 at the RWTH Aachen - as part of the team I'm too. On Monday and yesterday we did the setup and fixed a couple of bugs. The robots are finally working now.
In about 20 minutes we will have a friendly game against AIS from the Fraunhofer Bonn. We are relaxed right now, so it seems we are prepared :-)
If you want to see the robots you may want to visit the IT and Sport & Computer Science in Sport in Cologne tommorrow and friday.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Mail GAU
I have converted my IMAP server from UW IMAP to Courier IMAP. Mbox became to inefficient for my mail boxes and I decided to try out Maildir. I have already an installation at a company that I work for running with Qmail and Courier. This combination works pretty good. Here I use the combination Sendmail, Procmail and as mentioned Courier now. I think I will post a wiki article about the conversion and how I did it soon. The whole conversion took about two weeks (~ 300000 mails involved in conversion I guess), so bring some time...
Today I switched off the catchall of my domain. In the end I got about 5k to 6k mails, about 95% returning mailer daemon messages about junk, spam and undeliverable mail. Probably the result of some dumb idiot spamming with my domain name :-/ So guys, now mails only to well-known-email Adresses...
I will now look into implementing SPF for my domain. Since SenderID is delayed because of the Micro$oft patent thread raised through CallerID floating into SenderID this seems to be the best solution for now. This will hopefully help some other guys out there to kick some spam send with a faked sender.
