Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Winner RoboCup@Home at German Open 2007!
We made it, we won the RoboCup@Home competition at the RoboCup German Open 2007! I have posted more details about the tournament in my blog entry on the AllemaniACs website.
Additionally I have to mention that it was damn cold in Hannover. It froze during two nights! On Thursday we went to a supermarket where everyone bought an additional blanket. And that was really necessary. We had to get up anyway at 6 am (after going to bed at about 2 am) to have enough time for working on the code, but on one day where I was scheduled for 6:30 am (shower shifts...) I got up at 6:10 am because it was so cold in the tent that I more happily waited before the shower where it was heated...
There has been a lot of press coverage of the event. There is a ZDF heute article with a picture of our robot. We will put up some photos during the day so stay tuned.
Thanks to the whole team for their support, the mid-size fellows did the official fair stuff besides the RoboCup which gave us the time to work on the software. Great team work!
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
RoboCup German Open 2007
We are currently participating in the RoboCup@Home league of the German Open 2007. The event is held at the Hannover Fair. The competition field is quite small so it's pretty familial. Additionaly to that you can see the prototype of our new middle-size league platform at the Festo booth and our current world champion robot "Hannibal" at the North-Rhine Westphalia Booth in the Research & Innovation area. So if you happen to be in Hannover think about hopping by.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
Good bye coax
The next three weeks will involve quite a change - Anne is going to move here. We already painted a few walls to bring some color to our flat, decided on most of the locations of our chattels. We already had this move in mind for the last years when buying new stuff for the flat. Because of this most of the stuff fits nicely and we have a bed and a (bed-)sofa to start with, so we will even have some kind of guest room!
But this of course also means to get rid of some old stuff, that is blocking space or has been lurking around unused for too long. At home where I still have a room I threw away already half a dozen of big bags of old junk. Although almost all of these things remind me of something it has now been unused for just long enough.
Today I took a box that is under my desk - for almost five years now in two flats. I regularly forget about this box and because of this it has half a dozen of half-full battery boxes. Today I decided to muck out this box. This way I now threw away all of my good ol' coaxial cabling accessories - which I didn't use for the mentioned five years now. Even at home, where we had the coaxial cabling for quite a while we have not put new network cables into place. Other things that I found is for example an adapter to plug a PS/2 keyboard into a DIN-socket - think about it, usually you had adapters to plug old DIN keyboards into PS/2 sockets. I also found two balls from an old mouse, anybody who still has that kind of a mouse today? Probably not many - I don't. The i486 coolers are cute - and useless. I also have a few megabytes left of old SIMM RAM, with 70ns timings printed on them. If you want one for example to make a lanyard of it let me know, I'll keep these around. You never know when you need an extra megabyte for your keys...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Personal
One Billion Bulbs and a Server
In Stephen's blog I read about the one billion bulbs project. They try to convince people that exchanging their regular bulbs by energy efficient bulbs to save energy and money. Since I have already energy efficient bulbs in all lamps where possible I think I can't really participate. But I can do another thing which will save a lot of energy and should be worth a couple of bulbs: my good old server has to be exchanged. It's now running for about seven years (the oldest file I could find dates back to Jan 17th 2000) and this 24x7. Coincidently the server was bought back then by Stephen's company at that time to support my development on the Webmin stuff. A few months later I finished school and went to the USA to work there for three months hacking on open software. That was a really great time!
Back to the real topic. The server is a Pentium III with 500 MHz with a 4x20GB RAID 5 softraid array. Originally created under Linux 2.2 with a special patch for the raid support it is now running on a 2.4 kernel. Luckily I chose the patch in the beginning since the disk format is compatible with raid stuff in the 2.4 kernels. The machine started as a Halloween Linux (German Red Hat) box and then turned into an Red Hat 6 box eventually being upgraded and stuck at Red Hat 7.3 plus X (a couple of extra packages and hand-made upgraded packages). The machine is still running just fine but I guess not so far in the future some kind of failure must happen, it's always that way. So I want to setup a new box, something tiny, quiet and energy efficient. I'm thinking about a Pentium M or (mobile) Core machine with two 2.5" hard drives in RAID 1 (which still will be about double the storage capacity that I have right now). To close the loop I have to mention that this will presumably also save a lot of power. Just not running 5 fat old hard drives and a bunch of coolers alone will probably save a lot of energy, not to mention all the now-junk PCI cards that I needed at some point back in time...
But there is no one million servers website that I could post that to, so my blog has to suffice.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
23C3: Day 4
After not sleeping much in the night before we had to start this soft. But the first talk Unusual bugs was quite challenging to follow with a still resuming from hibernating brain. The next one about Podjournalism was a lot easier to follow and the author brought some fun and enthusiasm into the show which made it more interesting. I also used that time to catch up with some stuff on the net and surf around.
Even more enthusiastic was the TV-B-Gone guy. Having this on your mobile would be handy. Although the device is not rocket science and quite expensive he fascinated me. He made his way from the idea to a product and it did pay off. Great! He also mentioned some philosophical aspects about decisions that have to be made in life. Well, that hit a nerve these days...
A lot of fun was the next block. especially the Security Nightmares 2007 and the Fnord Jahresrückblick were fun to watch. This is a very condensed teaser about what fun projects there are out in hackers' land waiting to be started. This year it was especially obvious to me that next year will be packed with tons and tons of other work to do. Robotics is pretty cool though so there maybe an opportunity to pose with this at some point ;-)
The talk about Culture Jamming & Discordianism was kinda weird. Basically you go out have fun and confuse the world. But one thing really made me think "hmmm". There was a guy who painted classic pictures with some modern stuff in it (like a peace sign). He then went into a museum and put it next to the "real" pictures. Most didn't notice. That clearly shows how you look at many things but don't see them. Could have happened to me in a museum I guess...
Then there was the closing ceremony and 23C3 was over. I liked that a lot and I thing this time I will make it to watch some of the recordings as I couldn't listen to everything that I found interesting.
We then went to Kreuzberg to the Tabou Tiki Room had a cocktail and enjoyed life.
The next day we stood up early and headed back home. On that way I had some interesting discussions with Buck about user interface designs today and tommorrow. It turned out that we see progress but in some areas things have to be thrown away and redone. One of my statements is that OpenOffice currently in a really bad shape. One of the Google fellows told me that it takes 17 hours to build and does not allow for incremental builds. Horror! One of the most notably things that it is time to break it are the two close buttons. Although they reverted that StarOffice "Do everything in one place" bull and now every document has its own window these are still MDI windows. You can close the document with two buttons. In my opinion the inner button is totally useless. It just seems to me that this was the quickest hack you could do to turn it into what the users wanted (or something like that). I'm not into the code so I just talking from experience using the thing and from what I have been told by others - but still it seems that OpenOffice is the new Netscape. They have lost contact to the real needs and the code is horribly bloated. I think there need be tons of new ideas for a usable GUI, make that thing smarter and really know what a user is going to do next. Get rid of that thousand-buttons stuff that confuses my parents when they are forced to use this thing. We would have used Abiword but last time we tried it we had two show stoppers: it was not using OpenDocument and the translation was incomplete. Maybe we should give it a try again. I think I also have to try out M$'s new office. Although I do not want to use it since it's just closed junk I still want to see the new UI to see if they improved something.
The whole discussion started when we talked about the One Laptop per Child project. We could get hands on one of these at the congress at the Wikipedia booth. It's a really interesting thing that I read earlier in a post on OLPC by Mike Hearn. Now after seeing this in real-life it seems to be a good start to get rid of some ballast.
New Year's Eve was cozy. Anne and I had a great dinner at home and went outside just for a very short time. There are way too many people that think exploding random things is a good start for a new year...
The next days I will pull up back to SNAFU and to start digging into my thesis topics...
