, 1 min read
In the year 1989 people from Soviet occupied eastern Germany could flee to West-Germany via Hungary, see German reunification in Wikipedia. Hungary had opened the border to Austria. The German embassy in Hungary initiated a public advertising campaign thanking Hungaria, see Deutsche Botschaft…
, 1 min read
I can share 6 OnePlus invites for the next 5 days, i.e., up to Sunday, 23-Nov-2014. Device in question: One - 64 GB Sandstone Black. If anyone is interested please comment below with your e-mail address and I will hand out the invite. I will not publish or use your e-mail address for anything…
, 2 min read
Yesterday I went to the movie with my family and watched Laura Poitras's film Citizenfour. The movie in Frankfurt was completely sold out, many prospects had to be sent home, because there were no more seats available. I just got a ticket because I had a high number on the waiting list. I am…
, 1 min read
What effect can the optimizer have for gcc? On Intel/AMD I ran my intpoly program (with -n0) once with and once without optimizer. It showed a speed-up of about 3. no optimizer: 7.84s -O3: 2.25s gcc for Intel/AMD is version 4.8.2. On Power8 I again ran intpoly (with -n0). The factor is more…
, 2 min read
Last year I copied the employee and visit count of WordPress and posted this here. Now one year later the situation is still similar. The data is again from Work With Us. Company NameMonthly Uniques…
, 3 min read
End of August I bought the OnePlus One smartphone, henceforth called OnePlus. Previously I owned a Google Nexus 4 smartphone. My initial motive for a new smartphone was to have more storage in my phone. As I use my phone as a camera and do no longer use a "real" camera, lots of pictures…
, 2 min read
Since a couple of decades people drive cars, motorcycles and trucks which pretty much look and work the same as a couple of decades ago. I.e., cars are made of steel, use a fuel powered motor, have 4 seats, etc. Although there are clearly advances in the area, like fuel consumption, electronic…
, 2 min read
German tax laws requires you to issue a tax declaration if you earn more than a certain threshold or own a company. To create this tax declaration you needed the so called Elster-Software which only runs under Microsoft Windows. Luckily there now seems to be a web-form for doing the same thing. The…
, 2 min read
Six months ago Bruce Schneier posted an article on "Choosing Secure Passwords". Some of the key points are (mostly copied verbatim from mentioned post): The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they are broken. Password crackers do not brute force all 8…
, 1 min read
This blog was viewed more than ten-thousand times. As in this post, here are the numbers: The averages per day are: US and Germany are leading the visit-count. The development of visits is as below:
, 1 min read
I turned 50 this year. So what was up this half century of life? Half of my life I was educated in school and university. I traveled through a couple of western European countries, like Spain, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, either privately or sent by my employer. I…
, 1 min read
I own a single-core laptop with 1 GB of memory. Google Chrome version 34 for Linux 64 bit (ArchLinux) is completely unusable on this machine. I own another single-core laptop with 512 MB of memory. Google Chrome version 12 for 32 bit (Ubuntu 10.04) works just fine on this machine. Both machines are…
, 3 min read
Day 2 of the conference had below talks. Prof. Dr. Bernd Brügmann gave a short introduction. He pointed out that Jena is number 10 in Physics in Germany, has ca. 100.000 inhabitants, and 20.000 students. Dr. Karl Rupp, Vienna, Lessons Learned in Developing the Linear Algebra Library ViennaCL.…
, 1 min read
As announced in Workshop Programming of Heterogeneous Systems in Physics, July 2014, I attended this two-day conference in Jena, Germany. Below are speakers and pictures with my personal notes. Dipl.-Ing. Hans Pabst from Intel, Programming for the future: scaling forward with cores and vectors. …
, 1 min read
I struggled somewhat in getting audio via HDMI on Intel NUC. The following commands in .xsession solved the problem for me: /usr/bin/pulseaudio -D echo set-default-sink 0 | /usr/bin/pacmd exec /usr/bin/firefox The trick is to set the default sink in pulseaudio. I use Firefox on the NUC because…
, 1 min read
IBM no longer provides Perl for its mainframe machines, see Software withdrawal: Selected IBM System z platform products (a copy is here: IBM-Withdrawal-ENUS913-252). It looks like they have not heard that Perl is the duct tape that holds the internet together. Similarly IBM withdraw PHP from their…
, 2 min read
Assume you want to set-up a user-account which can only log-in to your machine if he sits in front of it and has to give no password. Let's name this user kiosk. Unfortunately there is apparently no single command-line switch to accomplish this with useradd. The task at hand is not be confused with…
, 2 min read
After finishing my ABAP programming course I wanted to upload the Netweaver-trial software to Telekom media-center. Telekom media-center allows you to store up to 25 GB of data in the cloud. That's more storage than offered by many USB sticks. Netweaver-trial software is about 3.5 GB, and…
, 2 min read
Microsoft brought down no-ip.org and many other domains with a court order. Here is the text from No-IP’s Formal Statement on Microsoft Takedown: We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning,…
, 3 min read
In the year 2010 I read Martin Varsavsky's blog entry on The 6 Day Week by Carlos Varsavsky. In this post Martin Varsavsky states his father, born in 1933, proposed the 6-day week, i.e., work 4 days and rest 2 days. To cope for the reduced productivity, it is proposed to interleave the 6-day week…