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Finally I’m sufficiently happy with kinoatlas.de to share it with the world. It’s a mashup that shows cinemas and their programme on a Google map, to make it easy to select interesting movies which are being displayed in cinemas close to where you’d go out.

You can find more details on the new kinoatlas page, or just try it out directly. However, it’s only available for Berlin, so if that’s not where you want to see a movie show, you’ll have to write your own mashup

Actually, I still wonder why this problem has not been tackled by some other movies site, or maybe it has but I simply just didn’t find it. Even Google still sticks to lists of cinemas with several pages of content.

As this project has reached some stable and presentable state now, please go ahead and try it, and I’ll go ahead with the next idea that needs implementation. Or maybe better just pass some more time with friends

Reviewing my past web projects, I’ve put the geowiki in nostalgy mode, i.e. password-protected the editing function to avoid further spamming. Since writing the app in early 2006, online mapping has fortunately evolved a lot, both Google Maps (and competition) as well as the great and free alternative from Open Streetmap. The concept of directly linking a map and a wiki still makes sense to me, though current mashups usually only allow small user inputs in form of comments, or contents that fit into a bubble to be displayed within the map.

Auch bei spiegel.de noch ein Artikel ueber indische Software-Spezialisten, die eigentlich lieber was anderes machen wuerden, aber von ihren Eltern in diese Richtung gedraengt wurden. Wie weit das verbreitet oder ein Problem ist, kann ich nicht sagen. Dass Eltern die (berufliche) Zukunft ihrer Kinder bestimmen wollen, ist sicher nicht nur in Indien gegeben, obwohl sie dort generell grossen Einfluss haben. Umgekehrt hoere ich, dass die meisten kleinen Inder schon selbst Informatiker oder Techniker werden wollen, weil sie damit nicht nur Geld und gute Jobs bekommen, sondern auch den Klassenaufstieg schaffen koennen. Das ist in anderen Feldern deutlich schwieriger, da die Klassen- und Kastenstruktur in Indien sehr zementiert ist. Und da ist IT in Indien wohl wie Fussball fuer Brasilien und dsds fuer Deutschland. Von so einer Situation traeumt die hiesige Branche (IT Berufe unsexy).

Das am Ende des Artikels erwaehnte Abwerben und Jobhuepfen von einer Firma zur besser zahlenden naechsten habe ich allerdings selbst mitbekommen. Von den Berufsanfaengern meiner kleinen indischen Firma (wo ich Praktikant war) blieb kaum einer bis zum Ende seines ersten Jahres, viele nicht mal fuer 6 Monate. Dafuer wussten die meisten Bewerber auch nicht, wo sie sich eigentlich bewerben, und brachten teilweise zum Bewerbungsgespraech auch gleich ihre Freunde mit. Wenn ich die Stelle nicht bekomme, dann vielleicht mein Kumpel.

Bei spiegel.de habe ich gerade Scott Kelbys Tips fuer bessere Fotos gefunden. Auch wenn die Empfehlungen erfahreneren Fotografen bekannt sein duerften, gefallen mir die Beschreibungen zu jedem Foto, wie und warum er die jeweilige Aufnahme so gemacht hat (Blende, Brennweite, Blitz-Anordung, Tageszeit, …). Hier sind die Links fuer drei “Kurse”:

• http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,577144,00.html
• http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,577646,00.html
• http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,577349,00.html

Das kann ich doch gleich fuer meine Hausaufgaben beim Fotokurs einsetzen. Mal sehen, wie die Portraets werden.

It’s been time. Finally I’ve updated wordpress to the current version and activated akismet. The latter saved me from manually checking 400 spam comments and will hopefully relieve my mailbox of future spam.

So the other news is an update of kaleidoscopr. Initially I just wanted to change the logo and some wording, but ended up fixing a real bug (which wasn’t obvious in Firefox) and a number of changes for IE (6), that I hadn’t tested before. In the end two days instead of two hours, but now I’m confident about the app.

Finally I’m done with a redesign of kaleidoscopr, the online kaleidoscoping app for flickr images, fixing a number of bugs and adding some new options.

What’s new:

• You can create kaleidoscoped images of bigger sizes (if the original photo allows it)
• You see infos and relevant links about the current image, like title, description, user name, license
• You can chose between several creative-commons licenses when searching
• Somewhat cleaner interface
• Tag search accepts multiple tags
• Code is object-oriented
• Updated to phpflickr 2.2.0 (thanks for this package)

One negative thing: old kaleidoscopr links won’t work any more. If there’s a need for it, tell me and I’ll make it backwards-compatible.

Check it out and enjoy on http://ctrl-w.net/kaleidoscopr

While browsing through sites of cheap airlines, I was nostalgically overwhelmed when visiting http://www.eurowings.com/ . I can’t remember when it’s been the last time that I’ve seen a real marquee in use (not the equally annoying javascript replacements), but probably years and on private homepages or relics from the iron age of the web. But here it is, a marquee on a business website, recommending to use Microsoft Internet Explorer with 1024 x 768 Hi-Colors.

Probably it’s just a prank by some web-design students or new media artist. This suspicion is supported even more by the name of the design agency: Know Idea GmbH

Just adjusted the kaleidoscopr to a change in flickr’s API, which had broken the app. The path of flickr pics has been extended by a farm id, and if it’s missing you get a redirect to the new url. Being lazy I only changed curl to follow redirects, but this seems to be enough. I also updated the phpFlickr to the current version 2.1, which works fine for me without any necessary modifications in the source.

For some time my apps on ctrlw.net failed to work, after the admins had changed allow_url_fopen to false. That’s fine since it increases security, but I had to spend some time now to make everything work again.

The Geocoder wasn’t much hassle, basically following the instructions on http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Allow_url_fopen and replacing the fopen call by a few lines with curl commands.

The online kaleidoscope took more time, but it was worth it. The rework also improves speed and caching a little bit, while for security reasons I now only allow pictures on flickr’s servers to be kaleidoscoped. And I moved everything to my Dreamhosted domain ctrl-w.net, the same place as this blog.

Ah, and I just created a small page about the kaleidoscopr in this blog, which explains the basics of its use.

It’s been a while. In the meantime I’m back to Germany, exploring Berlin, enjoying the summer-like weather and looking for a life here.

Yes, the year in Spain is over, and while I never considered to stay there for good, a few incidents within short time made us move to another place just now. One of these incidents was someone entering our Madrid flat by breaking the window, and leaving us without laptops, cameras and even the backup on the external hard-drive, so most of last year’s data is lost. Bad luck, but just the beginning, though I won’t bother you with the rest.

Apart from the negative impacts, it was a good experience having been there. I met many interesting people, made good friends and learned quite a lot. Madrid offers so much in culture and events that it’s hard to come along, but even if you only see a small part it’s amazing. One of the best exhibitions was the one of M.C. Escher’s work, but also the big museums (Thyssen, Prado, Reina Sofia), temporary exhibitions, special events or small galleries, it’s just so much and really good stuff. Then the bars. I think I’ve never seen so many bars and restaurants in such a small area, and they’re always crowded. There were so many places to go out just around the corner that I’ve hardly seen the other parts of the city, or just the public ones for botellon. Besides the worldly pleasures of fun and parties my friend David introduced me to the world of hacklabs and frikis, and made me learn new stuff about FOSS. Working at the Fundacion Bip Bip was very interesting as well. They’re doing a great job refurbishing and distributing computers to NGOs and have a fair number of interesting projects. But the best were the colleagues there. I miss you guys! And just to mention, the regular bouldering.

Ok, so far for the past, there’s much more to be told, but now I’m here in Berlin, typing a new entry on my freshly installed new Ubuntu-Thinkpad, enjoying better weather than the Spaniards and looking forward what this change may bring. Currently I’m both looking for a job (software development, research, web 2.0) and for flats (there’s a good offer here, but at the moment we’re mostly interested in a temporary place to get organised). If you know about any, tell me.