Daniel’s Blog

Please. Let’s stop with the politics on Planet GNOME.

Usually I just skip over your posts but today you definitely went too far. I really, really don’t want to be drawn into a debate about politics on Planet GNOME, but I can’t just leave this unanswered either. In order to avoid turning the Planet into a political discussion board, can we please all agree to avoid posting about our personal political views? I don’t care about the occasional remark or so, but please, Miguel, stop the regular promotion of your partisan political views. Let’s keep the Planet peaceful.

Dear readers, you may now tear me apart.

Update: Looks like I’ve taken a lot of steam for that one. Well you can stop now. Everyone, I was wrong and should have posted a rebuttal instead.

So — I didn’t make it at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut. Apparently the worst applicant who was accepted had an overall score of 1.5. The worst. Dang. Well, I can live with that, as I had mixed feelings about the suits-styled and marketing-laden atmosphere anyway.

But I was accepted at the Freie Universität Berlin, and two days ago I handed in my enrolment application papers and paid the fee for the first term. I already met someone from my Abitur year while waiting in the line. Also a friend of mine, Gabriel, majors in mathematics at the FU. And I’ll be able to join Spline.

On another note, my Internet connection at home is currently down. Versatel is messing up big time — it’s been dead for ten days now. Calls to my phone number end up at Café Reichert in Neukölln. It was funny for maybe the first two days but now I’m just pissed. As a consequence I decided to switch to cable internet provided by Kabel Deutschland. I’ll upgrade to 6000 kbit/s and actually pay a bit less for it, and since it’s cable it’s also independent of the Telekom suckers. And I’ll get a cheap cordless phone for free — which I’ll need since the phone I have right now is an ISDN one and the cable to phone adapter they provide only supports analog phones. They say it’ll take about three weeks to hook me up. Bah, this should be as simple as flipping a switch as far as the Internet connection is concerned. After all they already hooked up the whole building to their network just a couple of months ago.

Ah well. I now know first hand what Havoc meant about your computer turning into a brick without internet access. It’s really painful, and I’m not talking about the brick hitting your foot.

Today I received the preliminary results of my Abitur. Just as I feared, I had underachieved somewhat in Math and History. On the other hand I did better in English than I thought I would. And I hit the jackpot in Computer Science — woohoo! The overall score is 1.7, which means I’m fairly well positioned for university application. To raise my not-so-good Math score of eight points a little, I applied for another voluntary oral exam scheduled for next Tuesday.

Incidentally, I also received the application documents for the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam today. If I don’t make it there, I’ll probably attend Freie Universität Berlin instead. The ball is rolling now. I’ll be soon be entering a new stage in my life. I have a feeling it’s going to be a rough ride. Hope it’ll be fun, too.

Yay!

Whoa, what a day. Spent the night until 6 o’clock in the morning preparing a talk on a math project we did at school. Slept three hours and went to school. Gave the talk while trying to ignore my stage-fright, as it was the first time I talked to an audience larger than classroom size. Turns out that Stefan Fuchs, a friend of mine, was right in telling me that it’s actually somewhat easier with larger audiences. Weird.

Arrived at home again dead tired. Two friends of mine, Gabriel and Klaus, independently came around for a visit. The three of us then went to a meeting of the Ubuntu Berlin team at c-base. Witnessed lots of eager activity and organization around the upcoming Feisty Fawn release party on April 20. I felt awkward reminiscences of my past membership in various associations, so I was a little reluctant to commit myself to the cause. Instead I decided to enjoy one of the beers Klaus thoughtfully brought along. Despite my fatigue the meeting progressed to a nice evening with friends and other interesting people. Nina Feyh was also there.

So now I’m back home and ready to hit the pillow. And on top of all, I also turned 26 today.

I do way too much tinkering around. Scraping a single CPU cycle here, moving a pixel around there, and so on. You get the idea. It’s a habit that has recently become so excessive that I don’t get much else done anymore, because during my tinkering I find all over the place “exciting” new opportunities to tinker around.

So much for the whining part. Now, when it comes to software projects, what’s the best way to stop yourself from tinkering yourself to death? Right. Release it. Early and often, as they say. Release the damn thing and get over it. There’s an exciting possibility that further tinkering will likely involve actual bugs reported by actual users.

So I’m going to do just that right now. There’s a project I’ve been tinkering with for about four years now, and there has never been a public release until now. I guess I lose spectacularly in any time-to-market comparison. And this is a tiny project.

Anyway, back on topic. You probably guessed it already — the project I’m about to announce goes by the name Somato. Years ago, my computer science class at school did a software project term. The task was to write a program that solves the Soma cube puzzle created by Piet Hein. And so I did. But then I got carried away a bit. The result, complete with 20-milliseconds solver, 3-D animation and SSE intrinsics is now available at the Somato project page. I also created binary packages for Ubuntu to raise the chance that someone will actually download my favorite toy, despite the fact that it doesn’t actually do anything productive.

A nice side effect of preparing the release was that it forced me to complete my website. You’ll notice that the “Site Almost Finished” headline is gone now. I put together projects overview and how-to overview pages. So all the basic infrastructure is in place now.

Next week will see a regexxer release. For real.