Daniel’s Blog

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.

And here’s yet another new blogger on Planet GNOME. Many thanks go to Jeff Waugh, who kindly added me to the celebrity pool. I’m Daniel Elstner a.k.a. danielk, co-maintainer of gtkmm and also part-time employee of Openismus GmbH.

I thought it would be nice to celebrate the occasion with a new release of my pet project regexxer. It’s about time, too. Maybe I can get Daniel Holbach to sign off an NMU of the Ubuntu package before Feisty hits the mirrors.

Well, that’s it for now. Hello fellow Gnomers!

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.

Yesterday I watched Das Leben der Anderen on DVD. As far as I’m aware this is the first film about the GDR shown at the movies that isn’t a comedy. Thus it’s definitely worth watching even if you’re understandably tired of the recurrent theme by now.

The film’s gloomy atmosphere fell on fertile ground as I was tired and in a somewhat subdued mood that evening. Indeed, it’s been a while since the last time a movie made me cry. Das Leben der Anderen manages to be emotionally moving without any kitsch whatsoever. I really love the way the final scene ends in a still. Watching this movie reminded me of the fact that I’m still an optimist at heart, non withstanding my pronounced skepticism.

This film has been criticized as showing the Stasi in too mild a light, probably on the grounds that the main theme of the officer who sees the errors of his ways is unrealistic. And indeed it is. But I think that’s missing the point. As I see it, there are two main themes in this film. One of them being how the activities of the Stasi and the fear of them permeated a whole society. I think that part is shown accurately and doesn’t understate the role of the Stasi in the slightest. The hypothetical story of the true believer who is distressed by the cynicism of his colleagues is merely the dramatic ingredient that makes this a movie, and a great one at that. Also, in the audio commentary (yes, I know I’m weird), the director quite clearly outlines his views about the methods of the Stasi, and make no mistake, he’s not sympathetic.

On another note, I can proudly proclaim that I know one of the extras appearing in this movie. As it happens, my girlfriend befriends quite many interesting people. It felt rather odd to see Detlef Matthes, himself a victim of the Stasi who went into exile, among the audience of a lecture at a Stasi training center.

So, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, Das Leben der Anderen is definitely worth being on your list.