Botnet

This article is really amazing: how to control 70.000 machines to send spam emails. the OS statistics for the controlled machines are quite amusing (updating considered harmful!):

For the first time, I have installed Ubuntu now. Ok, it is not as performant as my current favourite Gentoo. But, it is so simple to use, that I will recommend it to my mother when I return to Germany in January :-)

My SLI graphics setup (using 2 graphics card in parallel) was working properly in less than 2 hours and giving me the desired 90% speedup :-) :-) Under Gentoo, X was crashing undeterministically (I guess that the current gentoo 2.6. kernel does not like this crappy (believe me!) motherboard).

Random cool fact: here

Coding

Recently, I am doing more and more programming. Getting results fast can be very enjoyable. Today, I want to report about my recent coding adventures.


Scheme
Currently, I am learning a new language: Scheme. It is over 30 years old and basically a weird Lisp dialect!

I am sure you think: Why the heck does anyone on earth want to learn such a language??? Let alone somebody doing "leading-edge research"??? Shouldn't he rather be learning some cool new web-framework like Ruby on Rails???

Good question.

First of all, I decided to follow my own recommendations (see my posting on enlightenment). I have already had my first enlightenment today: Blaine, you'd better stop trying to patent DP. DP and Scheme are isomorphic.

Second, learning one language at a time (Japanese) is boring ;-)

More importantly, I have realized that knowing Scheme is incredibly powerful. So many applications can be scripted by Scheme. For example, GIMP. Recently, I had to edit many pictures. My task was: cut a 640x480 rectangle starting at the bottom left corner of a larger image. The naive approach was to use the mouse for that. However, like this, this is totally painful .... Writing a 1-line Scheme script to do this was enjoyable in the end (although, it took me 30 minutes to figure this line out, haha).

Finally: I love rapid prototyping (time is money!). It seems to me that the highest expressiveness per lines of code can be achieved in functional programming languages (proof omitted, hehe).

bazar
As I have blogged recently, I am playing with Bazar. After finding and reporting a couple of bugs to the developers, we finally got it running:


A virtual teapot is augmented on a playing card. (mind the irony: the card is called Maessigkeit).
The lighting conditions in my room are reflected correctly on the teapot!

openGL
A couple of small experiments


The famous teapot. The greyscale represents the values of the depth buffer. This must be how a bat sees the world.
Or maybe not?


Stress test for my new laptop: rendering a 160MB model (33 million vertices) at 1440x900 at 100FPS :-)


3D Kanjis (tribute to 風の人, see earlier post).

Relax

As I was told in Jamaica many times: "you gotta relax man". To follow this advice, I am going to a famous Onsen in Izu's mountains (The next weekend will be 4 days for me :-) Gosh, I haven't been to a high-class Onsen for almost 1 year now :-( Some pictures

Long time no see :-)

Hehe, my life is just tooo busy. I find no time to write my blog. I hope that some people are still reading it...
Some random things that happened (the frequency of life in tokyo is amazingly high...)

• Today, I had a Japanese lesson. At some point I was totally confused about a grammar construct. Then, my teacher said: "Or, to put it more complicated: here, the Japanese grammar is left recursive." After that, I had no problems anymore! My teacher was totally astonished ("nobody has ever gotten that so fast"). What I did not tell her: the reason for my sudden enlightenment was that (at age 23) I had implemented a parser for left recursive grammars ;-)
  
• I was partying a lot recently. One of the best event's was Kazenohitos' (people of the wind) party in Ebisu. Some pictures can be found here. Another great act at this event was MC Leo and DJ Kom. I was drinking with those guys until the sun rose...
  
• I have bought a new laptop: MacBook Pro 15". I cannot believe it: it is 8 times faster in number crunching than my old laptop. Impressive! I am currently coding some funky stuff with it using bazar.
  
• A German friend of mine got inspired by my entry about children , and got engaged. I did not know blogging could make a difference for some other people's life :-)
  
• My brother gets his 4th child! Wow, I gotta catch up...
  
• Politics can be fair! (very geeky joke): here
  
• I WANT TO SEE THE BORAT MOVIE!!!! it's screening is delayed for undetermined time in Japan :-(
  
• Beautiful nature (a sandstorm): here
  
• I got some hits on my blog from MIT, Boston, USA. I am sure, this is Johnny-boy (click here, then see visiting scientists)! Hey Johnny, please post a nice comment sometimes! (nicer than the one you wrote for my japanese blog, hehe)
  
• Final point for today: I have started a Japanese blog :-) My co-workers convinced me that this makes totally sense for me: this way, I can improve my Japanese a lot! However, it is sooooo hard to use the blog without fully understanding it ...
  In any case: here is my profile. Since almost no reader of this blog here will understand it, I will translate a little: my nick name is: furyo kenkyusha (不良研究者: my co-workers think this is appropriate for me). kenkyusha means reseacher and furyo means (something like): crazy, party-maniac, not-sensible, etc.
  I have tried to express this chasm by my logo...
  

Returned from USA

2 weeks ago, I went on a business trip to the US to visit ISMAR. There, I saw some very interesting research projects. Also, I had the chance to see (and drink with) many people I know. It was great!
The most insane thing was the Parasitic Humanoid. This project's vision is to equip user's with a mobile computer. This computer learns about the user's behaviour. Ok, this has been done by several research projects. However, the cool point of this project is: the computer then starts to control the user unconciously. The implication is a symbiosis between human and computer. Scary? Probably. Thought-provoking: most problably!
An example is shown here: The computer control's the human to avoid a car.

This is done by "hacking" the human sense of balance. Weak electric signals are sent to the user's vestibular system.
I have spoken with people what have tried this: it really works...


Today (Friday), is a public holiday in Japan. That's sweet! I have time to do some housework... めんどくさい!!!

Nicest: tomorrow, Grooverider will play in Tokyo! I am excited to go there!!