in april i saw joseph weizenbaum in mannheim. i am really happy that i managed to see him again. weizenbaum is one of the most influential persons since i met him at rotis symposium in 2001.
last week i was invited to fh potsdam’s fritzing workshop and gameplaces talk in frankfurt.
the fritzing project is an attempt to develop a visual software for designing pcbs in physical computing. some of the arduino guys were there: massimo banzi, david mellis and tom igoe. i presented some projects of me and my students and described the way how we are working with arduino. due to the short time of the semester my students are using only breadboards instead of pcbs. this also enables an incremental and try&error learning process. tom igoe’s statement about the lack of women in physical computing was not present in my documentation and also some others.
wednesday i was invited to speak at gameplaces talk in frankfurt. i showed some game related projects of my students. the connection between experimental interface design and new game interfaces was quite promising.
if you should ever have to use an nvidia 8800 gtx under ubuntu feisty:
download the latest nvidia linux driver and install it like this (don’t download the beta drivers). that does not work after rebooting anymore.
open /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video and comment out some lines:
## Make nvidia/nvidia_legacy and fglrx use /sbin/lrm-video to load
#install fglrx /sbin/lrm-video fglrx $CMDLINE_OPTS
install nvidia /sbin/lrm-video nvidia $CMDLINE_OPTS
#install nvidia_legacy /sbin/lrm-video nvidia_legacy $CMDLINE_OPTS
#install nvidia_new /sbin/lrm-video nvidia_new $CMDLINE_OPTS
open /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common and disable the modules fglrx, nvidia_legacy, nvidia_new
add the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection
finally i made it to ars electronica this year. last time i was there i presented “statistics in computergames” in 2004. the topic “goodbye privacy” was very contemporary and in line with my research and interest. that’s why i spend the complete first day in the conference without seeing a single exhibition and stayed saturday, too. two of my students, chrisi and florian, were there, too.
graham harwood of MediaShed showed a film done only with existing surveillance cameras. they used a scanner to get the stream from the cctv cameras. it was a good inspiration for my current twitter / axis networt camera mashup. jaromil showed the geekiest presentation i have ever seen from his command line. marko peljhan presented their uav project in slovenia.
i talked to andreas steinhauser from ccc. he was showing his mikrocopter and the microdrone md4-200 in a garage in marienstrasse.
the whole second life stuff was quite annoying and antiquated..