I’m currently running around making final preparations for the Bergtagung. It’s a relatively humid and hot day here in Zürich. I’ll spend the next hour printing posters and flyers, finding a desktop projector for us to use and then sinking my teeth into a lovely Lebanese mali. Mmmmmh, mali.
You are welcome to join us at the Bergtagung, here’s the invitation. Get your arses up that mountain!
Democracy Player is was a video player with an iTunes Store-like interface bolted on. “Gah,” you say, “boring, next!” But the difference is, this player plays your content, video made by countless amateurs and professionals and distributed over the net. The channels Miro offers are somewhere out there, but to find them on your own is nigh impossible. The player makes it easy by grouping content into channels, giving them some order and making them searchable. All content is free (as in beer), and because Miro uses BitTorrent for its downloads, popular content can stay popular without costing the maker a fortune in bandwidth.
Another intriguing feature, in case you somehow got addicted to HD content, is that Miro offers plenty of that. They claim they have more HD movies than any other source, either online or off. I can’t verify that because I’d be waiting weeks for a HD clip to finish downloading, what with my throbbing 600 Kbit connection and all, but I’m sure it’s true.
Even if you’re not interested in downloading any of that stuff, the interface I mentioned makes it easy to sort your own collection of videos and the built-in VLC player can play almost any format ever, ever!
Grab Miro for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or Windows from the Miro website.
Risking to sound far older and grumpier than I am, I’d say that culture today is something that’s completely wasted on our youth. I base this statement on a number of facts that I’ve been observing for quite some time now, but what encouraged me to write a little blurb about it was this conversation I heard on the train today. Picture two girls, perhaps 15, talking about their German exams. They appear to be reading Kafka right now. Keep in mind that we’re in German-speaking territory, so Kafka is certainly an ordinary read in school at that age.
We’re joining our pair as they are discussing probable exam topics:
Girl 1: “Well, with Kafka I would get a good grade! He doesn’t use so many foreign words!”
Girl 2: “Oh yeah! Hell, I know! That other guy uses lots of them! It’s so shitty, you don’t understand shit!”
Girl 1: “But people now keep telling me that I have to learn foreign words too. But then I think maybe I would get used to them, and I don’t want to, because then I’d start using them myself! And nobody would understand me anymore because you just don’t understand foreign words!”
German, if spoken even with the slightest hint of eloquence beyond the requirements for being a McDonald’s burger flipper, is chock full of foreign words. I’m quite sure that I cannot relay the shock I’m feeling about the above conversation into English properly.
All of this is not just an isolated incident, I think it might be a symptom of something deeper. One of Switzerland’s largest newspapers, the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) has a writing style roughly comparable to that of the International Herald Tribune of the US. Several people my age have complained to me that they are not capable of understanding the NZZ’s articles, and that the NZZ therefore is “stupid”.
With that, I rest my case.
As Heise reports, Sun Microsystems has released their seamless ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office. That means that users of MS Office are now also able to use the ISO-standard format for office documents, which should lead to easy file exchange with users of standards-compliant office program suites such as OpenOffice.org.
Sun’s solution integrates into the file save/open dialogs of MS Office, thereby making importing or exporting uneccessary. This is a different approach than the one taken by Microsoft and Novell in their so-called “OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-in for Office”. Additionally, Sun Microsystems is the first to release a stable method of conversion, while Microsoft and Novell’s implementation currently lags behind in terms of features and stability.
