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vienna is an online city

If you didn’t know this yet: vienna is one of the coolest places to geek at. Nice town, cheap rents, cool people, free universities, art, recreation. And, most important: free wifi nearly everywhere.

Try it out in vienna: open your mobile computer and in 50% of all times, some nice person will have intentionally have left you an open wifi access point. Yes, these people believe that the world is a nice place and that you can surely use their wifi to read mail and google something up. There is free wifi in most of the cafés I frequent and there are enough public places like www.muqa.at with free wifi.

All this geek-friendlyness of vienna has led to many people using plazes there to check where they are and where wifi is. Vienna is on place four in an in-official statistics with having the most online plazes. Vienna is on a head-to-head race for place four with New York, perfect. San Francisco is second, first is Berlin.

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read dazinde’s blog and enjoy

Dazinde is a new fellow with DFKI, starting his diploma thesis soon in the Semantic Desktop research are. His full name is Danish Nadeem.

read his blog and enjoy.

topics at the moment are his diploma thesis, suicide packs in japan, weird pixelart and semantic web stuff.

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kissenschlacht-flashmob 1.4.2006 13:30

* Termin: 01.04., Punkt 13:30 Uhr
* Ort: Kaiserslautern, Innenstadt, Kreuzung der Fußgängerzonen
Fackelstraße/Kerststraße (beim H&M)
* Mitbringen: Kissen
* Aktion: Kissenschlacht
* Soft pillows only!
* Swing lightly, many people will be swinging at once.
* Do not swing at people without pillows or with cameras.
* Remove glasses beforehand!
* The event is FREE and appropriate for ALL AGES.
* Nach 10 Minuten löst sich alles in verschiedene Richtungen auf!

Achtung: das kissen darf nicht platzen. wirklich.

siehe http://www.newmindspace.com/pillowfightnyc.php

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amazon.de rentable dvd – missing titles…

Amazon.de started a service where you can rent DVDs. The idea is – similar to other existing online DVD rentals – that you pay about 10€ per month and can have one DVD at home all times. So, they send you a DVD, you keep it, sometimes you send it back, get the next one.

Now, cool: amazon, one of the biggest web shops has DVD rental. So I would expect that I can rent now all those nice DVDs they have in the shop. It would be perfect: in Kaiserslautern there is no specialised DVD rental service and we cannot get all the interesting movies (for example, the top 100 of IMDB cannot be retrieved in Kaiserslautern).
If amazon rented everything, it would improve something.

But no. Search for all the good titles – you can’t rent them.
A few examples:

  • Texas Chainsaw Massacer – DVD at amazon in three different versions, no rental
  • Hotel Rwanda – DVD at amazon shop, award winning movie. IMDB place 47. no rental
  • Shichinin no samurai – not at amazon.de at all (hm)
  • Animal House – one of the most successfull movies ever, part of american heritage, sold in amazon shop but no rental

This sucks. I only signed up there to get “Animal House” but they don’t rent it.

So what will happen? These online DVD rentals will steal income from local rentals, so expect that your local stores will close or get a more limited program. All online DVD rentals probably have the same blockbusting entertainment. I hope that someone points me to a good alternative online DVD rental, where I can get above DVDs.

Go support your local weirdo video rental, where you can meet fellow weirdos and can have interesting conversations.

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RDF/A Embedding RDF in HTML

A draft has been published of RDF/A.

This is a really simple way to embed RDF into html. Example:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Jo Lambda's Home Page</title>
    </head>
<body>
<p>
 Hello. This is <span property="foaf:name">Jo Lambda</span>'s
home page.
 <h2>Work</h2>
 If you want to contact me at work, you can
 either <a rel="foaf:mbox" href="mailto:jo.lambda@example.org">email
 me</a>, or call <span property="foaf:phone">+1 777 888 9999</span>.
 </p>
</body>
</html>

from W3C:
2006-03-14: The HTML Working Group and the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group jointly have published the First Public Working Draft of the RDF/A Primer 1.0. Produced by the groups’ RDF in XHTML Task Force, the draft is a companion to the XHTML 2.0 specification. This document introduces syntax for expressing RDF metadata within XHTML and explains the use of the XHTML metainformation modules. Read about the HTML Activity and the Semantic Web.

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trick your human friends

Old research, still funny. Dr Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Dr Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University created nice setups to trick humans, based on attention.

The setup they created is: tell somebody to watch this video of basketball players and to count, how often the white team has passed the ball.

the video:
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

At the end of the video,they ask: how often? And the (but don’t spoil this by telling it before): Did you notice the gorilla walking from right to left through the scene, banging on his chest?

An article on that.