Silent times are for listening!

Check this out! 13 pieces of excellent music that you should not miss on your iPod, MuVo, WALKMAN, iRiver, whatever...

Neither listed alphabetically nor preferred:

interpol antics
nada surf the proximity effect
mando diao bring em in
nine inch nails with teeth
bloc party a weekend in the city
röyksopp melody am
death cab for cutie transatlanticism
the perishers let there be morning
doves some cities
the shins wincing the night away
polarkreis 18 polarkreis 18
gorillaz demon days
erlend øye dj kicks (2004)

Enjoy! Max

Of course, ...

Christmas is special and everyone likes it to be as perfect as possible. We care about how we can present ourselves, what we are going to eat, what our place should look like. We get together with our families and spend time with our best friends. But what we should always have in mind is that it is not just about Christmas Time. It's the whole year when we should think about how we live and how we treat our fellow men. Here's a nice poem I found:

"Somehow, not only for Christmas
but all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more you spend in blessing
the poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart's possessing
Returns to you glad."

John Greenleaf Whittier (American Writer, 1807 - 1892)

I'm currently in Upper Austria celebrating Christmas Eve with my parents, my brother, his wife and his two little children. I'm very glad to see them and to spend some time with them. I really wish you are in kind of a warming place too.
Here's a picture I took today of a tiny fellow posing in front of our Christmas Tree, ringing the bell for the children to come in... :-)

I wish a Merry Christmas to all of you! Have a nice evening and enjoy the company of lovely people. I also want to thank you for visiting my blog!

Yours, Max

Some links...

I've got two interesting links for you:
If you are a member of the StudiVZ commmunity you may find this one pretty interesting! Maybe one should think about leaving the community... This one represents everlasting battles between Germany and Austria! We'll fight back! Promise... :-)

See you soon, Max

Some lyrics...

Haven't you ever felt like you believe in total agreement while listening to your favourite tune? These little phrases can contain so much of what one is thinking about the whole day long. Just one song can hold so much answers, confidence and especially hope.

Check out the lyrics section to the right. It will contain lyrics I prefer from bands I really like.

Yours, Max

A great little adventure!

If you are reading my posts carefully (I hope you really do ;-) you will know that I have been to Nice two weeks ago. I was visiting Sarah, she is currently there for five months to do some university lectures and of course to collect some experiences of living in a whole new world.
As a matter of a fact I'm currently not able to fly because of some unfortunate illness so I had to go there by train which took me almost 21 hours to get there and 20 hours to get back to Vienna again. Here are some impressions of this adventure:

I needed to get up at 5 in the morning in order to catch the first train that would take me to Venice Mestre, the first stop:

Unfortunately this train got about one hour late during the journey so I missed all of the following connections. That sucked! As one is not even able to board a train in Italy without a reservation I had to get myself new ones. And for sure I had to find new connections first. After one hour waiting and struggling in Mestre I finally got on board of a really nice Eurostar train that took me to my next stop. Milano Centrale:

You can't even call this thing a train station anymore. That's a train metropolis and probably the biggest building I have ever been inside.

Again I needed to get together all of my Italian skills to get new connections and reservations that would fit my plans. Well, the travel assistances at all Italian train stations where I have been acted pretty cool. As they recognized the delay of my first train I didn't have to pay for another ticket at all.
At this moment I wasn't that confident anymore about arriving at Nice on the same day. It realized that it took me around 13 hours to get from Vienna to Milano so I already started thinking of staying at one place and waiting for the next day and new opportunities to come. But the travel assistant was pretty sure that I can make it if there will be no more delays and so I boarded the next Eurostar train heading for Genova hoping for a smooth and of course a fast ride.

Genova was just a short stop but there was enough time to grab something to eat and to watch a statue of 'Cristoforo Colombo' in front of the station. The following train took me to Ventimiglia, a small Italian town near the border of Italy and France. It was 23:32 when I got there, almost 19 hours of overall travel time.

The train from Ventimiglia to Nice was the worst of all... First it had a delay of 5 minutes. Followed by 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30. By the time we finally left Ventimiglia at 00:20 or something I should have been to Nice already. This sucking train was so slow that I probably could have been riding a turtle much faster. I've been totally wasted when I finally got to Nice. 20 hours and 33 minutes of overall travel time...

There is nothing else to say about than to quote famous Michael 'Air' Jordan: 'Why drive, when you can fly?" ;-)

See you soon with lots of pictures from Nice!

Yours, Max

5th and last time VR...

The 5th assignment has been successfully completed. The task was to write a little C++ application which is able to track the marker sheets and to do some sort of collision warning. If the sheets come too close together one cube (the one from which the distance is measured) has to turn red. the given distance is defined by the small sphere on the bottom right. It's radius can be changed by pressing and releasing the mouse button.

We do now have all the necessery information to produce some enhanced work. Therefore we will work together in groups of three for the next few weeks. Our plan is to program a computer game which takes place in augmented reality. It will be some sort of a tankblaster-clone. I'm feeling pretty tense about how it's going to look like. I'll give you more information next time.

Yours truly, Max

2nd, 3rd and 4th time VR...

... and Nice in between.

Phew! The last two and a half weeks were both exhausting and really beautiful too. I made myself a little present to celebrate the graduation and so I travelled to Nice to visit my girlfriend Sarah. She is currently living there to enjoy all the advantages the Côte d'Azur provides even in wintertime. And of course she's doing some university courses too... :-)
One of the following posts will be a detailed report of my journey combined with a selection of more than 150 pictures I took. As well, I'm thinking of creating a Picasa web album to upload my pictures there.

Before I left Vienna I needed to perform the second and the third assignment of the 'Virtual and Augmented Reality' course. Again we had to take screenshots of our work and us. Here's what I got out of the second one:

We needed to accept two marker sheets showing two cubes whereupon the user (i.e. me) was able to change the color of one cube by pressing a button on the keyboard. Well, that was not too difficult again.

The third assignment was a little trickier but really funny:

The software supports some kinds of simple geometrical figures like cubes as you have seen in the previous pictures and other ones like cylinders, spheres or cones. So our task was to create either an alien or a robot standing, sitting, resting, whatever on a base plate. You can choose by yourself whether my figure has to be declared as an alien or a robot. :-)

I performed the 4th task when I got home from Nice. It has been the last and therefore indeed the trickiest one of all so far:

Again we had to accept two marker sheets and to perform some mathematical computations. You can see the normal vector and the vertices of the markers. In the top left corner of the picture you can see (if you can actually read it, I can't because of the damn color) the distance between both of the markers and the focus of the camera. This distance is computed in centimeters and will be the actual distance in the real world. The third line shows the actual distance between the two markers.
The most difficult thing was to compute the grey cylinder which connects the midpoints of the two markers. Well, the actual position wouldn't have been so difficult to compute but you have to remember that the position of the marker sheets can be anywhere in front of the camera. It's up to the user to decide. So the grey cylinder has to follow the movement of the marker sheets and has to be placed correctly in between with the corresponding length and everything has to be in realtime.

Please enjoy the pictures and explanations. There will be more next week when the 5th and last assignment has to be finished.

Bye-bye! Max