Am 18. Dezember 2006 fand bei uns am HPI der 1. Nationale IT-Gipfel statt. Viele wichtige und bekannte Persönlichkeiten wie Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Schäuble oder Hubert Burda (wow er hat ein Blog!) – um nur einige zu nennen – waren da.
Mein Kollege Justus will nun eine Online-Umfrage durchführen, die sich um die Einrichtung eines Blogs zum IT-Gipfel dreht. Das Gipfelblog soll kein gewöhnliches Blog werden, sondern für Blogs eher ungewöhnliche Features hinsichtlich Moderation und redaktioneller Kontrolle beinhalten – unter anderem deshalb, weil das Blog unter der Flagge der Bundesregierung stehen wird.
Hiermit also der Aufruf, an der Online-Umfrage teilzunehmen (dauert nur 10 min) – das würd uns sehr helfen.
Gegen Weiterverbreitung des Links zur Umfrage haben wir selbstverständlich nichts einzuwenden, ganz im Gegenteil – macht das Teil bekannt!

Die Umfrage ist beendet. Knapp 200 Leute haben teilgenommen, danke dafür! Sobald die Auswertungen beendet sind, werde ich von den Ergebnissen berichten.

The last CeBIT day has come. It was very interesting and a nice experience to talk to people who apreciate our projects and our work.
Today is another Beutelratten-Tag and we have to take care for our stuff, many pens have already gone lost and many kids come to us just asking for freebies. That's the part of a fair which is not so nice, since those poeple are not interested in your work, they just come to get as much as possible for free.
Yesterday was a very successful day, many people from countries from all over the world came to our booth. In the evening we went to the O2-Party in Hall 26 which was really great – good music, nice drinks (but nothing to eat unfortunately) and we had a real great time there together with the Osotis guys(by the way, they have a blog now.
I really look forward to go home again, but it was a nice thing to be an exhibitor and see the other side of CeBIT.
My talk today at Future Talk went quite smooth, though the audience could have been bigger. I was pretty nervous in the beginning but a chat with the moderator before my talk calmed me down a bit.
Allright, see you on CeBIT next year!

Well we had much more success this evening, no Mr. Murphy crossed our way!
The halls were crowded, even after 6 p.m. and this time we had no difficultities to find a place where we could spend the evening. In the afternoon we got a personal invitation to come to the Mitteldeutschland-Booth for this evening's party and also from another booth in our hall for free cocktails. Later this day we heard that G-DATA in Hall 6 will give a big afterwork party including a show from Guildo Horn and his band – the Orthopädischen Strümpfe – a show we wouldn't like to miss. Jörg from Osotis also called me telling me that the beer was pretty bad at the Mitteldeutschland-Booth and that there was a Jazz Band which didn't really meet everyone's taste, so the decision was crystal clear – we went to see the Meister. And hey, it was really awesome. The music was cool, the mood of the crowd overwhelming, food and drinks included Nussecken and Raspberry Icecream – what a relief after the evening yesterday. Don't think we came to CeBIT for party only, no no, but if you are here as participant, that's something you couldn't miss and which gives you some relaxation after an exhausting day talking to people, giving out information and all that stuff. This evening I was so smart to change shoes after the exhibition closed for visitors, so I could enjoy the party with comfortable shoes – no blood today!
After Guildo and his guys finished their show – Dirk even catched the towel, which Guildo threw into the audience after whiping his sweaty face – we went through other halls and saw some nice get-togethers (just to avoid the word "party" this time – we are doing hard work here!) – one company had an awesome buffet with Wraps and a chocolate fountain (forgot the name of the company, but the buffet was great), others had nice music and drinks. After having eaten and drunk, we decided to go to our accomodations and get some sleep since everyone was pretty exhausted after all. No trouble with the taxi today, everything went fine. Throughout the day we met really interesting people, let's see what tomorrow brings, when I'll go my round on the fair to visit all companies on my list.

We arrived in Hannover yesterday around noon. Dirk was on the same train as me, so we could travel together and the journey wasn’t that boring. Well the Sunday wasn’t that busy, since not so many business people have been on the fair, but therefore more “Beutelratten” – people who just go to the CeBIT to collect the most possible amount of free giveaways and gadgets. Our hall, the future parc, is not famous for giving away so many things, so not so many of this species have been attracted to come here and visit our booth. The others of our chair, who have been here since Thursday, were kind of glad to leave, being all day at the booth, talking to people, explaining things, celebrating legendary “Stand-Parties” seem to be a tough business (I guess I will learn myself the next days).
In the evening we were looking for a party to go to and went through _all_ halls (and I mean all!) – not finding anything, just some rare invitation-only parties, where we were not welcomed. Back in our hall, having bleeding feet and a stomach as tiny as a pea, we discovered that the Hessen-Booth was giving a party. *gosh* All that walking for nothing. Well it just wasn’t kind of our day, since they were ranning out of beer just as we arrived. We decided to take a taxi to go back to our hotel and go to a restaurant to eat something. Well fetching the right taxi was another story, but it’s too difficult to explain here. When we finally arrived in our accomodation in the lower-saxonian province, we met the landlord, who was a really funny looking guy (he had an inverted Hitler beard).
This morning we were a bit late since our taxi didn’t come on time to fetch us, but it was OK.
Finally some pics – again taken with my mobile phone, so dont bother me about the crappy quality

Iva and Feng

Dirk and Feng

At the computer graphics booth next to us. The guy with the moustache and the camera filmed the 3D fligt over Berlin on the screen, commanding Rico to zoom and such – very funny!

Our booth

Allright, did I get your attention with the buzzword loaded headline? Good good, that was my intention.
Osotis is an online video search engine. No, it's not something like youtube or Google Video, it's much more! Harald gives an explanation in his blog (also here ) about what Osotis is and what makes it different from other video-related sites on the web:
1.(1) OSOTIS offers search within videos
(2) right now, most videos available at OSOTIS are academic lecture recordings
(3) OSOTIS does not host the videos (as youTube or Google does). They only provide links to your resources.
(4) You can register at OSOTIS and maintain your own video collections, maintain an own user profile, make friends, choose your favourite videos, and (!) you can tag videos.
(5) You can even tag inside video streams. This means that the tagging information also includes time information and that the search is able to replay the video exactly from the right position.
(6) OSOTIS is a social networking tool.

Sounds really interesting, right? Well I tell you, it is!
And by the way, if you register to Osotis before April 15 2007 you can win a 30GB iPod! Try the next generation video search engine!

Osotis is also on the CeBIT, like us in Hall 9, but booth D04.

Since sphpblog has no support for saving blog entries as bookmarks in del.icio.us I've done some simple hacking (maybe it's possible to add some clean solution as a plugin, when the sidebar widgets plugins are available – check this post from Alex for more info). Under each entry you see now the del.icio.us icon, when you click on it, the permalink of the entry will be saved to you del.icio.us bookmarks.

How it's done? If you know where to add the code, it's pretty straightforward. You have to alter the file themes.php of your theme (for me it's themes/default/themes.php). In this file, the structure of a blog entry is coded according to the theme you are using. Search for the function [code]theme_blogentry[/code]. There you have to add the line

[pre] $blog_content=$blog_content .
'<a href="http://del.
icio.us/post?url='.$entry_array['permalink']['url'].'
&title='.$entry_array['subject'].'">
<img src="themes/default/images/delicious.gif"
height="10" width="10"
alt="Bookmark this"/></a>';[/pre]

I put that code right in the if clause for the related link, since I wanted the del.icio.us icon to appear right next to the related link.
That's it, no magic!
Don't forget to put the icon somewhere, maybe in your themes/xxx/images/ folder.

Well, haven't written anything for a while. Just didn't feel like it. Busy at work, not much free time, feeling tired. But hey, spring is in the air and I feel my spirits rising.
Our wedding preparations are running, we are now "officially engaged" and registered for wedding at the civil registration office (Standesamt). But there are so many things to be done and to be thought of – I really hope we don't forget anything important.

I will be at the CeBIT computer fair for the next days since our Institute has a booth there and I will present our project there. So if you are there, come around and have a look in Hall 9 (Future Parc), B39 at the stand of Brandenburg-Berlin.

(taken from train with mobile phone cam …)

It’s such a pity that I don’t have my big cam with me when I go to work. I can’t stop the train either (well I could, but I don’t like to get fined …), but the mornings these week have really been beautiful. Foggy meadows, the sun rising like a big fireball, immersing life in milky light.