Kurosawa + Hans&Franz

I am a big Akira Kurosawa fan. When I was in Tokyo 10/2004, I had a fantastic dinner in Kurosawa Restaurant. I enjoyed every one of his movies I saw: Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Yume and Ikiru. An interesting reference to Rashomon is contained in Ghost Dog.

Today Franz and tried (to the amusement of the people at the lab) to impersonate Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live ;-)
Transcript, audio

It's a Beautiful Day!

I solved the error that caused me headaches for months now (see last posting ...). The solution was soooo easy, but I still do not understand why it solves the problem: I disabled Hyperthreading in the BIOS (thanks Blaine for the hint!)
Also I had the best conversation for months at tonight's dinner ... Many more ahead I hope :-)

Ig Nobel Prizes & Frameworks

I discovered someting really funny:
Ig Nobel Prizes.

Not so funny is that i realized that using software frameworks is a double edged sword. Frameworks are every software engineer's dream, my former advisor used to say "never do anything without a framework". Very true, as long as everything works as it should (which is almost never the case in software development :-) Suppose you use many frameworks that are built upon each other - as it is common practice in software development (example). Debugging errors that span lots of different frameworks can be a real nightmare (see a stacktrace from my current work below)....

/home/sandor/dwarfBuild/lib/libDWARFcommon.so.2(_Z15segfaulthandleri+0x20)[0x41551c20]
/lib/i686/libpthread.so.0[0x4190896c]
/lib/i686/libc.so.6[0x41ae0aa8]
/usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN12QApplication6notifyEP7QObjectP6QEvent+0x7e)[0x4031c9fe]
/usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN10QEventLoop14activateTimersEv+0x283)[0x40309bd3]
/usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN10QEventLoop13processEventsEj+0x61d)[0x402c529d]
/usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN10QEventLoop9enterLoopEv+0xa0)[0x40331980]
/usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN10QEventLoop4execEv+0x26)[0x40331876]
/usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN12QApplication4execEv+0x1f)[0x4031d96f]
/home/sandor/dwarfBuild/bin/Viewer(_ZN12ViewerFacade9guiThreadEv+0x12e)[0x806933e]
/home/sandor/dwarfBuild/bin/Viewer(_ZN12ViewerFacade21guiThreadStartRoutineEPv+0xf)[0x806937f]
/usr/lib/libomnithread.so.3(omni_thread_wrapper+0x9a)[0x416d6cca]
/lib/i686/libpthread.so.0[0x41902f60]
/lib/i686/libc.so.6(__clone+0x57)[0x41b93327]


Franz

Finally I am not the only German guy in the lab anymore! Franz from Weimar arrived on the 15th and we are hanging out
a lot together. He is from Oliver Bimber's research group that has already produced some impressive work . He has developed basic technology for the "Embedded Entertainment with Smart Projectors" project as a follow up to his involvement in "Superimposing Pictorial Artwork with Projected Imagery".

I have already learned some new words in his dialect (Thüringisch) and I have taught him some Bavarian words ...His weblog (in German) is here . Especially his posting from 9/17 is worth reading :-)

Today the World Chess Championship has Started

Peter Leko (Hungary) is playing a 14 game match against Wladimir Kramnik (Russia).
The event lasts from September 15th until October 18th.
I hope that Peter Leko is going to win!!

Unfortunately he has just lost the first game :-(
Live coverage is here .

Chinese propaganda posters

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Motion Doodles

Finally I have found a movie of the
coolest animation interface that I have seen for a long time.

Ghost In The Shell 2

Yesterday i watched Ghost In the Shell 2!!

What I liked:
- The artwork was very beautiful. Especially the Japanese street parade with thousands of cherry blossoms flying in the air was unbelievable beautiful
- Lots of philosophical references to Descartes, Confucius etc....
- Nice soundtrack
- Heavy usage of computer graphics (crowd animation, advanced lightning etc.)
- Showing the future of User Interfaces (Heads-up displays in cars, holographic displays, augmented reality with implants that enhance visual system ...)

What I did not like:
- Story sometimes really confusing (maybe bad translation from Japanese?)

Lab Cleanup

We have cleaned up the lab. In parallel people were still working ;-)

Current main task: debugging

I am getting sick of debugging....
I hope I get this stuff done soon.
Figuring out things like this is definitely one of
the worst parts about being a computer scientist:

sandor@hiroshige: # gdb ./toll
GNU gdb 5.3.92
Copyright 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i586-suse-linux"...
(gdb) run warum.wrl
Starting program: /home/sandor/bin/examinerSrc/toll warum.wrl
[New Thread 16384 (LWP 11690)]

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 16384 (LWP 11690)]
0x40a8197d in SoInput::constructorsCommon() (this=0xbfffdd00) at SbStorage.h:38
38 SbStorage.h: No such file or directory.
in SbStorage.h
(gdb)


Wabi Sabi

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