BPI inside

Category: Uncategorized

  • It’s getting hot

    And today is another day where the thermometer hits values in the area around 30°C. Shouldn’t be so spectacular, as we’re having summer and the sun shines almost all day. Well, this reading is from inside an air-conditioned office!

    In the recent few days, I’ve been feeling somewhat uncomfortable and I completely blame the temperature for that. This is somehow strange for me as this is not the first year with such climatic conditions but the first year where I experience physical problems because of this.

    Maintaining concentration is now clearly an issue…

  • End of learning term

    Yesterday our last lecture for this term at the university took place. This concludes the second term and leaves just most of the tests open which will have to be passed in the next weeks. Last Wednesday we already had our Russian final exam. I expected to be quite bad in this as I’m normally quite bad in languages but I think I did surprisingly well. Of course, now I don’t have time to dig deeper into that language but I plan this for later.

    So, on to the next ones…

  • Building continues

    I just got noticed, that the tilers have finished with my new toilet and bathroom. I’m quite excited, that after some slow times finally a major step in the construction of my own personal living space concluded.

    There are still some big steps ahead but the bathroom and toilet were the largest part of leftover work which has been open for the foreseeable future.

    Altough I haven’t seen the final result myself yet, I saw the tilers results of yesterdays work. Awesome.

    Bathroom - tiles

    Toilet wall - tiles

    Toilet floor - tiles

  • System Shock 2 Addons

    Just for the record, so that I don’t forget about those:

  • Classic Remake – Metroid SR-388

    Maybe I’m a bit late on this but when I read about that I’ve been very excited and forgot to mention it. Metroid SR-388 is a fan project for Metroid which takes on the SNES version "Super Metroid" and follows this path.

    Currently, all what is available is this teaser but as the creator says it is already outdated and even this looks incredible, the expectations for this game are quite high.

    I just hope the final product will be available and copyright issues with someone (Nintendo) won’t put this to an end.

  • Goodbye K.

    Yesterday was the last appearance of my former manager of the project I spent a great part of my time in this company on.

    Two days ago he announced a small farewell-party and invited lots of people to it. It was quite a nice party and we all had a great time. There were some sad moments tough, especially when one after the other had to leave and made a final goodbye handshake.

    Goodbye K., you’ve always been one of the bright spots in every project we’ve participated together.

  • Some visual impressions

    Yes, I’m still alive. Just had quite few spare time because I had to manage to get my tiles and organize everything with the tiler (which is still not finished). Furthermore work and university have been quite time-consuming lately.

    Nevertheless to give you a bit of an excuse, I’ve found a few seconds of time to play with my cam again and here are the two shots which I like most.

    The first is a tunnel exit where I had only seconds to get the cam, turn it on and fire, so please excuse the low image quality.

    On the second picture I tried to make some long-exposure shots of a fountain but only this one at 1.5sec came out nicely and not too overexposed. I still have to practice at this. Furthermore I want to buy a small tripod because I couldn’t find a nice location to stabilize the cam during the shot but had to place it on a trash bin and tilt it a bit with a handkerchief.

    Enjoy.

    The light at the end of the tunnel

    Night fountain

  • Becoming a Single Point of Failure

    For quite some time now, my main activity at work has shifted to a different project. Nevertheless I’m still working on the old project for a smaller part of my time in a quite small team.

    Some time ago I’ve been informed that my project manager for this project will leave the company and take on new opportunities. This leaves me as the only person for this project, which has an almost-complete overview of the systems, interfaces, designs and most of the technical aspects of this project.

    Of course my manager is currently busy transferring as much of his knowledge to a replacement but it’s impossible to "copy" the know-how of a formerly dozens-of-people-sized team within a few weeks. Much of the knowledge we take for granted and forget to transfer to our substitutes falls into that category also with stuff we have in the back of our heads and comes back only in situations when we hit a similar problem or situation. Which means, that I’ll be the last person for quite some areas which will be able to manage, overview, design, fix and maintain.

    I’m now officially a Single Point of Failure, as well as some other people on the same project but other topics.

    "Career and progress"

  • New toy finally arrived… again…

    Ok, I admit that it took way longer than one week until my F31 arrived two days ago. The seller had to take it to the Fuji service one more time because apparently there was still something wrong with it and in the end they had to clean up the whole inside, removing humidity and dust. I have no clue how these managed their way into the case but it did definitely not happen while I had the cam. And then there were some issues about taking the additional costs and shipping etc. but in the end I paid additional 40Eur and the package was sent into my direction.

    Until now the thing works correctly and without any flaws and I hope it stays this way for a long time…

    PS.: Just one drawback, the guy which sold me the cam silently changed the contained xD memory card from H type (high speed) to M type (normal), but I’m tired of fighting and since the H-type card was never announced or described on the eBay offering, I’ll let this case rest.

  • Microsoft opens more protocol specifications

    As I just have read, Microsoft has released more specifications under its Open Protocol Specifications program. I browsed a bit through it and recognized that it now also contains specifications on protocols between Exchange and Outlook. It may very well be that I’m wrong here but if this means that now the whole communication between Outlook clients and Exchange servers is documented and freely available, I guess it will now be just a matter of time until many of our beloved mail clients will not only be able to use IMAP/POP3/SMTP as the protocols to talk to MS Exchange but use the custom/propietary protocol/API for accessing the mail servers. Also, groupware and calendar applications will be able to integrate with the excellent organisation-features (appointments, people availability, address completion, etc.) of exchange into their software.

    I really hope, that my interpretation of the things I saw so far is true…