If you – like us – need a picture of a shiny product box of a soon-to-be-released product for your presentation you may want to consider buying several tools to create such shots. But you can also just use a small tool and Windows Presentation Foundation.

There’s a great article on CodeProject where a almost everything is pre-set-up for our needs. And everything is written in C# – great stuff!

In action it looks like this:

Source: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/BoxShot.aspx?display=Print

There are more than 10 free eBooks available about Python:

… like “Dive into Python”:

“This is a fantastic book that is also available in print. It covers everything, from installing Python and the language’s syntax, right up to web services and unit testing. This is a good book to learn from, but it’s also excellent to use a reference. I frequently find myself visiting the site! If you only read one book on this list make it this one.”

other eBooks:

An Introduction to Tkinter
How to think like a Computer Scientist
The Standard Python Library
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
The Django Book
The Pylons Book
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python
Building Skills in Python
Building Skills in OO Design

Source 1: Dive into Python
Source 2: An Introduction to Tkinter
Source 3: How to think like a Computer Scientist
Source 4: The Standard Python Library
Source 5: Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
Source 6: The Django Book
Source 7: The Pylons Book
Source 8: Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python
Source 9: Building Skills in Python
Source 10: Building Skills in OO Design

“This book written by Granville Barnett and Luca Del Tongo is part of an effort to provide all developers with a core understanding of algorithms that operate on various common, and uncommon data structures.

Data Structures and Algorithms: Annotated Reference with Examples is completely free!”

The first draft is available now – and it’s 97 pages.

Source: http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/Data-Structures-And-Algorithms/

There’s a new free tool available from officelabs:

“pptPlex is a plug-in that explores an alternate method for presenting a PowerPoint slide deck. Using pptPlex, you can present your slides as a tour through a zoomable canvas instead of a series of linear slides.”

Source: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx

I am using iTunes as my main music player software for about 5 years now. In that time I had to move and restore my growing iTunes library more than 10 times. It can become quite a job to get it done properly so I came across this great howto article to help you and me out in the future:

“I see some discussion about fixing busted iTunes libraries, either when moving one on the same computer or migrating to a new one. Here’s what I have found works for me. Bonus: no slow AppleScripts or payments (donations cheerfully accepted and squandered).

First, what I have discovered about how iTunes manages music collections. There are two files it uses, one that is binary (ie, machine readable for faster performance on searching, sorting, add/edit/delete operations) and one that has the same information but in a human readable format (for a certain subset of humans who can read XML natively). The XML file is written from the binary file as a backup (check the dates to confirm).”

But that isn’t were it needs to stop. I had to do some more things with my iTunes library lately – like extracting all that ratings and exporting them into a new music player software I liked to test. I therefore wrote myself a little tool in C# that does the job of reading in the whole iTunes library and giving you programmatically access to that library. It only needs to have read access to the Mediathek.xml file iTunes stores in it’s music folder and you from there on can work your way through the bazillions of music tracks you may or may not have in your library. It even does the find-and-replace job a bit easier than the solution mentioned in the article above.

I release the code under the CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and here is your download:

ReadiTunesMediathek.zip (11,82 KB)

This code is a simple example of how to use the XmlTextReader in C# and how to traverse through them. It should be easy to understand and easy to change. I would love to hear from you when and if it helped you.

Source 1: iTunes library, fixing a broken one or moving one
Source 2: ReadiTunesMediathek.zip (11,82 KB)

Das wunderbare Leipziger Team tritt nun bald wieder mit dem .NET Open Space 2008 in Erscheinung:

“Die besten Gespräche hat man fern ab von einer festgelegten Agenda, bei einem Kaffee und beim “du”. Dort gibt es keine Rollenaufteilung in Sprecher / Zuhörer und die Themen finden sich vor Ort ganz von selbst. Das ist die Idee vom .NET Open Space. Hier sind alle gleich. Auch die Organisatoren halten sich im Hintergrund und moderieren nur ab und an etwas. Die Verantwortlichen der Themenfelder sorgen mit Einladungen für Teilnehmer darin.
.NET Open Space besteht derzeit aus den drei parallelen Themenfeldern:

• ALT.NET
• Mobile Computing
• Soft Skills”

Eine Agenda gibt es nicht, dafür aber einen Zeitplan:

Source: http://netopenspace.de/

You may have heard about things like “guidelines for user interfaces” – Sometimes I tend to think that there is no such thing as a design guideline for a better user interface because some applications are just plain unusable for a normal human being.

But there are guidelines for almost everything and I wanted to give an overview:

Microsoft:

• Windows XP Guidelines for Applications
• Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines (direct pdf link)
• Office System 2007 User Interface Design Guidelines
• Guidelines for Keyboard User Interface Design

Apple:

• Apple User Experience Guides Overview
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Apple Web Design Guide (oooold)

Linux:

• KDE Standards User Interface Guidelines
• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
• Motif Style Guide

interesting ones:

• NASA Usability Toolkit
• Blackberry/RIM UI Engine API
• IBM Object-Oriented Interface Design
• SUN Common Desktop Environment (CDE) Style Guide
• SAP R/3 User Experience

I am once again pleased to present the official Trailer for this years FIWAK. FIWAK is the annual outdoor-conference presented by FeM e.V.. This year these lectures are planned (german only):

• Openstreetmap-Workshop von Markus Brückner und Dominik Tritscher
• Technische Grundlagen DVB-T von Sebastian Schwarz
• Opensource Videobearbeitung von Florian Raschke
• FeM-Geschichte von Mario Holbe
• Vereinsinterne Kommunikation von Michael Bock
• Tanzworkshop mit Udo Pescheck
• Bewerbungstraining mit MLP
• Whiteboard-Technologien von Smart Systems

FIWAK takes place from 20. to 22. June 2008 in the forest around Elgersburg – a small town near Ilmenau. But now watch the trailer:

Source 1: FIWAK Homepage

Once again it’s time for the annual forest-lan-partyesk-camp organized and held by FeM e.V..

It’s the 5th FIWAK (FemImWaldAußerKontrolle) taking place from 20th to 22nd June 2008 in the Forest (Freilichtbühne) near Elgersburg/Germany.

You can still sign up if you like to come and watch the lectures and camp with the people there. If you like to get an more detailed impression of the last FIWAK just take a look here.

Source 1: everything about FIWAK on this blog.
Source 2: FIWAK Einschreibesystem

The agenda of this years STC is online. You can take a look here.

Source: http://www.studentconference.de/Agenda.aspx

“Das Datum steht fest: Unsere STC 2008 findet am 15.05.2008 statt!

Wir laden Dich herzlich nach Berlin ein und freuen uns auf einen tollen Tag mit Dir! Es erwartet Dich eine tolle Location, spannende Vorträge und Austausch mit Microsoft-Experten und –Ansprechpartnern, so dass Du ganz im Sinne des Networkings Deiner Karriere auf die Beine helfen kannst.

Zudem hast Du hier die Chance mit zu verfolgen, welches Imagine Cup Team im Software Design die deutsche Fahne beim internationalen Finale in Paris vertreten wird. Der Imagine Cup ist der weltweit größte Technologiewettbewerb für Schüler und Studierende – alle Infos zum Wettbewerb findest Du unter www.imaginecup.info.”

Stattfinden wird die STC dieses Jahr in der Kalkscheune in Berlin.

Source 1: http://www.studentconference.de
Source 2: STC 2007
Source 3: http://www.kalkscheune.de/

As ususal here’s the schematic overview of the things behind the curtain:

Source: http://www.implementierungsdetail.de/index.php?n=Main.TeamStreaming

Once again FeM is recording and live streaming a Chaos Computer Club event. The Chaos Communication Camp starts today and you can watch everything live:

“The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. The Camp features two conference tracks with interesting lectures, a workshop-track and over 30 villages providing workshops and gettogethers covering a specific topic.”

Chaos Communication Camp 2007
The International Hacker Open Air Gathering
8|9|10|11|12th August 2007
Finowfurt near Berlin, Germany (Old Europe)

“You can participate! Bring your tent and join our villages. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. The 100.000 square meter areal features enough space to camp, cozy places to hang out and a nice pool and lake to swim and do nautic experiments.”

There are two lecture halls called “foo” and “bar”:

Live Stream (WMV) “foo”
Live Stream (WMV) “bar”

Of course like at every CCC event you can grab an up-to-date schedule called “Fahrplan” here. The only thing I did not mention yet is the FeM-Village Wiki page…oh well..done

Source 1: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de
Source 2: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Streams
Source 3: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/
Source 4: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/FeM_Village

Today I had a talk about IP-TV in our local research network – a project I am involved in the past year. And since I did some of the legal and coding work (YAPS) I was the one who wanted to talk about it the most…

First here’s the slidedeck:

The talk was recorded and you can watch it as soon as the post-production team has finished working on it – I’ll keep you posted.

Source: Slidedeck as PDF

We spent the last two days in Duisburg attending the Student Technology Conference 2007.

“From Software Architecture, User Interface and Robotics to Games Development with the XNA framework: in use and brand new technologies of the IT – industry will be presented and demonstrated at technologically advanced level. Microsofts Student Technology Conference is the perfect opportunity to engage with potential employers and to get in touch with Microsofts .NET technology. Additionally the German Finals in Microsofts premiere technology competition, the Imagine Cup 2007, will have its final in the Software Design invitational right here!”

the keynote

view from our hotel room…nice, eh?

Source: http://www.studentconference.de

The trailer for this years FIWAK is done:

I had a talk yesterday about Windows Vista for developers. You can grab the slides here:

Source: dotnetcommunity.de

Here are my slides of my talk:

And I said that I would link to the article about .NET Reflectors impact on “Serial Keygen”, go and read it here.

I wrote quite a lot of code for the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress. And because of that I want to make it publicy available for everyone to download and use. It’s all GPL (because of the libaries used) so use it according to the license.

You can learn how to:

• deserialize the pentabarf schedule.en.xml file
• create a valid congress filename
• create and manipulate animations with text and bitmaps
• store those animations in AVI container files

Download: CodeOnCongress.zip

Und wie versprochen gibt es hier nun die Slides des .NET Compact Framework Vortrags (Version 1.0 und 2.0)

Download hier.

The planning process started way earlier than last year but as usual some things remain until the very last minute before everything starts. But since this year the teamwork and enthusiasm was extraordinary we finally made it almost as planned. We surely did not reach our goal of releasing the recordings hours after the talk ended. Mainly because we underestimated the amount of knowledge and pain it took to actually get the recordings running on the iPod. It was one of the guidelines for this years official recordings: they had to run on current generation video iPods and they had to have all the metatags. So the team did it and we ended up releasing the first half (nearly) of the 23c3 recordings into the public only 2 weeks instead of the 4-6 months of last year. Even better: we managed to improve the video quality and even got smaller files. That wouldn’t been possible without the encoding-pipeline knowledge that Michael Feiri brought into the team. With that knowledge it also took several days to actually build the working pipeline.(yes the iPod is one special piece of hardware) The complete encoding-pipeline we used will be documented and released soon.

So after all that planning we finally packed our stuff and hit the road:

After some hours and the unpacking the video studio looked like this:

here’s a close up of the Windows Media Encoders, the h.264 encoding machine and the storage (all from behind):

So we surely brought enough processing power to berlin. And this is what did take the picture:

BTW: the black machine in the background just
died during the keynote speech…

Want to see what it’s like watching “out of the window” of the video studio? No problem:

or how about another view of the studio:

So. So you had some pictures of the video studio and the setup. But I bet you want to know some more details about the setup itself. I created an overview for you:

Since last years setup was completely digital (planned) and we ended up using the DV-tape backup since all the recordings were screwed up we thought it might be a good idea to go back one step and use analog video as in FBAS to transport and record the talks. We also had the DV-tape backup this year and to be honest in some cases we have to fall back to that. Less than 10 out of 130 recordings are screwed up so we have to use the DV backup. That means 120 of them worked out as planned. Great! We are currently cutting and encoding them and as you read this more than half of them should be up on the official servers and the mirrors.

Now in the aftermath of the congress we learned a new lesson: there’s maybe one or another speaker that would not allow us releasing their talk recording. In the future we think of having something like a “don’t record me”-list to avoid misunderstandings.

It’s done.

The first 53 recordings of the 23c3 are currently uploaded to the server. The remaining ones will be available in the next few days.

You have the following choices:

ftp: ftp://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/23C3/video/

www: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/23C3/video/

rsync: rsync://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/23C3

Yesterday the first usergroup meeting took place in the computer pool of the faculty of mechanical engineering. Sven and Nico had their lectures for which you can get the slides as soon as possible on the website of the usergroup.

Update:

Windows Presentation Foundation (Sven Hubert)

AJAX with ASP.NET (Nico Orschel)

Source: http://www.dotnetcommunity.de

The event is over and it was great! More than 7 hours of new information compressed into 8 talks were presented today. If you missed the event, don’t worry: you can download the slidedecks here and of course if you like, you can participate in another University-Roadshow 2006 event in another german city (complete list and subscription here). If you like to attend some more talks at the TU-Ilmenau you can watch out for the local community website: www.dotnetcommunity.de – Since we’re in the process of building a INETA .NET Community here in Ilmenau we’re planning several events in the next months. Oh, to name one: on the 25th and 26th of next month there’s a ASP.NET workshop, held by my colleague Nico Orschel. More information on that can be found on dotnetcommunity.

The Slidedecks are available in three different formats(german language versions only):

Windows Vista für Jedermann (Daniel Kirstenpfad):

Tomorrow the US TechEd takes off. If you cannot attend personally you can attend it virtually. Microsoft hosts a website called “Virtual TechEd” where you can watch talks and keynotes via streaming video. Beside watching the talks you can listen to the TechEd radio livestream.

Source 1: http://virtualteched.com/
Source 2: TechEd radio livestream

As this is a germany-only-offer I’ll do it in german:

“Die Entscheidung ist gefallen! Die überwältigende Anzahl von 6477 Teilnehmern hat es der Jury sehr schwer gemacht. Dennoch stehen die deutschen Vertreter für das Weltfinale in Indien jetzt fest. Die vielen tollen Ideen und Euer super Engagement möchten wir mit Euch gebührend feiern – denn eine Party unter Palmen bei 25° Lufttemperatur und 31° Wassertemperatur geht auch in Deutschland. Wir laden Dich hiermit herzlich zur Imagine Cup Beach Party am 30. Mai 2006 in das Tropical Island Resort nach Brandenburg ein.

Es sind noch ca. 50 Plätze für Studenten frei. Also los und anmelden! Die Vergabe findet nach dem First-Come-First-Serve Prinzip statt.

Hier auch ein kurzer Blick auf die Agenda:

Source 1: Imagine Cup Beachparty 2006
Source 2: Microsoft Imagine Cup 2006

The complete MIX conference lectures (slides+videos) are online and ready to be downloaded. Very much information…

“The MIX conference is a 72-hour conversation between Web developers, designers and business leaders. When you attend MIX you’ll learn the latest about IE7, Windows Media, Windows Live!, as well as “Atlas”, Microsoft’s new AJAX framework.”

Source: http://mix06.com/Default.aspx

Berkeley University of California just made a great number of their audio courses available for free download on iTunes. Just tune in and get a taste of cal.

I actually got a taste of the incomparability of two universities… The courses are great!

But Berkeley is not the only university which has some sort of online-courses. FeM e.V. offers you a growing number of complete courses of the TU-Ilmenau with video+audio.

Source 1: Berkeley on iTunes

Source 2: FeM e.V. Streaming TU-Ilmenau

So here are some news about the 22c3 recordings:

According to the last information I got, 130 of 146 recordings are ready to go. I don’t know why the team decided to release them all at once only but unfortunately you’ll have to be patient.

The release is planned for THIS WEEK. So stay tuned and check back for more information.

Source: http://22c3.fem.tu-ilmenau.de

So here we are. The January passed by and still no recordings. What happened?

picture by namenlos

Straight after the congress we started working on the recordings – but soon we realised that almost all of the recordings we made live with ffmpeg and his friends were corrupted: The audio and video is just not in sync.

Well it would be easy if it was just shifted for a given amount of time – but the amount of shifting time is changing all through the recordings.

So we engaged DEFCON 4 and got back on our backup solution that is there, just in case something would go wrong. (who would have thought that?!).

So what’s DEFCON 4? We came to the congress with 400 brand new DV tapes. And that’s simply what our backup solution is: everything that was recorded during the 22c3 is on DV tape. And it’s in sync there.

So we are extracting nearly all of the recordings from those DV tapes…

And as you can imagine: this takes some time. It takes less time than we’d expected – we are making serious progress. Together with the CCC it was decided that an intro and outro should be added to each recording – that also takes some time. If you are experienced in creating scripted/batched DV material with definable text… we obviously need your help

So when will the recordings be available? We hope very very soon. Like I said we are making good progress in getting the stuff off the tapes, but it’s very difficult to give a time frame. Check back here or on the official 22c3 FeM Homepage for updates – … well if we can get the intro/outro issue working fast it’ll probably be only days away.

If you have any comment, feel free to comment here.

So here we are: a new year and just two days after the 22c3. As we can tell everything was recorded as planned and everything went just great.

I want to tell everybody who helped to make this happen: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure and great fun to work with you guys. The results that we all together achieved speak for themselves: nearly 1 Tbyte of downloaded live-stream bytes. Nearly 400 listeners on our streams at peak times.

In fact there is a lot to do afterwards: We have to cut the MPEG2 files (5 Mbit) of each lecture to set start and end-times correctly. We have to tag them and make them available (1 to 5 gigabyte each) for you as soon as possible – which means when the last hard drive arrives from berlin here in Ilmenau.

When all MPEG2 files are complete we complete our MPEG4 encodings – which means: we are already encoding everything we have in MPEG4 1.2 Mbit.

This is our main focus at the moment. It should be possible to make everything of the above mentioned available within January. After all this is done (or maybe in the meantime, we don’t know at the moment) the remaining WMV on-demand streams will become available as we have to reencode. So check back here to get more information and updates about this topic.

I often was asked why the WMV on-demand streams were only available for the first day: the answer is easy – we tested if it’s feasible to cut them nearly live – and we came to the conclusion that it raises the stress bar for our team to high to handle it the complete 4 days of the conference. So we changed our plans to ensure that you have a mostly flawless live-streaming experience.

At the end: Here is the list of the people I want to thank for their support and help at 22c3 (without any order actually):

laforge and his team, maedness, mucki, namenlos, manu, cosrahn, Agtmulda, yray, cutcat, ecki, ahzf, ambanus, somi, all the video and audio angels that made the great audio and video possible, Ambion for the great support, the POC who helped were our cable guys and supported us even with coffee, the NOC which made IPv6 happen finally and made the best conference network ever possible…. and a whole lot more people I forgot.

22. Chaos Communication Congress
3G Investigations

lecture slides

Scanning your GPRS/UMTS IP network for fun and profit

We are giving an overview of ip networks used for >=2.5G technologies. Our main focus is on scanning the overlaying ip network, on different Voice-over-IP filter implementations and the possibilities to circumvent them.

We want to explain the ip networks used in GPRS and UMTS cellular networks from the enduser point of view. How do they work today and what has to be done to get a normal webpage, voice-over-ip or even a video stream onto your PDA or SmartPhone.

For your private investigations inside your providers ip network we want to demonstrate you a tcp/udp port and round-trip-time based traceroute program based on the .NET compact framework. With the help of this program we want to analyse the anti voice-over-ip filters implemented by different cellular providers and show you some possibilities how to circumvent them _efficently_. So we don’t just tunnel all the traffic through a VPN. But even when these filters become more sophisticated in the future we want to present some ideas how to defeat your right to talk via voice-over-ip whereever and whenever you want to.

Slide download (PDF, 5.9 Mbyte)

Nico held is talk this friday – and here are his slides for you to download.

It’s time for another What The Hack wrap-up session: (slides are in german)

Slides: WTH_Bluetooth_Security.ppt (801 KB)

My slides are based on Martin Herfurts talk at the What The Hack 2005. You can get his slidesdeck at trifinite.org.

Nico wrote a cool article about the TerraServer WebService and how to use it with Visual Studio 2005. He uses this WebService in his talks as a WebService example – a great idea: The problem is now, that the example sourcecode does not work under Visual Studio 2005. So he changed it to work – and you can download the new sourcecode here.

Source 1: Nico’s Weblog
Source 2: TerraServer WebService
Source 3: Example Source
Source 4: Download VS2005 compatible Sourcecode

Here are the slides for my talk at the “.NET Chaostage” at the FH-Deggendorf. They are in german so be warned.

Slides Download: Einführung in .NET 2.0.ppt (2,74 MB)
Demos Download: Einführung in .NET Demos.zip (45,13 KB)

Oh…and Torsten Weber took some nice pictures of the FH Deggendorf campus:

In the future I will put all the slides I have from my talks online at schrankmonster. I will create a dedicated categorie: Talks and Slides

Slides Download: WTH_Exploiting_Pocket_PC.ppt (1,23 MB)

My slides are based on Collin Mulliners talk at the What The Hack 2005.