N.O-T/MY-D/E.PA/R.T-ME

Every year between Christmas and New Years the hackers of the (mostly european) world gather for the Chaos Communication Congress. This year for the 29th time. The 29c3 takes place where it all started – in Hamburg. This years subtitle is:

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Since the reports are already in that the fairydust has landed successfully in Hamburg there’s even a proof picture for it:

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Since FeM is already preparing it will be great to ‘attend’ the congress via live streams of all lectures.

Source 1: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/wiki/Main_Page
Source 2: http://blog.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/archives/836-Reisetagebuch-Mal-kurz-Hamburg.html

there’s a hackerspace in Bamberg

The other day I found out that there is an actual hackerspace in Bamberg – the city where I work and live nearby. For some strange reason it never occurred to me to search for an hackerspace nearby. But now since the 29c3 is at the gates I found them on the “Congress everywhere” pages (beware, it’s having a hard time right now).

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Since I just found it and christmas duties take their toll I wasn’t able to go by and talk to the people there in person – i’ve just contacted them over their IRC channel (#backspace on freenode). Eventually I will have time to visit them and I’ll have a report up here then.

For the time being enjoy their website and the projects they already did. Apparently there are some very interesting LED lighting experiments.

Source: http://www.hackerspace-bamberg.de/

know your numbers!

Wikipedia describes latency this way:

“Latency is a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured. In communications, the lower limit of latency is determined by the medium being used for communications. In reliable two-way communication systems, latency limits the maximum rate that information can be transmitted, as there is often a limit on the amount of information that is “in-flight” at any one moment. In the field of human-machine interaction, perceptible latency has a strong effect on user satisfaction and usability.” (Wikipedia)

Given that it’s quite important for any developer to know his numbers. Since latency has a huge impact on how software should be architected it’s important to keep that in mind:

 

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Source: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html