Sven has released version 1.1.3 for the Blinkenlights Library. It contains improvement with GIF conversion. If you are just interested in blinkenproxy functionality, you do not need to install it.

We have now managed to set up a realtime video stream. The video stream is MPEG-4 encoded. I would recommend QuickTime to receive it. We haven‘t done any tests with other software.

BlinkenPaint has been updated to version 3.14 to support the BMM file format of the BlinkenMini project now as well.

Cefalon has posted a first series of photos of the 20th Chaos Communication Congress (20C3) in Berlin. Here is the queue and here is the rocket.

A new version of BlinkenPaint (3.13) has been released. It fixes some bugs with the keyboard commands.

There is another web cam up and running provided by Cityscope watching Blinkenlights Reloaded from the Haus des Reisens.

We are still wrestling with our own web cam and streaming server and I hope it will be running soon.

For the technically inclined, a real-time data stream of Blinkenlights Reloaded is available. This means, you can receive the same Blinkenlights movie stream we are using within our installation live on the Internet with no significant delay.

In order to be able to see that stream, you need to compile the blinkensim program for X11, which relies on the blib and blinkenthemes packages.

Sven has set up a small text explaining how to set up your computer to receive our experimental data stream.

UPDATE: New updates forblib(1.1.2) and blinkensim (2.4) have significantly improved the situation. The proxy mechanism now works much more reliable even from behind NAT. At least it works from behind my AirPort base station and should walk through every properly working NAT system. Firewalls and misconfigured (or badly programmed) NAT routers still can prevent the stream from getting to your computer though.

This is real work in progress.

After a heavy debugging session most of the technical problems have been fixed. Blinkenlights Reloaded is now visible in all its greyscale glory. This frees resources to focus on the remaining issues.

In other news, a new version of the Blinkenlights Library has been released. See http://sven.gimp.org/blinkenlights.

It‘s never as easy as expected.

We are fighting hard with some weird power problems for Blinkenlights Reloaded. So far we haven‘t been able to unleash its full performance while we are wrestling with some obscure timing problems. That is the reason why we haven‘t enabled the Loveletters feature or included any external movies. It might take another day to get everything working.

Seems as if I have been able to create a persistent crash in iCal with the automatically generated iCalendar file of the 20C3 Fahrplan. I would be interested if anybody is actually able to subscribe to the calendar with out crashing iCal or if any other application is actually able to load the file.

So far I am not aware of any bugs in my calendar file (which doesn‘t mean there are none). At least I have found a way to trigger a reproducible crash in iCal. Hope the new crash notification feature of Mac OS X 10.3 is really helping Apple to fix the bug fast.

Update: The bug has been found. It was due to a missing information in the database that entries have been generated with a period information „PTH“ instead of „PT1H“. This makes iCal crash. All Hail Objective-C. Are there still people out there who think this is a modern programming language? Ha!