Okay, I have started setting up a dedicated page for the marathon realtime tracking. Still testing the set up but so far it is looking fine. The current plan is to display the tracked points and my current speed in a table and to put a dot on a map of Berlin to show where I am. This is done by instructing the phone to send out coordinates every minute, receive them via SMS on the server and pass them to a script that does the nice voodoo.

Unfortunately, the web world uses different formats for GPS coordinates (berliner-stadtplan.com uses degrees and minutes in decimal notation, the Benefon Track Pro phone spits our degree/minutes/seconds only and for realtime mapping you want degrees in decimal notation only) but I found a handy online converter so that helped to clear the confusion.

Light artist Heinz Mack seems to be behind a new Blinkenlights-style permanent light installation into the new KoelnTurm in Cologne. There is a movie clip available in three file formats, although the MPG seems to be corrupt (the QuickTime version is running).

Looks nice, but there is no public interface available. It is however a decent and worthy enhancement to the structure.

Radio SubEther was the 24 hour radio show at the Chaos Communication Camp. The radio crew did a lot of interviews and reports on the Camp.

Now the whole radio show is available online in MP3 format via HTTP and FTP. If you have missed either the Camp or the radio show, you might want to go for it.

Here is a list of known mirrors:

• http://home.verbrennung.org/mirror/camp2003/radio_subether/
• ftp://ftp.puettmann.net/camp2003/
• http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/CCCamp/subether/

If you are willing to set up a mirror for these files, please post the URL of your mirror here as a comment.

In an announcement, the Gentoo community reveals is plans to make its porting platform available for Mac OS X. This is a quite surprising move but also shows the broadness of today‘s open source efforts. It‘s not only about kernels and certain distributions anymore.

Gentoo has been a fresh start in the Linux community so far. Being mainly a „new distribution“ it brought with it a new (Python-based) packaging mechanism and a devoted crowd of developers that were bored with the bloatedness of other popular distributions.

Mac OS X plays an increasingly interesting role in this game. First, Debian affine developers set up the Fink project that is today the leading package deliverator for OS X. Soon afterwards – and due to its BSD heritage one of the more promising activities – the Darwin Ports project followed suit and is currently underway to release a revamped BSD ports system for Apple‘s brightest star.

All in all it is interesting to see that Mac OS X somehow arrived on the nerd‘s desk. Here at Chaos Computer Club Berlin we always had a strong Macintosh community but since OS X arrived, even more of the alpha geeks are switching to PPC hardware.

I consider this to be a good thing as two quite interesting developer scenes melt: on the one hand the true UNIX geeks favoring performance, functionality and stability and on the other the Macintosh devotee, hailing usability, simplicity and beauty. It can only get better.

Just finished my second talk. No more talks to give. I am happy.

On the stage now is Amy Alexander as the Ubergeek performing live a wild mix of music and using a wireless computer keyboard to control extreme whitespace, a perl script popping out tons of lovely colored terminal graphics. Pretty nice to look at.

It is interesting to see how the „geeky“ design is gaining ground in the art sphere. The beauty of naked tty visuals is somehow telling a story from the mysterious and hidden depths of the electronic machines which somehow pleases the Zeitgeist.

Finland, Finland, Finland. The country where I want to be.

When you think of Helsinki, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? For me (and probably for you as well) it is the movie Night On Earth by Jim Jarmusch. It is a great piece and tells the stories of five taxi drivers in five different cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and – guess what – Helsinki.

The episode in the finnish capital is funny although it is by far the darkest of the five stories: three guys get a lift by a silent taxi driver. One of them is totally drunk, sleeps and his friends bring him home. During the ride, they tell the driver about his „sad story“ (got fired, his girl ran away etc. pp.) The taxi driver is not impressed and tells his personal story which is so dramatic that the passengers find the the fate of his friend no longer that moving and leave the taxi without taking care of him anymore.

Well, that doesn‘t sound funny but the perfect storytelling abilities of Jim Jarmusch make it a worthwile episode which blends in perfectly with the other (also great) international taxi rides making it one the best movies I have ever seen.

Calling a taksi in Helsinki is not without a thrill now. So far, the drivers were very responsive, helpful and even funny. I am looking forward to even more taxi rides in the remaining two days of my stay.

Auto-Illustrator is a funny graphics tool. It is meant to produce vector graphics but it is adding some kind of unexpected features to what you do. It has got some intriguing features (like the „Penalty of death“ for refusing ugly graphics :-) and generally tends to do something else as originally intended.

Auto-Illustrator is written in Real Basic. I don‘t really like Basic (as a programming language) but it is interesting to see what people actually achieve using this specific incarnation.

I feel if I have never been introduced to the concept of „Sauna“ in my life at all. Just went to a party – in the context of the READ_ME festival – and apart from many people drinking a lot I also discovered a self-made hut made out of transparent plastic standing in the backyard. It had an oven inside and I thought „what a wonderful idea to have a warm room at the party“.

I called it „The Sauna“ but I didn‘t really expect it to become a real sauna at all. After some time I returned to the backyard to discover a naked crowd gathering in it (the tent was steaming like mad) singing and dancing inside following the karaoke text that was projected on a screen, k3wl.

Remote places have a tendency of being really wild. Finnland is really a part of this.

Paperikori is an SMS based story writing system. You hook on by sending a SMS to the system and you can subsequently write SMS messages that continue the story already told by other people.

Well, at least this is how it is supposed to work. I just sent my initiation message but I did not get a reply so far. Nice project idea anyway.