Author: Daniel Mettler

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Air traffic for ZRH/LSZH: A Google maps mashup

The Air Traffic Google maps mashup (provided by ZHAW) that displays departing and arriving planes at Zurich airport has received quite some media attention. It’s not fully real-time for technical and security reasons (fear of terror attacks, as usual) and when observing the airplane lineup during the approach to runway 28 I noticed that some planes were not displayed (I don’t know the reason however). A nice idea nonetheless.

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From an inflationary to a cyclic universe?

I have to admit that due to lacking knowledge in this area (and very limited knowledge in cosmology, physics and mathematics in general), I couldn’t really follow all ideas and models proposed in the popular new cosmology book “Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang” by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok. So don’t ask me whether I favor one over the other model – I simply can’t judge them, not even from a theoretical point of view. For me as a layman, it’s an interesting reading though already for the fact that the idea of a cyclic universe challenges the very popular, widely believed and almost taken-as-a-fact view of an inflationary universe.

For a next book about this topic though I would prefer one that puts more emphasis on mathematical formulae and derivations rather than prose as I would like to be able to better understand the proposed models and logical consequences. I’d be fine if I was presented a solution to highly complex mathematical equations I couldn’t solve myself (even with the help of Mathematica) as long as I get to know the underlying mathematical formulae and the confidence that others can verify the statements. With prose only in (popular) scientific books I always feel a bit “cheated”. And often, 200 pages of prose equal 10 pages of formulae, so I prefer the latter.

It would be great if the scientific community could find some experimental evidence for or against one or another model in the next couple of years, but that might be the even bigger challenge than the theoretical one, according to this blogpost on Not Even Wrong.

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Security through obscurity

[..] bei Sportgrossveranstaltungen wie der UEFA EURO 2008™ ist es üblich, dass die Eintrittskarten erst wenige Wochen vor Turnierbeginn gedruckt und versandt werden. Dies ist im Sinne der Sicherheit und verkleinert das Risiko, dass die Tickets den Karteninhabern vor den Spielen abhanden kommen.[..]

Isn’t it nice how the “EURO 2008 SA” cares for us? ;)

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Gentoo: “Silent” upgrade from Apache 2.0.x to 2.2.x

Finally, Apache 2.2 is running fine on this server! :) Upgrading, i.e. manually merging all the changed configuration files, recompiling old Apache modules (unfortunately, Gentoo doesn’t care about this automatically) was quite an effort though. The “silent” upgrade was thus not silent at all but rather just silently ended with a no longer working Apache and the according web server downtime. Conclusion: I should really rethink whether I want to stick with Gentoo for this server or rather switch to something more administrator-friendly like Debian, SUSE or Fedora.

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My mobile/cell phone currently out of service

Unfortunately, my mobile phone broke during my (nice :) vacations and therefore, I can’t be reached by mobile phone currently. Please use e-mail (mettlerd “AT” numlock “DOT” ch), skype (‘mettlerd’) or instant messaging (see below) instead:

Skype: mettlerd (most likely reachable, preferred)

ICQ: 196122009

MSN: h2o_ch@msn.com (don’t use this account for sending mail)

AIM/Groupwise: dmettler (business account)

Google: daniel.mettler@gmail.com (don’t use this account for sending mail)

Jabber: mettlerd@swissjabber.ch (don’t use this account for sending mail)
I intend to buy a new mobile phone the upcoming weekend (If the Apple iPhone was available in Switzerland I’d buy one. Unfortunately it isn’t.. too bad for Apple and myself. Any suggestion for another decent mobile phone to buy?)