Oberhausen Miniaturwelt - Ruhrgebiet as a miniature

This exhibition shows off the "Ruhrgebiet" as  a miniature - in old traditional model railway scale. 

Clearly works best if you are either a model railway enthusiast or interested in the "Ruhrgebiet itself". Basically the current exhibition provides you a view on the post 2nd world war "Ruhrgebiet" - as coal mining and iron ore processing ruled the industry in the area. 

Therefore it provides you with a nice time-travel back to the good old times which have coined the "Ruhrgebiet" - this provided you with a good foundation to understand where the Ruhrgebiet comes from, what are the actual difficulties it is facing to process the structural changes which is required due to the death of coal mining in this area and finally to value the achievements which have been made on this long way already.

As you can see the exhibition really focus on details and it is good fun to try to spot all the details which are present - including the night / day changes.

Future extension will include of up-to-date model of some parts of the exhibition. This will really show the structure change. Check it out - it is great fun. Perfect for a rainy day. It's located in the Centro area - so you can combining it with some shopping, cinema or pub visits if you like. More information is available on their website.

Ubuntu Update mess up: udevadm trigger is not permitted while udev is unconfigured

My cooperate environment forces me to only run Ubuntu in a virtual machine. So basically all the "real" work is done in VM. So my problem is most likely not related to that fact directly, but I won't blame Ubuntu for this problem. The problem occurred with the first reboot after a system updates which involved a new kernel version. During booting up the system issues "udevadm trigger is not permitted while udev is unconfigured" message and brought me to a limited shell.
Most likely this has been caused by not finishing the kernel installation completely. Likely to happen if you run from meeting to meeting and you host system tends to crash from time to time (See update on this one below).
Anyway - like always, I asked Google and here we go. Steps to recover are:

1. Grab some boot-able Linux iso and boot a Live System
2. Mount relevant hard disk  partition read-writable
3. Bind parts of the life file system to the new mounted hard disk partition
4. Chang the file system root.
5. Fix udev configuration for the new installed kernel.

Sounds easy and actually has been - once you figured out the necessary steps.


For Step 1 I decided to download a preview version of Ubuntu 10.10 - which looks great btw. Just boot it with the "try it" option and create a terminal window.


Step 2 is easy as well. Only two things to remember. You need to know which device (e.g. something like /dev/sda holds the relevant system folders and you need to make sure that you really mount the file system read-writeable - default is read-only. So issue something along the lines of "sudo mount -rw -v /dev/ /mnt" in the terminal.


Step 3 requires to bind  /dev, /proc and /sys from the life system into the just mounted hard disk partition. This can be done by:


sudo mount --bind /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /mnt/sys

Step 4 is an easy piece of cake. Just issue "sudo chroot /mnt" and its done.

Finally for step 5 you need to navigate to the folder which holds your installed kernels (usually /boot), figure out which kernel is the current one and issue

sudo update-initramfs -u -k   
command.

That did the trick for me. After rebooting the machine everything was fine again. I hope I remember my blog post next time this happen to me ;-). Input for the resolution is taken from here and here.

Update: And yes indeed - the update not properly finished. Next time I tried to start the packet manager, it forces me to run sudo dpkg --configure -a command and among others 

Setting up python-aptdaemon (0.11+bzr345-0ubuntu4.1) ...
Setting up sudo (1.7.2p1-1ubuntu5.2) ...
Setting up ubufox (0.9~rc2-0ubuntu2.1) ...
Processing triggers for menu ...
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic


the update-initramfs has been triggered. Next time I will focus a little more on the running update to have it finishing properly :-)

Installation of Diaspora - Open Source Social Network Implementation

There is a long list of pro and cons re social networks. Basically the whole thing is about sharing private information with other users and the owner of the social network to gain some insights and social relation to user users. Most of us don't go public with each single detail of their personal life and therefore want to control what they share with whom. This part - just follow the Facebook Privacy Discussions - is already a challenge in its own. Not all existing Social Networks are doing that fine in supporting the user to easy and reliable control what they share with other users. No matter how good the Privacy control is implemented in any Social Network, the owner or operator has access to all the data we share - unless we come up with some really fancy and impracticable security implementations. That's a point were the user's trust in the operator plays an important role.

The diaspora project tackles both dimensions of the problem by trying to provide a  superior Privacy Concept for the user to use aspect and being open and distributed to build the trust into the solution and "provider".

So let's give it a go and have a hands-on experience on this project.

The installation on a Ubuntu 10.04 system is pretty much straight forward. After cloning the git repository you find the installation script ubuntu-setup.bash which you can run on your machine. It makes sure that all dependencies like required build tools, gems, db, ... are properly installed on the system. I did run into some slight issues:

• The sudo permission detection within the script did not work for me. So I just commented out this line form the script..
• At the end of the script it tries to start  the server which failed with the following message: "http://github.com/BadMinus/devise.git (at master) is not checked out. Please run `bundle install` ". That one can be fixed by issuing a "sudo bundle install devise.git" like e.g. explained in http://www.jimmyhasablog.com/2010/09/17/geekspora-diaspora-install/ . Once this is done the server can be started with "bundle exec thin start" and is listening on port 3000. 

 I'm always surprised which kind of dependencies some of the Ruby based projects come - Would be fun to roll it out in our Cooperate production environment :-)

I will keep playing with it for a while and come back to you guys with my view on the current status of the project ...

Picasa Face Recognition

Already some time ago Google released version 3.5 and 3.6 of their picture management software Picasa which provides a local face recognition feature which is detecting faces in pictures and does some grouping of similar faces which than can be connected to persons. This does not require to upload your images to any of their servers. As I'm much in favor on deciding where pictures which contain myself and my family are going and I assume that this holds true for most of my friends this seems to be a good solution to get finally some (more) structure in my photo collection. Unfortunately the official Linux version is still 3.0 and lacking this feature.

Long time I did not bother to give any later version a try on Linux but this weekend while I wanted to sort some holiday pictures -  I started Picasa while my wifi connection was down. Looking into the empty local folder which usually is mounted  with the pictures from the NAS Picasa decided to drop all it's knowledge about the pictures. One connection was up again it started scanning all over the pictures again - ARGHHH. That seemed to be a good point in time to change something in the setup.

Up to know I'm still not aware of a good alternative to Picasa which overcomes the major issue with Picasa - namely  not supporting multiuser/single repository setup and being a windows application. Suggestions are welcome. So I just gave the current Windows version - which is 3.6 - a try. As the official Linux version comes with an embedded wine, it should be possible to get the current windows version running under wine as well. And Bingo - both under Ubuntu 9,10 and 10.04 the standard wine package is good to run Picasa without any hassle. That was easy although some of the nice feature - namely geo-tagging is not working. I decided it to run Picasa now on the NAS itself (Atom 330 based) to circumvent the network /multi-user issues by just having a shared account on the machine. Performance of Picasa - which still tends to sleep now and then for a while - is comparable to the earlier setup. It seems that network latency and smaller computation power balance themselves.

It took roughly 2 days to scan our complete picture collection. Once in a while we dropped into the process and started to create persons and match face groups to persons. Went quite well. I must say that our picture collection for sure contains quite some challenges - like uncounted picture of the 4 first years of my Son's life. Surely a challenge. We ended up with having a lot of distinct face groups for the same persons, but this is manageable. The amount of false positives is quite low. In the end we still have more than 5000 faces which are not matched yet. Quite some work but most of them are faces of unknown people somewhere in the crowd. Really working nice. We also got some quite funny detections like recognizing the face of a Playmobil puppet as a face or detecting my son's face on a picture which only contains the Christmas tree in the living room - on the first glance but there is also a small picture of my son in the living room.

Once we have finished the job, I really want to work on extracting the information from the Picasa database/files and get them into the pictures itself to prevent vendor lock-in. There seems to be a tool for this purpose - AvPicFaceXmpTagger. Will give it a try once the face recognition process is finished.

There is no free lunch. Picture data becoming more and more structured is great if you want  to manage your stuff but you might still not want to provide all this structure once you upload the picture e.g. to a website. So there is still a task for removing the structured information again form the pictures.

Dance on the Vulcano - Being off-line

Finally it was there - holidays. Being ready for some relaxing holidays for quite a while, we decided to book a package tour. Nothing to organize from our side - that was the idea. As destination we selected Lanzarote - one of the beautiful Canaries islands. We had a great time there - fantastic weather, great places to visit and a good hotel - and I took quite some notes and picture which I intend to share at a later point of time.

Have you spotted the issue on the picture above?! Me neither. I decided to be really off-line during the holidays. No Internet, no TV, no news papers and rarely radio news. Worked out quite well. In the beginning I felt some time a need to check my emails and social networking pages but this was going away fast and in the end I felt superior than the guys which spent a significant time in front of their facebook pages in the Internet kiosk of the hotel. Being off-line is really relaxing - a luxury these days!

On the other hand being off-line has also some disadvantage in out on-line world. We checked our flight back in the file folder of our travel agency at the hotel the night before we wanted to fly back. Everything fine. The other day as we checked out from the hotel - there was a surprise waiting for us. We should be really happy that we can leave suggested the woman at the reception. "No - we are not " I said as I really could have stayed a little bit longer on this beautiful island. Than we figured out what the whole on-line world did know already for 24 hours at least. All airports are closed, no flights, big chaos in Europe as Eyjafjallajökull - a vulcano in Iceland erupted. 


Nice surprise  - you could imagine worse situations than being forced to stay longer on holiday. True and we also had booked package tour - no worries the travel agency will manage it. So no worries? A few phone calls later - with the travel agency in Germany, the local travel guide and the airline - the situation changed a bit. Travel agency annulled he contract because of act of nature beyond control. They would still support us but there would be nothing they could do for us. As our flights are with Ryanair, this would be special anyway - just sit and wait. 

Nice advice - we would be still there if we would have followed this. In the end we prolonged our hotel, kept luggage there and drove to the airport to speak face two face to some people from the airline and this was the key to get home. In the queue in front of the desk we got first information. Airline offers to rebook the flights to later flights but direct flight back home would be only available in 10 days time. That will be a quite expensive holidays and will create some trouble at work I thought. In the end we got some flights via Madrid in 6 days time. After prolonging the hotel for the whole time, extending the rent of the car and passing the message to home and company we tried to enjoy the time as holidays as good as possible - but now on-line.


My take away from this. Organizing holidays on my own is definitely a proven alternative. Booking a packaged tour I would next time spent more effort to select a different agency. The one we selected - urlaubstours.de - was a completed fail in this situation. Looks like that low cost airlines does not fit well into the concept of packaged tours but they are still an alternative for self-organized travels. Let's see if and what cost we could claim back from airline or travel agency.

PCTV Diversity Stick Solo running on linux

As I planned to extend our HTPC with DVB-T capabilities, I bought a PCTV Diversity Stick Solo. Couldn't find any evidence that this one is running on Linux but as it was really cheap, I thought it would be worth a try. It is a usb-stick which comes with two receivers. The stick itself is rather big and together with the two delivered antennas it is nothing I really would like to use in mobile use cases but our HTPC is not moving at all ;-).

Being a absolute newbie to the topic DVB-T on Linux, I was really surprised how it went on our Ubuntu 9.10 system. After connecting the stick to the HTPC dmesg | grep dvb shows right away that the stick has been recognized and everything seems to be green. After installing kaffeine media player - and it's dependencies as I didn't had much kde stuff on it before - and running a service scan it was there: our first DVB-T channel is presented on the screen. Easy piece of cake.
Kaffeine showed two DVB-T devices, so I think both receivers can be used under Linux, but i don't think that diversity modus is supported (using both receivers to result in one single improved input signal).

Next step is to get yaVDR running as I want the topic TV to be handled from within the XBMC software we are using anyway. Real benchmark would be time-shift recording of "Tatort" on Sunday - I can't think of the last time we managed to watch this ...

Personenschaden - Great problem management by DB/PEG

Honestly I'm still overwhelmed of what happened yesterday. Running a little bit late after having a beer after work with some colleagues, the train driver announcement: "Personenschaden (damage to persons) - the train will not proceed after the next station" seems to indicate another upcoming public transport disaster. From experience the track is usually closed for hours, no alternative is offered during the first 2 hours. Maybe if it takes even longer they get some buses to move the people.
Yesterday it went perfectly different. Right after I checked alternative routes on the VRR website and informed home government they I'll be _really_ late, they announced taxi transport between the directly affected stations. So, get a group of four passengers and jump into the next taxi - paid by the DB.
Great - got only 20 minutes delay. Happy to be surprised by problem management of DB more often in this positive manner in general - obviously I would be even more happy if we could arrive to a point where less people choose to use "Personenschaden" as final exit strategy.