http://crschmidt.net/blog Ramblings of a GIS Hacker Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:15:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some things I learned about Berlin this trip: Berlin isn't really home to as large of a 'classical German' attitude as I would have assumed. Instead, it is (as far as I understand it) pretty much hippyville for Germany. Things like the fact that everyone ignores no-smoking laws -- Berlin much ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/536/berlin/ БогородицаThis week, Jess pointed out to me "An Invisible Woman Taught Me German", a story in Slate about German Language learning via the Deutsche Welle organization. My favorite quote: "It’s basically a Teutonic Scooby-Doo, with overt sexual tension among the young mystery-solvers. They investigate weird occurrences like crop circles, Beethoven’s ghost, ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/532/german-learning/ Overall, I'm loving the Air. The laptop is small -- so small it took me a couple days to adjust. But overall, it has everything I want or need, and I couldn't ask for anything else. Most importantly, it has working wireless in my office -- when the wireless in the ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/530/macbook-air-loving-it/ Yesterday, I finished my first deployment of a real service into AWS. Along the way, I learned some things: - Overall, the growth of the Amazon service offering is rapid and huge. I've said for a long time that much of the net today runs on software that was pioneered ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/528/mission-aws-complete/ Well, not quite yet, but next week. After using Linux for a month, and being relatively okay with it in general, I have, in the end, decided to go back to Mac -- not for any reason related to what I do at home, but simply because using wireless internet in ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/526/back-in-mac/ * Water Pump hacking: A water pump in Illinois was alleged to have been hacked and broken by Russian hackers over the past couple weeks by various news sources, including the BBC. The real story? The tech consultant who helps to maintain the pump was, at the time the ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/524/news-of-the-week/ I use Flickr as my primary image hosting. I like the Flickr UI, I like their tagging, I like pretty much everything about it. However, after years of using Flickr, I got sort of tired of always seeing "Photos of You (2)" on Facebook: The fact that there was some ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/521/software-fail-photo-tagging/ Today, at cjb's for Caturday Hacking: Uploading photos from Grendel's last week, and pushing my flickr2facebook scripts for copying photosets from Flickr to Facebook to github so that people could theoretically look at it and possibly re-use it. Though I'm not really convinced that's very likely, given that apparently I'm ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/519/caturday-hacking/ So, today I was just pondering the fact that I've been out of high school for almost 10 years now, and wondering if the school I went to does a 10-year reunion. From a brief search, I stumbled into the Wikipedia page about my high school. A couple things came to ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/517/learning-things-via-technology-is-weird/ So, my N9 wireless hotspot didn't work for a long time; it just returned a 'not allowed' error. Apparently, this 'feature' is because the N9 ships to... well, wherever this one happened to come from... with a disabled adhoc mode. The fix, provided by this thread, is trivial: Enable ... http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/515/why-is-wireless-so-hard/