Samstag, 28. April 2007

High bitrates are bad

Last night I wanted to record Lohn der Angst (great movie btw) with my DVB-S card. This works normally great with Kaffeine but as I wanted to cut the movie and burn it onto a DVD I noticed that the disk was full. The length of the MPEG-2 transport stream is 8 GB and the end is missing :-( Okay, the movie has a runtime of 145 minutes but come on it's black and white and from 1953 so there is absolutely no reason to use a average bitrate of more than 7000 kbps...

Hope it will be broadcasted again soon.

Freitag, 27. April 2007

MySQL for AS/400

I just found at golem.de (German it news site) that MySQL will be available for AS/400 with DB2/400 as a backend (yes, I still call it AS/400 whatever IBM marketing will come up with: iSeries, i5, System i or what it is called now).
My first thought was that this got to be a late april's fools day joke - why would anyone want to use MySQL on a AS/400 as DB2/400 is an integral part of the operating system.
Ok, after looking at the announcements from IBM and MySQL it seems this was mostly done to make thousands of open source MySQL and PHP applications run on AS/400. Oh well ... database abstraction anyone?

Sonntag, 8. April 2007

Second Post

I recently discovered that Jeremias is blogging since severals month and even James Clark ... no really I started reading feeds with Google Reader some weeks ago and it struck me to give it a try to write a blog myself. Lets see where it will go.
Actually I already started blogging in 2004 after the birth of our first daughter Anika (Blog available under http://localhost/wordpress :-) but I don't think that there are lots of people interested in stuff like when Anika got her first tooth.
So without much thinking I started with Blogger (and after one post it seems it's good enough) as I already have a Google account. I'll think later about a good title, tags, licence and a stable URL (should be done rather sooner than later..). I'm not even sure about the language (writing german is quite a bit easier/faster for me).

Donnerstag, 5. April 2007

Schifoan

We spend the last week with friends in Saalbach-Hinterglemm/Austria. After 15 years without skiing I gave it a try it worked a lot better than expected - I blame it on the "new" carving skis. Our three year old daughter took a skiing course - which was actually more like a Ski-Kindergarten including singing, dancing and driving around with a children train - and performed a lot better than her father ;-) All in all a really nice holiday, the weather couldn't have been better with sunshine all the time and a beautiful landscape with great ski trails.