The slides for the majority of the talks of the 21C3 are now available through the “fahrplan”. Their individual download link is located on the detail page for the single lectures.

If you are too lazy (like me) to click though all single detail pages to obtain the slides, you could try this link, but be forewarned: the URL might not be final and might be subject to potential future changes.

[21C3 Weblog]

Somebody is selling an almost complete set off the Sub Pop Singles Club on Ebay (only one record by Luna is missing). The Ebay page for this auction is worth a visit, even if you are not tempted to ruin yourself for 125 seven inches (the price is at $4.500 right now): The seller included a scan of every cover sleeve and every record of the set.

I have not decided jet what to do: Maybe I will sell my belongings so I can afford this treasure or I will listen to Posion Idea’s "record collectors are pretentious assholes" over and over.

Update: The auction has ended. The price stayed at $4.500, which is a lot, but is probably reasonable, if you take the time and money in consideration that must have been necessary to (nearly) complete this collection.

I hope the seller finds the time and webspace to transform his auction-ebay-page into a permanent documentation of the Single Club’s items.

[BoingBoing]

I just discovered an essential article about possible use cases of see (the command line tool of my favorite editor). It never ceases to amaze me, how powerful the combination of Os X’s GUI and its Unix underpinnings is, when it is done right.

Dave Slusher made me laugh today:

“A weblogger that dismisses podcasting as inflicting tripe on the world is like someone dressed as Mr. Spock giving Dr. Who fans shit for being dorks.”

The days when I was a devoted gamer are long gone but I still enjoy following the progress of the gaming universe occasionally. On my venture into podcasting I stumbled over the G.A.M.E. Radio show, which is syndicated via HackerMedia.net. This show rocks.

What makes it so enjoyable is the enthusiasm of the two presenters, two gamers at heart. They really love gaming. They seem to do it in every free minute. They own every single gaming platform. But they never fall in the trap of unreflected fanboyism. They probably talk more about their dislikes on a particular topic than about the aspects they like. Recommended.

Garrett Birkel published an annotated version of Neal Stepheson’s “In the beginning was the commandline”.

Although I don’t agree with all of his comments (as I didn’t agree completely with Stepheson’s original essay), Garrett makes a couple of interesting observations. My favorite one is the claim that the open source software model could only gain momentum because of the anonymity of the internet:

[…] No Internet, no Linux. No Open Source Software in general.

Why? Because the keystone of these creations is their appeal to previously anonymous contributors, and without the Internet, they could not be anonymous. They'd be part of a users' group, a lab, a company, a readership -- even if they were all just customers at the same coffee shop, there would be no reason for them not to form a company and take legal ownership of their work, and seek compensation for distributing it.

Maybe this idea is pretty obvious and well known. It is also not bulletproof and quite attackable. But it is a refreshing realistic alternative to the common stories about the birth and uprising of open source software.

I attended a talk on the L4 Microkernel at 21C3. Close to the end of the talk was a inaudible conflict of opinions between the lecturer and a member of the audience. I couldn’t figure out, what the reason for the differences between the two was. The member of the audience left the room with the words “what a waste of time”.

If there was another feedback mechanism instead of getting the microphone and asking questions, it would have been possible to get a more in depth insight. Weblogs and other webbased forms of publication have a significant advantage due to their feedback possibilities e.g. via trackback and comments. But I also value the conference model because of its compact presentation form and the potential in-person contact to the lecturer.

Sometimes I wonder if there could be a way of combining the advantages of the two distinct models?

• Live IRC chat? Nah.
• A weblog per talk? To much overhead.
• A conference weblog with one entry per talk? Maybe. The 21C3 weblog was already a step in that direction.

Joel Spolsky published an insightful essay for aspiring computer science students. If you are starting college soon or are in the middle of your education, this is a must read. I wish somebody gave me the same advice when I was attending UCSC.

Proceedings for the Chaos Communication Congress are available for the first time. This is very good news. It was rather difficult to find the presentation slides for talks in the last years. Usually the speaker would announce to publish his slides online but rarely announced the URL. And the central documentation page for presentation slides on the congress’ webpage stayed pretty empty.

The proceedings contain full papers for approximately a third of all talks including highlight like Peter Glaser’s keynote, Daniel Bartlett’s “Automated hacking via Google” or Angelo Laub’s “Practical Mac Os X Insecuritiy”.

The proceedings were available in printing on the congress and got released online afterwards. Get them now as pdf.

I am happy.

Norbert published his great pictures from the 21C3. Check out especially the last image of the set – a paparazzi shot of me harassing Emmanuel Goldstein.