Kategorie: brainwaves

My Personal Viennale ’10 Programme

Viennale is the annual Vienna film festival, which usually takes up the second half of October. During these days, I spend considerable time in the five festival theatres. It’s a great opportunity to catch a lot of films that I could otherwise never see at all, let alone on the big screen. There are a few mainstream productions shown, but I’m in a habit of steering clear of most of them.

This is my personal programme for 2010. If you would like to meet up, feel free to contact me on facebook, twitter or via mail at squadrat @ this domain (soher.at).

23.10.2010 21:00 – Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceausescu
24.10.2010 13:00 – The Dubai in Me – Rendering the World
24.10.2010 16:00 – Japan: A Story of Love and Hate
24.10.2010 18:30 – Dansa als esperits
24.10.2010 23:30 – Smash His Camera

26.10.2010 13:30 – American Grindhouse
26.10.2010 18:00 – Die verrückte Welt der Ute Bock
26.10.2010 21:00 – The Forgotten Space
27.10.2010 21:00 – Cuchillo de palo
27.10.2010 23:30 – Bezvucni pad gravitacije

28.10.2010 23:30 – Exit Through the Gift Shop
29.10.2010 23:00 – Marwencol
30.10.2010 01:00 – High School
31.10.2010 13:30 – Los jóvenes muertos

01.11.2010 21:00 – Mein Haus stand in Sulukule
02.11.2010 20:30 – The Pier of Apolonovka

Escape Unicode Characters In Java Strings

I was looking for a code snippet that does that for me but couldn’t find one, especially since native2ascii seems to skip a few characters I need to show. If you’re in a similar situation, feel free to use this:

package at.soher.unicode;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.text.FieldPosition;

public class StringEscape {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        File file = new File("~/file.txt");
        BufferedReader reader = null;
        try {
            reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                new FileInputStream(file), "UTF-16"));
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        try {
            String line = null;
            while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                String[] fields = line.split("[\t]");
                if (fields.length > 1) {
                    StringBuilder newLine = new StringBuilder();
                    newLine.append(fields[0] + " = ");

                    String input = fields[2];
                    StringBuilder dest = new StringBuilder();
                    for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++) {
                        if (input.charAt(i) > 127) {
                            dest.append("\\u" + asHex((long) input.charAt(i)));
                        } else {
                            dest.append(input.charAt(i));
                        }
                    }
                    newLine.append(dest);
                    System.out.println(newLine.toString());
                }
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public static String asHex(long number) {
        String hexString = "0000" + Long.toHexString(number).toUpperCase();
        return hexString.substring(hexString.length() - 4);

    }

}

March and Rally for Human Rights at AIDS 2010

Last week, the XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) took place in Vienna. Part of it was a rally for human rights on the 20th of July, which was headed by singer Annie Lennox, who also performed. I was there and took a few pictures. Please also take some time and read about the current struggle against HIV/AIDS and the 10 reasons why human rights should occupy the center of the global AIDS struggle.
[nggallery id=5]

My Trip to Berlin

I spent the days between Christmas and the New Year in Berlin. The weather was horrible, so I stayed indoors most of the time. That gave me ample opportunity to play with the new camera I got for Christmas in an environment with which I’m as yet totally unfamiliar.

U-Bahnhof Wittenbergplatz
Who would have thought London Transport would have a station in Berlin.
Haus des Lehrers
Haus des Lehrers (Teacher’s House) in Berlin, Alexanderplatz. A good example of GDR post-war architecture, the house was built as a replacement for the earlier Lehrervereinshaus.


Hello, Mr Crab.
Can you see it?
Are you watching me?
Just because I look like a leaf doesn’t mean I have no feelings!

License

This Kind of Slacktivism Is Addictive

Following a half-hearted recommendation by Stephen Fry I started to play http://www.freerice.com today. It’s one of the more compelling ideas I have seen lately, largely because it’s so simple: Play a quiz. For every answer you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated through the UN World Food Program. Easy, if not very much. The whole thing is funded through advertising on the site, which seems to be lacking totally.

The site has been around since 2007, so don’t expect any to turn up soon.

Now, how much are 10 grains of rice? I’ve counted somewhat around 315 grains of rice in one teaspoon. To get to 100g, I needed sixteen of those teaspoons. I did my math and found out that you needed some 25,000 grains of rice to feed a person for a day. So, don’t expect that your making a big difference. Still, a small difference is way better than nothing.

And it’s entertaining. You can choose from a number of subjects; arts, chemistry, geograph, math. And several languages. My favourite is the English Vocabulary quiz. I soon found out how much I have yet to learn. It’s no so much the words of Latin or French origin. We have a lot of those in German, and mostly they mean the same. No, what really gets to me is the high number of rarely used or colloquial English words you just don’t learn in school.

And it’s educational value is raised by the fact that you are presented those questions you answered wrong again a little later. So, even though I’m aware it’s no more that slacktivism, I’m going to continue playing.

Your 2 cents: The price of living in the public eye

Advocates of civil liberties throughout the world lament the loss of privacy. Orwell’s 1984, they say, is just around the corner. And, of course, they are right. “Business Intelligence” is one of the current buzzwords in the corporate world. Associations with 007 come to mind. Do large corporations have the licence to kill? If not physically, at least the average citizen’s reputation and creditability?

Many critics go one step further: With the success of social networks, we ourselves are cooperating in exposing ourselves to the public more and more. The more personal data we present on the web, the more is known about us. And again, they are right. We have already seen a number of ugly incidents. In England, the police recently sent a helicopter to end a barbecue birthday party which was announced via facebook using the words “all night”. This appears to be a code word for a rave in certain circles.

In Austria, people get accused of organised crime because they show sympathies for animal-rights activists.

In both cases, people unwittingy became suspects because officials traced their online activites and linked the data to, otherwise unrelated, prior findings.

So shouldn’t we share opinions with the public? Should we jealously guard every bit of information about us? Even lie whenever possible?

Sure, there are moments when it’s not a good idea to divulge data. Data are a commodity, they have a price. I personally am very reluctant to register for any online service if I cannot be reasonably sure that the benefit I get from the service is worth the data I share with the provider. For the same reason, I haven’t got a single customer account card from any store. I’m just not willing to sell the information about my buying habits for the mere pennies that are usually offered. And, of course, people are right to be careful where there is a risk of phishing and similar activities.

And, yes, I have an email address that I reserve exclusively for friends and family, which has never been published on the web and which is therefore still spam free.

And yet, I’m not convinced this can be a winning strategy in all situations.

Firstly, there’s no way anyone can lead a modern life and stay completely below the radar. Whenever we do anything on the web, we leave a trail that can be traced by someone. Given that people tend to make up all kinds of ideas when they feel the need to fill in the blanks, this will almost inevitably lead to even more suspicion and misled accusations. If said people happen to be government officials, we have the recipe for Orwellian scenarios like the two mentioned above. Isn’t it better to communicate actively and openly than to constantly keep each other under surveillance?

Secondly, a democratic society needs the participation of the many, not merely to avoid the dominance of a few, but also because diversity among the participants ensures the quality of the discourse. (Read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki for a perspicuous argument.) It’s not important that you have to say a lot, or whether your ideas are the best, or how brilliantly you argue. What counts is being part of the game,  throwing in your two cents. There’s simply no excuse for the silent majority to be silent anymore.

Thirdly, if there is inevitably a public image of you available, why not take active responsibility for that image? Since you are living in the public eye anyway, you need a spokesperson.

Of course, playing that role takes some skill. That’s why companies and celebrities usually have a specialist for that job. Chances are high that you and I cannot afford to hire someone. That makes ourselves the most likely candidates for the job, a job which starts today. As always, we can only acquire the necessary skills by doing it. From where I stand, getting in touch with the people out there, writing down our thoughts on things looks like a good first step. So that’s what I am doing.