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Mugison og Fjallabræður - Ljósvíkingur

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:00:05 +0100

Mugison og Fjallabræður - Ljósvíkingur

Porcupine Tree - Don’t Hate Me

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 02:00:06 +0100

Porcupine Tree - Don’t Hate Me

Jónsi - Sinking Friendships

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:01:06 +0100

Jónsi - Sinking Friendships

Archive - Again

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:15:06 +0100

Archive - Again

Iron & Wine - Such Great Heights

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:14:05 +0100

Iron & Wine - Such Great Heights

Rufus Wainwright & Teddy Thompson - The Maker Makes

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:55:06 +0100

Rufus Wainwright & Teddy Thompson - The Maker Makes

Kings of Convenience - Love is No Big Truth

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:07:05 +0100

Kings of Convenience - Love is No Big Truth

The Knife - Pass This On

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:05:05 +0100

The Knife - Pass This On

Aimee Mann - Wise Up

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:00:06 +0100

Aimee Mann - Wise Up

The Hall Clock At first, I wanted to write about this clock,...

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:46:25 +0200

The Hall Clock

At first, I wanted to write about this clock, which has been in my parents home as long as I can remember, but then I heard an exerpt from “The Fish Can Sing” by Halldór Laxness and now I’ll strongly recommend to read that instead. As for this clock, somebody bought it at the J. Brandmann clock store in Berlin-Mitte before the progroms took place. It obviously survived the World War II undamaged in a flat of an elderly woman, who died in the 1970s and my mum bought it then from her daughter. For me it always seemed to be a gate into another world: A wonderful, magical one at day and a scary one at night, when I sneaked into the kitchen and it suddenly started to ring. In the last few years it stood still because its ringing-mechanism was broken. When my mum moved into a smaller flat this year, she gave it to me and I fixed it. So now, it’s standing there, telling me what the time is and calms me with it’s ticking.

Photo

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:08:04 +0200

To the death of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:18:00 +0200

Did you ever wonder if there’s a world that is part of your world, of what you do, what you use, but you don’t know about?

Clearly, before the nineteenth century things were pretty easy: The tools people used came from other people living in their town or village, houses were built with the help of relatives and if somebody bought something like food or textiles, they mostly bought it from the guy who produced it or ran a shop were things were sold a relative produced. Since then many things have changed, factories and globalisation made many creators of things to parts of impersonal companies.

And in the last century, with the rise of the computer something came into peoples lives, that is not really a thing, one cannot touch it, but it is also a tool, something people use: software. You buy or download it for free, if it’s open source, and take it for granted. Sometimes, if it functions bad, people complain, mostly over or to the company or the group, which developed this software. But many people, as myself, never really say “That’s a f*cking good program, I’m really thankful to the guy (or girl) who wrote it!”.

Well, this is the layer I’m working at, mostly I write software for a product my company sells and our customers never have really contact with me or my creations because all they see is the user-interface and that’s the field of another guy in our company. If something doesn’t work, they complain to our service hotline and if everything is okay, they don’t say anything at all, mostly.

But I’m not at the lowest level: to write software, I also need tools and I do not mean just the editor I use to write my programs. There are several other things I use, but just take for granted, for instance the language I write my programs in. To help those, who do not know, what I’m talking about, understand: Developers usually don’t write software a language a computer understands directly. Software is written in a human-readable language and then translated into machine-readable language by a software that is called compiler. One of the most used languages is called C, it is a comparably old language, that has advantages and disadvantages, but let’s get back on track here.

The language C was invented by Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, who died on 8th of October this year. Besides inventing C, he helped creating Unix, which is the blueprint for most modern operating systems used today (not Windows, but Linux or MacOS X are designed after the concepts used in Unix). Not many people know this guy, but everyone in the western hemisphere has used something that his inventions helped creating. And don’t just think about smartphones and computers, Linux, written in C, is a clone of Unix and runs on washing machines, behind displays at airports or train stations or in modern television sets. Many software is written in C, independent of the operating system it runs on. The webserver, that has sent this website to you, is most likely written in C, too.

Well, as this great and quiet guy died after being seriously ill for a long time, I would like to thank him for the way his ideas shaped the world today. And I hope this little rant of mine inspired some people to try to look under the surface of software, as it is not just a thing, most likely it’s the creation of someone, who put his time, his ambition and hopefully his love into it, hoping this small piece could improve the world a bit.

Thank you, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie.

"Our World is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic […]. Western man […] sees..."

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 23:21:56 +0200

“

Our World is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic […].

Western man […] sees himself forced to take extraordinary measures of defense, at the same time as he prides himself on his virtue and good intentions.

”

- Carl Gustav Jung - Man and his Symbols

Ethel Reschke - Der Insulaner (Komponist: Günter Neumann)

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:01:05 +0200

Ethel Reschke - Der Insulaner

(Komponist: Günter Neumann)

Edith Schollwer - Das Insulanerlied

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:24:43 +0200

Edith Schollwer - Das Insulanerlied

This is how my volcano started

Mon, 23 May 2011 23:22:02 +0200

icelandwantstobeyourfriend:

Mr. Ingólfur Bruun made this ”gif” for you. (But I made the eruption.)

tunglið séð frá Berlín

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:02:03 +0100

tunglið séð frá Berlín

Þorrablót - þýsk útgáfa kemur um helgina…

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 04:00:07 +0100

Þorrablót - þýsk útgáfa kemur um helgina…

Mugison - The Great Unrest

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:15:18 +0100

Mugison - The Great Unrest

"Yfir kaldan eyðisand einn um nótt ég sveima. Nú er horfið Norðurland, nú á ég hvergi heima."

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:20:48 +0100

“Yfir kaldan eyðisand
einn um nótt ég sveima.
Nú er horfið Norðurland,
nú á ég hvergi heima.”

- Kristján Jónsson