Got my new 15-inch aluminium Powerbook yesterday – and returned it today. The machine puked its memory. Freezes. Panics. Unusable. This is what Apple calls D.O.A. – dead on arrival. We tried many different memory modules but either they led to immediate freezes or were not recognized at all. Everything else seemed to work fine: AirPort Extreme fetched data with 2,7 MB/sec and I never had any network dropout throughout my flat. The titanium Powerbook lost its signal if you were talking too loud, as it seemed. Stability has increased as well, the screen no longer touches the keyboard when the lid is closed and general IO throughput seemed to be boosted across the line. Hope I can continue my tests soon.

Back from the marathon. I had a very fast race. Here are the results. The final time was 1:40:07 which is around 5 minutes better than expected. My buddy Ulf was actually 1m18s faster than me. Congratulations.

Unfortunately, the GPS phone did not have enough power to send messages for 100 minutes so it stopped sending after an hour. So my marathon page does not reflect the whole track. But I had another GPS receiver with me that hopefully recorded the whole route. I am going to update the marathon page when I am recovered.

Thanks to Tobias, Jörg for setting up the system. Many thanks also to Papillon who was my pacemaker in the recent weeks. Thanks also to the team of berliner-stadtplan.com for allowing me to use their maps.

Just read in the local newspaper that there has never been a runner running the mythical route to announce victory before dying and the actual distance between Marathon and Athens is only 37 km. Furthermore, the modern Marathon distance has been set to 40 km initially by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and has been later extended to 42,195 because Queen Alexandra wanted to be able to follow the the start of the race from Windsor palace at the Olympic Games in 1908.

So it‘s all myth and mock-up, but I don‘t care. 42,195 km is actually a perfect distance for inline skaters (it is a bit too much for running if you ask me). Weather is better than expected. Rain was forecast but there is almost nothing. It is a lot cooler than the last days but I guess this can be considered ideal circumstances.

My marathon page is online now and should be running. From 1400 UTC you should be able to track my current position in Berlin. I am going to carry a second GPS receiver (a Garmin III) to record an ever finer track log for making a “map movie” afterwards. The Benefon GPS phone has been extended antenna which I put on my helmet for better signal reception. Hope all the technology I carry with me won‘t make me slow :-)

Michael Moore, well-known American movie maker and leading critic of the Bush administration responds to various “critics” of his movie “Bowling For Columbine” by providing undisputable facts.

So. I have filled the void on my marathon page with some initial test data. Gives you an impression on what I am about to do. Marathon starts at September 27th, 2003 at 14:00h UTC (16:00h local time Berlin).

Nokia has just announced its new Nokia 7600 UMTS phone and while it is having an already futuristic design, the company provides even more futuristic accessories: digital picture frames and a digital picture necklace and a kaleidoscope. Connects “wirelessly”, but they use infrared, not Bluetooth.

The Berlin-based project agency realities united has been working more than two years on a new digital facade for the new Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. The city of Graz is Europe‘s Cultural Capital 2003 and has therefore decided to spend a few bucks on modern art.

The result is called BIX and although I haven‘t seen it myself a look at the current press photography shows that the group seems to have succeeded in building a really cool and nice looking installation.

I have been following the project for a while and I know they have been going through a lot of technical and political difficulties. In the end, they seem to have found a solution to both problem domains. This saturday, September 27th, the new installation will finally be opened.

On the technical side, the set up is made of “a field of approximately 900 standard, circular fluorescent light tubes which are integrated into the biomorphic facade structure of the new Kunsthaus”. They can dim the lights and of course there is software behind that allows playback of movies.

I am a bit disappointed they didn‘t choose the Blinkenlights software that is available as GPL and provides everything you might need: a file format, a protocol and open interfaces. Instead they followed a MAX/MSP based approach. You can download a simulator for Mac OS X if you like. I hope in the end there will be a gateway to support Blinkenlights movies as well.

Oops. My project got mentioned on the official marathon home page. I guess this means my setup really has to work :-)

Okay, I have started setting up a dedicated page for the marathon realtime tracking. Still testing the set up but so far it is looking fine. The current plan is to display the tracked points and my current speed in a table and to put a dot on a map of Berlin to show where I am. This is done by instructing the phone to send out coordinates every minute, receive them via SMS on the server and pass them to a script that does the nice voodoo.

Unfortunately, the web world uses different formats for GPS coordinates (berliner-stadtplan.com uses degrees and minutes in decimal notation, the Benefon Track Pro phone spits our degree/minutes/seconds only and for realtime mapping you want degrees in decimal notation only) but I found a handy online converter so that helped to clear the confusion.

Japanese Apple User Group Kodawarisan has disassembled my soon-to-be-delivered new computer model. Oh, behave!