langalex.org

this article has some interesting ideas on learning, focussing on problem based learning (active) vs. teaching (passive)

(at kuala lumpur airport)

the flight was much more pleasant than my flight to sydney last year. the main reason for that is probably the lc display at every seat, showing ~10 movie channels, 10 music stations + some “interactive content” (tetris + co.). i spent the first hours watching ‘the edukators’ (die fetten jahre sind vorueber) - a very nicely shot german movie about 3 twens more or less accidentally kidnapping a millionaire…. (it’s not a comedy, the air line magazine says it’s a drama…well, not really, but it’s great anyway).

boarding time….

later…. at vienna air port. i was too lazy to get my laptop out during the flight, so i spent most of the 12h flight sleeping, watching movies and eating. my next flight to berlin is delayed by one hour.
a couple of interesting details from the last flights:

my air line (austria air) belongs to a larger air line called lauda air, which is apparently owned by niki lauda. as a result the entertainment systems offered such things as ‘nikis kids world’ and an separate section with information about laudas life - i could resist the temptation.

before landing in kuala lumpur: “ladies and gentlement, please be advised that importing illegal drugs into malaysia is a serious offense and will be charged with death penalty” - please throw your drugs out of the window now, or what did that austrian-english voice want to tell us here?

the seats all had adjustable head rests. you could even bend them so you had some padding at the side which made it much more comfortable (or even possible) to sleep - too bad i was almost the only one who found out - man these people were hanging in their seats

the bastards from the air line had put the manual for the business class seats into the air line magazine available at every seat, so we 2nd class passengers could read about how good the rich guys in the front had it; and that chief flight attendant also introduced the business class only chef to everyone. grrrr. food was not so bad anyway, and there was plenty of it.

switch to vienna air port:

culture shock europe

i know, i am supposed to experience what people call a culture shock when i go to a foreign country, but i think it’s at least as interesting when you come back and re-experience all the things you have forgotten about.

- the first negative thing i notice: there are smoking areas at the air port. of course the smoke does not stay there. you’d never have that in australia. the government there is actually preparing a law that bans smoking from all public places, including pubs.

- it’s freezing cold here, a ‘freaking fridge’ as my flat mate tanny put it when i explained the concept of a european winter to her. actually even worse than a 8 degrees warm fridge - it’s 2 degrees C. i wonder why i’m the only one in a t-shirt here. but when i came to australia i was the only one having a sweater/jacket so i guess that’s okay

- the vienna air port looks much less friendly than sydney. everything looks so cold (and the metal seats are). everyone is wearing black and grey clothes here - except me in red. i guess i’ll witch to my black fleece sweater in a minute, surrendering to the temperatures. at least my laptop gives me a bit of warmth - thank you for inefficient processors that produce some 50W of heat.

- every second poster on the wall is in english, or worse half english half german. but it’s not english, it’s german translated into something they call english here…. (yeah, i know i probably could not do it any better)

- the amount of old people has dramatically increased, in fact i see hardly anyone under 30. there are plenty of 60+-year-olds

- first question of the austrian customs officer: “irgendwas eingedascht?” - i must have looked really puzzled, i couldn’t remember having stolen anything. “anyssing in yoor pocketss?” - ah. no, nothing.

- boarding time. i wonder if i can use the informal ‘du’ when talking to the flight attendant. she doesn’t look like she’s much older than me. i try a charming ‘hi’ and get a ‘grueasss gottt’ and ‘bittaschoeeen’ in response. thanks.

- next to me is sitting a probably half senile ~75 YO blabbering bullshit to his wife next to him, in this typical *german* way some of these old guys that survived WW2 talk. man how much i’ve missed that….

i spent my last night in sydney in a club called star bar, where i learned some new “aussi clubbing laws”, people are not allowed to:

• wear a hat
• take off their shoes (even when sitting)
• dance and have a drink at the same time
• fight (okay, i have to admit that makes sense)
• dance while standing on a sofa

…. in all these cases some security guard immediately intervened…. i mean, are aussis too dumb to handle a drink while in a crowd? do they have to be protected from spilling it over their clothes or something? why do european governments trust their citizens but australia can’t??

oh, at 3 a.m. the music suddenly stopped playing, and we were asked by security to leave immediately. when we were standing on the street for a couple of minutes in front of the club we were then asked by police to leave the place … immediately. ohmygod.

there’s a new album in the sydney gallery. mostly night shots of sydney

wired has posted an article about the so called gigapxl project. it’s run by a guy who has constructed a (film) camera from old spy plane equipment that can take pictures with a resolution of up to 4 gigapixels. (remember, that’s 1000x your 4 megapixel digicam). he’s travelling through the states taking pictures of whatever he can find, e.g. the golden gate bridge. while the full picture shows the entire bridge, zooming in allows you to see the walk wires (maybe 5cm thick) used by the bridge crews to access the main cables. (2000x zoom). his next plan is to take pictures of endangered archaeological sites… cool.

i wrote my first unit test that uses easymock today. easymock is a little tool that lets you easily create mock objects for your unit tests. mock objects are a kind of dummy implementation of the classes required by the class you are testing.
example: you have a class … ActionExecuter. that class takes objects that implement an Action interface and executes their execute() method.


public interface Action {
public void execute();
}
public class ActionExecuter {
public coid executeAction(Action action) {
action.execute();
}
}


you now want to test if this class really executes the execute method, so with easymock you write the following test:

public void ActionExecuterTest {
public void testExecuteAction() {
MockControl control = MockControl.createControl(Action.class);
Action action = (Action) control.getMock();
// record expected behavior
action.execute();
// indicate end of record phase
control.replay();
// run test
new ActionExecuter.executeAction(action);
// run easymock verification
control.verify();
}
}

so, you create that mock control and the mock object, which implements your Action interface. then you tell the mock object what method calls it should expect, and then you execute the class you want to test. the verify method verifies if the expectations were met.
of course you can do a lot more than this, but i hope this gives a rough idea. without easymock you’d have to implement you own Action implementation and write code to verify that the correct methods have been executed, and the correct paramaters have been passed. who’d wanna do that?
there is another project JMock, they specify the expected behaviour differently using string descriptions, check it out. don’t know what works better yet.

when you go to a concert in germany, say to a “rock concert”… you know, that music that can get a little louder, and people get excited when they hear this loud music. i mean, really excited, at a concert. in germany, when you go to such a concert, then, at some point in the middle of that concert, a certain part of the crowd moves to the area in front of the stage (if they’re not already there). they then start bumping into each other, yes, intentionally throwing their bodies against each other. and it’s great fun for them (i am one of these, sometimes). everyone who doesn’t want to get bumped in just stays out of the way - it’s totally fine. in germany, we call that ‘pogen’.

now imagine you are in sydney, you go to a concert (or, say to a club with a live band, kind of a concert, isn’t it?). at least in terms of ‘pogen’ - you might think. in australia, when you listen to loud music, and you get excited, and then you bump into your neighbour …. well, a second later someone else bumps into you. suddenly, the music stops playing, you hear someone shouting “prick head” from the stage.
ok, so that other guy was the 120kg security guard trying to bring you down, and the guys swearing at you, that’s the band. weird world.

javalobby has put a bunch of presentations from the 2004 javapolis conference on their site. most promising (for me): spring in action, hibernate in action, eclipse in action, ejb3, j2ee without ejb … + many more.

i usually leave iTunes (mostly in radio mode, ’secret agent’ is an excellent station playing jazzy electronic stuff) running when i go to bed so i can listen to some music … the problem with that is that i want iTunes to stop playing music after i have fallen asleep. unfortunately there’s no sleep sensor on my iBook (yet), so i had to choose a time based solution: stop playing music after, say 30 minutes.
iTunes doesn’t have any sleep timer, but thank the apple god that we have a unix underneath, go to a shell:
ps ax|grep iTunes
gives me the process id (PID) for iTunes, and
sleep {milliseconds} && kill {iTunes PID}
stops the noise….