A spot of Snow

Posted on 2 February, 2009 by Matthias Scheler

Today for the first time since Silke and I moved to the south east of England we had snow worth mentioning. It started to snow yesterday evening and didn’t stop before noon. As such heavy snowfall is unusual for this part of the country it caused a massive chaos. The treacherous conditions on the roads resulted in several accidents, trains had to be cancelled and both the buses and the tube in London weren’t operating. The airports in the area had to either cancel a lot of flights or even close down.

By contrast Silke and I had a really nice day. As we are both fortunate enough to be able to work from home we could avoid the traffic chaos. Silke took a few photos in the morning and we had a snowball fight afterwards. 🙂

Snowy Garden

During our lunch break we even build a small snowman.

Our Little Snowman

In the afternoon it got a bit warmer and the snow began to melt. I guess that most of it will be gone by tomorrow.

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MeKa 2009

Posted on 25 January, 2009 by Matthias Scheler

In January 1994 a group of Amiga fans in Karlsruhe organized the first Meeting Karlsruhe, or in short MeKa. The meeting was a get-together for Amiga users and software developers. During MeKa programs were written in collaboration, freely distributable software was exchanged and a computer network got set up.

Setting up a network was quite a challenge back then. We had to fight with software problems (lack of congestion control in Amiga Envoy, unfinished IP routing support in the Linux kernel), hardware problems (Commodore ARCnet cards with the wrong network chip), cabling problems (too many long Thin Ethernet cables, sometimes mixed with a rogue RG59 cable) and power outages (too many desktop computers and CRT monitors). But when it was finally working we could enjoy a permanent, fast Internet connection which was quite a luxury at that time.

Fifteen years after the first event another MeKa took place last weekend. A lot has changed since the early days. The attendance has gone down and the average age of the participants up. There are still a few Amiga computers (among a lot of notebooks and the odd and often exotic desktop) but it is no longer about them. It is now a reunion of a bunch of old friends who only manage to stay in touch via e-mail or IRC for most of the year. But for one weekend in January we all come to Karlsruhe and meet again.

Over the years a fair number of NetBSD developers have joined the ranks. Just like in the previous years we managed to organize a BSD dinner on Saturday and Silke and I were happy to meet a few NetBSD developers for the first time.

Over the years there have only been two problems with MeKa:

  1. It is always over too soon.
  2. You never get enough sleep.

But well … that never stopped us from coming back the next year. 🙂

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Game of the Month: Mario Kart Wii

Posted on 4 January, 2009 by Matthias Scheler

A lot of people told me that Mario Kart Wii is a must-have. As usual I grew suspicious and wasn’t sure whether I wanted such a hyped game. But after playing Mario Kart Wii with my nephew I had to agree. When we were back home Silke browsed through a lot of shops in Cambridge until she managed to find the game in the last shop where it wasn’t sold out.

Mario Kart Wii is a comic style racing game. You pick a character from the Mario universe (e.g. Mario, Toad or Bowser) and either a kart or a motorbike and race over imaginative race tracks. The gameplay is simple, you only need to steer, accelerate and use extras. The extras are what makes the game so interesting. You can e.g. get extra speed boosts, missiles, temporary invulnerability, shrink all your opponents or turn into a cannonball which dashes along the race track. But some amount of fairness is maintained nevertheless. The racer in the lead e.g. never gets powerful extras. The real fun starts when you play the game with multiple players. Up to four people can play in split screen mode if you have enough Wii Remotes at hand.

I can highly recommend this game because it is very entertaining, a single race doesn’t require much time and you can play it with your friends. My advice is however not to buy the Wii Wheel. It only makes steering more sluggish compared to using just the Wii Remote. Overall I prefer to use the Wii Nunchuk anyway.

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