As I am in the process of setting up a new root server I got and moving all the content from the old webhost to it, there may be a more or less significant amount of downtime in the coming week depending on whether or not I will break something (or everything) in the process.

Consider yourselfes warned. Shouldn't be a problem, though.

As for new content, well. You see, a guy named William Shakesman once said: "Brevity is the soul of wit".

The front page of my last.fm account

As I am nearing the 50.000 track mark on my last.fm account, I thought it would be interesting to get some statistics. After all, I'm very fond of music in general and seeing as my collection keeps growing, why not have some statistics to brag about.
Because I had a lot of time to kill, I created a crude script that tells me how much time I spent listening to music over the span of three years (to be exact, since I last reset my account on Oct 31 2009):

Total secs: 12536221
Total mins: 208937
Total  hrs: 3482
Total days: 145

According to Wolfram Alpha, there are 1235 days between today and Oct 31 2009, so I listened to music about 12% of the time.
Considering that a large fraction of the day is spent sleeping, this percentage is quite high. Even more so as I actually listen to music and rarely do something else while listening.

The average length of a track in my music collection is 3.4 minutes . The average length of the titles scrobbled on last.fm - that is the music I actually listen to - is 4.17 minutes. On average, I hear about 40 tracks per day. With a median of 4 minutes per track, thats 2 hours and 40 minutes per day spent listening.

Statistics about my collection itself is rather easy to get as I can query my trusty MPD:

Artists:    492
Albums:     595
Songs:     8664

DB Play Time: 20 days, 20:24:33

57% of my collection are high quality lossless FLAC files, about 42% are MP3 (mostly VBR V0 or CBR 320). The last single percentage goes to OGG.
All in all, that's 130GB worth of music with 113GB in FLAC and a mere 16GB in MP3.

Check out my last.fm account here to see a distribution of genres, artists and albums.

XMonad with xmobar and GridSelect

Tiling window managers are awesome. And while I have used the aptly named Awesome for all my tiling needs so far, it is certainly due time for a change in software.

There are a number of things I don't like about awesome. In particular, its configuration file. Okay, it surely is easy enough to work with, but due to the fact that many features that should be internal are - in fact - in the rc.lua file, its sloc rises to enormous levels. Also, it's in Lua, and well... it's just bothersome to work with.

XMonad, on the other hand, does quite well in that regard. Being written in Haskell - a purely functional and lazy programming language - configuration is cooler, more interesting and generally easier to maintain. Oh, it's much less code, too.

While XMonad is very feature-rich, it does not have every function that awesome had. Given that these features were ones I never really used anyway, I can't say that I miss anything.

I have gone for a setup with xmobar as my default status bar. As I still have mpdcron running, I decided against using xmobar's MPD command and set up a simple pipe between mpdcron and xmobar's PipeReader:

One trade-off was having to disable true transparency with compositing in urxvt, because the window borders suddenly were transparent, too. This issue may be fixed in the future, but for now I'm using native urxvt transparency.

So, what else to say? Go ahead and check out XMonad or awesome (or i3 for that matter). You can also have a look at my configuration on github.

After some more work on xmobar and other features, this is how my desktop looks now:

WeeChat with #archlinux on freenode.

~ IRC is multiplayer notepad.

Right now, I spend most of the time online talking in various IRC channels on freenode . While IRC itself is nothing new to me - I dabbled in it a few times over the last 2 years - actually going out and chatting all day is something new and exciting.
Finding a really cool program to configure and use for IRC comes as a huge bonus.

In the last few months, I used irssi exclusively and while it is a really good piece of software, I found something even better.
Enter WeeChat, the best IRC client I have used so far. It's pretty much everything irssi is (a modular and extensible CLI IRC client), just more polished.

Irssi's modular system was a bit clunky. Very noticeable for example in the absence of a nicklist. There was no real plugin for it so you had to use a FIFO. In itself not a bad idea, but not very integrable.

WeeChat - on the other hand - provides a neat interface for new windows and buffers. As such, the nicklist and buffer list integrate nicely in the workflow and are actually a part of the workspace.
This is not to say that something like this is not possible with irssi. It just seems the interface itself is subpar.

Another thing I didn't like in irssi was its inconsistencies. Well, maybe not inconsistencies, but rather weird "design" choices. I was never sure what was what. Is that a buffer, is this a window? What becomes of split windows... or buffers for that matter?
In WeeChat you have the clear distinction between buffers and windows. It's just something that clicked when I read the documentation. This is something I miss from irssi, also. The documentation is rather lacking, I believe.

A really cool feature WeeChat has that irssi does not, is the support for 256 colors in terminals that support them. The configuration is straightforward and actually comprehensible.
That is a thing actually accomplished by a really neat plugin - iset. This neat little Perl script provides you with an integrated curses interface to all settings - easily traversable and with filtering capabilities.

But enough about WeeChat. As always with any software, just try it for yourself. As for IRC, well. I encourage you to give it a try. Just arm yourself with a client, choose a nickname and join some channels on freenode. I'm sure you won't regret it.

Oh, and if you feel the sudden urge to talk: Don't hesitate to hit me up.

I've put this off for far too long. -- Bilbo Baggins

Let's face it. This blog was neglected way too long. It is weird coming back and I don't really know what to write about.
Yet I figured it would be time to publish something new. The main reason behind the absence of articles is lack of time and motivation. Most of my free time I spend at the university or - increasingly so - at home... either sleeping or coding.

Generally, you would expect an influx of information one can write about when your whole social environment changes to a setting in which you come across dozens of novel ideas and interesting people, but the problem - for me - is to actually sit down and couch all this in terms.
Truth be told, there has been a lot going on lately. And that's certainly not a bad thing. In this regard, a special shoutout to #kitinfo. It just wouldn't be the same without this quaint little channel.

And yet, sometimes I just need to slow down. This is something I could do quite often last year, but in recent times things just exploded. Again, not a bad thing, but you obviously got to adapt.
That being said, once you get into it you start to realize how much stuff you've missed and will miss. And for someone who always had a relatively small circle of acquaintances, it does tend to get overwhelming.

In any way, I plan to get more stuff on here in the next few weeks. The odd rant, some tech stuff, personal things. Just bear with me, traveller.

One year after the release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim, Bethesda is still working on releasing new content. Following Hearthfire, the latest - a little gimmicky - DLC, Bethesda will release Dragonborn which features a whole new adventure. Set in Solstheim, Dragonborn's main focus will be a mighty dragon priest wanting to take over the world.

All jokes aside, I am really looking forward to playing this. Those who played Morrowind will recognize both Telvanni and Redoran architecture and I sincerely hope you get to visit parts of Vvardenfell. I still think Morrowind's art style is unmatched and seeing some of it in Skyrim's graphics engine will be amazing (if done right).

Also, the trailer features dragon mounts. Dragon mounts. Need I say more? Ever since I was disappointed by the fact that I couldn't really control Odahviing in the main quest, I have been wishing for real dragon mounts.

I'm not usually fond of DLCs, but I have to admit that Bethesda is going the right way. Having teamed up with Microsoft may have been a bad choice, but it's still better than the majority of DLCs that have little content and a huge price tag.

Brace yourselves, lectures are coming.

Seeing as I completed the first week at my new place in Karlsruhe and spent most of my time at the university, I figured it'd be fun to write down some experiences I had.

Well, firstly - and most importantly - the flat I live in is really neat. It seems I really got lucky with finding a place to stay. The rent is quite reasonable and it's got everything I need. Which is, to be honest, not very much. I'm not really a fan of the ISP, though; The connection is a little bit unstable in the late evening which gets very annoying.
As I am used to the "tranquility" of a more rural area, I was worried about the level of noise in a city and the implications for sleep. Thankfully, it's not a problem. It *is* louder, but not by a whole lot.

Now, what about the university itself? Well, it's huge. I don't have any other places to directly compare it to, but I'd say it does reach the size of a small town. Not necessarily in terms of actual living space, but certainly in terms of surface area.
That means that you have a lot of walking to do. Either that or you join the elite master race of deadly cyclists that come out of nowhere at every single intersection.
It comes as a bonus that the faculty for computer science is farthest away from the metro station. Run, Forrest, run!

I'm also really impressed by the whole infrastructure. There's a wireless network available for students, a library, a data center for students of computer science (or Informatics) where you can access the internal university network, use public printers et cetera.
It's notable - by the way - that the largest lecture hall can't actually hold all students. Thus, the lecture has to be streamed to several other buildings over the network. There, you can ask questions using the chat. Simple.
Granted, I'm sure other universities also provide stuff like that, but still. I am impressssed.

After thirteen years of school education, the lectures take a little while to adjust to, because you have to make sure to go over the huge amount of subject material again and do exercises. Still, it is a lot of fun.