Johan and I were overjoyed: last week Last.fm sent us to the Hadoop Summit 2008 in Santa Clara, California. Under Johan's wings Last.fm became one of the earliest adopters of Doug Cutting's Hadoop, and I'm a frequent user myself. And we had an excellent time. The conference was great as expected, we had lots of interesting conversations with people from all kinds of backgrounds. Additionally we spent the rest of our trip meeting people from other companies (Facebook, Powerset, and others), discussing technology (we're currently really interested in HBase), the various issues that arise from having to cope with …

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Photo by mlcastle, taken at 24c3. …

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I'm start to look into more secure ways to store sensitive data, and Apple's encrypted DMG disk images seem like a good compromise between security and convenience. If you're worried about long-term storage and retrievability it of course has the disadvantage of being a proprietary format, which means you would need an OS X machine to decrypt those disk images. Not any more! In one of the interesting talks I missed during last year's 23C3 (while being busy doing other things) Jacob Appelbaum, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and David Hulton presented their successful attempt to reverse-engineer the file format. They provide slides …

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Oh, and regarding my last article: I'm told I'm full of shit. …

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Photo by smallcaps. Update: Just found a nice (and brief!) introduction to the Chaos Communication Congress at 46halbe.org, just in case any of the following sounds like noise to you. The congress layout for 23C3 is fixed, and we're starting to plan the details. One important part of this is finding Heralds: volunteers who for a couple of hours are willing to be the main spokesperson in a conference room, who announce the individual sessions, and help out when something goes wrong. This year we would like to have a Herald for every single talk, not just the big …

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Yesterday night I returned from Datenspuren 2006 in Dresden, a conference on privacy and technology organized by the local CCC. This was both the first time I was in Dresden, and also the first time I attended the Datenspuren conference, so I was curious to see both. Short version: I'll probably come back next time. What follows are random excerpts from my conference notes. update 2006-05-17 -- From the Chaosradio "Chaos TV" feed: "Bericht von den Datenspuren 2006", with an MP3 download of a radio special produced during the conference. 15 minutes of interviews with organizers, participants and guests (including …

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I just came home from an interesting discussion: the "tesla salon" had a session at club Podewil with the topic "verwertungsgesellschaften im digitalen zeitalter" (roughly: "collecting societies in the digital age"). The event was organized by Radio 1:1. They had a well-chosen group of participants: Tim Pritlove in his role as podcaster and "discordian evangelist", Julian Finn as a representative of FairSharing (i.e., the culture flat rate), and two netradio guys whose names I haven't written down and who sadly aren't mentioned in the program. Update 2006-05-04 -- Igor writes to ask if the session will be published as podcast …

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Another 22C3-related Ruby script: I thought it would be neat to convert the list of Weblogs writing about 22C3 into an OPML file which can then easily be imported into your favorite aggregator. Ruby to the rescue. The script scrapes the Wiki page (or rather its export format version) and iterates over the table of blogs, adding a feed URL of each blog to the OPML outline. Look at the code for further information. Of course you can also simply get the exported OPML file linked below; but I expect that the Wiki page will change a lot even after …

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Just before I left my house over the holidays I wanted to print out the schedule for 22C3, and found that I couldn't -- no matter which browser, OS and method I chose, the schedule table was unreadable. A couple of hours later I sat in a train and had some time to spare, so I hacked together a Ruby script that parses the iCal version of the schedule for 22C3 and creates an HTML page with a clean, readable timetable that you can also print ;) You can get the script below, and a version of the generated HTML …

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The Fahrplan (schedule) for 22C3 (the Chaos Computer Club's Chaos Communication Congress) is now online, along with the blog, Flickr pool, wiki, and podcast. So I started to browse and collect lectures I'd like to see, and then realized that like last year I have a scheduling problem... I'm still trying to find out how I can use the iCal calendar file for things beyond looking at dates in iCal. Apparently the data is imported read-only, which means I can't annotate; and it would be great to find ways where iCal can help you schedule your congress experience. There of …

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2005-09-16 15:30-16:30 Moderator: someone from Musikwoche We were told that the panel was about the evolving possibility of artist self-management, which sounded pretty exciting; but as with the previous panel, turned out to be too business-focused and didn't contain any really new ideas. I expected some thoughts about Internet distribution and new communication channels, but those topics didn't appear at all. Surprisingly the most interesting aspects of the panel were the insights into DJ Bobo's business life; take a closer look at his numbers quoted below. The overall theme of the panel seemed to be: it's less about the music, …

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2005-09-16 14:30-15:30 Moderator: Joe Taylor, Record of the day Surprisingly the panel was mostly about ringtones -- it turned out interesting nevertheless, even if the participants enthusiastically painted a picture of a brave new world that to me looked rather devastating. Note: I forgot to write down the full list of participants. From memory: someone from Jamba, Record execs from both Indie and major labels, and someone who develops ringtones and was involved in the production of the crazy frog. Also note that we missed the start of the panel, so the first 30 mins or so are missing. And …

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Last week a friend invited me to visit the Popkomm, using the press pass of a colleague. Who am I to refuse a free invitation? Having never been at the Popkomm, I was curious to see what it actually was like. Another friend had already warned me that the general attraction was to meet business partners and potential clients, and that it wasn't really a place to experience new forms of culture, or a place where a lot of new bands got signed -- so my expectations were rather low. And still I was surprised by what you find there …

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