Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Some observations while on an 8 hour (night) train ride to the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) in Berlin:

• DVB-T doesn't really work exceptionally well in a train that's moving at 200-300 km/h.
• I also had almost no GPS signal in the train either, not sure why. The speed should not be a problem as GPS is supposed to work at high speeds (unlike DVB-T). I intended to create a nice visualization of all wireless networks on the way to Berlin (using Kismet and GPSDrive), but... well, without GPS data that's not too funny.
• They have coffee in the train! Not exactly cheap, but it's there.
• Having a ticket for waggon 23 of the train is somewhat... fitting.

There's a lot of press coverage about the congress already, so I won't repeat all of that here. Just let me tell you that there's a tremendous amount of great lectures, many of which I have attended (and they're also streamed on the web, as well as broadcast via DVB-T locally here in Berlin, which is great!).

I have recently built a homepage (based on Drupal, of course) for quite an interesting not-for-profit project called Ingoldesstat-finden.

Some history background:

A document of Charlemagne (Karl der Große or Charles the Great) from 806 mentions for the first time a "Kammergut" (estate) he owned, namely Ingoldesstat — which later became the city Ingolstadt (not too far away from Munich). Yes, that's the Ingolstadt you know from Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Ingolstadt will celebrate the 1200th "birthday" in 2006...

The project:

The aim of the archaeological project Ingoldesstat-finden is to find the exact place where the first settlers of Ingolstadt lived. Some recent findings indicate that the original Ingoldesstat was not where the city center is today...

The project, lead by Hans Strobl, has many volunteer participants, ranging from archaeologists, historians, art restorers, designers, photographers, videographers and — finally — a computer science student who created their website ;-)

There's a photo gallery which documents the excavations, findings, activities and people behind the project. I also set up a group blog so that all people involved can blog about what they do... It was a lot of fun for me to work with these people to get the site up and running and I'm curious how it will develop — my hope is that it will become a lively site with lots of discussions.

The thing that fascinates me most about this project is that so many citizens of Ingolstadt take part, help with excavations, wash findings, take photos etc. etc. I'll probably also take part in some of the archaeological stuff in the future. Expect to see me "digging in the dirt" soon, in the truest sense of the word ;-)

Software patents are to be introduced in the European Union, soon. Software patents suck.
Spread the word. Stop software patents before it's too late.

Get informed:

• noepatents.eu.org
• nosoftwarepatents.com
• Wikipedia: Software patent debate
• FFII Patinfo FAQ

Protest:

• Sign the EuroLinux petition
• Participate in the Web Demo and tell the world that you do so
• Put banners on your homepage
• Blog about how software patents suck
• Participate in the Photo Demo
• Write letters to the responsible politicians

Software patents were stopped in India. We can prevent them in Europe, too. But we need to act. Now.