When I came to Iceland, I saw the same symbol the command key on Apple keyboard carries (⌘) everywhere there was something interesting to see. It is called the Saint Hannes cross and is an old viking symbol and now used in the Nordic countries and Estonia to denote sites of touristic interest.

I wondered about this and apparantly there is a funny anecdote about how the “clover” sign as some refer to it came on the command key.

When Steve Jobs first saw the large application menus of the MacDraw application, he saw a list full of  logos. He didn’t like this, thought it would take the logo in vain and ordered them to find another symbol to take its place.

Update: Hmm, I forgot to mention that I keep running into the clover. Those were actually the reason for this post!

German band Silbermond uses it on the cover of their newest album ‘Laut gedacht’. No idea why, but they have one track called ‘Das Ende vom Kreis’. The End of the Circle as universal symbol of infinity and is ⌘ the new one?

In Die 13 1/2 Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär by Walter Moers, the protagonist lands inside the Eternal Tornado which is describing a course in the form of the Saint Hannes cross of about two thousand kilometers long.

p(right).

In Berlin there is… or rather was a building which apparantly was too ugly to survive the reckless Westernization of former GDR(German Democratic Republic) culture. It is called Palast der Republik and was the seat of the Volkskammer - GDR’s parliament - as well as an entertainment centre for the people with art galleries, restaurants, auditoriums etc.

Sure, it is ugly and completely out of time and place on the monumental Museumsinsel between late 19th century cathedrals and other buildings along the historical street Unter den Linden. But it was also part of the history of 14 million people who see it being demolished in record time.

The destruction of their past gives a feeling of being second-class citizens, of their past not being worth saving, that everything was bad in the east. Some things should be kept to serve as a warning, as a memory to what can happen if the wrong decisions are made.

The Palast der Republik is being torn down now, only to make place for a nice piece of parkland until they know what to do with it (and find proper funding to do it). Where once stood a Prussian palace, destructed by the war, torn down in the 1950s and rebuilt in the incarnation of the new palace, will have nothing new in its place.

Ole Tangen jr. created a short documentary film, Brokedown Palast about the socialistic building which I found by coincidence today.

Other interesting videos somewhat connected to the subject:

• Einstürzende Neubauten
• Aktuelle Kamera reportage - Aktuelle Kamera was the daily news, of course being a propaganda instrument of the SED.

So, when I’ll be back in Berlin… The palace will probably not be there anymore.

Well, so much for the practical part of the assignment, this is the version I’ll probably deliver end of this week. Added since the last pre-release are three types of isolines: Based on fixed levels, based on a fixed number of lines, based on fixed points in space. Also, it can do fullscreen, yay!

So, I hereby release version 0.1 of Fluids and name it Equinox, since that’s exactly what is going to happen tomorrow at 0:07 UTC. The days are becoming longer and longer, and starting tomorrow, they’ll be longer in Iceland than they are here again. Spring’s here!

• [Fluids 0.1 intel]/files/fluids/Fluids-i386-0.1.0.dmg)
• [Fluids 0.1 powerpc]/files/fluids/Fluids-powerpc-0.1.0.dmg)
• [Fluids source code]/files/fluids/fluids-0.1.0.tgz)

And we’re already two weeks later! Today I hacked together isolines in Fluids, based on a paper published in Byte magazine in July 1987.

So, there it is, for Mac OS X in PowerPC and Intel glory:

• [Fluids 0.0.2 Intel version]/files/fluids/Fluids-i386-0.0.2.dmg)
• [Fluids 0.0.2 PowerPC version]/files/fluids/Fluids-powerpc-0.0.2.dmg)

And, another anouncement, over at nogates.nl I set up a Trac page for the Fluids project. There you can get the source and some more information.

Walking dinner… or… hunting your own food. It is a yearly activity at Isis and usually one of the best-attended ones (most probably because there’s food involved). I don’t have exact numbers, but making an wild guess I would say about 35-40 out of the total 100 members were present.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, a small introduction. Everyone gets three addresses where they’re going to have entry, main dish and dessert, along with what they’re going to make themselves. You get this of course far too late to prepare properly and you don’t really have time to arrange much.

So, Jacco and I were a “team” so to speak and had our entry course, mustard pea soup with lots of smoked sausage at Rinka’s house at 6pm… Others at the table were Maarten, Erwin, Andre, Juliën, and Marcel.

Then, at half past seven we rushed home to prepare our main course: cheese fondue. Man, that’s the last time I attempt that at a walking dinner :Ð All was good, it just takes soooo much time to melt the cheese properly. We got Herjan, Lisa, Sibrecht, Floor, Wouter, and Michiel for dinner.

Barely making the two hours planned for dinner, we arrived a little late at Roel’s, where the Tiramisù was already waiting for Sandra, Mijke, Maresa, and us.

Afterwards, we met in café Spijker and thus and there the walking dinner 2007 was concluded.

I would say, it was very successful, we had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to next year’s walking dinner. Hopefully I won’t have to make the main dish then, it’s fun to do, but also a bit stressy.

Update: There are photos online.

While Ireen and Sven are becoming world champions in Calgary, the season in Eindhoven is already over. Wednesday was the last time on the ice for a few months and as a nice last training, we did a 10 kilometers, or 25 rounds.

I can only say this, there was a lot of pain involved. After about 15 rounds, my back hurt like hell and the only way to get on was to stand up, but then you lose stability, so you have to go down again.

Then, after 18 rounds, the trainer said something which I understood as ‘only 18 rounds left’… What! But it was a relief then to hear him shout ‘last round!’ after 5 more rounds already :-)

In the end I did the 10000 meters in 26.00 minutes, with a feeling of satisfaction. The world record of 12.49,88 12.41,69 is set by Sven Kramer, so I’m only about twice as slow as him ;-)

Last week on Monday and Tuesday by the way was the yearly Isis tournament where I played photographer (see the links).

Hooray! I actually managed today to get my [visualization]/studie/2006/03/04/visualization-1.html) compiled and running under Mac OS X. It wasn’t that hard after all, just finding the right libraries to include.

GLUT… X11 or Aqua?

glut.h exists in fink as well as in OS X, the former binds to X11, while the latter does the OpenGL directly in Aqua. When I found out about this, it was easy. I now only need Fink for the fast fourier transform library.

NEXTSTEP Application Bundles

Then the next challenge came, creating a real application bundle… Again not very hard, it’s just putting files in the right location and relinking the libraries.

So, now there is one little thing left, Universal Binaryness. But I can live with this result. It needs a pretty icon by the way.

• [Fluids 0.0.1 powerpc]/files/fluids/Fluids-powerpc-0.0.1.dmg)
• [Fluids 0.0.1 intel]/files/fluids/Fluids-i386-0.0.1.dmg)

I fixed some last bits in the streamlines and found a bug that was festering along all the time without really getting noticed. The source is included in the bundle, by the way.

Last stage, implementing isolines. Then I’ll write a report about it all and then hopefully [after more than a year]/studie/2005/12/29/trimester-4.2.html) I can finish the Visualization course.

The nice people at FOSDEM recorded their main talks and put them online, sadly without giving a playlist, so you have to click each link each time you want to play something.

So here you are, a [playlist for your comfort]/files/FOSDEM2007.m3u).

Very few of you might have noticed that Ehrensenf I mentioned yesterday doesn’t offer a RSS feed with enclosures, so you can’t add it to your favorite podcatcher (go Democracy!!!) for automatic downloading of new episodes.

Well, I sat down for half an hour, pulled some PHP and DOM XML magic out of the hat and voila; a feed with enclosures! (psst, don’t tell them, they lack the feed for a reason, namely advertisements).

As a regular Rocketboom viewer, I was introduced in December to the german show Ehrensenf (ES) (anagram of Fernsehen, or television), which I since then catch daily, too.

ES reached 300 episodes today! Congratulations!

While it seems to be a copy of Rocketboom at first sight, be it in German, the show turns out to be quite fun to watch and to be different.

Both shows are produced and scripted, but most hosts of ES (they have “backups” so to say in case Katrin is on the road for 3sat or otherwise busy for the radio or her studies in technical journalism) are in my opinion better than Joanne from Rocketboom. It just looks a bit more spontaneous, less rehearsed.

ES is funny, despite the Germans are thought of to have no humour at all (which is true in many cases, especially TV shows) and even though the ES team is from Cologne (and thus not from Düsseldorf).

That being said, I think the Netherlands lack a good light news internet-tv show, but somehow I just can’t imagine it happening here. The only site I would expect to come out with such a thing would be Geenstijl… Yay, what fun would that be… (pause) NOT!

An article titled Icelandic euros sold on eBay in Morgunblaðið caught my attention today.

The eBay auctionnair ede2016 claims they are proof coins. The MBL article however mentions that they are coined in 2004 by a Swiss company, which also created and sold Swiss, Greenlandic and Faroese euros.

The coins don’t have any money value, and probably not even collector’s value. Iceland is neither a member of the EU nor of the EMU (European Monetary Union), but they signed a number of EU treaties such as Schengen (Because of this treaty, it is possible for a EU citizen to stay in Iceland for as long as six months without residence permit, as opposed to 3 months for non-EU citizens).

The Icelandic krónur is completely independent from any other currency (which is the reason why it fluctuates so heavily, usually between 75 and 100 eurocents within one year) and it is unlikely that they will take up the euro soon or will even tie their currency to the European common coin. However there are some voices to do the latter.

Indo-European languages all had this beautiful case system with at least four base cases, nomenative, accusative, dative and genitive (which is the Icelandic order) and usually a few more.

In many languages however, including Dutch, those cases have almost completely disappeared. We have remnants of cases in our personal pronouns (ik (nom.), mij (acc.), mijn (dat./gen.)), put ‘s’ behind words to indicate ownership (i.e. a simple genitivus form) and do weird things (they’re in fact inflections) with adjectives (“sometimes” add ‘e’ suffix), but otherwise they’re completely gone.

In some languages which still have cases, such as German and Icelandic, the genitivus tends to disappear slowly in favor of a construction using the dativus.

Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod is an example of a sentence which doesn’t use the genitive but the dative instead, and becoming more and more common in spoken language. It is already pretty common to use this construction in Dutch (“De dativus is de genitivus zijn dood”) and now look what this language has become! The sentences “Der Dativ ist der Tod des Genitivs” or even “Der Dativ ist des Genitivs Tod” say exactly the same and are more aestetically pleasing.

In Icelandic the genitive is used extensively for creating adjectives out of nouns: “Ráðhúsið Reykjavíkur” (City Hall of Reykjavik), “Flugstöð Leifs Eiríkssonar” (Leifur Eiriksson Airterminal). However, here also the genitive is threatened by the dative in the sense that they will probably merge somewhere in the next 200 years.

As a citizen of a case-deprived country I would like to say to those lucky enough to still have them: Save and protect them!

And to those living in case-deprived countries having to learn a highly inflectional language: There will be a day when the penny drops and all of a sudden it just comes naturally, believe me.