Even if it's pretty late by now... a merry christmas to all of you. ;-)

Well, this english version of my blog never had that great amounts of visitors per day... There were days which brought three users to this blogs, but there were also much more days without a single user in this blog (of course it could have been my fault - without new posts for weeks the chances of many visitors regularly reading this blog are quite low). That was before November 13.

On November 13 I had a sudden increase in the number of visitors in this blog: In the time from 22 to 24 o'clock I had almost 250 visitors; the next days brought 1900, 900 and 2300 visitors per day. Since then the numbers dropped again, but I'm still at about 60 visitors per day.

And what was the reason for all this visitors to visit my blog? Do you know StumbleUpon? That's a pretty popular extension for Firefox. It displays the button which when clicked brings the user to a randomly chosen website. And my post about cleaning your keyboard in a dishwasher was submitted there...

By now this blog has reached about 6600 visitors. At the beginning of the month the counter showed just 350 of them...

Aaaah, and again there's a huge hole without any new entries in this blog...
But this time I have a pretty good excuse: I was hit by my typical once-in-a-winter-cold, which was just some weeks early.

But by now I'm fully recovered. ;-)

Yesterday evening we were on a concert of the german punk band "die ärzte" in Dortmund.

It was a really great concert - die ärzte are known for very long and funny concert. The whole show went on for almost three hours and the audience was asked to perfom some very interesting mexican waves: The normal ones, a slow-motion variant of it, and even just with sound. Very nice. I'm already looking towards their next visitin Dortmund. ;-)

Last night at about 2 a.m. there was a car accident right in front of our house.
A driver (of whom I'm pretty sure he was driving under the influence of [lots of] alcohol) almost crashed into a wall.

He didn't seem to be seriously hurt - his upper lip was bleeding, that was all. And he was wavering from the alcohol. But of course we called an ambulance and while we were waiting for them to arrive, he suddenly tried to start his car again and drive away. Well, first he tried to convince my father to back off the car so he could drive on (which my father of course didn't do), then he tried doing so himself. Well, he tried - we didn't let him.
As the ambulance arrived, he told them that we were driving the car... let's just say the paramedic didn't really believe him. ;-)

Well, the driver was okay... but he did make some damage: The right one of the two serving area interfaces was lying on the street, the left one just got "touched" by his car (in the meantime a technician "reapired" them); the phone booth (which wasn't a real phone booth - it's called "basic phone" [Look at the according Google Image search results]) was lying on the street, too (it's the small silvery thing on the right next to the serving area interfaces), and last but not least there was a big sign pointing to an restaurant down the street, which's frame can be seen in form of some wooden bars on the right side of the picture.
The car has been towed off; if it was still standing there, it would've filled the picture as if it has been normally parked on the sidewalk.

Phew, that was a night!

Two days ago the winter began for me:

It was cold outside, I was sitting in a bus, the rain splashing on it's front window showed the usual patterns of melting snow - and at the same time my iPod played "White Christmas" by Otis Redding. Cool.

Now I'm waiting for snow - lot's of snow. ;-)

I wrote this text about two years ago for my german blog; now I'll more or less just translate it to english. ;-)

Update: Someone posted a comment on stumbleupon saying "The internet is not the web. Not all web pages are the same size. His figures are just stupid." Well... he's somewhat right. While writing this post, I didn't think of the fact that there's more on the internet than just "the web". So in order to be absolutely correct, you should replace all occurences of "internet" in this text by "the web" (or "the websites" or whatever you think is the best term). ;-)

During the course "Introduction to Computer Science" we had an interesting idea: Let's print out the internet. The whole internet. That way we would'nt need a laptop to surf the net during boring courses. ;-) So I took the time to make a few calculations on this idea.

On August 11, 2005, Google knew 8,168,684,336 (over 8 billion) Webpages. I got this value from wikipedia, since google doesn't show their statistics on the front page anymore. And even this number isn't correct: On the one hand there is the fact, that google doesn't know all webpages. On the other hand there is also the so called "Deep Web", which consists of that part of the web which isn't searchable by normal search engines. The Deep Web (again according to wikipedia) consists of about 500,000,000,000 (500 billion) pages. But for now I will just stick with the 8 billion pages of google.

My first question: How much space would all these 8 billion pages use?
Since there was a package of 500 pages lying right in front of me, I took a measurement of it: One page of DIN A4 paper (DIN A4 ist the normal paper size in Germany, it is (IIRC) just a tiny bit shorter than the US letter format) has a size of 210x297mm. 500 pages have a height of 5cm, so one page has a height of 0,1mm.
Now we have to remember, that a normal web page won't fit on a single sheet of paper. So I'll just assume that the average webpage needs three sheets of paper when printed out.
So we would need 24.506.053.008 sheets of paper. If we built a single stack of all this paper, it would result in a height of 2,450,605,300.8mm = 2,450,605.3008m = 2,450km. For comparison: The ISS is orbiting the earth in a height of about 400km, so this stack would reach the ISS six times.

All those printed pages would have a surface of 1,528,442,526,108,960mm² - that's 1,528,442,526m² or 1,528km². With all this paper you could cover the whole city of New York two times!

About the weight: Normal paper wighs 80g/m². So the stack would have a weight of 122,530t. That's so much, I can't even think of a suitable comparison.

How long would it take to print all the pages?
At the time of research, I found an article written on Septemer 12, 2005 by macwelt.de about the fastest laserprinter on earth: The IBM Infoprint 4100 is able to print 1354 pages per minute. That's really fast - but not fast enough: The print job would take 18,099,005 minutes - that's 12,568 days equaling to 35 years. As soon the printer would be done with this job, you'd have to start it all over if you're not interested in antiquated web pages...
If you want to finish the print job a lot more quicker (let's say within a month), you'd need 420 of these printers. Well, one of them costs about 1 million dollars...

And of course you'd have to download all this pages before you can start printing them.
Let's say the size of an average webpage is 20 KByte and you have a reasonable fast internet connection of 100 MBit/s. Then, you'd have to download about 163 Terabyte (163,000 Gigabyte), which would take you 151 days (5 months).

Conclusion: The internet is huge. Really huge. And you should carefully think about any plans of printing out the whole internet. Very carefully. ;D

Attention, dear StumbleUpon users: If you liked this post, then please click here to vote for me at StumbleUpon. Thanks.

Well... I didn't post any new entries to this blog for over one month. :-O

Well, I noticed that writing english blog entries takes me a lot more time than writing the same entry in german... Paired with the fact that there were lots and lots of work to do this sadly resulted in a very noticeable lack of (english) blog entries. But I will write more in the next days, I promise. ;-)

Today was the first day of the O-Phase [?], in which experienced students show the new students all the important things a student at the university of Dortmund should know.

Since I'm going to have to re-write the acronym-plugin for my usages and also are very tired, the reports of the O-Phase [?] will take a day or two to be translated into english...

Some time ago (on May 9th) the Uni Film Club presented "Blues Brothers". The three days prior to this "event" were very busy for Dominik and me: Every day we dressed like the Blues Brothers, stood in front of the refectory and advertised the movie. During this the shown photo was shot. (Here's a link to my german blog entry of this day.)

Well, even though my blog hasn't that many visitors, the picture made it into the Google image search results: Without content filtering it's visible on page 3 of the results, with strict filtering it even jumps to the first page of the results. Wow. ;-)

Thanks to Stefan, who found this out.

Today the new semester starts. I don't really know much about universities in the USA or in Great Britain, so as a quick info for all the english-speaking visitors: In Germany the semesters start at October 1st (that's the Wintersemester) and at April 1st (the Sommersemester).

A pretty important thing for the "ordinary student in Dortmund" ist to remember to change his student ID - these little slips of paper are valid for just one semester and have a "built-in" ticket for the local mass transit (which is also limited to one semester). So, the ticket I used for the last half year isn't valid anymore which could lead to some problems ticket inspection...

Even I almost forgot to do this - I had planned to post this entry last evening, but then forgot to do so. So I put the new ticket onto my desk to remind myself to take it with me the next morning - and almost managed to forget it there this morning.

I just heard it in the radio:

Cinemas are the big, dark rooms where all that people meet who are too stupid to download the movie from the Internet.

I just wrote a small plugin for serendipity to allow me to semi-automagically display a link to the alternative version of any entry in my german blog.

At first I planned to automatically generate the links based on the entryID, but that solution would have required me to keep the IDs in both the blogs synchronized at any point... now I just have to put the link to the alternative version of an entry into a text field and voila.

Since this version blog is intended to be a more or less complete translation of my german blog, I have to announce it in here, too: My blog (the german one) is two years old. :party: Well, not exactly... it's birthday was 3 days ago, I just missed it. :-|

Also the german blog's been visited by it's 50,000th visitor about a week ago. Hooray. ;-)

The last few days haven't been very pleasant for me... so there were no blog entries.
The reason: My grandfather died last monday.

Some time ago medics discovered that he suffered from cancer. They tried many different methods of treatment, but without success. 9 weeks ago he was told that there were no more options on how to help him. So he asked to be released, to die at home.

Some days later I drove down to Bavaria and said good bye. 7 weeks later he passed away.

The funeral was this friday. It was - as long as you can say this about a funeral - a nice funeral.



Rest in peace, Opa Gerd.