Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my fellow crawlbots…

Well… this category, as well as the whole blog was unmaintained for a while… but now, I, the Starseeker, will do something, I’ve never done before. Its nothing spectecular but very uncommon for me, since I am reading less books in a year than I own computers… My book recommendation for today is:

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. In this book, the narrator “Leo” talks about the new girl student at his school… who is really really diffrent from the students, this small highschool has seen before. Her name is “Stargirl”. She dances through her schooldays, entertains everyone with her mysterious way of kindness and happyness and seems to like everyone. Leo, who hopelessly falls in love with her, watches her popularity grow until nearly everyone likes her, imitates her and wants to be like her. She seems to be the only one on the whole school, that lets the very own character out. She is real.
Things suddenly change, when she, without purpose and just because she is just too kind, jurts the pride of all students during a Basketball game.
The book tells the heartrending story about a girl, who just is herself and a boy who can’t decide between being loved by his schoolmates or being loved by Stargirl.

My cousin Carla told me about that book and lend it to me. First, I was a bit sceptic about the storyline, but when I had read the first few pages, I was like trapped in this story. Already the cover picture fascinated my very much. The character Stargirl is the kind of girl I looked for very long. She is a real star… a treasure for everyones life. Its some kind of sad that its just a book. When I was reading it on the train, I was very moved and was about to cry all the time… now, I am still irritated by the shining “Stargirl”… (who really matches my nick… doesn’t she?)

These days are totally free of special events… except one thing.
My old friend Brigitte from school and I seem to get friends again after nearly 2 years withour contact. I’m so happy :). But theres no more… :/

Today I finished the PBX for the Essen Linux Days… it was horrible. but theres really no more… sad huh? Definately.

Your starseeker

Hi my friends,

currently its Monday, 5.10AM and I got up about 15 minutes ago. Its much to early and I have a very strong need to sleep. Today in University, there is only one lecture that I have to visit… but I, as said, have to, so there’s no use in dreaming.

So far… have a nice(er) day (than me). Your starseeker

Yesterday evening I did something I didn’t do for a while: Nightwalk. Some time ago it was something similar to an ritual act to me to walk through the night and think about stuff that i care about. Yesterday it was time again to do so… many things to think about had gathered to make me do so… so I retreated and went outside. It was a beautiful night, no clouds, the moon in a shape of a reaping hook hung over the city skyline and was guiding my way. I had my favorite meditation music with me, which is krill.minima and digitalverein from thinner and I noticed some kind of unlimited relaxedness sneaking upon me. It felt great. The absolute apogee was, when i left the town border where no streetlights are disturbing your view to the sky… and the whole heaven opened up. All the stars where glittering, some in very interesting colors, some like plains (some even were plains… but some not ;)) some like twinkling angel eyes… it was beatiful. Over the evening, i walkes about 6km without even noticing the distance. I’ll say it again… it was very refreshing, relaxing and simply great to me :).

The Starseeker… wathing his heaven’s stars

Well.. we all probably know the Problem, that if we diclose ourselves to have a hea of knowledge about a specific topic, everyone asks questions about it all the time, which can be very annoying once in a while. The Netherrhine and Ruhr area LUGs have announced their project “Essen Linux Days” (find it here). Please drop by! I’ll also be there and announce my new project: teilen.org.

At this point, I should explain in short, what happend the last few days. I was very busy with university stuff and planning on the linec-event and my own project. Teilen.org (teilen is the german word for “sharing”) aims to be a project, that makes it possible, to exchange precious places. If you have one, please take a look… or visit us at the linec-event.

See you there… the Starseeker

Its not, that i’ve found an ancients treasure of navigatory wisdom of have the total clue about how to find the shortest possible way to my next target, but I have made up my mind about that.
Imagine a network of N nodes… with N greater than 2 with hardwired connections… every node is reachable… not every node is connected with every neighbour… let this be our near realistic scene of a Country with cities and roads (at the moment, all with the same quality, but different length).
Imagine you are in town A, willing to get to town B. Its your interest to get there as soon and as relaxed as possible. Because you are a lazy guy, you bought a TimTim-System (imagine that as a fictive company with proprietary map data, selling navigation systems) some while ago. You type in “City A” and then “City B”. The route you travel gets you there quick… or short… but even relaxed? The data of nearly all navigation system providers derives from sattelite positioning data and digital maps, defines crossings of a type, defines roads with a quality and length and calculates an approximation of the way, it wants you to take. That may be wht most people are looking for, but its not the best way.
My idea starts in a very simple way… Imagine every City as a root for a tree… every City you can directly (with maximum a step) go to is supplied as a data source and can be treated as a small Tree. If you want to go from city A to city B, the algo takes the small tree for city A, which … micht have city C and D as a neigbour… and attaches the subtrees of city C and D to it. City C has City A, D and E as a neighbour, city D has city A, C, and F as a neigbour. So all the subtrees are attached with only 2 rules:

• A subtree may be attached many times in one layer of the pathtree
• A subtree may be attached only in ONE layer. If it has to be attached in a second layer, too, the path ends at this point. (This imlies that the root tree is not attached any more, too.)

The extension of the tree ends, when there are no more leafes, that can be extended. “Thats very lazy!” you might scream now, because that only finds some possibilities from A to B, but thats all we want, hou? So lets pick one of the paths from A to B now. All Paths in the tree, that end with the leaf B can be considered as possible ways to B. I said before, that we have information about how long the ways are (this information may be replaced with an algo, that weights them in a different way). We just add the weights for every path and pick the one with the lowest weight… and voilla! Here we have our precious path!

This method has some flaws:

• a long route to a target is preferred, if it has lesser nodes in it.
• if there the target is unreachable, the tree might get very huge.
• The weighing doens’t change the route completly, but only has influence on a choice of a very small number of combinations.

but also some rather impressive advantages:

• The memory usage is kept in acceptable states, because the tree is only expanded in a senseful manner (if there are no nodes with an unusual high ammound of neighbours)
• The algo’s weight behavour is very flexible, because nearly every meta information can be combined (to a comparable value) to be a weight.
• There is no need to know about koordinates and streets
• Because this algo not aims to choose the shortest way, it is not affected by the “traveling salesman problem”.

The new idea is the weighting system, I imagine. It consists of a “matrix of interests”, that produces some value, that ist used as weight. Possible Meta Information may be “Occurance of traffic jams” “Speed limits” “Beauty of the landscape” “Occurance of police controls” “Relaxedness of traveling”… and many other things that might be ignored my major commercial Companies.
This is because I thought, that if we already have the community giving the data, it might also be able to classify it and tell us ubout their experiences with it. First, to prevet others from running into the same trouble, second to share the beauty of a nice trip.

Connnected to this, i want to create a system named “Happy Sightsharing”, which should be a open portal for exchange of GPS Coordinates of beatiful scenes and/or points of major interest. Thits system might generate gpsdrive waypoints (or export the whole favorites as waypoint snippet) or even other waypoint formats. This is the most realistic option of them all, so it might be implemented first. I am not sure, if I will be able to impemennt all these nice things, but I hope, some nice people (perhaps YOU!?) might help me.

I aim to implement that algo as a web application to collect meta data, position data for nodes, ways and many other things. You can take this moment as the moment, a new “initiative” is formed, named: “Free shortest of the simplest” or short “Fresh ofS”. I want this to become a research project.

If you want to, feel free to yoin my projects in some way. I’d like to share my ideas with someone.

So far… with my strange ideas… let this all become a freaky spot for exchanging the beauty of traveling!

The Starseeker

I am now on the train to Duisburg and its about 6:15. We’ll soon arrive in Alpen, the first station after Xanten… and also has only one Platform.
The weekend was fun. Me and MaBU revived old times when we were playing GTA2 over network. Even if it was senseles, we both had a lof of fun. It reminded me of the times, long gone, when I played with the computer a lot. After that, we prepared my Studio-PC to make it run some awesome OpenSource Games. We happily stumbled upon glest, s.c.o.u.r.g.e and freedroidRPG. They mostly worked (for our readers with windows PCs: Some of the OpenSource games run on your slow on demand platform ;)) great and I really am considering becoming a gamer again O_O.
That was Alpen just now… so we’ll arrive in Millingen soon. After the first 4 or 5 ways on this train, I was able to predict all the stations. Not only by name, but also by time of arrival. I even can tell how many unbarriered train crossroads there are on the way.
I was wondering, if i was able to code an application, that can navigate me through the university (using a network of connected nodes with coordinates). I was especially wondering about the way, a tree parser could find the shortest way from ‘a’ to ‘b’. I will try to implement that in JAVA when the time has come… perhapy using the mobile engine to make it run on mobile phones.

So long, i’ll go on for a great day.