GND42 published his brand new website about the “Anatolia Express 2009″ also known as “Race Across ANatolia”. Grab it while its hot!

Last weekend I upgraded my 3 year old PC (Windows XP, Core2Duo E6600, 4GB Ram, Nvidia 7900GS) and put in a new SSD hard drive (Samsung SSD PB22-J MLC, 128GB) and installed Windows 7 (Professional 64bit, English) on it.

The SSD is nearly 3 times faster than my old Western Digital traditional hard drive. But some people say that the speed gets worse by the time. So we will see.

I skipped Windows Vista, but Windows 7 RC impressed by his performance and stability. And Windows 7 does too.

• It recognized all hardware and installed actual drivers.
• Booting and shutting down are extremely fast.
• Working on the desktop is real fun.
• There is so far only one program which didn’t worked, so I installed the Windows XP Mode and now it integrates seamlessly into the Windows 7 desktop.

In conclusion, I have to say that it feels like an new PC.

Sorry, but I need to do an extra post about the “geo twittering” I told you about yesterday. Why? Because it’s actually pretty cool.
At our first tours, we created the corresponding google maps after the tour. At our last tours, we used GPS trackers (Christain & Jan) and postet them as we have had an internet connection. But now in Anatolia, we dont expect to have internet so regulary. So we tried twitter:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

But the most cool feature ist that you can update your status via mobile. Just send an SMS to a twitter number, and they update your status. You can also change your location, but you dont have a location history. To solve this problem, we use the status update as location history. So we try to send our GPS coordinates at least once a day (maybe more often) and a status upate (short roundup of the day) via mobile (have a look at my twitter page to see what I mean).

<technical stuff>
Now I’m grabbing the latest status updates via the twitter api, parse the result via regexp for the coordinates and the status message and create a javascript file where I write all the selected data into.
Christian includes this file into his OpenStreetMap map. And shows the data as points on the map.
</technical stuff>

Now you can go to this map and track were we have been today and the days before.
Including time/date and the roundup of the day. You can also switch between different layers (yahoo, bing or google maps) and select the view you like most.

geo twittering, it’s eays as this.

• Geo twittering – map where we are

• flights booked
• trainings performed
• bike pimped
• geo twittering set up
• get vaccinations

Anything forgotten? Don’t hope so. T’bilisi here we come!

For more infos visit http://gnd42.blogspot.com/.

It happens very rarely that I post webtips. Because I’m not that kind of guy who’s posting youtube videos in his weblog. But today I found a real piece of jewellery: Jamendo.

Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses. Share your music, download your favorite artists! Free, Legal, Umnlimited.

You don’t need no login and don’t need do accept licences. Just select your favorite genre, listen to the songs and download the album if you enjoy it. Or buy the CD from the artist website if you realy like it.
There is also a very wide scope of music, e.g. 8-bit lagerfeuer by pornophonique: Very cool music in 8-bit style with some locals in “lagerfeuer romantik” with songs like: “take me to the bonuslevel because i need an extralife” or “space invaders”.

Needless to say that it has all the web2.0 features like: widgets for your own weblog, playlists to share or commenting and rating of the artists.

Enjoy it!

Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

Eminem – Loose Yourself (Intro)

Sunday, April 20th 2008, Bonn (Germany):

• km 0 – start
• km 11 – I found the 3:59:59 p(e)ace maker
• km 21 (1:56) – stopover at McDonalds (the only toilet on the way)
• km 25 – it’s getting harder with every kilometer
• km 28 – the hardest part (12 minutes for this only kilometer)
• km 29 – turned on the iPod – the viewers on the track have done a great job so far
• km 32 – self-catering in the bag was broken, very adhesive affair
• km 37 – cramp in the calf, so from now on only very small steps
• km 42 – it’s done – finished in 4h and 19 minutes – I’m immortal

In a recent software project I needed to select the upcoming birthdays of the
users. But now I detected a problem with the turn of the year. After some time
of researching and trying, I found a stable solution. For your convenience,
here’s the code:
SET @today = '2007-12-20';
SELECT
user_id,
birthday,
DATE_FORMAT(@today, '%Y') - DATE_FORMAT(birthday, '%Y') + IF(
DATE_FORMAT(birthday, "%m%d") < DATE_FORMAT(@today, "%m%d"), 1, 0) AS new_age,
DATEDIFF(birthday + INTERVAL YEAR(@today) - YEAR(birthday) +
IF(DATE_FORMAT(@today, "%m%d") > DATE_FORMAT(birthday, “%m%d”), 1, 0) YEAR,
@today) AS days_to_birthday
FROM users
HAVING days_to_birthday < 14
ORDER BY days_to_birthday ASC;
And you can easily extend it to limit the result to some specific ages. This is
very useful if you want only the big O coming up:
...
HAVING days_to_birthday < 14 AND new_age IN (10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100)
...