Tobias Schlemmer's Website

Moved to St. Gallen

Tobias — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 13:50:18 +0000

I moved to St. Gallen last week. The last five years in Buchs SG have been a wonderful time. St. Gallen is only a stone’s throw away but a consequential move for me. So far I’m very happy to be here and feel already like home in my new flat which has by the way an amazing view over the city.

I would like to thank everyone who helped moving and being at the house warming party for welcoming me to St. Gallen.

SSD harddrive speed after 1 year usage

Tobias — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 14:06:21 +0000

Still as fast as it was 1 year ago:

SMTP Port 25 for swisscom customers blocked

Tobias — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:58:28 +0000

I haven’t been able to send e-mails through my local mail client since today. I received an error message which guided me to this Swisscom webpage. Swisscom blocks all SMTP connections on port 25 if they don’t connect to a Swisscom mail provider like e.g. bluewin.

Swisscom has started operating an additional spam filter on the DSL network. This filter now also checks e-mail from free e-mail providers such as GMX, Google Mail and Hotmail if the e-mail is sent from a Swisscom connection … As a result of the introduction of the new spam filter, e-mail that is sent with SMTP authentication via port 25 can no longer be sent.

So I changed the SMTP port in my mail client from 25 to 587. But the server didn’t accepted the port. Thanks to rinetd a port redirection is installed in a few seconds and everything worked fine again.

So I hope spam gets less in the future and the trouble for other people (who may have more problems like me with this huge change) pays off.

Breaking News: Anatolia express website online

Tobias — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:10:01 +0000

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

PC upgrade: Windows 7 + SSD harddrive

Tobias — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:35:46 +0000

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.

geo twittering – the twitter / maps mashup

Tobias — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:32:24 +0000

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).

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.

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

Anatolien Express En Vélo

Tobias — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:24:42 +0000

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

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

Todays webtip: Jamendo

Tobias — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:42:33 +0000

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!

My 1st marathon – Bonn (DE)

Tobias — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:05:07 +0000

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

MySQL-Query: Howto select upcoming birthdays

Tobias — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:14:14 +0000

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) ...