Tribute to the Ninja

powerstationsunset
When the sun goes down, the ninja comes out.

It’s true, they’re among us. And they’re just
waiting for you to be too curious and make a mistake, and
they’ll just kill you.

If you like to know more about Ninjas it’s a must to see the
podcast episodes at askaninja.com

Meanwhile I managed to uncover some of those nightactive friends
with my infrared spycamera.

The Kitchen Ninja, awaits you in the night, when you’re
sleep-walking.
kitchenninja

The Todana / evil cupboard Ninja…
todananinja

…and the most deadly of them all, the fridge-ambush
Reizoko Ninja, just waiting until you want to get some midnight
food or drink when the service has already finished and then just
cutting your arms off, followed by the head.

reizokoninja

I just mean, watch out, they’re really there and
deadly.
Lucky me, with my knowledge about ninjas I survived this last
night, with my head still on its place.

sunset

Holiday

Cigarderaltesackcigarsmoke22-1
Ahhh… holiday, finally.
My wife is on her way to Japan, visiting her parents, some friends
and a marriage-party.Time for me to let good old times roll… Winking
Try all that cigars that are already waiting for me a long time,
and my expensive bottle of australian red wine that I kept for a
special moment. Bought me that wonderful tub chair
tubchair
directly at the airport after my wife left me alone back here….
Sad

But I guess I’ll find some things to do within those two
weeks, and if it’ll be pure relaxing only.
cigarkingcigarking2

Vocabulary Trainer ProVoc

title
I’ve been looking around for some time now to find the
ultimate vocabulary training application on Mac.
Since my focus goes to the ability to train japanese vocabulary,
the range of applications supporting asian characters is rather
small.
My first finding was Kotoba which is specialized on japanese
kanjis, but it’s more or less a vocabulary card type learning
program, as you enter your vocabulary or load an existing one, and
you view one language and guess the other then review the
answer.ProVoc goes much further, as it has real multimedia abilities, like
audio and even video support.
Additionally you can type the answer even in japanese or any other
input style, or just point and click from multiple choices, or just
enjoy a cinematic slideshow of vocabulary.
And for those of you on the road it is even possible to export your
vocabulary to the iPod including audio and exercise wherever you
are.

Statistics freaks may enjoy the historic view of hopefully getting
better vocabulary testing results. It’s also possible to
train only the last wrong answers. In other words….

…ProVoc is simply great !!!!

BeNuts Ska@StuStaCulum

Right after their big tour in Japan,
the BeNuts finally arrived at Munichs biggest annual student
festival, the “STUdentenSTAdt spectaCULUM”.


Above video is from one of their biggest hits: Ska Summer Night,
filmed during their concert today.
I have to excuse for the bad quality, but I only had my wifes
camera by the hand, which only does QVGA, with horrible 8kHz mono
8bit sound.

The BeNuts started 12 years ago in munich, and have already managed
to be successful on tour in Madrid, Moscow and the big japanese
cities Tokyo, Osaka…

Check out the BeNuts Homepage, buy a CD there and
further checkout the StuStaCulum website.

Virtualization @ MacMini

gentoo7
This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X
release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major
release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating
system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation
software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q
gentoo4-2
Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a
universal binary, which means that it will provide near native
performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like
Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo
Linux Winking as it doesn’t need to translate all the
CPU operations to a foreign architecture.
gentoo2
Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image
from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a
harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.
Q Screenshot 4

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work
perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.
gentoo5

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked
myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I’m not missing a single application that I had used before on
win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own
application if I’ll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.