Many of the popular existing social networks have a certain focus; from a German perspective this would be MySpace for bands/music, StudiVZ or Facebook for the student life and Xing for the business networking. Based on these distinctions, they also attract different social groups. Though this diversification and competition itself should be considered useful for the end user, it leads to separation. Most of us will know the situation, where some real-life friends are on one social network and some are on another. As the existing networks do not talk to each other, the only solution to stay in contact with all your friends, is to join a number of popular social networks:

Another issue arises, when one of your social networks decides to change its policies in an unacceptable way. Currently you have two choices in this situation: leave the network and loose contact to those friends or accept the uncomfortable changes and for example show more information publicly than you intent to.

The image described above changes dramatically if we look at how many people with their web-based e-mail accounts. One friend is registering with GMail, another one with his ISP and yet another one (a geek like me ) is running his own e-mail server. Yet noone wonders that UserA@gmail.com can send a mail to User2@t-online.de! And even that geek renting a server or running his own infrastructure can obviously communicate with both of them. Should one of the e-mail providers turn rogue, a user can just get a new e-mail account at a different provider and still stay in contact with all his friends and colleagues in his address book.

Wouldn’t this be nice for social networking?!

Well, this is basically what OneSocialWeb (OSW) provides! Based on the communication protocol XMPP (formerly Jabber), which is standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), OSW provides a social networking experience, which is very similar to web-mail. Individuals (like me) or commercial organisations (like GMX or GMail) can run their own social networking platform and the individual end users registered at these platforms can freely communicate with each other. OSW supports the known ways of communication in social networks, like creating realtionships between people (“friend”, “follow”, …) and exchanging updates on current activities. Similar to e-mail, the end user can just switch the social networking provider, without loosing contact to his friends.

If you are interested in trying out this new approach to social networking, write me an e-mail or a comment, and I can create a testing account on http://social-one.de/, which is a test platform without commercial intent, hosted on a rented server.
Currently there are three ways of interacting with the system:

• A traditional web based client (http://social-one.de/), which would be familiar to most users coming from traditional social networks. As this is still in alpha stage, it does not provide the full functionality, yet.
• A graphical client for Android devices, which I couldn’t test so far, as my old Android 1.5 is not supported. (If anyone can report on this, please write a comment)
• A text based client on the console, which is not exactly the most convenient way of interacting, but it is the client supporting most of the current functionality of OSW.

I hope this is a helpful introduction to federated social networking. Many thanks to all the developers around the OSW project, you’re doing a great job!

Cheers
Tim

The next afternoon, Martin and I met at the beergarden in Leinfelden. After a laid back late brunch we went to Vaihing to get drinks for the party at Flowrider’s garden that night. At the mall we stumbled into a store selling nonsense gadgets like Hawaii flower garlands and soap bubble toys, of course we couldn’t resist and bought a bunch of the garlands and bubble toys for the party.
As things already got late, we drove straight to Flowrider’s party in the fields behind Vaihingen. The usual crowd barbecued and partied all night, getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes from the nearby pond.

Another big luck was the beautiful weather I had for the whole stay, just as I arrived at the airport on my way back home, it started raining again.

Cheers
Tim

Bilbao Airport:

Guggenheim Museum:

The City:

I’m sorry I haven’t updated this site in the last few weeks, but I was pretty busy settling in at my new town.

Let’s do this in a chronological way. After doing my thesis-presentation, I had three days left to get my bags packed. With a little overweight, I left from Stuttgart airport, boarding a direct flight to Atlanta, GA.
As I had slept pretty bad the night before, and just had a few short naps on the plane, I was pretty worn out by the time I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson. The long immigration procedure and the double checks of my luggage didn’t really relax me either.
After I picked up my rental-car outside the airport, I made it to Kristi’s place rather easily, meeting her again after three years. She had invited me to stay at her place for the first few days, which was soooo helpful! (Thanks so much Kristi!)

During this first week I managed to find a nice shared flat, just about five minutes away from my new workplace, Engineous, Inc.
My new flatmates, Zack Zach and Ben, are two really friendly, laid back Americans, both from South Carolina. Ben works as a webdesigner while Zack Zach studies epidemiology. We share a nice kitchen connected to a well equipped livingroom (Cable, XBox, RC-Heli,Stereo) and two bathrooms. Amongst the amenities are a washer, a dryer, a mircowave, an ice-cube-making fridge and a really nice “Lean-Mean-Fat-Reducing-Grilling-Machine”. In the appartment block we also got a swimming-pool, a tennis-court and barbecues in the garden.

My workplace at Engineous is really nice as well, a small professional team and I got my own cliche cubicle!
The last few days I was pretty immobile, as I had returned my rental car. To get to work, Ben gave me a ride in the mornings and in the evnings. As America is really organised around cars (drive-thru-everything), I was looking for a used car. Last weekend Zack Zach and I were driving around the area, looking at some offers I had found on craigslist. In the end we found a 2000 Toyota Corolla, which is said to be one of the most reliable cars over here. As I didn’t have an insurance yet, Paul (another friend), whose insurance would cover any car he’s driving in, brought the car to my place, where it sat the last days, as I was waiting for my insurance to kick in. After getting all the needed paperwork together, I took “Heart-of-Gold” (her name) for a ride and got my the registration plates just today!

Actually I just came back from a round of tennis with Ben, though I lost 0:4 it went way better than I had expected after a break of ten years or more!

Well, so far for now, I’ll try to keep the updates coming more regularly.
Cheers, Tim.

As I haven’t written much in a while, I’ll just give a brief overview of the last events.

As the new version of Ubuntu was released this month, I organised a small release party in Stuttgart. Though this was quite spontaneous, we ended up with a group of six Ubuntu interested people.

A few days later Kathi and I randomly got to watch a pre-worldcup soccer theatre performance in front of the new castle in Stuttgart. Especially the pyrotechnics were really impressive!

I also started working on my assignment, focussing on evolutionary optimisation of rule based designs. Ask me in person if you want a more detailed description of this.

So far for this update, cheers …
Tim.

After learning for nearly 2 1/2 months now, my mind goes on strike. Words start to become meaningless rows of letters after a while. There’s hardly any difference between my brain and my dessert anymore!
Little more than a week and I’m done for this semester, finally! Hopefully the weather will be more like spring by then.

I’ll try to wobble some more nondestructive testing into my jelly-brain.
Cheers, Tim.

To let you know what I’m doing at the uni, I posted a few pictures of the laboratories for non-destructive testing.

This is me, pictured by an infraredcamera; I guess those structures at the side of my forehead are veins.

These are the inner structures of my mobile-phone, x-rayed from behind.

The left picture shows a standard photo of the nosepart of some wing. The right shows the same part in ultrasound exited thermography, where the defect (a small crack between two rivets) shows up in white because it radiates heat.

Aside this we are preparing for the final presentation of our airliner-design and the last few days I started preparing for the tests coming up in the next months.

G’day everyone,
Tim.

Lately I managed to decide on a new monitor. After reading quite a few tests, I chose to order a Hyundai L90D+

replacing my old blurry Eizo T662 tube, which I had bought used three or four years ago.

It’s amazing how well logistics can work! It took less than 24 hours from clicking the “buy” button till the delivery guy rang at my door.

Aside that not much new to tell, my friends and I finished the work at the airliner design contest and handed in a report of 160 pages. After the final presentation I will put the paper online, for those interested in our work.

So far, have a good time!
Tim

Once again there are exams to be written, so I’m sitting at my kitchen-table, learning for Space Systems at the moment.
Fluid Dynamics, Flight Mechanics/Flight Control and Thermodynamics will follow later.
A nice thing this semester: there will be 2 1/2 FREE weeks between the last exam and the next semester!

Cheers everybody!
Tim.

Aside the studies I also got a job at one of the aeronautics institutes in the “leighter than air”-group. My first assignment is the design of a gauge, measuring the momentum and force at a small propeller engine.

Thought the weeks are quite busy, it finally feels like I’m getting somewhere, somewhere right.
Cheers everybody,
Tim.

Well, enought of the past, I’ll be boarding any moment.
On the road again, taking the long way home.

Thanks everybody for this nice time,
Tim.

Oh bright future!