SUMMERJAM

Next weekend we will go chillin' and party on the Summerjam 07! Really looking forward to see Sizzla, Beenie Man, Anthony B, T.O.K. and all the others on stage. Keep your fingers crossed for jamaican-like weather in the cologne bay ;)

Placebo Concert

...was great! Good sound, nice people, a great show. Nothing more to say. I think they had some Martin TW1 on the rig. Great devices!

PS 3 HandsOn

This weekend we had the chance to try a Sony Playstation 3 and I'd like to share my view on this device.
We connected the PS3 via HDMI to a 40'' full HD LCD TV and the quality of the game graphics and the blue ray movies was absolute impressive. We played the Gran Tourism concept demo and it's really hard to tell the difference between a real race and this game.
After watching three blue ray movies, you don't want to see any DVD again. And switching back to the good old TV signal makes you feel sick.
I also liked the openness of the platform. You can install yellow dog linux on it and you can plug in nearly every USB device.
We connected the PS3 via wireless LAN, and we got demos, trailers and updates for free. Overall the hole concept feels better then the XBOX360. Unnfortunatly I had no time for checking out some BD-J examples (I've seen cool demos on the JavaOne) but I will try that next time. XBOX360 and HD-DVD: Get lost! ;)

New Toys

Last week I spend some money on fun stuff and I bought the Gyrotor indoor helicopter from Silverlit as well as the X-Twin rc-plane. I first tried the Gyrotor in my living room and it's pretty hard to control. It took roughly three hours training to get a feeling for this helicopter, but now it's really fun to fly it inside. You should have plenty of space in your room, otherwhise you will hit the walls more often then you wish ;)
This weekend I had the chance to try the helicopter and the X-Twin plane outside. It turned out that the gyrotor is a pure "inside" toy. The range of the RC is pretty limited and it's quite unstable to fly outside.
But the X-Twin is a real cool thing for the outside world. It's easy to fly, and the battery is good enough to play up to 15 minutes! I really enjoyed that!!
Upate: Check that heli flying in my office ;)

Interview about JavaFX Mobile

Here is an interesting interview with Jacob Lehrbaum about JavaFX Mobile. Besides the disturbing background noices, you can find out that Sun really wants to sell a complete integrated software stack for mobile devices to the handset manufactures. Let's see if there's really the need for another platform on heterogenous mobile market....

Street View

I just tried out Google Street View and it's pretty impressive. I found the diner where I had an excellent dinner as well as the hotel we stayed and many other places in San Francisco. Unbelievable that this runs in a browser without any additional software installation. Excellent job!