Dutch detour

We made it to the internal SFB689 spintronics workshop in Niederalteich, though barely in time. The origin of the delay is so bizarre that it just has to be reported: on the motorway, some sort of heavy duty vehicles were transporting two tram cars across the Bavarian province. That's not so strange in itself, but one of them seemed strangely familiar to me, with a logo "HTM" and a destination displayed as "Station HS". Who had the crazy idea to give a Dutch tram car from Den Haag an excursion into the Danube hinterland?!!! Anyway, see for yourself...

Assembly line physics

After more than three days of non-stop exam grading (~130 students, 10 questions, ~35% completed), it was time for a break. I mean, at some point I might actually be frustrated enough to really run off to the McDonalds in Maximliansstraße and get some blank job application forms, and I think this might not really go down well with the faculty administration. (Not only with the administration, of course. :) If I find the time, I'll have to place a reference solution online, since most of the questions were so easy to solve. But to be fair, some people did rather well, so not all is lost. (And since the exam was designed to be "too long for available time", it's probably normal that some questions are just not answered.) Next stop then was (among some other things) preparation of the internal spintronics workshop next week in Niederalteich monastery. Some of the guys in our group have to give a presentation, so we've been discussing the slides...

Nanotubes, nanoonions, nanooysters

Thanks to the arXive blog, another gem of recent preprints has surfaced. Multiwall carbon nanotubes, when irradiated, turn into onion-like balls - and the pressures at the center of these balls can be so large that the carbon structure even crystallizes into diamond at the center! See the original paper for more details... Update... Why is this cool? Well, just imagine what pressures one needs to grow artificial diamonds. In nature diamonds crystallize somewhere around 50bar, and the process takes literally ages. Nanotubes are grown in the lab pretty quickly, and the astonishing thing is that intramolecular forces alone can generate such extreme conditions.

Photo galleries offline

For those who have not noticed yet, the photo gallery server at www.ostpforte.de is down. For the technically minded, it failed to reboot after a kernel update (because of CVE-2010-3301). Since the box is physically in a different city in the basement of a building where I have no key, this may take a while. Well, at least I then have some time to sort the Korea photos from summer...

Piled higher...

Have I already mentioned that I'm (as many people around the world at university labs) a big fan of Jorge Cham's PhD Comics?! Right now I'm sitting in the office for a late shift of grading the big exam, and all that comes to my mind is the cartoon series on Cecilia grading undergrad homework... :)

Database mania

Somehow about every bigger software package nowadays wants to use a full-scale database backend. Just after I kicked amarok out of my box, now I realized that digikam-1.4.0 actually depends on an existing mysql installation. It's nowhere in the documentations (yet?), but in hindsight the CMakeLists.txt in the main directory is pretty explicit in its wishes. Now what is then the point of using an abstraction layer like qt-sql, you say? Well, surprise, there is another bug where the qsqlite plugin just not seems to suffice. Now at runtime. I shared the resulting fishy feeling with the penguins running my chroot compilers nice and quietly in the background. The hair-rising result is that digikam-1.4.0 only starts up if qt-sql supports both sqlite and mysql...

Things to do...

Somehow the last days of the week already became pretty busy. How did I spend Friday? Well, planning with an engineer the renovation of offices and discussing in detail the locations of ethernet sockets, cable ducts, ceiling lamps, ... Then, starting to read and commenting on two work-in-progress theses of >70 pages each. And finally, nearly finishing this stupid bachelor exam. One more question to go (that's something for this evening), and then follows tomorrow in the office printing and stapling the sheets. (And locking the resulting pile of paper away properly. :o). The personalized cover sheets with names and matriculation numbers are already finished. Some colleagues have promised to help as "invigilators", some more help will still be organized, and monday at noon this should be done and over with. I just hope that nothing was messed up with the participant lists, and that someone from the administration can be reached monday morning in case of unexpected problems with formalities...