Alright, I’m fed up with it. I have never seen any TV-Program from DDR, german democratic republic till 1989, in german public TV since 1989. The german public TV (ARD and ZDF + local TV stations) prevented us bill paying people from seeing movies from eastern germany for nearly 16 years! I don’t belief that there is any censorship, but I ask a very simple question here: Why did the german public TV broadcast only old movies from west-germany?

The german public TV is paid by everyone who owns a TV. In return the public TV-stations have to produce program that is relevant to the public. Its programm has to contain cultural, political and educational program. I ask again: why do we westgerman watchers not get the experience of the east-german TV, but only of old westgerman Heimatfilme, Schwarzwaldklinik und Lindenstrasse? I demand DDR TV-Program on ARD and ZDF!

Professor Brinkmann and his Schwarzwaldklinik staff

Conclusion: people from east-germany have a more rich mass-media experience than people in the west. They know the east and the west german TV-Programme in opposition to the west-german people. Btw: I also never have seen ANY picture of art from the DDR, wether on TV nor at the museum. Why?

A whole cultural era of TV-Program is withhold to watchers from west-germany. West-german watchers only know west TV-Program (ARD, ZDF, Heimatfilm, die Schwarzwaldklinik mit Professor (Prof.) Brinkmann). West-german watchers never had seen ANY movie form the DDR. And that is a real shame!

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenters on this blog! I have to defuse this article. I have never seen any DDR movie to the best time (in fact I haven’t seen any), or at the biggest brodcast-station - but there are some! Click here and search after DDR or Defa:
http://www.mdr.de/tv/programm/
http://www.rbb-online.de/fernsehen/programm/
http://www.ard-digital.de/

Alright, I’m fed up with it. I have never seen any TV-Program from DDR, german democratic republic till 1989, in german public TV since 1989. The german public TV (ARD and ZDF + local TV stations) prevented us bill paying people from seeing movies from east germany for nearly 16 years! I don’t belief that there is any censorship, but I ask a very simple question here: Why did the german public TV broadcast only old movies from west-germany?

The german public TV is paid by everyone who owns a TV. In return the public TV-stations have to produce program that is relevant to the public. Its programm has to contain cultural, political and educational program. I ask again: why do we westgerman watchers not get the experience of the east-german TV, but only of old westgerman Heimatfilme, Schwarzwaldklinik und Lindenstrasse? I demand DDR TV-Program on ARD and ZDF!

Professor Brinkmann and his Schwarzwaldklinik staff

Conclusion: people from east-germany have a more rich mass-media experience than people in the west. They know the east and the west german TV-Programme in opposition to the west-german people. Btw: I also never have seen ANY picture of art from the DDR, whether on TV nor at the museum. Why?

A whole cultural era of TV-Program is withhold to watchers from west-germany. West-german watchers only know west TV-Program (ARD, ZDF, Heimatfilm, die Schwarzwaldklinik mit Professor (Prof.) Brinkmann). West-german watchers never had seen ANY movie form the DDR. And that is a real shame!

This is an amazing idea.

Have made world’s crappest programming language: Automat. I’ve just tried to mention BrainFuck, the world’s simplest programming language but as I’m using a university machine to make this post it aborted the browser and logged an illegal usage complaint. I will put the ammended link here when I have access to an uncensored machine: brainfuck. Suffice to say that my own language is nothing by comparison. It stinks. I have at the very least become a little more familiar with PHP.

To say that Stephen Wolfram has his spoon in a lot of soup pots is a bit of an understatement. Now you can take a little bit of mathematics with you everywhere you go with his algorithmically generated ringtones. Visit the site, and generate your own tones in a variety of different genres. Truthfully, the rock is not very rocking, but show me a ringtone that is.

As Marc Thiele just tells me there are almost no tickets left for the Flashforum Tour Events in Düsseldorf (Sep 21st) and Zürich (Sep 26th). So if you are still deliberating whether to attend (for just 25 Euro a ticket, that’s actually a no-brainer) - you should get your ticket now - because today is the last day of the advance sale.

It’s nice to visit boingboing and read that MIT researchers had a project going in your hometown of twohundredsomething thousand inhabitants:

Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity. Because it is possible to simultaneously ‘ping’ the cell phones of thousands of users – thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time – these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens.

press release
project page

I stumbled over a Wikipedia entry named “Internet phenomenon” by chance. If you’ve ever had to try to explain phenomena like 1337-speak to people who don’t use the web for anything but e-mail, you’ve probably wondered where to start in order to describe the unique manner of propagation of memes on the internet.
What I like about the Wikipedia article however, is not the explanatory paragraph. What I like is the categorized list of dozens if not a hundred of past examples of websites, videos, pictures and ideas that quickly spread around the world, including Apple’s Ellen Feiss commercial, Limecat, Mahir Cagri and many, many other things, complete with short descriptions of the meme in question and links. As such, the article both provides entertainment and serves as an interesting and descriptive historical outlook on online culture.
link

Two of the best software synthesizers ever, ReBirth and RubberDuck, are now completely free. I tortured many a roommate with my awful ReBirth tracks in the 90’s. I called the effort Brain Fusion, then Kodama, then Kid Icarus (whoops, already…

Macromedia has officially released Flash Professional 8 today so finally you can download the 30-day trial version and get your hands wet.

And if you haven’t done so yet here’s your chance to quickly update your Flash Player to the latest version:

As promised I have uploaded the source files for my recent experiments and demos, so you can dissect and improve them yourself:

ColorMatrix (Source)

Depth Of Field Simulation (Source)

Bubblegum (Source)

Aqua Glass Effect (Source)

Today I’ve got something not very spectacular but nevertheless quite useful: a demo of my ColorMatrix class. The new ColorMatrixFilter is a very versatile tool that allows for many color manipulations, many more than the good old ColorTransform was capable of. The only problem with the filter is that in order to use it you will have to feed it with a ColorMatrix which in pratice is an array of 20 elements. Not really the most intuitive way, but that’s the price for its flexibility.

Fortunately there’s lots of documentation all over the web on how those ColorMatrices work and what numbers you have to put where in order to achieve a certain effect like adjusting the contrast, creating a greyscale version or roating the hue of an image. The ColorMatrix class takes care for all the matrix operations that are necessary to achieve those effects. I will publish the sourcecode as soon as Flash 8 is officially released. For the moment here’s a little demo of some of its possibilities: