Command & Conquer 1 for free!

Hi folks,

in a phase of nostalgia I viewed some videos on youtube of old pc-games I played when I was younger - and the first Command & Conquer part Tiberian Dawn was one of my favourite. Of course the dos version with just 320x200 pixels ;-) But it was the perfect real-time strategy game in those days. But I think everybody knows it so why talking much about it - you can play it now for free. In 2006 it was re-released in the 'The first decade' compilation pack - even the SVGA windows version including a patch to work under XP/Vista. Then in September 2007, EA released these iso images for free downloading on their servers. So what are you waiting for - go and get it!

Command and Conquer Gold Download

Firefox 3 is out!

The final reason of Firefox 3 is out and waiting to be downloaded. I have just installed it and I'm fully happy with it. Looks better, seems to be even more stable than version 2 and alone the new "AwesomeBar" makes it worth to get it. Since Firefox 0.8 it's the only browser I use and I'm really a fan of this (in my opinion) best existing browser. It has also broken a world record by being downloaded more than 7 million times in the first 24 hours!

Download Firefox
Firefox Worldrecord

Diploma Thesis

That's just a quick post to tell what I'm doing now. I found finally an interesting diploma thesis at which I have been working for the last two weeks already. It's official title is "Development of a Power-Aware Rate Controller for H.264 Video Encoder" and it's located at the Chair for Embedded Systems at University Karlsruhe. My mentor seems to be really nice and to be motivated to help me completing my work successfully. I have 6 months to finish it and hopefully this length of time is enough. I was surprised how complex this H.264 Encoding Standard is and how many complicated steps needs to be accomplished to encode a video with good quality and less need for memory. I have read two complete books and several papers during the last weeks and also dived in the C Code of the standard implementation of this encoder but understanding the rate controller process/steps seems to be really hard. I think this will last but let's see...
The good thing is that when I come home I can watch football the whole evening :-) Or I go to a place with public viewing when the German football team plays. The European Soccer Championship is really exciting and I'm curious what will happen... :-)