Semester started

Horrible. I think it is about *** months that I have attended a lecture at university. It is really boring and I don’t know why I am here… Uwe Egly is presenting about Knowledge Based Systems. I am the third time listening in my student career to this lecture. He is talking about the same things for at least 5 years (according to the date of my script)

I had to clean up my office at the DBAI institute today but I think I found a new room with Max Goebel. I hope this will also increase the motivation to finally finish my studies next year…

My battery on the laptop is running low, so I have to finish this short story right now. Btw: In 40 minutes the first meeting of the swa-tutors start…

Long time no see

It’s been a long time since my last post in this blog. There are several reasons for the long interval between my stories. First of all I haven’t had much leisure to report of my life because it was a little stressful and uninteresting. My plans to work hard on my thesis were more optimistic than I thought though it worked for some weeks. I worked quite hard on it but no results came out of all. A little frustrating isn’t it? I have some motivation problems since two weeks though. Wolfgang is going to Seattle in a few days, so the one who gives me positive input in person will be gone for the next months. I hope we establish some regular skype-conference or anything so my motivation will arise again.

Dominic Dale visited our Snooker club last week and this was really a highlight. He did some trickshots and played some frames against some of our players. And here comes the highlight. He sang “Happy Birthday” for Konrad who also was in the club on his birthday. I arranged it with him secretly and Konrad was totally surprised, overwhelmed and a little embarrassed. It was great!

My private life was quite boring the last months, so nothing interesting to tell here about it. I installed a Twitter account, so if you interested in some quick updates during my normal day just visit the page or let inform yourself through your mobile phone. I totally enjoy the idea and I think it is a fantastic way to express yourself in a short way.

And here is a short list of the personal highlights I have “survived” the last 2 months (if you want to have some more information about a special event, just contact me, and I will tell you more ):

• visited Budapest for 3 days
• went to the Volksstimmefest and watched Drahdiwaberl
• was on the 15 reds summer-party in Waldviertel
• watched Attwenger on the Donaukanaltreiben
• was on the Falterfest both days
• Soccer and Choir season started again
• Event season started again

I’ll promise improvement in regularity in this blog for all readers!

Master Thesis project started

This week I started with the preparations for my master thesis I want to finish up during the next months. I started collecting papers, articles and interesting Web Sites for my topic. I also started reading again about Machine Learning, especially Neural Computation and Unsupervised Learning. I downloaded a few books, tutorials and slides from NC courses. I also bought the MATLAB student version, installed it and get used to it again. But I really got angry today as they don’t deliver the neural network toolbox with the student version. And yet more anger to come. They are not able to provide a download on their homepage. They say it’s for free but the download does not work. This really throws me back because I wanted to start some experiments in the middle of the next week.
Besides of all that computer staff I caught a cold the last days, I suppose because of just walking around with a T-shirt the last days. This was also the reason I stayed at home and did not go to the office today just to recover. I was able to read write some things today as well, so I am very happy with the progress of my studies. I think I will go to the office tomorrow again but I am not sure as I don’t feel very well yet and working is o-k at home too if you are just focusing on something.
Yesterday I was also out to watch a movie: Live Free or Die Hard. A wonderful movie stuffed with stupidity. It is about Internet hacking and Computer hacking and most of the scenes are so ridiculous that I had to laugh out really loudly in the cinema.(Shutting down every light in the New York traffic with just logging in to the FBI Web Page and stuff like that) And of course there was another highlight in this movie: Justing Long played side by side to Bruce Willis. And? Bells ringing? Yes, of course Long plays the real Loser in Dodgeball. Thomas and me, we had to laugh tears if we first saw him. But actually during the movie you realise that the guy can roleplay a little. And of course if Thomas and me we are reminded of Dodgeball we straightly went home after the cinema and watched it from our DVD. I suppose we have seen it 10 times this year already.
On the weekend I have again some work to do at the museum, but it shouldn’t be very hard. It’s just the saturday night with the princely family. I am sure it will be hard preparation in the beginning but during the event we all will stay in the background I think…

Events are over (for now)

Uff. I had terrible last two weeks. With 9 Events during 11 days this was the hardest time for me during the last year. I went to bed in the early morning hours during the last 2 weeks. We had RZB and Format summer-cocktail and some weddings as the largest events. I had 51 hours of work this week. But now it is over.
Konrad is back form his 1-year trip to Eugene. I went playing Snooker with him yesterday for 2 hours. We will meet for a poker evening this week again I hope. He visited also Vancouver and Seattle so we had also talked about these 2 wonderful cities. He had the better weather in Seattle so he saw the Mt. Rainier from every spot in the city.
What was also on since the last post? I went to the Donauinselfest the last Sunday very spontaneous because of Simons tip. I saw Shantel and Gogol Bordello which was really good. You can also look at the videos on my youtube account for some impressions.
I had no time to do anything for university besides the oral exam I made last wednesday (of course after an event where I was very tired). But it was good. We all got a 2 on the exam. I will take freetime until the end of the week I think to normalise my sleeping rhythm. After that I will fully concentrate on the production of my thesis. Somehow I feel very good about it and am happy to do it!

Stress Week pure!

The last week really was a horror for me. First of all the Event Marathon in the Liechtenstein Museum started on Tuesday and will go on for the next two weeks. I think I am working at least every second day. About what is going in on in the museum I will tell you some day during this week.

I was very hard working at the university also, so I really got tired on the weekend. I had to work on Friday til midnight but went out rather extensively on saturday.(The first time I went out for about 10 days or so). Marian and me started the evening with listening to my singing teacher Bernd at the Spektakel where we were listening to a wonderful performance of Quintessenz.We were laughing tears, it was fantastic! If you have time on september 18th this year, you must visit it!

Besides all the stress with the VENTex project (Bernhard visited us in our new office at the university on wednesday, where we had a really nice talk) I also do some programming in Haskell which I don’t understand at the moment. Plenty of hours reading documentations and tutorials I am able to write 20 lines of code which don’t work… I rather dislike functional programming, I suppose. I almost solved the third exercise of the “Programmiersprachen” Lab in Ruby in a few hours. I like Ruby especially with my new favourite Editor JEdit. With a few extensions you can use quite powerful though the internal console does not work properly.

Today Wolfgang told me about a good program for making sketches like in Presentation. It’s called Inkscape and as far as I can tell it makes fun to draw things in it. I am currently working on the VENTex documentation and drawing the overall system.

The next few days will again be very hard, 3 days in a row working in the Museum; but there is a light at the end of the tunnel: On sunday there is the picnic of our choir and I am sure this day will be fun!

Father Party and Sportunion Soccer Tournament

On Tuesday there was a big party after our weekly Soccer playing in the Kultur Beisl Morgenstern. I haven’t drunk Vodka for the last two years, but Dominik and Rainer always ordered some rounds of “Stoli” to cheer for the Lelia-Sophie. David had his first day off after his young little daughter came 2 months too early but is in good condition. The mother is also getting better. So this evening rather was a desaster and wednesday was only good for reading my new Ruby book I found. Ruby seems quite interesting for my project and so I will spend some more days in getting practice in it and also to have a little more insight into this programming language. I like that it is kind of declarative.

On Thursday there was a big soccer tournament organised by 1. FC Sportunion Mariahilf. The grass was very good and the organisation was outstanding. There were 11 teams playing each against each other in a 9 minute match. I was playing the first time in the defense (usually I am midfield-offense or even forward) and I liked it. I was sliding around, kicking balls away from the dangerous zone and starting an attack. I would say that for my first time, it was quite o-k. My body now hurts like hell, especially my left lower leg(coming from sliding into the opponent about 20 times and sometimes really got hit hard there), my left tigh and my left butt(especially the muscles. I think it also comes from sliding), my left wrist(this is also coming from sliding, once I must have landed very bad on my hand) my left forearm(in the training before the match, I stole David the ball while sliding at him and he stepped on my forearm ) and my left shoulder(fallen badly once). I commited two fouls (one was seen, the other was very hidden, I just pulled on someone’s arm very hard so he couldn’t reach the ball while running beside him) and I shot one of our four goals. It was against the Ramin-team, this was a real pleasure in the last game of the day. We won against Ramin 2-0. The first goal was one of Simon’s famous half-volleys into the short upper corner of the goal and mine was a long high ball from approx. the middle of the field over the goalie into the net. I must confess it was a beautiful goal Nevertheless we were just second last with 2 victories 4 draws and 4 losses with 4 goals shot and 5 goals accepted. All our matches were very tight as you can see, so next year we will do much better if we train a little on grass for this event.

RoR, Web Services and Watergate

Today a heard an o-k talk about an alternative to WSs. You can find more information here. My curiosity about RoR is growing and growing, so I surely will take a closer look to that during the summer. It should be really be powerful for little-medium Web applications, so perhaps I can use it for my thesis during summer.

Yesterday I heard a talk given by Dr. Henry Kissinger in the Liechtenstein Museum. It was a talk about Russia, the new planned rocket shield and the relationship between USA and Europe. It was the most conservative, republican oriented and arrogant talk I’ve ever been listening to. I can’t believe or understand that this guy has gained the Nobel Peace Price in 1973. He accused the Irans producing or willing to produce atomic weapons and said that the rocket shield in Poland has nothing to do with the Russians. Anyway, he also made clear that President Bush is not stupid. Now we know it for sure!

Flickr organized

I tried to organize my photos on flickr a little better and I hope I did. I added descriptions and more tags to the Vancouver and Seattle photos which I brought online as well. You can find the Collection of all Vancouver and Seattle photos here:

Feel free to comment them if you have a flickr account.

HDD Crash

Two days ago my hdd crashed due to unknown reason. I just plugged it in after my trip to Canada and the US. and it simply didn’t find the partition. After some log reading and a little bit of googling I found a solution that worked out “o-k”. Find the error message and the solution here:

I was not able to mount my hdd manually so I went through dmesg and the syslog and found the following error:

EXT3-fs: journal inode is deleted.

After a little bit of googling and man-file reading I used the following commands to reproduce data:

e2fsck /dev/sdaX

This command is converting the ext3 partition into an ext2. You need to install a new journal after that. This is done with:

tune2fs -j /dev/sdaX

A new journal was created but the folder structure was totally destroyed. Every folder was now in /lost+found/ and had a name like that: #4345221 (which I suppose stands for the inode number). All the folders where “flat” as well. To go through every folder would be hard work, so I just decided to recover the most important files with locating them with find and then copy it out of the /lost+found/ folder. Creating and moving folders was possible after creating the new journal. The next few days I will recover all my files but at the moment I am too lazy.

Finally the GPLv3 seems to be in its final state now. It seems that this will not lead to any problems with existing code under GPLv2, you can simply upgrade your license as far as I understood Richard Stallman’s article.

Eugene and Portland Photos

Attached you’ll find the links to the Photos I made with Konrad in Eugene and Portland. We visited the Columbian River Gorge the last sunday, it was fantastic. The first set points to the photos made in Eugene, the second one contains photos made during our nature trip. You’ll also find a video about Koni.