Raphael Brand, Hannes Pernpeintner and I presented our semester project yesterday on the Media Night at our university. It was very nice to met some interested people, to answer their questions and to show what we did during the last four months. Thanks.

During this summer semester, two friends of mine and I made a student project called TechTrends. TechTrends is a web application that lets you search for articles and trends in the field of computer science. We crawl posts from Reddit and Hackernews and provide an intelligent search on them. You can type in a key-word (e.g. bitcoin) and get a timeline showing you when articles for this topic have been published.

The question is easy: How can I visualize the track of a KML file on Google Maps via JavaScript?

Optimizing the images of a web page is easy and the best way to speedup the site. On the basis of the famous book “Even Faster Web Sites” by Steve Souders, Annette Landmesser and I made a small presentation for an university course called Development of Rich Media Systems thought by Jakob Schröter. The presentation contains some general patterns and practices for lossy and non-lossy optimization. Enjoy.

Parsing HTML is easy. Libraries like Beautiful Soup give you an compact and straight forward interface to process websites in your preferred programming language. But this is only the first step. The interesting question is: How to extract the meaningful content of HTML?

Sometimes you need to collect data - for visualization, data-mining, research or whatever you want. But collecting data takes time, especially when time is a major concern and data should be collected over a long period. Typically you would use a dedicated machine (e.g. a server) to do this, rather then using your own laptop or PC to crawl the internet for weeks. But setting up a server can be complicated and time consuming - nothing you would do for a small private project.

I spend the last few weeks in Aix-en-Provence, a small town in the very south of France close to Marseille. My girlfriend is currently studying there as a part of her master-degree. Since the weather is not so bad there (especially compared to Germany and Sweden), I got the chance to shot some good photos. Enjoy.

Nachdem ich nun mittlerweile wieder zurück in Deutschland bin, ist es Zeit für den obligatorischen ERASMUS-Bericht. Anbei findet ihr das PDF für meine Hochschule, aber auch ein paar persönliche Meinungen von mir zu den Vorlesungen die besucht habe. Ich hoffe es hilft euch.

After almost 5 months Linköping University in Sweden, it’s time for me to leave and go home again. The tickets for the ferry are already booked as well as a cheap hostel in the middle of Hamburg - I think this stop will be fun.

Last week, my new courses for the second period of this semester started. Since one of the courses is about multicore and GPU programming, I wanted to prepare myself a little bit. As a small practice for our first lab next Thursday, I implemented the Mandelbrot set in Java. I used tasks to draw the picture in parallel and made some measurements.