Martin Geisler Online

I’m visiting my family in Aalborg for a couple of days — when I go to Switzerland next month they wont be just an hours drive away anymore :-)

The plan for this week is to package the stuff in my room and move it up here to my parents. I’ll bring some of it with me to Switzerland, but only the most important stuff. Of course that includes my computer!

Speaking of my computer… I’ve ordered two Seagate 7200.7 SATA NCQ disks each with 120 GB. The plan is to combine them into a RAID 1 mirror so that I will have a reliable place for my photos and other data. In Skejbygård I could just copy my data to my friend Svend’s computer, but that wont work anymore when I’m in Switzerland. And besides: I’ve wanted a RAID system for quite some time now — I believe that the Debian installer can install on a RAID 1 system now.

Just as I have put my site back online and written a single post I see that Janus already has posted about it… impressive! So now I of course just have to try out making a post about his post — using the TrackBack thingy of course!

So far WordPress seems to do what it’s supposed to do: give me a clean platform for writing stuff for the web. I have yet to checkout the post-by-mail feature, but since I like editing my stuff in Emacs I think I might love this thing — for I am of course sending my mails using Gnus from within Emacs :-)

I want to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Nothing much has happened here at GimpsterDotCom, but as usual that only reflects that a lot has happened outside of it.

I have been busy working as a student programmer for the DAIMI:~dIntProg course. There I have worked on making all sorts of (hopefully) interesting assignments that the students will have to try their luck on next year. They are all done in Java and range from simple wrapper classes that enable one to do image manipulation to an MP3 player. The player is the current project, and I’m working on it with Mikkel Krøigård who now also works with the course.

Together with Mikkel and Andreas Danielsen I made a project in our [Cryptography][4]/crypto.html] course. In the project we looked at how one can generate truly random bits, and how a sequence of such bits can be made much longer with the [Blum-Blum-Shub][5] algorithm. You can download the project report (in PostScript and PDF formats) as well as the associated source files.

My favorite pet project, PEL, has not seen as much work lately. This is mostly because nobody so far seems to be using it for anything, but also because it actually works. I have yet to come across an image which the current version of PEL doesn’t handle correctly — if you find such an image, then please send it to me.

That was a little bit about what has been going on lately. Right now I’m with my parents in Aalborg, getting ready to celebrate Christmas tonight. Merry Christmas to you all! -Martin Geisler

[4]: [DAIMI:~ivan | http://www.daimi.au.dk/~ivan/ [5]: WikiPedia:Blum Blum Shub

I came back from my trip to Switzerland a couple of weeks ago. The trip was really great, I finally got so see Stéphanies homeland and I got to meet her family. I felt very welcome in the family and I enjoyed meeting and getting to know everybody. That was the great thing about being away for three weeks: you really get to know the place instead of just being passing through. So now I’m even more excited about my trip next year to ETH Zürich where I’ll be studying for a whole year, beginning in March 2005.

But eventually I had to return from Switzerland, and more importantly, from Stéphanie :-( It was strange to get back and live alone again, but luckily this is only temporary! That helps to keep the mood up.

Work, work, work… (but fun work!)

Another thing that helps on the mood is distraction by work: I have been busy with work ever since I got back to Denmark. I’ve started working for University of Aarhus, where I’ll be developing software for the DAIMI:dIntProg course. This is the very first course that the young future computer scientists get, and now they’ll have to deal with exercises made by me… hehe! :-) No, luckily for them, then it wont be as bad as it sounds, for Michael Caspersen (the lecturer) is looking after me and he will make sure that the exercises don’t get too far fetched :-)

So far it’s been great fun working on these projects — I get to play all day long making small programs. I’ve also worked on some Python code for another project, and so far I find Python to be a very cool language.

Need psychiatric help?

Speaking of working, then my mom has just opened her own website: http://x-psyk.dk/. She is opening a private business where she will be offering psychiatric help in the form of conversations and advice. She has just finished her degree in pedagogical psychology and is now getting ready to work.

That’s it for now… -Martin Geisler

Stéphanie and I have packed our bags — they are many and heavy! — and are now ready to travel to Switzerland. I’m really looking forward to seeing the country, for I’ve never been close to mountains before. When I’ve shown Stéphanie the “mountains of Mols” she was rolling on the floor, laughing… :-) The highest point in Denmark is way lower than the lowest point in Switzerland.

The trip will take about three weeks for me, then I’ll be back in Denmark — Stéphanie stays in Switzerland for now :-( Don’t expect me to answer many mails in the time to come, both because of the trip and because of my harddisk crash.

I wish everybody a great summer!