My name is Martin Geisler, and I am the guy running this website. I am 24 years old and from Denmark, a small country in Northern Europe.

I started studying Computer Science in September 2001 at DAIMI, University of Aarhus but went away to ETH Zürich in Switzerland for a year in 2005/06. Having returned I’m now pursuing a PhD in Cryptography with Ivan Damgård as my advisor.

Work

I’ve worked for Aalborghus Gymnasium (I believe that a gymnasium roughly corresponds to high school in the US.) where I was co-webmaster of their website. The pages are all written in Danish, so it might be a little bit pointless to go and see the pages, unless you should happen to speak Danish, or want to look at the design of the pages which was one of the things I made.

After I started at DAIMI I’ve had the pleasure of being a teaching assistant twice (in the Distributed Systems and Security courses) and a student programmer working on educational materials for the introductional programming course.

Free time

As you can probably tell by now, I enjoy playing with computers. In fact I spend most of my spare time with them. I switched to Linux some time in 1998, and have had a lot of fun with it since. The transparency of the system is the best thing: there’s no stopping you from understanding the system in full detail — except your lack of time :-) I find the [Debian distribution][debian] to be just great.

I’ve received a lot of very positive feedback on a little script I’ve written, called PHP Weather. I must say, that I never imagined that it would grow into what it has become today — thanks everybody! When I think back to when it all started, it’s kind of strange. I just tried to make a script that could parse a METAR — and then it evolved from there. The morale must be this: if you have an idea, then code! Even if you don’t think it’s something big, then suddenly other people discover what you have made, and then it becomes something big.

Another thing which has brought much good feedback with it is my tutorial on PHP. It covers basic PHP and should be good for anybody who doesn’t know much about programming.

If I’m not sitting at my computer or doing homework, then I might be reading or listening to music. I love the Lord of the Rings triology both as books and as films, atmospheric music by Enya, and best of all, spending time with my wonderful girlfriend.

I try to digitally sign my outgoing mail (using this (7E45DD38) GnuPG key) and would of course like incoming mail to be signed and if necessary encrypted. I would be very happy to meet with people for keysigning, just drop me a mail if you happen to be around the Århus area. Send your mail to mgeisler@mgeisler.net.

You want an image of me? Okay, here ye’ go:

To answer just a few questions: Yes, that is me riding on a bike and I’m also the photographer. No, I’m not actually doing the paddling, that was done by stunt driver Andreas. Yes, it is actually Mikkel that can be seen trying to catch up with us to the left. And yes, this bike ride was part of our project on random bits in our Cryptography course (it was the “getting there in time for the presentation”-part).