Finally it is done. I’ve written all exams I could participate this semester. And I know that I passed everything except the last exam, because the final grades haven’t been published yet, but I’m quite confident. So for now the holidays could commence - well if tomorrow would not be the first lecture of the next semester (deja vu anyone?!). I guess that’s the price you’ve got to pay when you attend courses at a pseudo-elite university like the RWTH.

Never the less my job as a tutor for the lecture datastructures & algorithms starts in the next week and I’m excited about it.

Well at least I was able to sleep long in the past five free days I had. Well except for tonight… Did I already mention that Nano has the worst timing ever?!

Imagine the following situation:

You’re studying in a foreign country. You invite a group of your friends from your home to visit you in this particular country. Then, after they come to Aachen after a four hour flight and a ninty minutes trainride, you decide to take them out for supper in the city. There you introduce them to your fellow student (whose role I take in this insane plot). Well after having supper and drinking a bit you finally come to the conclusion that everyone is really exhausted, so you decide to dissolve the group and bring the guys to your appartment where they will stay for the next few days.

But when you arrive in front of your appartment-building you notice, that you forgot your keys inside your appartment. Well, crappy situation but no need to despair. You have been intelligent enough to deposit two extra keys. One is with another fellow student who - by an ironic temper of destiny - isn’t home and the other one is with a person that you even can not get a hold on after several minutes on the cellphone…

Well, long story short. I’m really tired, because I had to share my tiny appartment with four spanish guys because Nano is to stupid to bring his keys with him…

- Michael, tormented.

Hi everybody.

I’m a german student in the field of computer science and industrial psychology at the RWTH Aachen since 2004.

I am twenty-five years of age and, that of I am quite grateful, haven’t started growing hair out of my ears like most old people do. The most distinct attribute of mine is probably also the most annoying one: my odd sense of humor in combination with me not knowing about adequacy.

Right now, at my third year at the RWTH I work at the “Zentrum für Lern- und Wissensmanagement” institute of the RWTH Aachen. My job - at least at the moment - consists of developing a middleware solution for a joint research project governed by the “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung” from the field autonomous microproduction using highly flexible flows of material. Also I work at the “Lehr- und Forschungsgebiet für theoretische Informatik 1″ as a tutor for the lecture “Datastructures & Algorithms”.

My personal fields of interest expand from music and embracing nature to all aspects of software engineering and computer graphics theory as well as a few domains of mathematics.

My future ambitions besides obtaining my diploma are to read and travel much. I tried to find the time to travel to China in this year, but like things look like right now it’s not gonna happen. Better luck next year I guess.

Hi again. I’m back again. After the exam today there are only two more to go and until now I didn’t fail any of them - what is very nice

While chatting with some fellow students I got the inspiration for this new ugly code duckling from Clemens. This one was not commited by any of my students, but was found somewhere in the internet. I can’t recall Clemens mentioning where he found this snippet, but I think it is worth being published here. Enjoy!

int getRandomNumber()
{
return 4; /* chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random. */
}

(I’ve been told via a comment that this source has it’s origin at www.xkcd.com. Because the anonymous contributer did not leave a valid e-mail address I deleted his comment.)

This page features a list of the projects I am currently or have been previously working on. More detailed descriptions are made on the project pages themselves.

Current Projects:

• Daidalos Engine
• SAT Solver

Hi there,

Neglecting one point, that I have to discuss with my professor in psychology first, I patched up a first version of my layout for the experimental set-up we need to create this semester to gain the admission to the written exam in psychology.

Because many people amongst my clique yet do not have a certain conception of how to structure and layout the set-up, I upload the PDF and the LaTeX source code as a treat.

• Experimental Set-Up (.pdf)

(So finally this is the version of the experimental setting that was accepted. The original version posted here earlier had a little flaw regarding the measurement of a variable involving something called the “null-effect”. So I had to turn some of the little screws located at the rear site of the box right beneath the purple image of a rabbit to make it work…)

So. After I failed the exam in “discrete structures” last semester *arg!* I have to write the exam this semester with the newly introduced bachelor lecture named “discrete structures”. In fact the content of both lectures are nearly disjoint. To make things even better, the lecture in “mathematical logic” I am attending takes place at the exact same time as the lecture in “discrete structures”. So I will have to learn the whole stuff by myself. I have access to the book recommended by the professor, but it is a total mess and I will not recommend buying this book to any of my friends, that’s for sure. Never the less I have to work through all the materials of the lecture. Whenever I figure out how something works that I had to learn myself I will try to create a kind of “guidance” and upload it here. If you need more information on one of the topics feel free to take a look at my documents. If you find any errors in the documents I would be grateful if you drop me a line or two.

• Solving homogeneous linear Recursions (.pdf)
• Difference Calculus (.pdf)
• Permutations (.pdf)
• Principle of Inclusion-Exclusion (.pdf)

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[youtube skSOu9sueFk]

Hi there,

So tomorrow is the exam in psychology. At least I think it is. I have been studying the past two days for it and it seems as if the exams have been very similar over the past two years. So I merged the mind journals of the exam contents that have been available to me into a small PDF document. I’m not sure if the interpretation of the questions or the answers are correct but I’ll post it anyway.

• List of questions (.pdf)

Hi there,

after working through most of the nights this week I am proud to present the final version of my proseminar on self-stabilizing algorithms. To be honest I am more charmed by the thought of a whole night of sleep than anything else… So I’ll make it quick and just post the documents here.

• Self-Stabilizing Algorithms - Elaboration (.pdf)
• Self-Stabilizing Algorithms - Presentation (.pdf)

As you are, soldier. When me and my fellow tutors where looking over the last exams in the programming lecture, I made a few notes on what can safely be considered as “crimes against humanity, style and every definition of common-sense”. Somehow, I suppose because of the huge workload I have to cope with at the moment, I forgot to publish a new “Ugly Code-Duckling”.

Well to serve yet another cenotaph (/hug Thesaurus) as a warning to future generations:

At first I was curious why someone would use an integer array to encode a duration of days which, at least in my opinion, seems to be predestined to be encoded as an integer variable.

int[] duration;

Well, “diligence” and “intelligence”, surely not among my most distinct traits contrary to “creativity” I still could not figure out how the Java-program in front of me should work… Well, until I saw the following:

public void setDuration( int n ) {
duration = new int[n];
}

Well, after a few minutes I capitulated to stinging pain in the back of my head and just accepted what my eyes told my brain to be part of the reality I love so much. And we all know that humanity has its flaws, so what do I know…

…well - I know that another line in the source-code quoted:

duration.length = duration.length + 1;

End of transmission.