During the last few days I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Texas in the US for a project I have been doing together with Michele Bertoni – a fellow student who came to Munich from Italy for an Erasmus semester, Ryan Lindeman, Maithaa Alhousani, Chris Castro and Jose Contreras (all 4 students of Texas A&M University) and their project sponsors Gazoo Inc. and Texas Engineering Experiment Station.

The project involved the creation of an app and a hardware device. Without going too much into technical details, the vision is to be able to use any computer from remote from any middle-class Android smartphone or tablet. In order to do this, the user connects a hardware box to the HDMI and USB ports of the computer. This box that the American part of the team is developing then acts as a bridge between the app and the computer. While there is software that offers similar capabilities, with our solution there would be little to no complicated configuration before you can start using it.

In total, there were 5 of us traveling there: Nils Kannengießer, a PhD candidate at the Chair for Operating Systems at TUM in his last year who is the instructor for the Android Practical Course, Philipp Fent and Benjamin Sautermeister, two German students of the upcoming term of the course that will be working on a different project with Texas A&M University, and finally my teammate Michele and me.

I chose to take the cheapest flight possible that literally took me an hour in the wrong direction to Istanbul and then – after a stop-over of 2 hours – to Houston.

Having gone through an extremely tedious passport control in Istanbul before getting on the plane (one of the security men actually followed me onto the plane to look at my passport one last time) I arrived in Houston a few hours late and was greeted by all the other German students, our instructor and two of the American students.

After a drive of some one-and-half hours we arrived where Michele and me were staying: Thanks to the hospitality of Ryan’s parents we did not have to stay at a hotel but could stay privately instead.

The next morning we went to university: What is really impressive is the sheer size of the campus: While our own campus in Garching is Continue reading 8500 Miles by Plane, 1500 by Car – University Trip to the US →

I am currently migrating the webpage for Easy Feed Editor to a new domain (More on that some other time).

Since registration is apparently taking ages, I wanted to make sure that everything is properly set up on the webspaces (Sourceforge Project Web and Bplaced). However, I have mod_rewrite rules that redirect you to the proper 2nd-level domain if you enter subdomain.bplaced.net or subdomain.sourceforge.net:
So I can’t test anything until I turn all these rules off (One .htaccess per directory; No access to httpd.conf).

A clever way to do this is:

find . -name ".htaccess" -print | xargs sed -i 's/RewriteEngine On/RewriteEngine Off/g'

First we find all files named .htaccess and then we feed them to sed one-by-one to do the replacing.