Since I am at Waterloo this term I have the awesome opportunity to dive into North American Hackathon culture. The first event I took part in was Hack the North in the middle of September. It is Canada’s biggest hackathon and well known even in Europe.

After meeting a lot of awesome people at the team building and brainstorming session, I decided to form a team together with three full-time Waterloo students and we set out to pursue an education-related idea: Did your teachers in grade school ever reward you for doing well in class with stars and/or stickers? Some of our teachers went beyond this and rewarded their students with points that could be spent on rewards, such as pizza, movie days, and toys. This was the original idea for what later came to be called Points and Me; to create a elegant, approachable, and friendly system for rewarding students for excelling in academics.

Continue reading A German Hacking the (True) North →

So, a couple of other exchange students and me were asked to give a short presentation on our home universities and opportunities to go to Germany at The University of Waterloo. This post is an attempt to collect some of the relevant information so others can refer to it later.

This past Saturday, two friends and I took part in the German Collegiate Programming Contest. Since none of us actually trained much beforehand and it was the first ICPC-like programming contest for two thirds of the team (me included), we were not one of those teams that managed to solve almost all problems, but ended right in the middle of the ranking with a total of three solved problems (even though we were really, really close to solving four 😉 ).

Nevertheless, I’d like to share some insights into one of the problems the organizers of the GCPC came up with. I really like it because there is a beautiful algorithm that you can apply to it and (mostly because) it is somewhat StarTrek related 😉 . The problem I’m talking about is problem L of the GCPC 2016 which you can find in this PDF. The solution of course contains spoilers, so if the problem statement makes you curious I’d recommend giving it a try first and coming back later to see if you found a more elegant solution. If you are a TUM student, you can even run it against all the tests that were used in the contest on TUMJudge.

Continue reading Problem L of the GCPC 2016 (Maze) →

Earlier this month I attended Dragonhack in beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia. It was a truly amazing hackathon and I got to know and work with a whole bunch of awesome people. Turns out the organizers made an aftermovie for the event which they have recently released and which I’m gonna share with you today. Try to see if you can spot me in the video, I haven’t found myself in it so far…

However, they also had a professional photographer at the venue who took over 200 photos, so there inevitably are also some photos of us. I’m gonna share the two best photos of us: One of our entire team deep in discussion and one of me on stage demoing our hack with my teammates in the background launching a last-minute effort to get our livedemo to work.

Continue reading Dragonhack 2016: Video and Photos →

Despite really wanting to, I didn’t find the time to go to Hamburg for the 32C3 (bachelor’s thesis + TOEFL exam in January + work) but I caught up on some of the talks thanks to the amazing recordings the CCC always provides. I’m gonna share some of my favorite talks here with you. (Small disclaimer: I obviously didn’t watch every single talk ;))
Continue reading My favorite Talks at 32c3 →

Since I did not want to start the new year with software that isn’t up-to-date (or because I had a little time and didn’t want to do any real work), I decided to update my ownCloud installation to version 8.2.2. Unfortunately, the update tool failed:

Fatal error: Call to a member function getLogger() on a non-object in /path/to/owncloud/lib/public/util.php on line 166

After spending some time trying various stuff, I decided to compare my installation with a fresh one. The only thing I found that was weird was that I had a config.php in the main ownCloud directory (probably left over from a manual update I did a few months back).

So I renamed that one – and voilà. Apparently having a config.php in the main folder causes ownCloud to stop working.
I write this because I didn’t find any solutions of this problem online when I searched.

In the beginning of November I had the amazing opportunity to take part in the ATHENS programme, a program that brings together students from Europe’s leading Technical Universities for one week intensive courses on a variety of subjects.
For me that meant spending a week in Paris and attending a course on Information Extraction at Telecom ParisTech.

After a first meeting organized by our local coordinator at TUM and a trip to the airport the day before because of the flight attendants’ strike it was off to the airport for me. I happened to be on the same flight with three other students that study at TUM as well and with only a slight delay we made it to CISP Kellermann (a hostel in the south of Paris), that was gonna be our home in Paris for a week.
After unpacking my stuff, I walked around the neighborhood with a few fellow students when all of us started receiving phone calls and texts because of the ongoing terrorist attacks in Paris. Back at the CISP all of us had a lot of questions but no answers, so after convincing friends and family that we were safe we decided that there wasn’t much we could do on that day anyway so we called it a night.

Usually, the hosting university organizes tours and visits for the incoming students, but in our case those had to be cancelled, so we organized our own program for the weekend which consisted of prolonged walks around the city, a lot of good food and obscenely many group-selfies.

Continue reading ATHENS November 2015 in Paris →

Back in 2009, the first website for Easy Feed Editor was at easy-feed-editor.bplaced.net. But since that URL is really long and not very trustworthy, I thought about getting a TLD: Now you have to remember that I was still a high school student back then and I didn’t want to waste any money on a proper domain for a project that might just live for a few more months.

So I kind of went the middle way and got a .tk-Domain. The advantage of those are that they are free. The deal however is that you need to renew your registration once a year or the domain will become available to everyone again.
Being busy with other stuff I forgot to do this last year. A few hours too late I noticed and tried to renew the registration, hoping the no one else had registered it already. Which luckily no one had. However the domain was now considered a Premium Domain and no longer available for free (probably due to having actual traffic). Continue reading .tk OR If you wait long enough, your free domain is free again →