Sun, Fun, Party
Work, Life, Music
Friends, Trips, Experience
New, Wild, Fresh
Can’t think of more at the moment, nevertheless going abroad for internship was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Thanks for reading and being with me. See you all soon somewhere around the world 
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In the fourth semester at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, my project group started creating a mobile flirt application, FastFlirt. The aim of that application was to
During our research, we discovered a similar application already available on the market, which had the major flaw to rely on text messaging. A user first has to send the current location and afterwards got information abount people currently at the same place. This might work for static situations, but on train it would fail.
FastFlirt automatically sends Geo information (current GPS data) to a central server and delivers results instantly. One thought we had, was that the great diversity of mobiles and mobile operating systems could be a problem. Not anymore with the new iPhone 3G. And some guys really think that this is the next big thing on a global view:
Basically they consider an iPhone 3G with integrated mobile community support would reshape how we interact with each other. An they are right, why didn’t Apple implement something like that? A google search with relevant keywords doesn’t bring up any good results at all.
Building relationships through electronic devices (facebook, flirt sites,…) has the drawback of beeing very superficial. Most people hardly fill out profiles, and who really maintains profiles on social networking sites on a regular basis? It’s usable to get to know people very quickly, on a basis of a few significant facts as matching music favourites, age, … But how could we push this very basic matching?
The next step of flirt sites (or mobile flirt application) after there was a matching, reading through the suggested profile and maybe sending E-Mails to each other for a certain amount of time, will be to meet in reality and check how reality compares to the virtual impression. At this stage, a lot of time has already been invested in finding out more about each other. And the decision to find out more about a particular person was based on very basic matching facts. Wouldn’t it be better to start from another direction, and match people based on their very personal thoughts, ideas, dreams,…?
A personal web diary application could serve as a framework for this idea. Can you remember what you did four weeks ago? Or two months ago? Or can you see certain topics in your life emerge, as others probably decline in interest? This additional functionality could motivate more people to use that service. In the background, the systems matches people based on their entries.
The difference to ordinary blogs is not obvious: Blogs usually don’t contain the very private thoughts of a person, thoughts you’d maybe not even share with a single other person. In the new system you’d be encouraged to trust it and write down everything you got on your mind though. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said: “Writing stories is one way to get rid of past things”. The service could also be advertised as a tool for your psyche, your mental healthiness.
People can only read other peoples entries if they match on certain topics. And also then, only parts of the entries are accessible. A special feature for premium users could include to be able to read more that just an extract.
Some people might find it useful to not automatically get matched with others, but to decide when they’d like to get matched. “Press the button and find out who’s like you!”.
If you have any ideas, suggetions, interest… in those ideas please let me know.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: University Hagenberg
Tagged: ideas
‘Be there or be square’ was the headline of a housparty of a friend of mine a few months ago. Well, yes, my last post was quite a time ago. I don’t really liked writing for the past few weeks, what is probably because of your’re getting more and more involved in every day live of where you are: in work-life of my university, private-life with friends, and my life, I’m still kind of on my own. Well, that wont change, I know that there will come the time when it’s time to go.
More and more people are leaving now. Especially the exchange students, who were here for one semester for about 3 months, are leaving for holidays an Australia vacation now. I met some really nice guys, and we probably will catch up in Sydney for New Years Eve. The firework should be great there And if I’m staying in Sydney at this time, I’ll still have a good time. I really love speaking English all day long, it’s getting better and better. Especially when I talk to Germans it’s great to speak a language, where nobody of us is professional. Some of them are trying to speak German, but I don’t really care about German. I love English, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m here, to learn some English. So why speak German? I’m not like those Asian guys grouping together and talking their language all the time. That’s kind of boring. Not just for us, must be boring for them too. As soon as I’m kind of interested in Australians, I have to talk their language, otherwise I’ll fail. And nobodys’s perfect, especially not oversees students
Today we celebrated Kim’s farewell, she’s going to leave for Germany on Tuesday, We’re going to catch up somewhere in Europe probably. Would be quite cool. Some of the guys I met are going to be in Europe for the next semester. So there’s a good chance to meet some of them. Especially the Austrian guys from around Upper Austria. But Germany and Greece is not that far away either. It’s just exciting seeing all those people doing the same thing as so many other people, who already took this step.
By the way, this weekend was about halftime for my internship here. A bit of a summary for the last few weeks:
I’m helping here and there, trying to make things easier for the guys. I feel like an intern, and would never say to be something else. I read papers, but don’t do any serious research, I think about how to solve problems and suggest my ideas, but never really have all the responability to get results. So just how it’s meant to be, it’s great!
This week I got a parcel from Teneriffe. My parents went for vacation, and sent me a book and lollys from there. They also sent some nuts, but Australian Post decided to take out those nuts because of Quarantine reasons. I could send those nuts back to Austria, but it’s about 45 bucks to do this. Well, it’s about half a kilo of nuts, maybe I should do it…
So people, I hope you liked reading another post from Down Under. If you have any ideas, how to make this nice life a bit nicer, let me know. My grandmo is gonna send me some cookies for Christmas, hope those Post guys don’t eat them. And I also expect some Austrian guys on their around the world journey around Christmas, maybe we’re going to a nice island close to Adelaide before. The best thing for them: They probably can stay in my house in a room which is going to be empty for a few weeks. They just stay for a few days, so it should be no problem.
What I just thought of: There are a lot of blogs like this out there, especially about KWM internships around the world (see the link bar to the right). Most of people started to write, when their internship started. But it seems like the longer they do their internship, the less they write. Why’s that? I’d love to read a lot more about your daily life and work. What you’re doing in Vienna, what you’re thinking in Munich. What are you exploring in Stuttgart? And what about Berlin? What’s up in Wisconsin? Some people seem to write quite constantly and provide some insight to their lifes: I know whats up in Canada, and I know what’s going on in Stockholm. But there’s so much more outside. So, guys, please start writing again. I love reading your impressions from home and around the world 
Just another little thingy here: FH Hagenberg started again. That means, I have to do some stuff beside my internship over the Internet. That was quite tough in the first days for me. It just sucked. Reading all those posts and then trying to formulate my own opinion to a topic where everything has been said already. But now I’m getting more and more used to it.
To conclude with a questions: When there’s a person outside you are feeling very close to, how do you know what your relationship to this person is or could be? I thought about asking, which I might do. But sometimes words are just boring…
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Tagged: adelaide, party, work
…, noooot Anyway, three weeks ago, it was a Saturday night, I met Anna. We had some beer and talked about this and that. She’s very interested in Austria and sports. I was very interested in Australia and Aussie slang. And indeed I learned a few new Aussie slang words in the upcoming weeks.
Back to track. I told Anna about my dream to become a diver and this special offer in Glenelg beach. 800 bucks, and bring a friend for free. She was excited as, and instantly decided to do this course with me. Well, that was quick, I thought. Course started on Friday, we met on Monday, Labour Day, for a walk in the mountains. Afer a nice drive, we visited the ‘Whispering Wall’ (you can whisper to each other over hundreds of meters using a huge wall), walked for a few hours in the forest and finally saw two Kangaroos. Neat!
Next day I organized everything for the course. The day after we picked up our learning material (DVD and 200+ pages diver manual). On Thursday before the course we started to learn everything. And on Sunday we passed the exam. Inbetween we had our first pool dives and some class lessons. First part well done.
Second part was this weekend in Edithburgh, a 300 km drive from Adelaide. The group and two instructors met there Friday night. On Saturday we’re all amazed after our first open water dive. After an hour we did the second one, which was even better, we stayed at the bottom for almost 60 min in about 7 m. The main purpose of these and the two following dives on Sunday was to practise skills like: buddy check (steps: BCD, Weight, Air, Releases, Fins) descending(steps: Signal, Orientation, Replace, Time, Equalize, Descend), ascending (steps: Signal, Time, Ascend, Rotate, Swim), buoyancy (which is a bitch! we had dry-suits, which are as opposed to wet-suits completely closed and fillable with air), emergency ascend and methods, hand signals (pretty easy to learn), BCD and weightbelt removal on the surface, mask clearing and much more…
In short, a great experience. Each Scuba Diver takes a certain risk of decompression illness (bubbles of nitrogen in your bloodstream, which expand when you go to the surface and can keep the blood from streaming), which occurs in case of ascending too quickly after beeing too deep for too long. Responsible planning minimizes that risk. Scuba Diving can be learned by everyone, as long as you are physically (the cylinders and weightbelts are heavy on land!) and mentally (know how to plan dives, and don’t exceed your planned limits) alright.
Beside diving I couldn’t keep away from houseparties 
→ 5 CommentsCategories: Leisure · adelaide
Tagged: adventure, blue, diving, edithburgh, scuba, weekend
Had a nice party weekend. Yesterday the AFL (Australian Football League) Finals took place, and people went crazy in the city afterwards. They know how to party.
At first, it seemed like me buying some books in the city and returning afterwards to my place for a nice read. Well, Mike (from Germany) texted me if I’d like to join going to Glenelg for some Frisbee beach session. Why not? So we went there, but it was too windy to play. The guys had some beer cans with them, so we had them near the beach. But generally, beaches are “dry zones”, means alcohol drinking is not allowed there. Right when we opened the cans, a police car stopped by. Officers told us to ex the beers, and they won’t fine us. So we did, and saved 200 bucks each, a total of 800. Thank you guys! Nice one, we thought, and went for a walk, direction city. After half an hour walking and chatting, somebody suggested to go into a pub, so we did, had some drinks and moved on back to the city. There we split, I met with Gavin and Mark (from French speaking Switzerland) in Duke of Yorks, where everybody was dancing like crazy. So I just went crazy too and enjoyed myself and people around me throughout the night
More pics on facebook.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: Leisure · adelaide
Tagged: party, weekend
At the end of the fourth week in Adelaide a short recall of topics:
Linux
Debian:
Ubuntu:
Commands: sed, cp, mv, nc, ssh, dhclient, ifconfig,…
Databases
Oracle
PostGres
As we’re running Macs in our Lab, we’d like to keep the TimeMachine funcionality on the Mac Pro where the database is going to run. Therefore, no Linux. In fact, there’s no Oracle 11g server distribution for MacOS. As we won’t need Oracle’s Spatial functionality like we thought before, we might port to PostGres.
Oracle – PostGres differences
| Oracle | PostGres |
| VARCHAR2(n) | no VARCHAR2(n), use VARCHAR(n) instead |
| no autoincremention, use triggers instead | auto incrementation data type SERIAL4 |
| sequence.NEXTVAL, sequence.CURRVAL |
|
| PL/SQL unique constraint exception DUP_VAL_ON_INDEX | UNIQUE_VIOLATION |
| RETURN | RETURNS |
| DROP FUNCTION fname; | DROP FUNCTION fname(TYPE, TYPE,…); |
| EXEC fname(arg1, arg2,…); | SELECT fname(arg1, arg2,…); |
| Before creating a function: CREATE LANGUAGE plpgsql; define to use this language in function header: … RETURNS void AS $$ DECLARE …; after function creation: $$ LANGUAGE ‘plpgsql’; | |
| DESC tablename; | \d tablename; |
| START script.sql; | \i script.sql; |
| Start client from command line: rlwrap sqlplus username | sudo -u user psql database |
| Exit command line: exit | \q |
| Show user tables: select table_name from user_tables; | \dt |
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Tagged: debian, oracle, postgres, semantics, ubuntu, work
Maybe I should stop translating German phrases into English… Today I got up at 6 am, and that’s very early compared to what I’m used to on weekends. (Not going out yesterday paid off obviously.) So I had the exciting idea to grab my picture cam and go for a run. There’s also another pic, which is more related to my last post.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: Leisure · Sports · adelaide
Tagged: adelaide, weekend
A great thing about living in Adelaide: There are parties almost everytime. At least on weekends. If one would like to get out on weekends, there’s not doubt that somewhere in your area something’s going on. In Adelaide City, Saturday’s the right day to stay awake till early in the morning. You can find a lot of pubs and clubs. But keep in mind to always carry your ID, in my case that’s the passport. Otherwise you could run into trouble trying to get in certain clubs. On my first Saturday night in town, of course I didn’t think of my ID and went to the city, which is a 30 minutes drive with the bus. Btw, public transport drivers in Australia are generally very helpful, as most of Australians are. If you ask for how to get somewhere, they always do as much as they can to guide you. And on that Saturday, I didn’t even had to pay for my bus ride, which is normally about 2 $ for one direction (the main reason was, that I wanted to pay with a 20 $ note and the driver had no change).
So I got on that bus, happy to ride for free, and after half an hour I arrived at a club called ‘Duke of York’. At half past eight, hardly any people were there, so I just made my way to the entrance, where a blonde girl waited for me. “May I see your ID please?” she asked me. “No, you can’t” I thought, I haven’t had it with me. “aahhm… well… here’s my International Student ID. How’s about that?” I asked, trying to look nice and handsome. But the blonde girl was very strict and answered: “I’m sorry, you can’t get in. I’m the manager. You can’t get in without an ID.” Damn it. I knew that it’s usual to carry your ID when going out in Australia, I did it in Sydney before. So I was kind of pissed off. After a few minutes, Gavin which whom I was supposed to meet, arrived and I told him my story, which pissed him off too. Moreover, he started complaining about my sport shoes. (Yes, maybe they look kind of crappy. But so many people weared sport shoes in Sydney, so I thought, well, why not me on a Saturday night?).
As there’s only one bus route I actually know to get from and to the city, I had to wait about 20 minutes for my bus home. Of course I wanted to go out that night, even if I wasted two hours to go home again to get my passport. That was my opinion when I waited for the bus. In fact, back at home, somehow I felt tired and my motivation for going out was gone. So I sent Gavin a message to chancel the meeting, he had some other friends to meet anyway. I felt hungry, put up a nice pot of rice and switched my notebook on. A few minutes later, my mobile indicated a message arrival, in which Gavin stated that they were betting either if I came back to the city or not. Two beers for me were the odds if I came. And I thought: ‘Well, he’s right, it’s my first night out in Adelaide, the club looked nice, I should really go out. And there are those beers!’ So I grabed my stuff, put on stylish leather shoes and a jacket and hurried up to catch the bus.
Beside the fact that I didn’t have to pay for the second bus ride to the city again (AdelaideMetro ftw!), after the first station I recognized it: No passport again! Damn! I was on the last bus to the city, so getting out, walking back, picking up the ID and catching another bus was no option at all. So I did the only possible thing that made sense: Trying to get in another time without passport. But instead with new shoes and jacket.
And guess what: It was as easy as it is for 14 year old teenagers in Austria to get into ‘Nachtschicht’ on weekends. I showed her (that time, it was another girl) my International Student ID again, and everybody was fine. The dance floor inside burned already, music was great and Gavin was really surprised to see me. After the first beers (the local Coopers is really worth a try!) and a nice chat with his friends we all made it to move our bodies to the hottest rythms on earth. We had a great time and enjoyed ourselfs til early in the morning.
At about 4 we (Charlotte, Rose, Gavin, me) decided to leave ‘Duke of Yorks’ to get out for some fresh air. Gavin hunted the whole night for Rose, but Rose played some games girls sometimes like to play. Those kind of games, where several guys are involved at the same time. Those games, were it seems like there’re loosers and winners (stupid, I don’t like those games). And it seemed like he lost (to him, IMHO the other homeboy didn’t had a chance at all!). Anyway, Charlotte (I think that was her name) was still after Gavin. So why not give it a try? They did, and we finally all crashed Rose’s place. She provided us with yummy pasta, and after another two hours we felt kind of tired and went to bed.
Unfortunately, Gavin had to get up at 8 again. Because I had no idea were I was (we went with the cab in the morning) I joined him. His brother picked him up, and after a short visit at his house I was dropped off at a bus station, where I expected a certain bus. Which didn’t show up. After one and a half hour I decided to try another bus, which first took me back to the city where I could take my default bus route home.
Four hours after getting up, I finally got off at my home station 33 (right next to McDonalds) and suddenly (surprisingly) felt very hungry. At that moment, I was thunderstruck! You know that feeling, when you forgot something very important, like an exam the next day and you didn’t learn anything yet? Increasing heartbeat rate and Adrenalin rush! When I was at home the night before, I actually didn’t intentioned to go back to the city. And I felt hungry. And I put a pot with rice on the gas stoven. And I didn’t turn the gas stove off when I left the house! So what could have happened? Either the whole house already burned down and there’s nothing more to rescue or some of my housemates smelled the burned rice and turned the cooker off. In both cases, it wouldn’t have had made anything better if I stressed myself and therefore went to McDonalds for two double-cheeseburger and a coffee.
Back at home, the house was still there. No smoke coming out of the door or windows. Inside it smelled a little bit. And the pot was… well, I bought a new one. Happy that nothing serious happend, I decided to stay at home and chilled with some old-school computer games after a nice Skype session with a great girl.
→ 4 CommentsCategories: Leisure · adelaide
Tagged: adelaide, party
My course of study KWM (Communication and Knowledge Media) could also be called International Communication and Knowledge Media. Currently, a third of students are on their internships, somewhere abroad. UK, Sweden, Germany, Australia, USA. It’s really impressive.
But when it comes to the local time in a particular city, things get messed up quickly. Want to have a nice chat with someone 15,000 km away? Just check the Foxclocks in your Firefox toolbar and you’re ready to go. Configure Foxclocks to show the current local time from as many cities around the world as you’d like to see (btw, I couldn’t figure out a city in Wisconsin, so I took Chicago, seems to have the same local time as Milwaukee).
→ 1 CommentCategories: Leisure
Tagged: foxclocks, gadget
Work diary, second week:
The Debian server is almost ready to go. Managed to get Apache2 with phpWiki running this week. Reminder: Always delete every other Apache installation. And: Watch out for existing log dirs when setting up a VirtualHost (entries have to be the same as in filesystem).
Set up Webmin, a great webinterface for Linux systems. You can manage almost everything: Apache server, MySQL server, processes, etc… from remote. Disabled automatic boot startup and changed port for Webmin. SSH works great.
Main application is running, although it seems to have still some problems with particular sites.
Future tasks: Discussed goals with Helen. As soon as the server setup is finalized and the application runs smoothly, the system is going to move (still open: try .sh scripts, port from Mac to Debian; access from only within the Lab network?). Subsequently, based on the image retrieval project I outlined in another post, I’m going to rebuild the experiment and do research in a new direction.
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Tagged: future tasks, linux, work
