gehrcke.de » General

going to Montana: ICMRM

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:06:03 +0000

In a few hours, I am leaving to visit the ICMRM, a conference about physics (magnetic resonance and stuff like this) in Montana. It will be my first time in America, but a very short time: just a week.

The route will go along Würzburg, Frankfurt, Dallas, Denver, Bozeman and Yellowstone Park; half around the world. That’s new to me.

My group and I will be presenting our work on Magnetic Particle Imaging, a very new imaging technique for biomedical applications (German slides). After working on GSoC until August, 24th, much effort was needed to finalize the poster for the conference. Now, a few hours before the flight starts, it’s “just finished” (see below).

Hopefully the weather in Montana is great and the conference will be a success for our group! Maybe I’ll post some impressions here, when there’s time and internet .

Google Summer of Code end: code upload and acknowledgement

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:17:01 +0000

The Google Summer of Code 2009 final evaluation deadline is today; 19 UTC. I don’t have time to summarize my summer here now, but there are two things I want to say to the world. First, I want to thank many people for enriching my summer. Second, I would like to announce the Clobi project on Google Code.

Acknowledgement

Kate Keahey (Argnonne National Laboratory/The Globus Alliance/Nimbus team).
She offered me a fabulous mentorship. I assess this at its true worth by looking at what I’ve learned throughout the summer just because of these great conversations . Thank you for all your support and dedication and for pushing me and the project forwards!

Tim Freeman and David LaBissoniere (Argnonne National Laboratory/The Globus Alliance/Nimbus team).
Wonderful, extensive and patient extra-premium-support-with-special-treatment regarding Nimbus/Workspace in the MUD. Thank you so much! You smoothed my technical way through the project.

Ian Ward (creator of urwid, a console user interface library for Python).
He supported me so great while I was implementing the user interface for Clobi’s Resource Manager using urwid‘s new SelectEventLoop technology. Talking to him saved so much valuable time. Thank you!

Mitchell Garnaat (the creator of boto, a Python interface to Amazon Web Services) and the boto users mailinglist.
Great and essential support since almost one year now. Thank you very much for answering many questions!

Predrag Buncic (CernVM) and Artem Harutyunyan (ALICE@LHC).
Thank you for your support regarding CernVM on Nimbus!

Jakub Moscicki, Ulrik Egede, Johannes Elmsheuser and the rest of the Ganga crew.
Thanks a lot for very important, effective and efficient support concerning the system behind Clobi and Clobi’s Ganga backend. You are great!

Stefan Kluth and Stefan Stonjek (ATLAS@LHC, Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, Munich)
Thank you for many helpful discussions, support and beautiful times in Munich!

Borja Sotomayor (University of Chicago, Globus Alliance).
He made a great job as GSoC mentoring organization administrator. Thank you for this and for introducing the MUD .

Paul D Marshall.
Thank you for discussions regarding dynamical deployment of computing resources.

Xiaoming Gao.
Thank you for the exciting cooperation regarding Virtual Block Stores for Nimbus.

Alex Martelli.
He answered an important Python question that most people could not answer. Smoothed my way to implement inter thread communication in Clobi’s Resource Manager.

Clobi @ Google Code

In this blog post I introduced Clobi, the result of this Google Summer of Code project. Today, I created a new project page for Clobi on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/clobi/

As a first action, I pushed my local mercurial code repository into the online repository. You can browse the code here and you can look through the development history (the commits I’ve made) here.

Then I prepared a test release of all Clobi components. You can get it in the download section.

That’s all about Clobi for the next time. From tomorrow on, I will go on with my master thesis project in Physics (about Magnetic Particle Imaging). Next week, the ICMRM conference in Montanta starts and I’ve to make a poster for my contribution (abstract here).

I will go on with Clobi, when there is more free time .

Small page update

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:42:30 +0000

Today I slightly changed the page style, to make it better readable.

The font is now bigger and Georgia (Tahoma was ugly, in particular in italic mode); the lines now have more spacing inbetween and the background color now is a gentle grey, which should be more comfortable for the eyes than the clean white was.

Some more minor changes are worth looking at but not mentioning

Btw: I also changed the header image. If the colours don’t fit at the moment, you probably should clear your browser cache!

Petition gegen ein generelles Verbot von “Killerspielen”

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:09:14 +0000

Als ehemaliger, begeisterter “Killerspiele-Spieler”, der durch dieses Tun dennoch — so denke ich — keine besondere Neigung zu Gewalt entwickelt hat, unterstütze ich die aktuelle Petition gegen ein generelles Verbot von “Killerspielen” sehr. Petitionstext:

Der Deutsche Bundestag möge sich gegen den Beschluss der Innenmisterkonferrenz vom 5. Juni 2009 entscheiden, der ein “Herstellungs- und Verbreitungsverbot” von Action-Computerspielen vorsieht.

Aus der Begründung:

Als volljähriger Bürger und Wahlberechtigter bitte ich Sie nachdrücklich, …
den irreführenden und diskriminierenden Begriff “Killerspiele” aus der politischen Diskussion zu nehmen.
das Vertrauen der Öffentlichkeit in die bestehenden staatlichen Jugendschutzmechanismen zu stärken.
den Vollzug bestehender Gesetze zu verbessern und zu gewährleisten, dass Kindern und Jugendlichen nur Computer- und Videospiele entsprechend der USK-Jugendfreigabe zugänglich gemacht werden.
Eltern, Pädagogen sowie erzieherisch verantwortliche Personen bei der Förderung der Medienkompetenz zu unterstützen.
die Computer- und Videospiele-Branche in Deutschland und insbesondere die Ausbildung in diesen zukunftsträchtigen Berufen zu fördern.

Ich habe mitgezeichnet und Du möchtest es vielleicht auch. Man muss sich einfach registrieren und hier “Petition mitzeichnen” anklicken.

Das Schlimmste, was ich je getan habe …

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:49:23 +0000

Auf Spiegel.de werden mal wieder junge Leute zitiert, die tiefgründige Antworten auf schwere Fragen finden. Damit das Ganze repräsentativ ist, ist diesmal auch Maik dabei — als Repräsentant der Gruppe der Oberlippenbartträger oder einfach nur als “Quotentürke” (entschuldigt den Begriff, ich wusste es gerade nicht anders zu umschreiben)?

Das ausführliche Interview in seiner ganzheitlichen Form:

Das möchte ich in diesem Jahr erreichen …
Ich möchte an einer Hochschule angenommen werden.
Das schlimmste, was ich jemals gemacht habe …
Ich habe in Australien ein Känguru umgefahren.
Ich habe Angst davor, dass …
… ich auf dem Arbeitsmarkt der Zukunft keine Chancen habe..

Das Gesicht dazu:

Maik mit "Rotzbremse"

Von demjenigen, der den Dialog aufgeschrieben hat, ist leider kein Foto vorhanden. Aber “Das schlimmste” hätte er besser groß schreiben sollen.

Die Art und Weise seitens Spiegel, in letzter Zeit regelmäßig die “Generation C64″ (was für ein bescheuerter Name. Der C64 wurde vor 27 Jahren eingeführt. Wenn es so etwas wie eine Generation C64 überhaupt gibt, dann sind die Jüngsten davon mindestens 30) neu zu definieren und auf ihre Probleme hinzuweisen, wird von Artikel zu Artikel grausamer. Zitat aus “Jung, gut ausgebildet, chancenlos”:

Von der Uni kommen sie mit besten Noten plus Praktika plus Auslandserfahrung. Sie haben alles richtig gemacht – und fassen dennoch kaum Fuß auf dem Arbeitsmarkt. Die Wirtschaftskrise trägt viele junge Akademiker aus der Kurve. Dabei sind sie zu fast allem bereit.

PS: neben Rotzbremse, Nasenflokati, Respektbalken, Testosteronhecke und Schnubbi finden sich weitere Synomyme übrigens hier: http://www.mundmische.de/entry/search/Oberlippenbart

Get Back Up!

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:52:39 +0000

This is amazing.

Spread it.

gehrcke.de: new appearance

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:35:39 +0000

Hello everyone out there!

In the past weeks I spent some time on creating a new website behind gehrcke.de. Now it’s released to the public.

As a start, there’s some “static” content and already some blog posts (e.g. this one: it explains, why I am blogging now ).

I’m curious about how much time I will spend on broadening the spectrum and keeping these webpages up-to-date.

Please leave me a comment — it’s much appreciated.

Why do I blog? That wasn’t the plan…

Jan-Philip Gehrcke — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:41:52 +0000

There it is, my first blog post — faster than expected (if at all). But why that?

It was my wish for a long time to make the design of gehrcke.de acceptable or even good-looking. Until now, most pages were Apache directory listings: it tells its own tale.

In former times, in the days of Web 1.0, I even developed my own small Content Management Systems using PHP/MySQL, while the layout was done via tables. Although this is better than this example of Web 0.1, today one would get killed for a such an unprofessional work (e.g. because of possible SQL injections and browser incompatibility). But I don’t have the time to do everything by myself and fulfill all modern requirements simultaneously. The good thing is that today there is no more need to pull everything off from scratch: there are so many professional CMSs that build up a more valid website instantly than I ever could. So I looked for a proper CMS. I didn’t want to have an overkill for my marginal requirements (like Typo3). I soon found WordPress, originally developed for setting up blogs. But with its ability to create “static pages” (pages not showing blog content), the availability of masses of glorious themes and plugins, it turns into a very useful CMS, which is very well documented and easy to customize.

So, I installed WordPress. After setting it up, it took my three days to decide which Theme would be the best for me. I hope that I’ve made a good decision with Atahualpa 3.3.3. It’s convincing because of it’s many built-in options and the clear design, supporting widgets and other stuff.

Okay, until now I created the first “static pages” with WordPress and will create more of them in the future. But the origin of WordPress are blogs. Most of the functionality is for blogs. The adminstration interface is so great and everytime I use it to manage my “static pages”, I must go around the big section for composing blog posts. And this really looks inviting… So.. there it happened and there it is: the reason, why I am blogging now, too: Because WordPress is ingenious!