Hi, my name is Felix...

One day when I came home from work, I heard a cat crying miserably. It sound to be very near when I went on the balcony, but the cat's location was not detectable. So we started searching on the attic, in the garden, we even replaced tiles from the roof as we thought the cat is maybe stucked under the roof. Finally we found him - stucked in the drainpipe of the cullis! Most probably he went over the cullis and fell into the hole where the drainpipe starts towards the ground and as the pipe is quite thin the cat pinned inside the pipe. So we dismantled the drainpipe in order to rescue the undercooled, wet, afraid cat. I suggest he was only 4 weeks old and no mother or brothers/sisters were in sight, so we decided to keep him :-) Say hello to my new lodger:

What's currently going on..

So folks,

I had last week off as my company has closed for four days due to the financial/economical situation. I used this 'forced spare time' to go on holiday - I went with my girlfriend to Vienna, Austria for some days. This was really nice - it's a really cool city with many, many places worth to visit, so we were the whole day on the move. Additionally we had awesome weather - look at this:

What else I have done in my spare time? Well, I must admit I began to play a video game which I came across in the net. It's a quite old one (dos game) which I own for about ten years but never fetched again from my rack because of lack of time and motivation. Then I saw the screenshots on the net and read that is has been drastically improved by hobby programmers which reversed the whole game and made it open source. Moreover it's now running under Windows (also under linux and mac, just for information!), I tried it again and nearly became addicted again. I'm talking about Transport Tycoon, more precisely Open Transport Tycoon - go and check it out (but you need the game data files from the original game). Here a screenshot:

What's about coding, reversing and your homepage you ask? Damn, a good question. Of course, it's not dead. I have just only little time... But I read about many topics I am interested in and some really cool ideas for projects in my head but everything is taking much time so new coding activities just progress slowly.
But I do my best :-) Let's see...

Some personal news

So folks,

finally a new post :-) Just to tell that I'm still there and some things have changed in my life...
I have successfully completed my study at University of Karlsruhe and received my diploma in computer science. My diploma thesis about H.264 video coding finished very well and I'm quite proud of it, likewise my mentor and professor so I expect a very good grade :-)
After this, I moved away from Karlsruhe and now live together with my girlfriend in our own flat. That's why I had no internet access for more than one month and was not able to update my blog. Since beginning of February, I am working as a software engineer at Robert Bosch Gmbh in the sector of automotive control units, more precisely called DCU (Domain Control Unit). Everything is quite new so I am excited how things will go on - hopefully fine and successfully.
But yeah, only less time is available for spare time compared to be a student, so I have nearly no time for my personal coding and my website ;-( But no fear, this will change and I will somewhen resume to please the world with my code snippets ;-)
So then, stay tuned!

Still there

Hi,
currently I'm very busy with my diploma thesis - I just finished a big part concerning mode decision inside the encoder, now I have to implement some algortihms in VHDL and after that I will start with the actual Rate Controller. Things are getting more complicated and I also have to read some papers and books to build a mathematical theoretical background for my model. Well, nearly half of the time is already gone, so only 3 months left = stress.
That's why there is also no real update on my website. Ok I improved my layout as you can see which took already some time - did I ever mentioned that I'm no friend of html/css/all other web scripting languages - they just look ugly compared to a real programming language!
But I have already two cool tools coded concerning planar 4:2:0 yuv-files which just need some commenting and bugfixing before going to be available on my site - so stay tuned.

(Caution: Advertisment) I came across two cool free downloads - maybe you are also interested:
First of all, google published their own browser chrome for free download. My first impression is pretty positive - it's fast, small and easy to use - most of the screen is used for the displayed website, there is no over-blown gui with thousands of menus and statusbars. I like it but I stick to my lovely firefox - I am used to it and the bookmark bar is better and more comfortable to use in my opinion. But you should give chrome a try!
Second, after releasing Command & Conquer 1 as freeware, C&C - Red Alert is now also freely available as download. It's even better than part 1, in fact it is my all-time favourite realtime strategy game ever. I loved it. So go and download the iso images and start playing. For playing it under Windows XP/Vista, choose compatibility mode 'Windows 95' for both, the setup exe file and game exe file, and install also the provided patch - then you have no trouble.

Diploma Thesis

That's just a quick post to tell what I'm doing now. I found finally an interesting diploma thesis at which I have been working for the last two weeks already. It's official title is "Development of a Power-Aware Rate Controller for H.264 Video Encoder" and it's located at the Chair for Embedded Systems at University Karlsruhe. My mentor seems to be really nice and to be motivated to help me completing my work successfully. I have 6 months to finish it and hopefully this length of time is enough. I was surprised how complex this H.264 Encoding Standard is and how many complicated steps needs to be accomplished to encode a video with good quality and less need for memory. I have read two complete books and several papers during the last weeks and also dived in the C Code of the standard implementation of this encoder but understanding the rate controller process/steps seems to be really hard. I think this will last but let's see...
The good thing is that when I come home I can watch football the whole evening :-) Or I go to a place with public viewing when the German football team plays. The European Soccer Championship is really exciting and I'm curious what will happen... :-)

Last oral exam done!

Hi everybody,
after 8 weeks of learning and diving into the secrets of nets, pointclouds, bezier and bspline curves, triangulations, many graphical algorithms and much more, I had yesterday my last oral exam - in computer graphics. It went perfectly :-) Fortunately I was very well prepared. My study thesis is also finished so I'm looking currently for an interesting diploma thesis. But now I make holidays for two weeks - very nice cause the summer slowly begins now here in Germany and the weather is great!
So perhaps I'll find some time for coding - have already two things in mind that I'm wanna code, but let's see.
Well, over the last years my interest in computer games constantly decreased. But when I played something (very seldom) then it was of course Trackmania Nations. I did already mentioned it on my site when this game was released two years ago - completely for free! It an really nice, good looking, challanging racing game which you can also play over the net against others. And now, finally, the next part was released - Trackmania Nations Forever - again for free! So if you like racing games, be sure to check it out! Best thing is to check out following very good site - there you find everything you need:
http://tmnforever.tm-exchange.com/

So have fun!
Sunshine

Hope dies last

So, January is nearly over and that's just my first post.
As always, much work to do :-( My study thesis does progress quite slowly unfortunately. The problems are pretty resistent against my tries to solve them ;-)
I managed it that my log entries can be sent from the htx-board to main memory. Therefore I use a linux device driver to allocate a buffer in main memory and send its physical (not virtual, that's why a driver is needed) address to the board. So when my associative memory on the board is full, they are written to this buffer and I can read them with my user-level test application. Of course, some little bugs are still there (not surprisingly, isn't it). Write requests are not correctly logged in contrast to read requests and I f***ing don't find the reason. But I still hope that I can finish it in near future.
I'm slightly sad that I have so little time for my website and coding. I had begun to code my own burrows-wheeler-transformation in the last week of december, but just one day wasn't enough to get it working. The reverse transformation is quite difficult to implement it efficiently - the way I learned to do it by hand is not a good way to implement it. Perhaps when this term is over, I have some spare time and enough motivation to complete it.
Till then, keep cool,
greetz Sunshine

No time for anything....

So folks,
pretty long no update, I know. But this term is quite stressful - my Informatics I Tutorial needs some time for correcting the exercise sheets, for preparation the material and holding the tutorial and the computer execercise lessons. Then I attend some lectures, all of them about computer graphics. Some of them are quite difficult to follow cause of the complicated mathematics involved. And last but not least the most time-consuming thing in the last time: my study thesis. I did not even managed it to update the study page on my homepage with information about it.
Well I'm working with a Xilinx Fpga Board Virtex4 Fx-100 where a Hypertransport Core is running on (I got it working). My task is to extend the core with a monitoring feature - till now I managed it to log the write and read accesses in an associative memory. But now I have to write these information to the main memory using DMA - and this does not work (damn!). Either the linux kernel panics or the computer just hangs up. I really don't know how to achieve the right behaviour, this drives my crazy. I have no simulator, there is no possibility to 'debug' it and synthesizing my design with ISE and upload it to the board takes every time more than 45min. This is definitely no fun! As soon as I get it working, I will post more detailed information about my study thesis.
Anyhow, I got round to code and publish a nice applet demonstrating the Cohen-Sutherland-Algorithm last week. And guess what? The implementation of the Sutherland-Hodgman-Algorithm is nearly finished and waits to be uploaded on my page :-)
But for now, Christmas is coming soon, I still have to organize some presents and I'm looking forward to some relaxing days. So I wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new year!!!
Greetz Sunshine

Again I'm coding...

Hey folks,
well at the moment I have some free time. No exams, the lectures are going to start not until middle of October and there are some problems with my study thesis. I cannot begin cause the HTX-Board (a special board to study the hypertransport bus) is not working properly, so this week seems to be idle too.
But not that bad. I came across a little game similar to sudoku and I decided to code a nice applet to play it. And of course even more: also a solver which gives all solutions to a quest (which is even finished and fully working) and a generator to create new games which has only one valid solution. This in fact is pretty more difficult to code - till now it takes in some cases nearly one minute to generate a quest which is sometimes not even solvable! Ok this tool I hacked in really short time without thinking about a clever algorithm so this is something I have to recode I think. The applet coding comes slowly to an end, here a screenshot from its current state:

As you see, I coded also some kind of lame visualization of the currently game. Well, that's not important for the game. It's more my first try of coding a simple wireframe 3D software rendering engine! Not that easy to code - you find only little information about camera and screen projection, but I succeeded :-) Let's see if I will also implement solid filled polygons...
So keep cool, I'm going to proceed with coding!
Cya

Holidays are over :-(

Hm, what a nice time I had in August - 4 weeks free! Three weeks relaxing at home, meeting with friends, shopping, going to parties, relaxing and sleeping... But everything has an end and real life comes back. Next week my last oral exam in my minor subject, then I am going to begin with my study thesis - it will be about examining/monitoring the hypertransport bus system. Let's see how it will be - I hope easy :-)
I noticed that I haven't done anything in reversing for a long time but somehow I currently don't feel motivated to do something concerning this topic. But I dived into bezier curves and coded some nice applets (look in the java section of my site). An applet about b-splines is already finished - some little bugs have to be killed. In a few days I'll release two short articles about polygons with a nice applet so stay tuned and keep coding!

Still there

Hey,

well long time no sign from me. Last time was pretty stressful, as always when the term-time reaches the end. On Monday I have a written exam in 'Communication and Databases' so no time for coding or doing anything else. Then I have 3 weeks holidays which I spent at my parents and one week in Spain; but that also means no updates on my website cause I have no access to the internet the whole August! In fact I have no idea what to code or reverse anyway...
Apropos Internet: I changed from German Telecom to o2 and this caused a lot of problems! In fact I had no telephone and no access to the net for more than two weeks! o2 is completely incompetent - they really suck!
So, I hope all of you reading this enjoy the summer and relax in the sun - exactly as I will do in the next weeks!
bye Sunshine

Got a new laptop... and Vista.

So,

a few days ago I started with some coding and reversing after I had done nothing for a long time. I code a little game in Java and also a bruteforcer which can give the solution, but there will be more information about that on my website in a few weeks. I also thought about coding my own implementation of Huffman-Encoding-Algorithm, but I'm not sure if I should do that.
Anyway, one incident stopped me: my laptop finally broke down. I had problems with it for some time: the battery didn't charge anymore, the touchpad didn't react and, most important, the display often flickered and switched itself off. And now the graphic card broke down, more than some purple lines on the display could not be seen.
So I decided to spend my saved money for a new laptop: I decided myself for a HP Pavilion dv6000. Main features: Core 2 Duo, 1GB Ram, 160GB and a lot of additional stuff. Runs very nice, but... oh no... no XP was shipped but Vista!!! Well after 3 days I slowly feel comfortable with this new OS, but I like XP more. Perhaps it will just take some time.
But I needed a patch to start Visual Studio 2005!!! What's that? Up-to-date Microsoft products are not compatible with Vista? They are all stupid...
Fortunately till now I had no further problems, but they will come... Let's see what will be next...

Exams are over!

Wow, now I'm feeling relaxed :-)
Had three oral exams during the last seven weeks: in Automotive Mechatronics, Automotive Engineering and the most important one, in Embedded System, which was today.
I'm really fed up of learning... it's too strenous and takes too much time. I had no time for coding or anything else that's why there was no update in this blog and on my website. Hopefully that will change now and I'll get more constructive...

A visit @ IBM

Last week a group of students from the courses of Embedded Systems (including me :-) made a study trip to the IBM research center in Böblingen. Quite cool to have a look behind the scences...
First the building is quite modern and has a nice atmosphere. And very important: the meals at the staff restaurant taste really good! ;-)
We listened to some interesting speeches about IBM servers and of course about the architecture and development of the brandnew Cell processor! Wow! We got also some information about the 'blue gene' and made an excercise for training soft skills.
I think working at IBM is really interesting and must be fun! But to get there a job is very hard for sure... Well, that's future. I have some terms left with learning and exams... So I should get back to work...
Bye

Touching .NET

Hey,

again long time no post :-( Well, as always: friends, family and my studies are more important and time is limited...

But I finally managed to have a look at .NET and C#. As you perhaps know, I code Java and C/C++ (with Windows API) for some time. And I'm pretty impressed!
C# looks as I could like it - but as I'm used to Java I have still some problems to find the right commands. And a C language without real pointers? Unusual ;-)
But it seems that you can really fast develop windows applications. Compared to GUI Programming with Windows API, it's like heaven!

Interestingly it remembered me coding with Delphi and its VCL several years ago. So Microsoft needed more 5 years longer than Borland to provide us coders with a useful 'forms designer'. Better late than never...

Currently I'm working with Visual Studio 2003 and .NET FrameWork 1.1; I really like it although it's always difficult to dive into a new language. I thought as a first project (to get familiar with all those new things) of a simple Brainfuck Interpreter. I know, there are more than enough to find in the www, but I wanted to start easy :-)

Started some days ago, I found some strange things. Most annoying till now was the RichtextBox control. I derived a new class from it just to add some simple special functionality. Surprisingly that was not that easy!
* There is no function to get the line and column of the caret - you have to code it yourself (column is not that easy).
* You can specify automatic scrollbars if the content fits not into the visible area. But how to set/get the position of a scrollbar (as with GetScrollPos/SetScrollPos in WinAPI)? How to scroll by code?
In the end, I created my own scrollbar as a child window of the richtext control, but that meant some work and still contains errors... Not the best solution.
* Also using syntax highlighting/coloring (for which the richtextbox was designed) need pretty much programming effort.

Well, I thought these things would be easier than they actually are. Hopefully in Framework 2.0 or 3.0 there are some improvements concering these points.

So in the next days I want to continue coding... hope it progresses faster.

Till then, here is a image from the current status: (as you see, still a lot to do)

Life sign from me....

So, I'm back again... Last week the new university term began and I have a lot to do. It's the first time I could choose all the subjects myself... I decided to attend all about embedded systems and as minor field of study vehicle construction. Seems quite interesting, hopefully it's not getting too difficult!
I haven't coded nearly anything during the last weeks cause I have broken my arm on October 3rd :-( And typing with just one hand is not that funny... A few days ago, I started my own sudoku solver. It's working, a bit slow but working. But testing if a self-generated puzzle has just one solution is NOT working. I don't know why... I hope I get it soon but my motivation is fading away...
Furthermore, I have a new girlfriend, and spending my spare time with her is much more better than sitting in front of a monitor. So let's see what comes next...
I'm out...
C ya

Came across a new band...

Hi,
while surfing the net and listening to some music on amazon, I found a new band which I definitely like. Perhaps you had a look at the music section on my website, so you probably know that it's a rockband :-) I'm talking about 'Flyleaf'. I've seen their best song (in my opinion) on TV and bought the album. The come from Texas and played already as introducing band for Korn. Although the music is not as hard as I wish it to be (some songs sound like a harder version of Avril Lavigne), they have some awesome songs! Be sure to check it out > http://www.flyleafmusic.com/

Keep cool...
Sunshine

Hey out there,

pretty long no post by me :-( Well, since beginning of August I have holidays and I spent most of the time @ home with my parents and there I have just a lousy internet connection... with that surfing is no fun anymore.
But I updated my homepage with a little tool called 'Desktop Symbol Utility'... was quite funny to code it... dll injecting into explorer process... Would I have done it in Win9x, I would have seen more blue screens than anything else, but fortunaly XP is much more stable if you crash explorer.exe :-))))

Till now, I had just one written exam (in Computer Architecture) this summer. The subject matter was pretty easy but the exam was a bit strange... won't be a good result I guess. After that, I had enough time to relax, to meet old friends and to make party... it's the time of the wine festivals now :-) Unfortunately the weather here in Germany was really terrible, just rain, and I didn't make holidays somewhere else. I was out of luck this summer. Slowly I have to start learning fot the other two exams... well no stress, some time left.

Every now and then, I coded a little bit my project called FolderInfo. It's gonna be a little tool which shows information about harddrives, folders and files (which type of files are most in a specific folder, which subfolder is the biggest and so on). But I'm quite bored coding it: cause it's plain Win API in C++, I have to code the whole GUI with the fancy Windows API and this is killing me! So I decided to freeze this little project... perhaps I have more motivation one day or other... Here a screenshot of the current state:



Cya.... and keep party!!!

We badly lost....

Hey out there,

well, no post for a long time. But I really enjoy summer (great weather for several weeks here in Germany) with all its partys. Really cool! And yes, a bit work for my study also... Exams are getting nearer :-(

I was never really a soccer fan, but the Fifa World Cup this year definitely changed my mind. Okay that's probably because it's in Germany which makes it a bit special for me. Thousands of people go to the parties in the city, everybody is nice and happy... it's just another nation. I would have never ever thought that it's would become such a cool event and that so many people make party and enjoy it. Just gorgeous!
Well, but I have to admit that I was really disappointed on Tuesday when Germany has lost against Italy. I know, they played a bit better, but it would have been so fantastic if Germany would have reached the final :-( Cause I was also a fan of the Australian team (they stayed in a hotel just a few kilometers away from my home) and they also lost against Italy... Hm, I have the feeling Italy will win the championship... but let's see what will happen on Sunday.

Btw, my BAC calculator is now available on my site in English and Germany. Works fine, but the database is a bit small... hope I will feel like adding some more items.

Enjoy the World Cup Final on Sunday!

Problems with Outlook :-(

Hi,
just started Outlook to check my mails... and all my contacts were gone! Hm... strange... a few hours ago everything was fine. Clicking on the adress book just gave me a nice message telling me that it is corrupted and I should reinstall it! But all my emails were still there...
Ok, so I searched for the adressbook file (*.wab), and doubleclicked it.... same message. Importing it in outlook also failed (what a surprise ;-)
So I searched in the world wide web... and found:
1) the path in the registry pointing to the adress book is most likely corrupted -> so I had a look but everything was fine
2) the adress book file is write-protected -> no it was not in my case!

So searching again and finally I found it... Three days ago (!!!) I installed the security update KB911567 from microsoft's windowsupdate.com ... That's s the reason. It modifies outlook files and kills the adress book. Fortunately you can uninstall it! But I don't get why it still worked the last days and suddenly (3 days after installing this update) it collapsed.

Well, I hate such shit. You think you do something right by installing updates and then it fucking kills your adresses! Bah! PURE HATE!!!!
I think I will drink a beer know to come down....
Good night!