IT Playground
When weather does not inspire me for outdoor activities, I enjoy diving into various IT topics to gain and maintain the knowledge I keep teaching in school. Basically, I'm fascinated and attracted by Open-Source IT software or standards like
- Linux
- Python, JS
- MySQL/MariaDB
- Arduino
Since my time in university, I've been fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Back then, we'd learned how to recognize handwritten digits. Today, I'm intrigued by the scientific achievements made available by AI frameworks like TensorFlow.
I suppose many software projects would better meet user needs if they were open source for three reasons:
- as a user, I have the freedom to customize and improve the software as I wish. This could actually encourage more people to learn programming.
- as a user or organization, I can check the source for malicious or unwanted parts (like trackers, spyware etc.)
- by buying or ordering only open source products, my organization has the freedom to adapt the software to meet actual needs.
Saying this, I am well aware that open source software does cost money (or at least a lot of time) to develop, test and distribute.
Notice: Schirmer Scientific Systems is now Green-ORCA :: Operations Research Computing and Analysis Schirmer
- Details
- Category: IT Playground
Here is an unfiltered list of my Github repositories. Some repos contain real software projects, yet most repos are personal playgrounds or serve demonstration purposes in school.
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- Category: Research Projects
The two-process model of Daan et. al (1984) was combined with a phase shifting and amplitude altering routine for better entrainment of the circadian processes by light. Genetic algorithms were used to find the appropriate model parameters for the natural distribution of different chronotypes (early birds, owls) that was published by Roenneberg (2007). As a breakthrough, the resulting distribution of one of the 8 free parameters - the circadian period - closely matched both distribution and average of the human circadian period published for experimantal data by Czeisler (1999).
These results were presented at the UKSim 2013 in Cambridge. A full description as publication and presentation are available here.
Subcategories
Research Projects Article Count: 7
Since my studies, I am fascinated by simulation and computing algorithms inspired by nature. Be it ant colony optimization for fleet routing, be it genetic algorithms for optimizing high dimensional paramterization problems, with my research company Green-ORCA I can tackle it.
Web Design Article Count: 3
Back in 1996 I started learning HTML and CSS. The internet bandwidth was still so slow that one thought twice what size of pictures to upload, and interactivity was mainly achived with simple forms. Times have changed, and the once mainly static world wide web turned into a giant market place and communication platform.
Server-side technologies like PHP, ASP or Java plus browser-embedded JavaScript (JS) and CSS enabled platforms like Facebook or Amazon to deliver content dynamically, database-driven, on demand. The advent of AJAX greatly improved the browsing experience by avoiding page reloads and enabling true interactivity like search suggestions.
And here we are - JS-based server-side frameworks (like Meteor) with extensive code generators for client and server-side make full-stack development extremely productive, and perhaps sooner or later replace the classic server-side and client-side code mess.
However, for the time being this page is mainly a technical playground for me, based on Joomla and a few PHP and JS snippets of my own.