Who am I?

I am a student, living and studying in Koblenz, Germany. I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in computational visualistics, which is computer science with a focus on computer graphics, image processing, design, software ergonomics and the automated creation, manipulation and analysis of images in general. I am currently working on my master’s. I’m very interested in multi-touch technologies and am currently working on my thesis in that area.

My Activities

It is most likely that you are visiting this page after you found it somewhere on the internet, perhaps even after stumbling upon it in some community. Thus, allow me to elaborate on the topics the target audience is interested in, rather than exposing my private life to the internet. (That, by the way, is the reason this website is kept English-only at the moment. Most of my readers don’t speak German and there are hardly any Germans who don’t speak English. I know that this might be uncomfortable for some of you, but until I (or someone else) write a multi-language plugin for the underlying system used here, the state will remain as is.)

Open Source

I am an active fellow of the Open Source movement. Being a software developer and power user, I demand high-quality tools to get my job done. It all began when I started using the Ubuntu Linux distribution some years ago. The possibilities of flexible collaboration fascinated me from the beginning – and still do! If you open your mind for this philosophy, it is almost inevitable to participate yourself. Note that I am not a religious fanatic, though.

Projects

Reverse chronological order:

PyMT

After my initial involvement with the PyMT project, I’ve become a core-developer of the framework. PyMT is a framework for rapidly developing multitouch applications without having to worry about platform or low-level issues. Initially, I have used it for my bachelor’s thesis to create a multitouch user interface for the volume rendering application I developed. I am very interested in multitouch and human-computer interaction in general (so if there is any commercial or scientific project going on, let me know. I am available for hire.).

Movid

I’m a founder/core developer of the Movid project. We aim to deliver a fast, scalable, modular, open, extensible and easy to use image processing / tracking application. Movid is an acronym; It stands for modular open vision interaction daemon.

Zine/Pocoo

I am a member of the Zine/Pocoo team and help with fixing bugs and adding new features to the software.

MoinMoin

After Google announced their Summer of Code 2008 I sent out an application for the MoinMoin Wiki Project and got elected as one of the students who were working on MoinMoin for a few months. My task was to refactor the storage backend of the wiki engine. One of the developers volunteered in being my mentor. More on that in an extra blog post.

During Summer of Code 2009 I again became a student for the MoinMoin wiki project. This time I integrated the work I did last year even further, so you can now use ACLs and make use of fairly advanced configuration capabilities. In addition to that, I also begun work on a SQLAlchemy backend that (in theory) allows you to run MoinMoin on a variety of database flavors.

MeMaker

I wrote my first real code for an Open Source project when I still was at school. Through Planet Ubuntu I got in contact with another developer and some time after that, we founded a project called MeMaker. The program allows you to select from a predefined set of features (parts of a face) and easily combine them. The result is a scalable vector graphic representing your face. The graphic can be used under a creative commons license.

Ubuntu

Once my experience with the system was sufficient, I became a supporter for the project. I joined the German Ubuntu Association and did some smaller work like translations, bug reports and reinforced our booths at public events. I had a few talks where I explained the system to interested users and even wrote a few articles about it for professional magazines. Following that, I was granted ubuntu member status, which entitles me to have my blog aggregated on Planet Ubuntu. Today you may know me from my activity as operator in the German Ubuntu IRC channels. If you happen to be one of the visitors of the first German Ubuntu Conference, you might have heard my talk or met me there (I wore one of those badges the organizers had). I recently joined the webteam of the German Ubuntu forums, which really is a large community.