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W e l c o m e
Welcome to my Collection of Projects

During the years I worked in my spare time on several little projects which I would like to share. My two big passions are physics and computer science and you will find material for both fields here.
During my physics studies I assembled several thoughts and calculations and produced TeX / LaTeX documents which might be of use to other physics students. I provide the information in source and postscript versions. Before I changed to use LaTeX I wrote my own extensions to TeX which will be needed in order to compile most of these documents.
In the area of computing I have collected several small projects which might be of interest to you, too. Just browse the collection below and have fun.

I n f o M a t e r i a l
Collection of Thoughts about Physics

During my studies I used to write down several ideas about what I had learned, mainly in order to practice and deepen my understanding of the subject. Maybe some other Physics student -- perhaps you? -- still finds these collections of thoughts useful. Therefore I decided to put all those which are of general enough nature to be useful to other people on the web. I only regret that all of these collections of thoughts are in German and therefore only of limited use to the general public.
>>Read the full story

I n f o M a t e r i a l / P r o j e c t s
Finance / Open Java Trading System

Recently I discovered an interest for finance, stock markets, risc management and all the mathematics behind that. Therefore I decided to start a new project on sourceforge, the Open Java Trading System, which is meant to be a common infrastructure to develop (stock) trading systems. There are four parts: gathering of raw data over the internet, recognition of trading signals, a visualisation module and trading with banks. Besides that the project is also a platform to communicate the experience I gathered and still gather in the financial domain.
>>Read the full story >>OJTS on SourceForge

I n f o M a t e r i a l / P r o j e c t s
Economics / Money

Via the entry point of finance and stock trading I also touched areas like political economics or how our money works. Here you can find a collection of thoughts that evolved over the years while thinking about these general aspects of our day to day life.
>>Read the full story

I n f o M a t e r i a l / P r o j e c t s
Physics / Stirling Engine

Since I first saw a stirling engine in motion when I was still going to school I am fascinated by these devices. Recently I built a simple one myself. You can order a simple construction set at astromedia for only 22€. I've built it together with my children on a week-end in a few hours.
After that initial success I became more courageous and bought the book Der Stirlingmotor from Dieter Viebach. The book describes how to build a stirling engine from a tin and some other building parts. The book asserts you that you should be able to build the full device on a kitchen table with devices that usually are available in standard house holds. I cannot confirm this statement :) After trying for some week-ends I had to give up and I gave all the parts to one of my uncles who has a fully equiped workshop. He was able to finish the device and here you can see the result: motor.avi.

P r o j e c t s
ICQ / AIM Logger

I was trying to find a tool on the web which did log all the online status changes of the people in my contact list. I found a tool which is called imlogger. This tool is only working under unix and it does not log status changes. Besides that it does the logging by switching the ethernet interface into promiscous mode. All of this I did not want. But this tool did go in the right direction. After I found in addition to the above tool a web-site which documents the ICQ/AIM protocol called OSCAR I just decided to write this tool myself and I created a little MSVC++7 project. In order to run the tool you will have to install WinPcap 3.01 auto-installer (driver +DLLs).
>>ReadMe.txt >>aimlogger.exe >>Source

P r o j e c t s
SABlaster

SABlaster is meant to be several things:

• first of all SABlaster is a game project written in C++ and targeted for the Linux and Windows platforms. It is a clone of the well known bomberman type of game.
• second, SABlaster is meant to be a library integration project, where I test the compatibility of several different libraries and technologies like the
  • ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment) Framework
  • SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer), a portable multimedia layer abstraction
  • STLport, a thread safe and exception safe implementation of the STL (C++ Standard Template Library) library
  • the C++ Boost library, an extension library for the STL
  • WFST, a Finite-state template library in C++
  • ParaGUI, a cross-platform high-level application framework and GUI (graphical user interface) library
  • libmzscheme, an implementation of the programming language scheme as scripting language
  • SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator) to be able to plug in several different scripting languages into the same project
  • xtl (eXternalization Template Library) to externalize data structures in C++
• as a third point SABlaster is meant to be a design study of using patterns and object oriented methods in game programming
• and finally as a long term aim SABlaster should be used to compare the object oriented design methodology with functional programming design methods by reimplementing the game in different functional programming languages like Haskell, Lisp and SML and having a direct comparison of the different game sub modules.

I n f o M a t e r i a l
Linux Security

I am interested in security related issues mainly from the programmer perspective, e.g. I am interested in writing good code without security problems. In order to really understand the threats and pitsfalls you will encounter during your code development it is necessary to write exploits yourself. This will give you the right state of mind while writing code to be alert to avoid these problems. I collected here on a page some links to security relevant documentation that will give you enough background to avoid the common mistakes.
>>Read the full story

I n f o M a t e r i a l
Object Oriented Design

I had for a long time the plan to write a document about program design, design patterns and all of what people think are industry's best practices. In my opinion when people talk about industry's best practices most often this is an excuse for being average compared to being outstanding. Yesterday I came across a paper comparing object oriented design patterns with techniques used in functional programming languages which stated (in much clearer words than I was able to say) several of my critics in object oriented design basically saying that if you would not use OOP you would not have to solve the problems it causes.
The second link you can find below talks about trouble with OOP in an extremely easy set-up to show to people in a real world example where the little secrets in OOP are that nobody talks about.
>>Bridging Functional and Object-Oriented Programming
>>Subtyping, Subclassing, and Trouble with OOP