Author Archives: Ingoal

What a party…

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Wow. I just came back from a house-warming party which took place in a mate’s new flat in Karlsruhe (90km from where I live). We partied hard till nearly 5am and I was really surprised that it took the cops so long to crash the party – it was as loud as in a club and I guess you could here the party from five blocks away.

After the cops told us to settle down a little and close the doors and windows it was really time to get some sleep – or at least to try. I didn’t get any as there were people snoring, opening the door, shouting around, closing the door all around me. So I tried to at least relax a little, which I did, although it wasn’t all that comfortable on the wooden floor, until 9am.

After a little water to the face and brushing my teeth it was time to check out the flat and oooooh boy, you really saw that this was one hell of a party (I guess there were around 80people at the party with around 1/3 partying till well after 5am) – some puke here, some puke there, loads of broken beer bottle, cigarettes everywhere and you could hardly get your feet off the floor (did some spill “a little” something everywhere?! – yup!). So we took off to a small pub to get some breakfast and after some coffee and sitting outside in the sun I wasn’t feeling tired at all. That change right as we drove back. So I’m starting to get really tired atm, so I guess I’ll close the laptop after this post and try to get some rest/sleep right here on the couch :-)

Director of Google Research visiting…

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Wow, the Director of Research from Google is visiting my university next week. It will go down on thurdays 28th october…I’m sure going to visit that session.

“The Past, Present, and Future of Web Search Engines”

Abstract:

Web search engines have emerged as one of the central applications on the internet. In fact, search has become one of the most important activities that people engage in on the Internet. Even beyond becoming the number one source of information, a growing number of businesses are depending on web search engines for customer acquisition.

In this talk I will brief review the history of web search engines: The first generation of web search engines used text-only retrieval techniques. Google revolutionized the field by deploying the PageRank technology – an eigenvector-based analysis of the hyperlink structure- to analyze the web in order to produce relevant results. Moving forward, our goal is to achieve a better understanding of a page with a view towards producing even more relevant results.

Google is powered by a large number of PCs. Using this infrastructure and striving to be as efficient as possible poses challenging systems problems but also various algorithmic challenges. I will discuss some of them in my talk.

Posted in Uni

My name will be in the NY Times, too…

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As I took my daily tour through the numerous blogs I read regularly I found something really catching my eye. Chu Yeow talked about support the Firefox campaign by donating to their newest idea – an ad campaign which will buy a whole page ad in the New York Times when the big 1.0 drops, with the “side effect” that this ad will include all the names of the donators making this ad possible.

So I thought this is a great idea, and to help Chu Yeow out a little I made my donation via his donation link – if you would like to donate feel free to use this link which can earn him a t-shirt signed by the firefox team :-)

My donation to the ad campaign

If anyone has access to the NY-Times’ print edition it would be lovely to get a scan or a notify so that I can go out an get a copy. Cheers :-)

Ill

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Oh no. Alright, it’s autumn and all, but why now? It’s two weeks till project deadline (S.E.S.S.) and now I’ve caught a bad case of a cold with sore throat and all :-(

Nontheless my To-Do-List is still nearly endless so I need to get all my strength together this afternoon and get some things done. Wish me luck.

First Dreamhost impressions…

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…alrighty. After signing up the domain was registered less than an hour later (thumbs up). Shell access working fine (thumbs up). No CPanel?!? (thumbs down).

Now after trying to get some mysql-databases to work right away (impossible, argh, thumbs down), I’m a little bit disappointed atm as I had planned to export some dbs from my other server and import them and get the site up and running, which didn’t work out due to different reasons:

  • No CPanel? You gotta be kidding me – CPanel might not be the securest thing in the world, but it’s the fastest and easiest way to get everything going (fast and right away) – and the DreamHost Panel is really something you need to get used to.
  • MySQL-DBs take some time to get activated…
  • …and now there’s only an index page and not the real page showing…argh!
  • After almost 16h infront of a computer screen it’s time to get my eyes some rest…maybe everthing will be up and running tomorrow

Enough for now, I guess “the world will look brighter” again tomorrow and I’m sure DreamHost will stand up to it’s reputation of being on of the best hosts around :-)

Dersim Ludwigsburg 1-1 FCM II

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Oooh no! The tie doesn’t help either team…we had the chance to go up to first place, now we’re stuck in third place (14pts). Dersim is down one place to 2nd place (16pts) and Besigheim (which we’ll play in a few weeks) are up to the top (16pts, but better goal-difference).

Now we need to win the next games (especially against Besigheim) to stay in the championship race…

Keep ’em comin’

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Wow. Got another grade today: another 1.3 for my seminar about Instance-based learning. I guess I’m on a roll atm :-)

Posted in Uni

Blogshares

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Well, I opened my account two days ago…and I gotta say I really enjoy “playing” and some of my moves are already paying off:

Blogshares Net Growth ranking

FCM II 7-0 Spvgg Schlößlesfeld II

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Rain rain rain. So we had to play on artificial turf, yet again, but as it’s also our training pitch we’re quite used to it anyway so no worries. After a lot of missed opportunities we finally score the go ahead goal and two more followed till half time, 4 more in the second half.

Not a brilliant game, but we did what we had to do and are now only 2 points behind first place with the “clash of the titans” 2nd (we) vs. 1st (Dersim Ludwigsburg) coming up on October 10th.

Personal: played the last 15minutes :-) , referee ruled me offside twice (one wrong decision)…no shot on goal :-(

Burnout 3 – Takedown

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Inspired by AntiMatter’s (of Nuclear Moosecandy) Review of the PS2 version I thought this game was worth getting. So I went out and got the Xbox version and I gotta say: now that’s a fun game. I didn’t have the chance to play all that much yet, but I’m already intrigued by the whole concept.

It’s not really what you might consider a “normal racing game”. You gotta take (sometimes huge) risks to be fast and successfull – and the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward (turbo). But you gotta be careful not to take too many risks as the (spectacular!) crashes can really throw you back. I think this will be my new favourite racing game (up to this point it was: Need for Speed Underground – but I already completed that months ago, so no big challenge in it anymore) and I’m sure there will be many hours of playing with this one!

Amazon launches search engine (A9)

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Hmm…Amazon ended beta testing and has officially launched it’s very own search engine called A9.

I just tested a little and it really reminds me of Google especially when I search for my own sites. I guess I should read a little as I’m really interested what type of ranking etc they’re using to optimize their search results, what kind of crawler they’re using etc…

update: now that makes sense, A9 uses the Google search engine along with other helpful resources like IMDb. So I guess the only “true innovation” is their user-specific preferences (cookies need to be enabled). I guess they’re using the history etc for statistics and placement of results (similiar to the “customers who bought x also bought y” on amazon)…

SGV Hochdorf II 0-2 FCM II

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Result: :-)

A really bad game on a worse pitch…2 late goals secure 3 important points….there were times where we would have lost such a game.

Personal: hmm…a 14 player squad…so almost guaranteed playing time one may think….bah! 10 seconds…ooooh… :x :-( [Strike 2]

GMail Invites…final post

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So…this is going to be my final post concerning GMail invites…I’m tired of having them on my back, and wandering around I came across Isnoop gmailomatic…you can send your gmail invites to them and they’ll add them to their pool…

If a user wants one he can simply enter his email-address and he will get one from the pool! Cool idea…

/heads over to gmail and sends invites to isnoop…