I've just finished watching Donnie Brasco with some friends and I really have to say here and now that it's an awesome movie and that Al Pacino and Johnny Depp really deliver an amazing performance, too. It's based on a real-life story which is worth a look, too - there are a few differences to the movie, though.

Lately I've been watching quite a few movies, not that I would have that much spare time but after an exam, I spoil myself with a movie now and then and since I've had four exams in the last week you can guess how many movies I've watched. I've been busy like a bee this term which also accounts for the lack of new posts on this blog in the last months and I've pretty much finished the second and the fourth term in one. Which is awesome!

This means that I will have more time in the next terms to work at university and earn some good money. Moreover it's not just about the money but also about the projects I plan to work on, but more on this later. Right now I'm working for the chair for medical visualization and augmented reality and my only (and current) project so far has been about implementing a paper about "Importance-Driven Volume Rendering", where I'm currently and still stuck with work on the UI for the transfer functions (the data only consists of intensity values and since people prefer colors, some preprocessing has to be done).
The bad thing is that I've totally forgotten everything else over it - I've spent like two weeks reading up on volume rendering and raycasting in general and even wrote a very simple raycaster in RenderMonkey, but I hardly remember any of it anymore now..

Most of the lectures that I attended this term were pretty interesting (Linear Algebra, Theoretical Computer Science, Computer Networks) but Algorithms and Data Structures was more on the incompetent side of things due to the lecturer not preparing for any of the lectures beforehand and an incredible amount of errors in his slides - our weekly schedule was as follows: 2 hours of new subject matter, 1 hour of discussing the corrections of the errors he introduced in the former 2 hours. In the end I only attended that one hour because it was more fun and I didn't get as much confused. My main source for learning about algorithms thus was the book (Cormen et al).
I've also attended Software Engineering and I'm still not sure about what to think of it, so I'll wait for the exam and maybe reread Code Complete for it to get some common sense about the general topics back again.

I must admit that university hasn't told me a lot of new things so far. Especially nothing that I couldn't have learned on my own just as well or even better in less time to be really honest.

So all in all I must say that anyone who is bright (I consider that myself) and already knows a lot about programming is well-advised to try and get a job in the industry directly if possible because anything else is just a waste of time.

On other news I've finally acquired my own domain: blackhc.net after blackhc.com was already taken. I haven't really had any time so far to set it up properly, but I've already routed blog.blackhc.net to this blog, so it's not a total waste..

I might also move this blog to it but I'm not entirely sure yet, because I'm pretty happy with wordpress.com's service so far. There is a little bit of irony to it, too, since I only got the idea of getting my own webspace, because I wanted to post a blog entry about matrices, etc. and needed formula support for it. I searched with google and everything I found required its own wordpress installation with plugins and so on. Then I started to look at domain names and found out that blackhc.com was already taken by someone else and that HostMonster was really very cheap (5 USD a month if you subscribe for 2 years) and the deal was pretty much settled.
After I bought the domain and the hosting package, I went on to search how to install the plugins in wordpress and eventually found this FAQ posting..
Now I know that wordpress.com can do LaTeX after all and I have lots of cheap webspace, too - I should call that a net gain, right?

That said, I think this post has become long enough and I'll drop by in a few days and write more after my last exam. I also still have that linear algebra post in the queue and possibly a few others, so hopefully I'll have enough time to finalize them and publish them soon.

Cheers,
Black

Finally the second university term has started and I'm back in Munich working hard to get through university as fast as possible.

I've also moved into a new room - I'm staying at a dorm now - and it's really pretty awesome. There are lots of exchange students (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan to name a few) and we're all having a good time constantly, so really it's a huge improvement, when it comes to meeting other people. On the other hands it not a typical dorm either: my room has got its own little bathroom and it's all new because the building has been renovated in the past months - although to be honest, some parts are still being renovated, which sucks badly, because there is still a scaffolding standing outside and I can't really look outside.

But pictures can convey a lot more than words, so here are some low-res photos that I have taken with the web-cam that is built into my notebook.

Lately I've spent a lot of time developing batch files for Edu2, writing for weirdness for batch renames and having fun with the command-line in general, since it is my tool of choice that goes beyond simple Explorer and SVN Tortoise jobs. And because of that I've found a few quirks and bugs that are either funny or at least worth noting since they are a PITA to track down.

How to crash cmd.exe

Plain and simple:

for /R %f in () do echo

crashes cmd.exe in Vista

Environment Variable Mess-Up

Maybe you know the environment settings dialog in XP/Vista. It allows you to specify environment variables both for the global environment and for the current user. (The former only if you're an admin though.)
A neat feature is that you can, of course, set the same environment variable twice and Vista/XP will merge them to one, which naturally allows for some neat system configuration.

However, it has its issues, too, of course.. Notably it handles case-sensitivity of environment variable names inconsistently, which results in some pretty weird behavior.

For example let's assume we have a global and a user PATH environment variable, then Windows would merge the two, so that for applications PATH will be %PATH_global% %PATH_user% (where _global and _user refer to specific variables).
You can easily try that by opening cmd.exe and typing in set path and notice how they are merged.

Now what happens if you have e.g. a global Path and a local PATH. You'd expect that they either show up as two different environment variables (if Windows treats them as case-sensitive) or they will be merged into one variable again (if they are treated case-insensitively).
Sadly none of the above happens:
> set path will return Path = %Path_global% %Path_global%, which is both useless and can cause severe headaches, when only one half of your environment variable is available suddenly (for example after installing a program that changes or adds environment variables).

What happens? My guess and the only possible explanation are that Vista's (maybe XP's, too) handling is inconsistent. Detection of variables that need to be merged is case-insensitive, while the actual merging is not. It fails to find the user environment variable and instead uses the global one again (maybe it uses the same buffer to cache their value before concatenating them).

It took me some time to figure it out because, obviously, the set command and everything else treats them as case-insensitive.

File Associations

I've been using Notepad++ for over half a year now and I really really like it. But a few days ago I made the mistake of switching over to using it exclusively over notepad and for that I decided to change its file associations. Thank god it provides a simple dialog for that in its preferences window and it was a nice and easy task. Except that I also changed the file associations for .bat and .cmd files and instead of changing the "Edit" verb it changed the "Open/Execute" verb, which caused .bat files to only be opened in Notepad++ instead of being executed.

Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP had a really nice file association tab in their folder options which gave you total control over pretty much all aspects (except for some obscure cases where you had no choice but use regedit to change things). Now Vista's designer apparently have decided that it gives users too much control and that that is a bad idea - so they have totally crippled it. I repeat: totally and fully crippled it. Instead of being able to edit and manage various verbs, specify DDE actions, setting a default verb, etc. etc., you only have a "Change Action" button that only allows you to specify the command-line.
They have also moved it to System Settings, which is probably a better location than Folder Options where it was next to the visual appearance tab, but it's totally useless now - as are more freeware tools that you find on the internet .
After some cursing, goggling and worrying I eventually found some .reg files that restore Vista's default associations but that's really not what I would call a perfect solution.

Stay tuned for a last blog post about Edu2: a post-mortem (coming soon hopefully) and more,
Andreas

About 1.5 years ago some students (including me) from our school participated in a federally supported project called "Jugend denkt Zukunft" ("Youth think Future" - and yes it sounds shitty in German, too, and uses bad grammar...).

Interestingly enough most articles that have been translated don't translate the grammar error, too, examples here, here and here.

Let me explain what it is about:
The school partners with a local company (or rather the other way around because it seems that the local company has to pay a lot of money (some 6000 EUR) to the organization - NGO, of course - to participate and you (that is if you are the students) are part of a "role-playing game", in which you first learn about "mega trends" of the future and then in the last two days have to come up with new product ideas that have more or less (mostly less) to do with the company and its current product lines.

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