Stephan Paukner :: syslog

There is an epidemic going around in Austria these days which can be described as “put your car seats a life vest on”. As since May 2005 it is compulsory in Austria to wear signal vests on highways and country roads, it is recommended to keep them in the passenger compartment of your car. But many people don’t want to keep them below the front seats or elsewhere, no, they properly put them their seats on to tell everybody, “Hey, I’m so good, see how I do have signal vests in my car!”

I don’t give much about the look of my own car, I admit that I don’t keep it well, but since so many people do care so much about the appearance of their cars I can’t really understand why they don’t see a disturbance in their “radioactively” yellow car seats.

Well, “last exam” doesn’t mean the final master exam, which comes after the Master Thesis, but it was the last step to take before I could have my head clear for the Big Last Step.

Mr. Teschl graded me “Sehr gut” (i.e. an “A”) on Ordinary Differential Equations, which is another proof for the theory that the understanding for a certain subject is very dependent on the teaching person (or his script, heh).

First of all I will enjoy my two weeks of holiday, and after that I want to decide what direction to take for my thesis. I will meet with Thomas in the mid of August to have a look at Applied Matching Pursuit, and after that with HGFei to get an idea about the second possible topic. I want to get into the status of an graduand officially within August - for this, I will have to hand in all my report cards and to disclose the topic of my thesis.

If RCS is used separately from CVS (e.g. for system configuration management), I sometimes want to know whether there are any uncommitted changes pending. Here’s my bash alias to get an overview:

Maybe you want rcsdiff to be an alias for a home-made rcscolordiff, which itself simply calls

rcsdiff $@ | colordiff --no-banner.

Immer mehr Nordic Walker unterwegs

Da ich Anfang August in Tirol urlauben und dabei ein pauschales Aktiv-Package einlösen werde, bei dem u.a. auch eine Nordic Walking-Einführung inkludiert ist, muss ich streng darauf achten alles richtig zu machen und die bösen Trendläufer verächtlich anblicken.

Due to Thomas being busy this week, our meeting has been delayed until next week.

I will ask Mr. Teschl for a date of my last exam next week, as he will return from his research travel tomorrow. I really want it to be done by the end of July, as I will be on holidays for the first two weeks of August.

Eben genau “geschlechts-spezifisch”! Der Konsens ist nämlich, Begriffe wie Leser, Studenten, Terroristen, Lehrer, Schüler, Pensionisten geschlechtsneutral aufzufassen, erst durch Verwendung des “Binnen-I” (steht’s schon im Duden?) wird explizit zwischen Mann und Frau unterschieden, womit sich gleich auch mal ein Problem mit solchen Personen ergibt, welche physisch und/oder psychisch dazwischen stehen.

100 neue “weibliche” Zusatztafeln (orf.at)

I met with Thomas K. today at his office in the 9th district, where he gave me an introduction into the topic of Matching Pursuit Algorithms. It is in general a more linear algebraic sort of thing. You have a set of vectors in a Hilbert space, which is large in relation to the dimension of the space, i.e. there are many linear dependent elements in it. This set of so-called ‘atoms’ is called a dictionary and will be used to describe elements of the space. The aim is to use only those atoms which are ‘near’ (-> inner product) the vector to analyze. These best atoms can be obtained by the so-called Matching Pursuit algorithm. In general, this has nothing to do with Numerical Harmonic Analysis, but the relation to NuHAG’s more central topic, Gabor Analysis, raises when a Gabor dictionary(?) is chosen as a dictionary, which also is an overstuffed set of atoms, which are then called frames(?).

Thomas will mainly give an overview of these algorithms in his master thesis, and his idea was to have me do the ‘applied part’ of this topic in my own thesis. I should have a look at the two papers he sent me, and next week we would meet again to have a look at some applied examples he can find.

As far as I can tell at this point, a topic which is nearer to Gabor Analysis would be of more interest to me. I will have to wait for my decision until HGFei gives me an overview of the second possible direction for my thesis. What argues for working together with Thomas is that he has a similar background as me: He is regularly employed, writes his thesis during his freetime and simply has the finishing of his studies as primary motivation.