good carma!

Still can’t believe it: today I went to Cafe String in Södermalm and had tea there. It appeared to happen, that I found a Nikon D50 camera right next to the sink in the bathroom when I went there.

Being the nice nice guy I am, I took the camera and gave it to the bar man – in the hope that he would give the camera to who ever it belongs to – in case this person would show up and ask for it.

Anyway, later this day I was thinking, that this was actually pretty stupid to give back a camera, which is worth about 500 Euros… however, I was treated so well by the destiny these days (I lost my room keys twice and got them back both times without any problems) that I think it was definitly the right thing to do So I hope this recharges my good-carma-account.

Trip to Tallin

Last week some friends and I went to Tallin, in order to check out one more of the baltic cities, which are really easy to reach from Sthlm.

As the weather forecast predicted, the waves were nice and small and fortunately the ‘Near Gale Warning’ (see image) was a little bit ambitious.

Tallin itself is definitely worth a visit! Probably one of the most interesting cities around the Baltic See.

Thanks to Simon, who is living at the moment in Tallin, we got really nice impressions of the city and excellent coffee

Challenging the Baltic Sea

This afternoon I am going to depart to Tallin – again with a ferry from Tallink. I am not sure if this is a good idea but I checked the wave forecast of the Finnish Institute Of Marine Research.

According to these forecast results, the weather is going to be nice and calm – nothing compared to the light gale we got into, when we travelled back from Riga a week ago.

Stockholm-Riga-Stockholm in only 51 hours by boat

Hej!

A week ago, some of my friends from Tyresö and I went on a boat trip to Riga. We choose to take the Tallink ferry because this is much more friendly to the environment and additionally pretty cheap. It was especially cheap, because Tallink had its ‘Crazy Weeks’. When we booked our tickets, we had no idea that this loose promise of craziness would be fulfilled.

Before we entered the ship, we saw at the check in desk a weather forecast. In there it said something about a gale warning. Since we are not used to this jargon we asked the officer behind the desk, what we should expect with having a gale. As nice as the man was, he just said something about some waves, which isn’t quite a good explanation for this phenomenon.

We had the pleasure to travel with the Regina Baltica, which is a ship with quite a bit of history – as one can read in this article. I like especially this part of the article!

The bad thing with the good consciousness regarding the climate is that the such a boat trip does not take only 1.5 hours but 16 wonderful hours. The great challenge is to spend this time, without going crazy. So one has to avoid the ‘best band in the Baltic Sea’, which is playing almost constantly in ‘the night club’. Further, one has to make sure to make a big circle around the karaoke event. If one is really curious about very individual personalities, which do not care to make a fool out of them self, one might want to have a look at this. However, this is basically the same as American Idol but without the experts comments – so not so much fun. Anyway, the most exciting thing on the MS Regina Baltica is the show dancing event. This is so strange and boring that I can’t explain this here.

So long story short moral: it is a good feeling to leave the ferry in Riga for a couple of hours.

Riga itself seems to be a beautiful city. Unfortunately we did not see to much of the city, because the weather was so bad, this means it was very windy, cold and snowing, that we stayed most of the time in cafes, churches and restaurants.

Nevertheless we had a good time at this place and returned back to the ship just in time. As we were making our plans, how to spend the time on the ferry in the most possible pleasant way the crew anounced that the departure would be delayed for approximatly 10 hours due to the bad weather conditions.

This basically meant, that a collegue and I could not make it to the presentation of our homework at the following day. So we checked if they could provide us with an internet access, which the crew could not arrange. What we did finaly was sending SMS to another student in Stockholm, asking him to tell the teacher, that we are stucked on the boat in Riga.

The evening was actually not to bad, however it makes a huge difference if the boat is moving and you know that every minute that passes by brings you closer to Sthlm or not.

In the end we left Riga 14 hours later as originally intended and passed the rest of the storm.

More 3D Graphics for Game Development

Hey,

here are some pictures of the 3D world we created for the second assignment of the 3D Graphics for Game Development course.

We created this scene using the Blender Game Engine. It is really straight forward to use this software and to create easily quite impressing scenes:

So if you are interested in the secrets of creating recommend you to take a look at the Blender website.

Course: 3D Computer Graphics for Game Development

The second term of the winter semester has started. One of my new courses is 3D Computer Graphics for Game Development. This course is taught at the Stockholm University at the Kista IT campus. Unfortunately the materials and the lectures are in Swedish. This is quite a challenge for me since my Swedish is not very good. In fact I understand in the best case 50% of what the teacher is talking about.

What do I do to catch up with the course anyway? Well, what I do is to make as much notes to every slide as I can. This unsorted and unstructured bunch of information needs to be processed afterwards. For this, there are wonderful services available on the net. The first service I use is of course Google Translation. Another great service I use for translation of Swedish is Språkrådet. Finally I use other resources as the SiteSeer site, the ACM digital library and Wikipedia. Once I translated all the words I did not understand, some things make more sense. For everything else I need to find other explanations.

This means basically that it is more time consuming to attend a course, which is taught in a language one did not master yet. However, it is possible!

Furthermore the assignments have to be done in teamwork. This makes lots of things easier. The first assignment of this course was to create a 3D world, with UV textured walls and borders. Further one should be able to fly through this scene. So this course follows the same paradigm as the computer graphics courses at my home university in the sense that one learns the theory in the lectures and in the assignments one has to apply the knowledge using the open source modelling application Blender. This makes a lot of sense, since it takes quite a while to implement a game engine by oneself.

Alby, Stockholm – The vision of a city

Excursion to the suburb Alby with the course “Swedish History and Society”

Since I am very interested learning as much as I can about the Swedes, I am also attending a course about the history and society of Sweden. In the context of this course we are discussing also the history of Stockholm as a city and how it developed. So city planning and its outcome is also an issue we discuss.

In order to get an impression of how visions of city planning were implemented, we made an excursion to Alby. This is an suburb in the south-west of Stockholm, designed to be the perfect place to live at.

In Alby Kerstin Bodström gave us a guided tour through the city she studied for a long time. Here are some pictures to give you an impression of this tour:

Kerstin Bodstroem talking about Alby

A case study: Internet Search Techniques and Business Intelligence

One of the courses I attend at KTH is Internet Search Techniques and Business Intelligence. This course is taught in English by Erik Sneiders and Hercules Dalianis and is offered to students of the University of Stockholm (SU) as well as to students of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).

The first thing about this course, which is new to me is that in case one passes all the assignments and laborations one earns 7.5 ECTS. Concerning the fact that one ECTS should correspond 30 hours of work of a average student who reaches average grades this number seems to be a little bit high. However, this concerns only this particular course and certainly not others.

What is this course about?

This is a tough question to answer. So I follow the approach of the teachers who answer on the course web page the other question, what this course is not about: “This is not a course on how to use the interface of Internet search engines. The course gives an insight into the techniques for information searching applied on the Internet.” (Quote Origin). Obviously there are people who thought this course would teach them how to use search engines… can’t believe it. And still what is this course about? I try to summarize this:

1. How does information retrieval (IR) work?
2. What are basic IR models? (Boolean and vector space based models)
3. Search engine evaluation.
4. Similarity between documents and queries.
5. Page Rank and how to calculate this?
6. Search engine optimization of web pages.
7. Key word optimization.
8. Link optimization.
9. etc.

This is roughly the part Erik Sneiders teaches. The other part of the course is about Business Intelligence. The interesting thing about BI is that this field concerns issues how e.g. a company can get all information needed in order to have an advantage over those competitors, which do not have these information. Therefore BI is basically about information search for companies. This part of the course is ongoing at the moment and I will summarize this part by the time the course will be finished.

Laborations and Assignments

Besides a final exam this course requires to fulfil the so called Laborations and assignments. Laborations are practical sessions in computer pools at the university. So within 90 min. one has to fulfil a certain exercises. In the first lab. e.g. the big challenge was to use a software with a Swedish interface. This makes a lot of sense in a course taught in English aimed for international students etc. But it seems like that the teacher Hercules is not so aware about that people choose this course partly because it is supposed to be taught in English.

Assignments are to be done in little groups (3 to 4 students). The topics are more time consuming and take more effort than labs. In the first assignments it was demanded to conduct a search engine evaluation in a very small scale. The most difficult part about those assignments is that one has to work in groups with people one does not know at all. So for example a I turned out to be in a group with a girl who has not too much time because she mother of a little child. The other girl in the assignment group has a job every day the week until noon and lately also an exam so she does not show up at all. The third one is also an exchange student who is the total difference to the first two: he is very skillful and works hard for this class.

So all in all it is hard to say what I should think or say – is it better here than at my home university? I realised that I like smaller numbers of students in lectures (here we are about 50 students – I am used to about 10). What I like a lot is the idea to be finished with the course in the middle of the semester and then starting new courses… Too many aspects one could talk about!

The IT campus of KTH and SU in Kista, Stockholm

The main reason for me, why I am in Stockholm for a semester is that I wanted to close as many gaps in my knowledge about IT and computer science as I could. This initial intention has dramatically shifted due to some difficulties in finding a department where I could join the research work. However, I decided to make the best out of the situation and attend some courses, e.g. about topics that are not taught at my home university.

The courses about IT and computer science happen to be located on the IT-campus of the KTH and Stockholm University (SU). This means, this campus is located in the beautiful Science City in Kista, Stockholm. Why this is still supposed to be Stockholm is a maze. It takes me every day a millions of hours to get there and back.

However, this campus in Kista is pretty new and the lecture rooms are stuffed with technology for e-learning etc. Besides a huge rear projection screen you will find always a Smart Board in every lecture room. This means teachers could annotate the slides they show during their lecture. I find it very amusing that this has not been the case one single time so far.

Kampus Kista Lecture Room

In order to make sure that everybody hears everything the lecture rooms are equipped with a lot of audio technology. So the lecturer could use a mic as well as people in the audience, who wish to discuss something. As well as the CSCW technology the audio technology is not used in the lectures I attend. However, I find it pretty cool to have such nice lecture rooms etc.

Mic at every place in the audience.

Besides the technology in the lecture rooms, the campus is stuffed with IT stuff. For example almost every door is secured with an electronic lock. If one has a key card and in some cases the corresponding pin code, one can access the room or corridor behind this door. This is in some cases a little bit annoying but at least one does not need an access card to open the doors to the rest rooms.

Trip to Skansen – Stockholm

Hey hey!

Last week I had the great pleasure to visit the museum Skansen in Stockholm. This visit was organised by the course Swedish History and Societe, which I attend in order to get to know a little more about Sweden. The first advanture in the context of this visit was that I was 30 min. late when I came to Skansen becuase I had a so called laboration this afternoon in Kista. Kista is the place where most of the courses I attend are taking place, which is quite a challenge. This is because I get travel-sick quite easily in Stockholm’s Tunelbana. However, when I arrived at Skansen there was nobody I knew at the entrance so I just asked at the entrance if they let me in, since I was late and missed my group. Luckily the nice person just let me in and told me to call somebody and ask where in Skansen they were.

The guided tour in the museum itself was very interesting, since the person, who showed us around could tell stories about every single artefact. In Skansen you can see little houses from the far North of Sweden as well as framer houses of the South. Also some buildings build by king Karl Gustav III are there.

Fig. A hut from Lapland (Jonnie Nord (User:Zaphod))

Besides the buildings there is also a collection of various animals e.g. elks, reindeer and brown bears.

(Picture taken by Alisdair McDiarmid from Glasgow, United Kingdom)

So if you ever have the chance to go to this place: do it. You will get some nice impressions about the life in Sweden and besides that, it is like a little vocation from the big city Stockholm