Bits and Pixels

So I had this router for quite a while. I bought the EA2700 when I moved to the US, without doing much research. That was a mistake. I had a bunch of the famous WRT54GL routers before and was super happy with them, mainly due to the flexibility of installing an alternative OS on it, which unleashes a lot more power and functionality. However, the WRT54GL was just too dated in 2012, so I decided to get a newer model and got the Linksys Cisco EA2700. I don't want to go into too many details, but this was a pretty bad decision. The software is just really bad. Almost no functionality and on top they tried to put some 'cloud-connection' stuff that is not only unnecessary, but counter productive. They tried to market it as a "Smart Router".  A bit later I bought myself a TP-Link  TL-WR1043ND  and have been using it ever since. However,  today I found the (now old) EA2700 in a moving box. This inspired me to check the interwebs for the current status of DD...

Today I releases a couple of updates to my website. In order to test a few new features, I completely re-did the UI for the pictures. When you go there now you will see some polaroid-style photos. I was inspired by this post from the guys at ZURB. The albums view now shows some seemingly randomly positioned photos with a custom text that looks like hand-writing. I used the Google Web Font API for this. While being at it I also replaces all the head graphics with actual fonts. This reduces the number of requests made to fetch the data and the total amount of bytes loaded. In the next weeks I will try to roll-out some more features to the site. I plan to overhaul the portal page a bit and to optimize performance even more. By the way, you can now also reach this site at s13g.com :)

This week I've got a new toy: The Nikon D7000. Today I had a chance to test it for the first time. I am with my folks in Germany over the weekend and the weather is gorgeous. One of the great new features of the D7000 is that it can shoot HD video at 1080p and 24fps with auto-focus enabled throughout the shoot. I didn't have a camera that could shoot HD video before, except for my recently purchased Canon S95, which "only" shoot 720p. After some tests in the garden using flowers and fishes as my subjects I have mixed feelings, although I am mostly positive: The picture quality is stunning. Especially when watching the footage on a big 1080p screen. The DSLR lenses enable you to shoot with shallow depth of field which enables some quite professional looking shots. So what's the downside you might ask: Although the D7000 is able to focus throughout the shoot, the focusing technique used is not very good. The contrast detection mechanism forces the camera to focus in...

It's been a while since I wrote by last blog post. I've decided that it's time get the dust of this blog and to throw a new entry out. And again I hope, that this time I might be able to keep some more posts coming. Anyway, on to the actual topic of this post: I just released the source code of an application I worked on in my 20% time at Google. I called in PicView. It's a photo viewer application for Android. What can it do? It can download and show you photos from Google Picasa users. When you start up the application you can enter a Picasa user name, such as "saschah", which is mine. You will be presented with a list of albums of that user. A tap on the album will show you thumbnails of all the photos in that album. A tap on one of those - you guessed it - will show you the photo full screen. In full screen mode you can tap on the left or right-hand side of the photo to go back and forth the current album. The app is also caching heavily. Every download ph...

Hi folks! Finally the new website is here. It has been much longer than I thought, but I guess it's normal when you try to finish a degree, start working and spend time on other toy projects. I started designing this new page a long time ago and I think it took me a year to come up with this design in the end. However, it took me another 2 years to finally push a working version out there that I could live with. For the last year or so it was basically living under my experimental folder and only a hand-full of people have seen it. But now I finally thought, man this is embarrassing and you design will soon be totally out-dated. Technically, I started with the good old PHP, but then after my internship at Google thought after actively working on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to use it for my website. So I started from scratch and implemented a GWT version that was totally dynamic. However I then saw that having a dynamic version brought more disadvantages than advantages and I didn...

Hey there! You might ask, why I am publishing so early again. It's not been months since my last post. So what the heck... Well, first of all, there is not much time left for me here in Atlanta. My internship is almost over, only two weeks left. It's unbelievable, but the time is speeding up fast - at least this is how it feels like to me. The second reason, why I am blogging again.... I want to focus on pictures this time and not text. There aren't too many pictures that I got for you, as I didn't get around as much as in San Francisco. But still, just to give you a glimpse of what it is like around here, I assembled a little album. Unfortunately I forgot my camera when Maria and I where out in Madison, GA, a neat little town west of Atlanta. But sometimes, the camera was with me and so some photos have been captured. You can find them on Picasa: Maybe a last post will follow, depending on my schedule and mood. I have to finish some papers for University in Germany and...

First of all I want to say sorry for not writing for such a long time. I could say I didn't have the time, but it wouldn't be completely right. It's just that not so much has happened that is worth writing about and I am in touch with many of you anyway. As my last post was created in Mountain View, let me say that I arrived savely back in Atlanta after staying in California for about a week. After an amazing week at the headquaters of Google, I spent a day in one of my most favourite cities: San Francisco. As it is only a 90 minute ride from Mountain View, I could manage to visit some friends there for a few hours. Some weeks ago, my girlfriend Maria stayed here in Atlanta for 15 days and I tried to make some room among all the work I have to do. I think it worked out great. Fortunately the working hours are quite flexible so I could shift some days and worked from home. During those two weeks we managed to see a lot around here and it was actually the first time I could e...

After making a stop in Denver, I arrived in Mountain View yesterday . Everything went pretty well, except that there are too many hotels called Residence Inn in this area, so even the cab drivers get confused. One of them actually dropped me off at the wrong place. But another one then actually got it right so I had a nice place to spent the night before the big day. And today it is... the big day. ... my first day of my intern orientation. Of course, I am not allowed to write about anything in detail, but from what I've seen today, this is just a great place to work/live. Free food everywhere, places to relax.... just a great atmosphere. A lot of very talented people all around.

First step done. I arrived in Atlanta today without any problems. I am currently staying at a hotel in Midtown Atlanta until tomorrow noon. I will then leave for the airport again to get to Denver and finally San Jose.

With just a few hours left in Germany, it might be a good idea to write a little bit about the current status. My visa got here in time. Just one day after being in Frankfurt, my passport with the attached visa was in the mail, yay! I also made arrangements for my stay in Atlanta. I found a nice offer on craigslist for a furnished room in Decatur (which is quite close to Atlanta city itself). After a few talks on the phone and exhanging quite some e-mails with the owner of the house, I am confident that this will work out and that I will have a nice stay there till the end of December. So tomorrow (Sunday) I will depart in Frankfurt at 9.30am and arrive in Atlanta at around 1.00pm. After I got through the screening, customs and imigration I will head to my hotel in downtown Atlanta, where I will stay for one night. The next day I will again go to the airport again, to get on my plane to Denver. After a quick stop my connecting flight will get me to San Jose. From there I will head to ...

Today I've been to the US Consulate in Frankfurt to apply for the visa. Everything went suprisingly quick. I got there at about 8.20am and left about two hours later with my visa application granted. Now I hope that the visa will arrive here in time. I also scheduled the flight to Atlanta today. It will depart on September 3rd from Frankfurt and goes directly non-stop to Atlanta. I will arrive there around 2pm. A few days ago I also found a nice person through craigslist, who is renting a room for this time. So after stepping out of the airport I will directly seek for a way to get to this place. I will have some time to rest until my flight on the next day (Monday) will depart to Mountain View. Unfortunately not a non-stop flight. But well, this way I will see Denver... or at least its airport. So everything seems to be set for a stressful week. After getting back to Atlanta on Sept. 10th I will start my regular job at the Google offices there and I hope to get some routine in th...

Today I've done some experiments with the layout of this blog. As it turns out, it is very flexible. All the html can be formatted so I implemented a design that I did a couple of days ago for go|west 3. I also added some useful links, replaced the standard ones and removed the blogger bar at the top as I think it's not so useful for me. If you think otherwise, feel free to tell me. I am a newbie when it comes to blogging - so don't bother ;) I might do some further fine tuning on the site and also start adding some on-topic information as well. So stay tuned (whoever is tuned in).

After using my own scripted site the time I went to the USA, I thought it might be worth a try to use a blog software this time. I will try to explore the capabilities in designing and integrating this into my own site. If it works this might get a part of my future site, too. So, sorry for not writing more, I have to do some exploration :)