KPMG Charity Run 2006 in Berlin (General)
I have been invited by KPMG to attend to the KMPG Charity Run in Berlin last weekend. It was a lot of fun. See the gallery or a few selected pictures: walk, group picture, start (I know I look bored), me in action 1, me in action 2, finish, and cheque.

Greetings,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 21:48 2006-07-16 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Gtalk2VoIP.com rocks (General)
Hi all,
today, I upgraded my Nokia 770 with the 2006 software edition recently released by Nokia. This update contains a Google Talk client (so, there is hope that Google will sooner or later release a Linux version of Google Talk) and I played a little bit with it. Fortunately, my alpha geek hero pointed me to a website called Gtalk2VoIP.com. Gtalk2VoIP.com offers to call every phone in the plain old wired telephone system. So far, Google is not offering such a service so it is really cool that a third party came up with such a gateway. I played a little bit with Gtalk2VoIP. com and I really liked it. This is really cool stuff! Great job! I would like to promote this service here: everybody who is using Google Talk should try it! You get 5 cents for free to make trail calls. I called my answering machine at work and it really worked. Unfortunately, I cannot say anything about the voice quality because I used three wireless lan access points in row to get Internet access. I will try at the university soon and then I let you know.

Greetings,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:31 2006-07-13 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

JSTUN and the Free Network Project (JSTUN)
For Summer of Code (sponsored by Google) I suggested to enrich the Free Network Project client with STUN and UPnP capabilities. Unfortunately, my proposal has been dismissed. However, a few days ago, one of the main developers contacted me because he now likes my ideas. I was really pissed because a few weeks ago this particular developer argued against the usefulness of these techniques. Despite these discrepancies I am going to lend this project a helping hand. The Free Network Project offers so many cool features that it is worth adding a few features.

Greetings,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:43 2006-06-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Moving (General)
I have decided to move out of my current apartment because I feel too old to live in a shared apartment any longer. I enjoyed the accompany of my roommates in the past, however, now I am not a student anymore (hence I am rich enough to pay the rent for a complete apartment ;-)). So, I was looking for a 2-room apartment in downtown of Mannheim. After reviewing a few apartments I found a very nice one. Lucky as I am I was selected by the landlord to be the next tenant. So, next Saturday I will move all my stuff to the new home. This is why I took a few days off to pack my stuff and get prepared for the relocation.

Greetings,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:32 2006-06-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Travelling around the world ;-) (Ph.D. studies)
In the past week I have been travelling to Uppsala, Schweden and Nizza, France. The first journey started on Sunday 18th June and finished on Thursday 22th June. The reason for being in Uppsala was to present a paper at the RealWSN workshop (ACM Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks). Actually, I have not presented my own paper, in fact, I presented a paper of a colleague of mine who was busy attending to another conference. The title of the paper is "The Impact of Forward Error Correction on Wireless Sensor Network Performance" and you can find it here. The talk and the question and answer section went pretty smooth. I learned a lot and it was great fun to present work I haven't actually done. ;-) After the workshop finished on Monday I attended to the well-known Mobisys (The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services). Although a lot of really cool work has been presented I was surprised that two shitty papers passed the review process. However, I met a lot of really cool researchers and the talks and discussions were very instructive. In fact, I picked up a few very promising ideas for my own research interests. After arriving in Mannheim on Thursday, I re-packed my stuff to be ready to fly over to Nizza on Friday.

On Friday afternoon another colleague of mine and I moved to Nizza to visit another colleague. The trip was supposed to be vacations so we did a lot of touristic activities: visiting Monaco, hiking, lying at the beach and going out.

Of course, I took many pictures from all the things we did. You find my pictures as usual on my website.

Greetings,
Thomas

P.S.: I am really sorry, KiyuKo - I know, I forgot to review the latest developer version of poster. I promise, I will do it tomorrow.
Posted by Thomas King at 00:17 2006-06-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

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