Papers
Character Sets & Co.
For a training talk I held for the local Munich ISP
Linksystem München
in 2002 I created an introductory paper explaining the notions of
character sets, character encodings,
scripts, and fonts, and advocating the
extensive use of the most universal
Unicode
character set and the associated character encoding
UTF-8
instead of the myriads of legacy character sets that are
ISO-8859-*, EUC,
(Shift-)JIS, Big5, GB2312,
or KOI8-*.
Philip Bernstein, Concurrency Control
In the course of the
Database Hall of Fame seminar
at
TUM
in 2001 I wrote a paper about
Dr. Philip Bernstein,
one of the most distinguished database theory researchers to date,
and about one of his most prominent fields of research:
database concurrency control.
This work intends to give an introduction to the theory of
transactions and serializability,
followed by an overview of various mechanisms for concurrency
control that have been developed, some of which have been
implemented in many database systems that are in use today.
Monads
In the
Pearls of Computer Science seminar
at
TUM
in 2000 I presented the programming concept of
monads.
Monads can be used in functional programming to aid the modifiability
of programs and to emulate side effects — such as global
state, exception handling, output, or non-determinism — which
are commonly only found in impure functional or imperative
programming languages, while retaining ease of reasoning, one of
the most appealing aspects of purely functional languages.
This paper not only explains the concept but also gives a handful
of examples in
Haskell.
Introduction to Non-Linear Dynamics
As my high school thesis (Facharbeit) in the subject of physics at
Michaeli Gymnasium München
(a Munich high school) in 1998 I wrote an introductory paper on the
basics of non-linear dynamics.
Terms such as the principle of causality,
sensitivity, phase space, and
attractors are explained, the setup of the popular
magnetic pendulum experiment
is described, and its behavior is analyzed qualitatively and
mathematically. Finally, a computer simulation of the experiment is
used to illustrate and analyze its behavior on a larger and more
abstract scale.
Japanese Kana Learning Cards
While taking
Japanese
courses at
Münchner Volkshochschule
(adult education center) I made up these 平仮名
(hiragana) and 片仮名 (katakana) learning cards.
Just print them double-sided and cut them out using a carving
board!