Generation W

Chemnitz University of Technology and the Computer science faculty are currently conducting a number of programs to attract more pupils from schools. Yesterday, I was giving a lecture on Web internals to a group of 10th grade students. All born after the invention of the Web, they have been growing up with it and already knew a lot. Most of them had experience in writing their own Web sites, many of them had also programmed Web applications.

idFS Homepage online

The idFS homepage is now online. The site offers a downloadable version of idFS, current idFS-related news, documentation and related papers. Moreover, there is an online demo available that illustrates, how federated single sign on can be achieved through browser redirects.

Site updates

After the recent visual changes, the VSR web site is now becoming a) "more English" and b) "more semantic". During the next weeks, we plan to translate most of the up-front pages to reflect the international orientation of our research. Yesterday, I extended the publication list with an RDF view, linking papers with our FOAF files. Furthermore, we have added a new DGS list for projects.

The new (old) design

As the eye of the careful observer might have noticed, Chemnitz University has switched to a new Web design, which is slightly more pastel-greenish than the old one. The real progress is however even more subtle: the style template is now proper XHTML, i.e. much more friendly for machine-readable markup (microformats, RDFa etc). I still remember the hassle with the last version of my homepage when I manually adjusted a copy of the PHP template.

UDDI over SOAP over HTTP over TCP over IP over Ethernet over SOAP over ...

The first exercise session of the lecture on protocols for distributed systems starts today. During the last few weeks, I have written a lot of sample programs that partially implement or use most of the covered protocols on top of TCP sockets. Apart from some unpleasant experiences with COM, it was good fun, largely due to the simplicity of the technologies. The exercise later in the semester will also feature some of our own research products.

DGS List Manager complete

The first version of the DGS List Manager is now complete and in productive use for the VSR homepage. The programs serves as a front-end to the Data Grid Service (DGS), a Web-service for creating and managing lists of aribtrary XML content in an ad-hoc fashion via an easy to consume interface.

PhD Talk

Yesterday, I held a presentation on my PhD area of research at an internal group meeting. While it was quite challenging to pack the most important things in 30 minutes, I got some valuable feedback for further improvements of the talk. As the thesis itself is currently under my supervisor’s review, I’m now more occupied with the upcoming semster than with my PhD.