User:Siko1056

A: An introduction

• I'm Kai Torben Ohlhus, a computer science and engineering student in the final master semester from Hamburg, Germany. During my studies I specialized on software systems and communication networks and discovered a passion for computer arithmetic and algorithms, which will now be topic of my master thesis. I speak German (native), English (fluent) and Spanish (basic).
• My intention to participate in the GSoC 2013 is to work on a software project that can be part of my master thesis, which I start now in April. Till now I haven't participated in any GSoC and this year will be my last chance to do so.
• The choice for Octave came during the planning of my thesis schedule. My master thesis will deal with accurate fast scalar products and matrix-vector products for big sparse linear systems, usually coined to be called with MATLAB's MEX-Interface. But I prefer to use software where I can read the source code of how something is done, rather than a sparse documentation. So don't be afraid to disapprove my application, I'll stick to Octave.

C: Contact

• I know how to use IRC and I will be online as often as possible under the nick siko1056 on #octave.
• GMT+02:00 (CEST)
• I use to work from 10.00 to 18.00 +/- 2 hours.

E: Coding experience

• Since the beginning of my studies (so more than four years) I work with C, C++, and m-scripts. I attended many courses and laboratories dealing with these three languages. From my 3rd semester on I'm a student tutor for these courses: Software part of a laboratory course (MATLAB), Computer Programming (C) and Introduction to Programming (C). I have little experience with Qt4 and with OpenGL I have no experience so far, but I worked with SDL.
• Other languages of my studies were Java and web applications (JSP and Servlets). Because I use GNU/Linux as my day-to-day OS, I know BASH-scripting and for FPGA-Programming I worked with VHDL a lot. Additionally I created many documents using LaTeX.
• Nearly all programming laboratories at university were solved in a team, making use of version control systems and organization techniques like scrum.
• My biggest project so far was searchbooster a desktop document search tool based upon Apache Lucene and Apache Tika. It was developed by me and three other students in a team using scrum, Subversion (at Google Code now GIT) in a time of three months. I learned like in other projects, that an interface is something you shouldn't break every day and a proper code and comment style saves a lot of time!
• I haven't contributed to Octave so far.

F: Feeling fine

• IRC I don't use that often and I read some mailing lists.
• I worked a lot with GIT, Subversion and Mercurial.
• I successfully installed a Mediawiki on my homepage once and I'm familiar with Wikipedia.
• make, gcc, gdb, javac and IDEs (e.g. Eclipse) I worked a lot with
• It would make me happy and stay I see that my work is used in the stable regular releases of Octave!

O: Only out of interest

• Since I got to know MATLAB in my first semester, I also got to know about Octave and other numerical software environments. At my university we have free MATLAB student licences and thus many courses are dealing with MATLAB (but I figured out, that you can nearly run all m-files in Octave too). No other questions arose so far.

P: Prerequisites

• My operating systems: Ubuntu 12.04.2 (64 bit) and Windows 7 (64 bit).
• Root access, no time restrictions.
• All day internet connection.

S: Self-assessment

• As far as I can assess my coding behavior it is more defense:
  • I don't like to delete work (think before coding).
  • I code in small revertible portions and like testing these steps to avoid above.
  • I like to find out more efficient ways to do something (so critic is welcome, I want to learn).
  • Sometimes I strive for perfection (not always useful, you get stuck unnecessarily).

Y: Your task

• Did you select a task from our list of proposals and ideas?
  • If yes, what task did you choose? Please describe what part of it you especially want to focus on if you can already provide this information. Please also wiki-link the page for your elaborated proposal here.
  • If you apply for a task you have added yourself instead, please describe this task, its scope and people you already talked to concerning it. What field of tasks did you miss on the list?
• Please provide a rough estimated timeline for your work on the task. This should include the GSoC midterms and personal commitments like exams or vacation ("non-coding time"). Optionally include two or three milestones you expect.