ABOUT ME

General

Welcome. My name is Daniel, and I am a 34 years old software engineer from Switzerland. That's me:
Me
Pleased to meet you.
You are on my personal homepage.

Computer science

I have a master's degree (MSc ETH CS) from ETH Zurich. My main areas of interest include web development, XML-technologies, security as well as low-level stuff and compilers.
I am familiar with the following (programming/script/markup/database) languages:

I am a long-time member of the coding-board, a community of german-speaking programmers.
Make sure you check out my projects.

Occupation

I currently work for GetYourGuide, an online marketplace for tours and activities. In the past I have worked for SWISS TXT, the company that is responsible for teletext production an broadcasting in Switzerland.

Hates

There are various things in this world that I absolutely hate and that I would like to never have existed. Here's an (incomplete) list of them:

Greetz

...fly out to: All members of the coding-board, Razor1911, SKIDROW, ViTALiTY, HATRED and POSTMORTEM.

Last update: 10.03.2017

Projects

This page summarizes some of my projects.

QR code library

During my bachelor thesis at ETH Zurich (see below), I wrote a library for generating QR codes in the browser. The library is written in JavaScript and relies on the HTML5 canvas element to render the codes. The library can be downloaded here: QRCode.js The library defines a class QRCode. To obtain a QR code, one uses the so-to-speak static method getQRCode of this class, supplying the data to encode (as a string) and the error correction level to be used as parameters of the constructor. The returned QRCode object then offers several methods for rendering the QR code, for example drawInCanvas: var objMyQRCode = QRCode.getQRCode("My example text", QRCode.ECLEVELS.Q);
var objCanvas = document.getElementById("MyCanvas");
objMyQRCode.drawInCanvas(objCanvas, 4, "#FFFFFF", "#000000");

My bachelor thesis

In my bachelor thesis titled "Ad-hoc sharing of content with public displays using web technologies", I investigated how web technologies can be used to run a public display infrastructure so that the displays can be remote-controlled from the browser - for example on a mobile phone. The key focus was the ability to upload content from the controlling device to the display, and the ability to share content with other people in vicinity. The two resulting web applications can be tested here:
HyperVision (runs on public display)
WebDesk (runs on controlling device)
My supervisor Matthias Geel wrote a paper summarizing my work, which was published in the Pervasive Displays conference 2013 in Mountain View, California.

EOBS

Since 2008, I develop and run a small comunity site called EOBS (Event Organizer Brügg & Surroundings) for me and my closest friends. It allows us to organize events, has e-mailing and text messaging functionalities, a chat, provides birthday reminders, and offers a Doodle-like voting system.

CheckWord

Last but not least, I am the author of the commercially available application CheckWord, which was developed in particular for my former grammar school. Its purpose is to help learning french words, providing the user with a german word and prompting him/her for the french translation of it. It features dictionaries, statistics and focusing on the individual words that the user has problems with.

MUSIC

I am a music addict! My CD collection currently consists of more than 100 albums and it's growing steadily. Some of the artists I like are:

Alternative/Nu Metal/Rapcore

Rock

French Hip-Hop

German Hip-Hop

International Hip-Hop / Dancehall

R'n'B / Pop

Swiss artists

Electronic / DJ

Classical / Film music

GAMES

I LOVE video games. Not only the current high-end games, but also older ones, especially console games. The following is a list of my favorites:

You will NOT find me on any servers. Why not? I think online gaming is bad practice. It can be fun but there are a lot of cheaters, kiddies, people who you will never be able to beat because they're busy with the game 24/7 and lags. Furthermore, online gamers support copy protection, a thing I can't stand. And to all the online gamers who "really love that game": In 5 years, your co-players and servers will be gone and you will never be able to play it again. Too bad for you.

My gaming history

When I was about seven years old, my parents got me a PlayStation for my birthday. At the time, I hadn't heard of the system, and at first, I thought it was a coffee machine. It wasn't long before I knew better. Along with the console came the original Ridge Racer, which I used to play for quite some time. The first game that I bought myself was its successor, Ridge Racer Revolution - and it's still among my favorite games today! I remember exactly the day I bought it. It cost 49 Swiss francs. There was also the Gameboy Pocket. I don't remember exactly if I got it before or after the PlayStation - but in any case, it couldn't really compete. I played Super Mario Land on it, and I actually beat it. But it was so frustrating that you couldn't save the progress... Then came Pokémon. I didn't catch 'em all, but I played for hundreds of hours, restarting over and over again - excited to find out if any of the rumours about how Mew could be caught were true. Then came the Gameboy Color, and things got even better. The second generation of Pokémon games was my favorite, and it was all in color!
At some point, I borrowed The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening from a friend, which got me interested in the series. I ended up getting Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, and spent a lot of time on them.
Back in the days, I used to read a magazine which reviewed PlayStation games, and it came with Demo CDs. This is how I got to know Crash Bandicoot: WARPED. And it soon became one of my most played games. Eventually, I bought all the games for the original PlayStation.
It was also the time when I got into RPGs. Breath of Fire IV, Final Fantasy IX and Jade Cocoon were the games that had caught my attention. The last one was very hard to get - I had read an article about it, but couldn't find it in a store. But my godmother managed. Eventually, the PlayStation 2 came out, and I definitely wanted to continue my PlayStation career. I got it for christmas, and it came with Gran Turismo 3: A-spec. I didn't like the Gran Turismo genre at first, but that changed soon.
When I was a bit older, I got my first laptop, but I didn't like PC games back then. In particular, I didn't like first-person shooters. Compared to the other games, they looked so crappy. I remember a game in which palm trees penetrated buildings when they moved in the wind, I couldn't stand it. But then, Battlefield 2 came out, and everyone in my highschool class was excited about it. At first I wasn't, because I thought it were just another World War 2 simulation. But then I saw a friend playing it, and found out it was a modern-day shooter - and it looked beautiful! I wanted that game, and I got it. It was the beginning of my PC gaming history.
That's all for now - I might go on about the PlayStation 3 and everything else later on.

Console games and emulation

At some point, I wanted to play the old games again. But I had also realized that consoles were not made for eternity, and that they old ones would eventually cease to exist. But fortunately, the games for those consoles would live on forever thanks to the existence of emulators. At first, it was just the Gameboy. I downloaded the games that I already owned physically from some ROM sites (and some others as well, but guess what, I never played them...). At first, they were just there, but I didn't really use them.

CITES

In this section, you will find some of the cites I like most.

La police est partout mais la justice est nulle part!
Sinik
Nix tut mir Leid, sei mein Freund oder Feind, ich hab viele Moves gemacht aber keinen den ich bereu!
Chakuza
A quoi ca serre donner de l'or a ceux qui ne l'ont pas mérité?
Raf Camora
Es gibt kein Gut und Böse, es gibt nur Macht und jene, die zu schwach sind, um danach zu streben
Lord Voldemort
N'ayez crainte puisque la mort n'est que la suite de la vie
Sinik
Ich bin der Typ der das, was er denkt, auch direkt ausspricht
Jeyz
Vertraue nicht jedem weil sich die Menschen wandeln, und du wirst sehn wieviele Menschen ohne Herzen handeln
Jeyz
Vielleicht hab ich mich in zu viel Menschen getäuscht, ich versuchte ehrlich zu bleiben doch ich wurde ständig enttäuscht
Jeyz
Je vois ma pierre tombale,
Ceux qui viennent et ceux qui ne viennent pas,
Plutôt ceux qui m’aiment ou qui ne m'aiment pas.
Je peux tout voir et je ne vais rien vous cacher;
Certains y pleurent, certains y vont pour cracher!!!
Sinik
I'll tell you what it's like to not give a shit, to tell the fucking world to come and fucking suck my dick, bitch!
ABiCA
I doubt you will ever really see the amount of trash you amount to
Dead Celebrity Status
Ohne Waffen gäbe es keine Kriege, ohne Kriege keine Sieger und ohne Sieger wären wir alle Verlierer
Myself
Jeder Mensch ist etwas besonderes und drei von vier besonders SCHEISSE!
Myself
Eine Welle mit einer Schwingungsdauer von 2 Sekunden ist eine halbherzige Schwingung, weil f = 1 / T
Myself

Links

Programming

Downloading

Shopping

Perhaps you didn't know, but Amazon is not just reachable in different languages on different domains, but the offers on the individual sites differ! Both product prices and shipping costs will vary. Additionally, some Marketplace sellers are not visible on all sites. To get the best offer, you should always compare all sites. A neat tool to do this is the Amazon Linker. The least expensive site is often amazon.co.uk, especially if you buy from private sellers, because the shipping costs are very low.

Like Amazon, eBay is reachable under a variety of domains. The difference here is that not all offers are visible on all domains.

Contact

For obvious reasons I am not giving you my e-mail address here. If you wish to contact me, please sign up on the coding-board and send me a PM there. You can also try to correctly interpret the following e-mail address which belongs to me: 6171756170756D61@msn.com. (The address is "ciphered" this way to take out e-mail spiders and to stop noobs from contacting me.)