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Other programs

Stephan's academic projects

• IFSLab

  IFSLab is a program which allows you to construct beautiful IFS fractals for Mac OS X. Its main features are:

  • Easy construction - simply draw a shape and transform it a few times. You don't have to know any of the math behind IFS Fractals (although it won't hurt if you do)
  • Live preview - As you apply transformations, a live preview immediately shows you the results of your actions.
  • Animation - IFSLab allows you to create stunning QuickTime movies of morphing IFS fractals.
  • Fractal Assistent - New to IFS fractals? Don't want to read boring manuals which took weeks to write? No problem, just use the Fractal Assistent to get a basic idea of what this is all about.
  • G4 and multiprocessor support - IFSLab is multithreaded and makes full use of the G4's AltiVec unit.

  This started out as a private little project for my own amusement. Over time, IFSLab grew into quite a large project (25000something lines of code as of today) with many many optimizations. The latest incarnation of IFSLab (not yet published), done for the Advanced Programming course, spots a major internal overhaul and supports network rendering with zero configuration.

• ProMo
  A implementation of a probabilistic model for the Information Retrieval course. Written in Java with a Mac OS X Cocoa GUI. Core classes are platform independent, source is released under GPL V2. Co-authored by Andreas Bogacki and Rüdiger Helge Wolf.
• Noema
  An extensible RSS reader - Wolodja Wentland and me did this as a project for the Semantic Web course. Written in Objective/C and Cocoa - Mac OS X only.
  (Wolodja, if you're reading this, and I KNOW YOU'RE READING THIS... well, you know... my eMail address is at the bottom of this page ;-))
• S16Sim
  Sweet16 is a cute little microprocessor design we did during the computer engineering course here at the University of Heidelberg. Unfortunately, the only available simulator was for Windows (urgh!), so I decided to roll my own. Objective/C and Cocoa, OS X only.
• Solitaire
  A project we did for the cluster computing course. Parallel solitaire written in java using RMI, with (what else?) a Cocoa GUI. Written together with Stephanie Schuldes
• WorldBuilder
  This once was my main programming project at the LCL, done sometime between 2000 and 2002 (I think). Basically, this is a (very extensive) GUI for creating ontologies. More specifically, it's a GUI for creating interactive fiction - draw rooms, objects and doorways, connect them and assign their relations, then build a binary out of it.
  Although I'm usually not known to be bigheaded, I really think this could have been one of the biggest things coming out of a study of Computational Linguistics for many many years.
  Unfortunately, the staff decided not to support the project (while at the same time proudly sending us to conferences and exhibitions to show off our work), and the rest of the team, having pledged to finish WorldBuilder whatever ludicrous support we might get from the LCL, disbanded due to the catastrophic teaching situation in Heidelberg quicker than you can say "turncoat".
  The current state of WorldBuilder is: Usable, but not what it could be for a long time yet. Over 25000 lines of java code, many man-years of development and a hip Cocoa GUI for Mac OS X. Maybe, some day when someone pays me for what I am able to do...