At the KiVS 2009 conference, I received the Master Thesis Award from the communication in distributed systems (KuVS) group for my thesis entitled Statistical Error Model to Impair an H.264 Decoder. See a copy of the award here and retrieve the slides of my talk here. Please find below some pictures of the award session, taken by KiVS organisers.

Me giving the talk.

Professor Lars Wolf, head of the award comitee, ceremoniously presented the KuVS award to me.

I just discovered some fancy amateur radio related stuff on the web recently. It all started with AmateurLogic, which is a one hour video podcast published by US hams. I just looked at the Field Day episode (14) this morning. It’s really good edited and comes with a excellent audio and video quality. Moreover, it was interesting to see that the definition of a Field Day is somehow different to the German. What US hams call a Field Day seems to be a fixed, nation wide day of activity. In contrast, the German hams call it a Field Day when joining a group of people to make portable activities. It’s not a fixed day in the calendar when everyone’s out there, nor would one even hear “CQ FIELDDAY” here in DL It’s more like a contest in the US, whereas here it’s just a synonym for portable activities within a group of hams. Pretty interesting.

It also sounds like this kind of activity was unknown to the VK ham participating the show. However, this VK ham also spoke about the foundation license with the WIA (Wireless Institute of Australia), which was pretty interesting to me as I didn’t know that the 4-letters-suffix-guys have HF permissions. And the “Your Entry Into Amateur Radio” book, which is dedicated to exam preparation, also seems to be nicely edited; there is a lot of color, pictures, nice headings, etc. …AND..it seems like there are no tubes in it )) Seems like a good way to get people into the hobby. (and not like: computers? oh my good, all you need is a morse key!

Furthermore, they also mentioned in episode 14 the nicely produced WIA podcast, which is available here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/vk1wia. I totally agree with the Amateur Logic producers; the WIA news sounds like professional broadcasts and is really great work. I’m currently enjoying listening to it. Moreover, they also refered to twiar.org (this week in amateur radio) and soldersmoke.com as another HAM audio podcasts. Unfortunately, it seems like the latter has a bad audio quality. Amateurlogic was really too good edited