PulseAudio is the audio framework used in many Linux distributions. It controls all audio to be played and all audio playback devices (e.g. soundcards, headphones) connected to the computer. PulseAudio also provides tools to manage these inputs and outputs (called sinks). In our electric taxi EVA we have stereo speakers on every seat. We use PulseAudio to manage the input from internet radio, as well as streams from passenger smartphones and control which output (or seat) each input is directed to. For EVA, we wanted to be able to control PulseAudio inputs and sinks from our Java framework, such that we can start playing music from different sources on different seats. The tool described here allows us to do exactly this.

On my desk at work, I am using two computers: A Windows laptop, given from our IT department and a self-administered Linux workstation. The Windows laptop is Windows 7 and the workstation is Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivate, with a KDE desktop. The workstation is crunching numbers and running most of the time. I use Synergy to use the mouse and keyboard attached to the Linux workstation also on my laptop. This setup works fine, except for the case of locking screens when leaving the desk. I always have to lock and unlock both computers separately. This is costs me a few seconds and is thus not acceptable. A script is absolutely required to make this easier.

My employer TUM CREATE is a research organization centered around electric vehicles. In this context, it was decided to also build an actual electric vehicle. As taxis in Singapore account for 15% of all driven kilometers, though they only make up 3% of all vehicles. Thus, the leverage effect for environmental impact is especially high in this category of vehicles. Following this, TUM CREATE decided to build an electric taxi, designed for tropical megacities, such as Singapore. The outcome of this project is EVA.

While there exist a number of publication management tools on the web, I prefer to have my publications stored locally in a BibTeX file. This BibTeX file might be easy to parse for machines, but it is neither particularly nice for humans to read nor pretty. Luckily, there exist some projects out there using JavaScript to parse a BibTeX file into HTML and show this in a pretty manner. I base my work on the work of Ville Karavirta and Martin Lukasiewycz. Based on this I developed a small Kirby tag which allows to easily include a publications list into a Kirby page.

My work often crosses the areas of verification and optimization, which often require a large amount of computing power or memory. This holds especially whenever a large amount of testcases shall be solved. However, in many cases, e.g. with independent testcases, these computations can be easily parallelized, simply by calling a separate script for every testcase.

For longer blog entries, it would be nice to be able to divide them into different sections and show a table of contents, such as done on this site. While Kirby, the CMS I am using for this site, allows to add different levels of headlines by adding one or multiple # in front of text, it does not automatically create anchors, which can be linked to. Additionally, there is no option to automatically create a table of contents of a page.