Raphael Reitzig - All Posts

Creating Swift Projects in CLion

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Swift is a modern language with a little teething trouble, but it is still worth a look. If you are like me and you do not want to work on a Mac if you can avoid it, your choices of development environments are rather limited at this point. Here, I explain how to create a Swift project with Jetbrains’ CLion, for which Jetbrains develops a Swift plugin.

Read more on reitzig.github.io.

Low-Tech Audience Response with Plickers

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Last winter, I tried to engage a small group of students in class by using a method of active learning: audience response. The idea is that you ask reasonably scoped questions during your presentation or discussion and have the audience respond, typically using some technology that enables quick and accurate counting as well as anonymity (at least among students).

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Google Hashcode 2016: Our approach

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0100

In this post, I briefly discuss the approach we developed for Google Hashcode 2016.

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Google Hashcode 2016: Impressions

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Last week, a colleague and I participated in Google’s Hash Code. The idea of the event is simple: give small teams of programmers a hard task and give them too little time to solve it. See what they can come up with.

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The Agile Education Manifesto

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Gunter Dueck is one of my favorite voices on (and off, I guess) the internet. ⊕Also on Twitter and YouTube. In a recent blog article he observes that while we¹ have embraced the paradigm of agile software development, we have not thought to transfer the ideas to an arguably more critical application: education.

Read: a non-trivial subset of the people in this area of work. ↩

Read more on reitzig.github.io.

How useful is Landau notation?

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0100

In the context of a new answer to an old question on Computer Science SE and a subsequent chat, I started thinking about how useful Landau notation (also “Big-Oh”) really is. Since I am quite opinionated about the whole thing I thought a blog post would be a better place than Stack Exchange for collecting these thoughts.

Read more on reitzig.github.io.

Signing Websites

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0100

Today I reread some thoughts of mine on how super-computers may engage in battle. What I wrote got me thinking in another direction: how can we, even today, be sure that what we read on the internet is what the alleged author intends us to see? Especially if our connection to the webserver is not encrypted, man-in-the-middle attacks are a very real possibility.

Read more on reitzig.github.io.

A Researcher's Jekyll

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0100

There are myriads of ways to build websites. When I decided to create a new one for my work, I evaluated my past experiences – mostly with Wordpress and Joomla ⊕I don’t know if there is a use-case for Joomla. – and decided to go with something less bloated. That is, something that

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Quick Images with TikZ

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0200

How do you create high-quality technical images for documents, your website or posts on Stack Exchange? I have used tools in an ad-hoc manner for a while and have become frustrated lately. Once you have used TikZ ⊕Check out the awesome gallery of examples and the comprehensive manual. with L^aT_eX most other tools feel inferior. The only problem is: TikZ is a L^aT_eX package and can not be used on its own. So how to convert TikZ to, say, PNG comfortably?

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On Planarity of Control Flow Graphs

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

For our master’s project, we include visualization of control flow graphs of Java bytecode as a user interface feature. When discussing the feature, a question quickly became apparent: are control flow graphs (CFG) planar? If so, we expect drawing them to be relatively easy. If not, however, we can abandon hope for being able to always draw nice graphs.

Obviously, unconditional jumps can cause arbitrarily nasty CFGs; that is not surprising as goto is generally to be considered harmful. We agreed, however, that we should rather consider basic blocks of actual Java rather than arbitrary bytecode, as it is Java code we want to talk about. Sadly, even if we disregard labeled break just to be save, Java CFGs are not planar in general. The examples we found suggest that this is true for most procedural and object oriented languages, too.

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