Happy newyear !

01 Jan 2010
For the last couple of weeks, my fingers have been itching to work on a bunch of projects and keep a log about them. Then it occurred to me that I have a blog and that I managed to neglect it !
So let me fix that right now.

The past 6 months have been quite active.

From July through October, I was a member of the K.U.Leuven iGEM team creating the essencia coli bacterium that would create vanillin based on the amount of blue light received. The ingenious part of this bacterium was that it included a feedback loop to regulate the amount of vanillin in the environment.

In August I spent all of my time studying for 2 exams I had to take again: Systems theory and Thermodynamics. I passed both exams very well, but the exams rate as some of the worst experiences I've had taking exams.

At the end of october, beginning of november I went to MIT in Boston for the iGEM jamboree. Afterwards, most of the team went to New York. It was all great fun :) Pictures are on facebook

I started working on my thesis in september. It was first about lowlevel security in android smartphones, but the subject has now been altered to lowlevel attacks and defenses in general. Specifically, I'm doing research on data only attacks, but I'm not allowed to blog about it.

I'm now taking the master in engineering sciences: computerscience curriculum in 1 year, and the outlook is good. I plan to finish by june 2010. I've enrolled in the following courses:

• Capita selecta: human-machine communication


• French in the enterprise environment


• Formal systems and applications


• Athens course on "remotely controlled physics laboratories" at IST in Lisbon


• Internet infrastructure


• Multiagent systems

The first 2 courses run both semesters, the next 2 are in the 1st semester, the last 2 in the second semester.

The athens course from 14-21 november was very nice. More than the course, I appreciated the social interaction with my fellow students, all from foreign universities.

What else ?

I'm still active in the OverTheWire community. There was a breakin in one of the wargames servers and the cracker sniffed all network traffic. Because of this, the wargames server was taken down and is still not up. I am revising the current network topology and plan to have everything back up and running by the end of this week (fingers crossed)

I'm also planning to start working on a DIY CNC machine, but I don't know when those plans will become reality.