Finished my bachelor degree!

I’ve been so caught up in work and reducing the amount of work (by lowering the number of projects I’m involved in), that I had not yet posted my results.

I finished my bachelor degree on July 7, 2009, with honors! (It’s actually honors over the entire course of the bachelor degree: it is calculated over all three years.) Most importantly though, I received an extremely high score for my bachelor thesis: 19/20! It’s the highest score possible (a perfect score of 20/20 is never given) and was the highest of my year. My bachelor thesis was considered of the level of a master thesis! (And for a master thesis, you get twice as much time to write it.)

I had hoped for a high score, but I never saw this coming. I’m glad to see that the significant amount of time that I put into my bachelor thesis was rewarded with a high score. However, my main motivation for doing so much work was the fact that I wanted to build something that’s truly useful, i.e. something that can be used in the real world, and not something that is limited to the academic world. I succeeded in that, but I still have to create a better web presence for the head piece of my thesis: the daemon.
Right now, it’s hard to find and very few people know about it. For it to become a healthy open source project on its own, it needs a proper name, a homepage and a publicly accessible source repository. That’s still on my to-do list.

So what’s next? The next two years, I’ll be pursuing a master degree, but I’m not sure yet which one…

For those interested, I’ve attached the following files:

• the final version of the bachelor thesis text with links (for viewing in a PDF reader) and without links (for printing)
• the defense presentation in the original Keynote 2008 format
• the demo movie used in the presentation, compressed with the H.264 codec (which resulted in some color loss) — the original version (in lossless quality) is available upon request (over 200 MB in size)
• the defense presentation in PDF format
• the signed letter providing explicit permission to release all code under the GPL (added on February 10, 2010)

Because my bachelor thesis text is more than a hundred pages long, I doubt many people will start reading it. It’s also unlikely to be indexed deeply by Google. So, to increase readability and findability, I’ve asked permission to repost parts of the text as articles on my web site. My request was approved, so you can expect a series of articles this week.