During the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) 2011, I had the chance to give a presentation on the Dojo Toolkit, an Open Source JavaScript library that helps to ease the development of AJAX websites and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). At Univention, I am currently involved in a redesign of our extensive administration frontend for the Univention Corporate Server, our business Linux distribution. For this project, we strongly rely on Dojo in combination with a server backend written in Python 
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You can find my slide at slideshare.net.
It has already been a while that I transcribed David Qualey’s marvelous song “A Prayer” for acoustic guitar from his CD Handmade. In order to share this effort, here David Qualey – A Prayer – Tablature score for Guitar (PDF), as well as the LilyPond Sources and the automatically generated MIDI file. Enjoy !
“Moin” from Bremen, North-Germany! I am very happy to announce that I will start a new job at the Linux and Open Source company Univention. I always was intrigued by the philosophy and the possibilities of open source .. and to be able to work in this domain as a full time job, is just great . I’m very much looking forward to my new job!
Great news: I finished my PhD studies with a successful defense on July 31! The jury’s critics for my presentation and defense were very positive, and so the jury was happy to award me with the doctor diploma .
My PhD jury (from left to right): Ivan Laptev, Martial Hebert, François Brémond, James Crowley, Alexander Kläser, Cordelia Schmid
For people who are interested in my research work on automated human action recognition in realistic video sequences, I invite you to visit my homepage at the LEAR research group.
After about 3 years and 8 months of doctoral studies + 8 months for my master studies, approximately 15,000 km of cycling, many ups and downs , a lot of new things that I learned, a deep dive into the French culture, many wonderful people that I met, a great shared flat in Grenoble downtown (!), many wonderful musicians that I was able to play with (thanks, light motif!), and a wonderful stay in a really nice city, my time in Grenoble has finally come to an end. Thanks to everybody that I was able to meet and to share a part of my path that led my through Grenoble!
I was thinking about how to play ‘Happy Birthday’ with a jazz feel and with typical jazz harmonies. I found it at first really difficult to put the standard I-IV-V chords into a more open form with IIm7-V7 progressions. I kept on thinking about and trying different things. Finally I a found a form which sounds jazz-like, yet still natural to me. I sat down and recorded a version this weekend .. sorry, I sang again (of course you need vocals for ‘Happy Birthday’!). The solo instrument is the great Guitalele from Yamaha (illustrated on the image to the left). It is very small, however, since it has six strings, it can be seen as a hybrid between a normal guitar and a Ukulele (which only has four strings). The song also features me on the samba egg.
And by the way, have you thought about this? You know somebody who has birthday? Here is the great idea: Make him happy and send him a link on this post 
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I was contacted by Artem Galitsyn who arranged a big-band style Jazz version with a great femal singer and lyrics in Russian ! He kindly allowed me to put his version here online:
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For people who are interested in the chords:
|| Gmaj7 Am7 | Bm7 Bb13 | Am7 | D9 |
| Am7 | D9 | Gmaj7 C#dim | Gmaj7 |
| Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | F9(#11) |
| Em7 A7 | Am7 D7 | Gmaj7 Bbmaj7 | Ebmaj7 Abmaj7 ||
Lead sheet online @ wikifonia: I put this Happy Birthday jazz version also online to the website wikifonia which is a collection a lot of publicly available leadsheets. This is a great website. There you are able to download a nicely layouted pdf version of the leadsheet, you can also transpose it automatically, and download the music file itself!
Lead sheet 2: Thanks to Roger (see his comment below)! He send me a lead sheet for Happy Birthday in jazz that you can download !