Werner Keilholz 
Welcome to my personal
homepage.
If you have some form of business relationship with me, or want to
maintain the illusion
that I’m a serious person, please consider to not continue reading and
go directly to my
My picture on the right of this text is not quite up to date; it will be
taken in the future.
If you insist and want to know what I look like, there’s also a more recent
one.
Where I come from
I was born out in the
uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the
galaxy , where an utterly insignificant little blue planet orbits a small
unregarded yellow sun at a distance of roughly ninty-two million miles. If you
are interested in travelling to that region, I recommend the Hitchiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy, one of my favourite books.
My hometown is Bamberg, the
nicest town of Franconia, Bavaria,
Germany, Europe, Earth, 3rd planet of the system Sol.
What I did
I studied computer science
at Fachhochschule Nürnberg,
and during that time spent 6 great month at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley,
California. Back to Europe, I did a PhD in Nice, France and, liking the region,
stayed there since. Starting as a passionate programmer (BASIC, PASCAL, C, C++,
FORTRAN (yes !), LISP, PROLOG, back to C++, some more FORTRAN, …, some JAVA
lately for the fun of it), I am now in charge of a software
development team at CSTB , the French scientific centre for building
physics, where I try to transmit my passion for computer science to the Next Generation (I’m desperately
trying to hire a guy called Jean-Luc Picard, good level of C++ required).
What I do
At Work
If you want to know more
about the great stuff we develop, please
take a look at our web site. This is a personal page, so stop talking about
work, will you ?
Almost at
work
My current job here at CSTB
evolves more and more away from the original hacker kind of activity I started
out with. To compensate for this, I now do the hacking at home. You can
download some of it:
-
In
2002, I started to be submerged by spam email, so I wrote an anti-spam tool
(you can download it for free here).
-
When I
upgraded to the Psion series 5 (talk about a change !) I wrote a currency convertor in OPL, just to try it out.
-
The Excel
data link for the Lexibook organizer is something I’m no longer proud of, but it
was a nice gadget in its time.
When I don't need my
computer, it is searching for extraterrestrial life... follow this link to the 
project if you want to find out more about a quite original, imaginative
approach to parallel computing, the use of the INTERNET and the search for ET.
When I'm not
working (yes, it does happen !)
I play in a local, very
bad Ice Hockey team,
which is a nice contrast to my daily struggle with computers...
I also enjoy skiing in the nearby mountains and sailing in the Mediterranean
(HobbyCat, Laser, windsurfing). When I was young I did some quite
crazy things with a whitewater kayak.
Otherwise I like everything
that runs on batteries and that you can carry around, from digital watches
(yes, they are great!) and cameras to robots and PDAs. I’m member of the
Sophia Antipolis robot club, which has its own homepage,
of course (French only, sorry). Building robots to shoot them up being
expensive, and my salary being what it is, I started to organise virtual robot
combat tournaments in the frame of a yearly, local sports event (see Jeux de Sophia web site).
I regularly try out some of
these devices on our cat, Chakira. Unfortunately, she
doesn’t share my passion for electronics and mostly prefers more traditional toys.
One of the results of my long-term research on this subject yielded that you
can improve the performance of remote controlled cars by attaching a plastic
bag to the antenna – it may get the cat really interested. (I had good results
with miniaturized RC cars the size of a mouse…). Let me know if you want to
join CSTB’s virtual cat fan club (periodic emailings of cute cat photos).
Where I live
I live in the nice little
village of Châteauneuf de Grasse. Here’s how to get there:
-
Once
you localized France, make your way south and exit the A8 motorway in Cannes.
Then follow the instructions on this map.
-
In
Châteauneuf, this map helps you to find ‘Les Hauts de
St. Jeaume’.
-
Finally,
follow our cat Chakira on this map to our front door.
Werner Keilholz
Werner Keil olz
Can you write my name in
another alphabet ? Please tell me about it
!