Author Archive for Timotheus Hell

Our booklet is now finished and is available for download. Ilya Martchenko prepared a kit with some hints and references for this year’s problems. And I just set up a gallery that will host all the pictures we take at the IYPT.

update 7/1/2010: IYPT President Alan Allinson asked us to remove the kit (because it might limit the creativity of the participants). I therefore removed the file from our website.

Tomorrow the Austrian Young Physicists’ Tournament will start in Leoben. I am looking forward to another exciting tournament. On Saturday we will meet to decide who is going to represent Austria in this year’s IYPT in Vienna. More about the AYPT: aypt.at

Update: Thanks to Peter Schatz we have some great pictures of a typical YPT in our press section!
Oh, and the Team of Bischöfliches Gymnasium Graz won this year’s AYPT.
Now we’re about to decide who will be nominated to go to Vienna.

We are glad that some of you like our registration system so much, that you’ve asked if you can use it for your own competitions. Sadly in general the anser is no:

We do not have any time at all to support this software. There are no bug fixes, no customizations etc.

This is not uncommon for software and often the decision is to make it available “AS IS” – without any guarantees or support whatsoever.

However we do not think, that a bunch of php files that are highly specific to our infrastructure would be of help to anyone.

Besides we do not feel good about the idea of releasing something that does not yet meet all of our own standards concerning software. There are still quite a few hacks in there, things that are only acceptable if used for our own project.

To use our code, to adapt it for your own projects, you’d need someone matching our own (modest) php/mysql skills. If you have such a person, then letting them start from scratch will probably be less work. If you don’t, then our software – in its current state – will be of no use to you anyway.

I’ve spent the last days working on our database. A central webbased php/mysql db with a nice frontend so that the teamleaders can input their data. I guess something similar is needed every year – it’s a pity that we have to reinvent the wheel for every IYPT.
Nevertheless I’m pretty confident that what we’ve worked out so far will do the job pretty well. No more Microsoft Office Excel files or crappy Access databases. Nice, clean html and css. phpmyadmin to query just about any information about the participants.
And the coolest feature so far: badges are created on the fly as pdf files.
As mentioned before I’m a fan of CSS based webdesign, so I decided to abuse this quite powerful layout tool to design our badges. Sadly there is no elegant html to pdf converter available. There’s dompdf but it doesn’t work with absolute and relative positioning or floats. I quickly realized that it would actually take a full blown html renderer – like the engine behind Firefox (Gecko).
In good old iypt-style I started to investigate and eventually found a great firefox addon, simply called Command Line Print, that allows firefox to be started in a special printmode. That worked fine on my desktop – but what about our server? Firefox wouldn’t run without a display – but google saved the day again and found me xfvb. Ok, so i would install a webbrowser on a headless server, install a print add-on and eventually start it all with a simple php exec. Guess what? That just didn’t work.
First we had to get a new VPS because on the old server – still running ubuntu dapper – the software we needed just wasn’t available. We now use a VPS running a recent debian, so firefox is actually called iceweasel.
The server would happily create perfect pdf files, but only using my user account. Apache runs as www-data and the extension wasn’t installed. On my account i did that via x-forwarding – getting that to work with another user again took some effort.
Finally i could create my pdf files when logged in as www-data. But still no luck with php executing the script.
Later Georg solved the mystery: apache sets it’s own env variables, so iceweasel quit because it couldn’t access it’s .mozilla dir which was supposed to be in the home dir.
There were some other, minor problems as well as you can imagine. But at least the core functionality is running smoothly now.
I still have to migrate some stuff to the new server. The forum, this blog, our svn reps. By the way I’m thinking about switching to git. It’s much more flexible.

We’re proud to announce this year’s IYPT Visiting Teachers’ Programme. It will enable teachers to watch physics fights, to discuss physics issues with jurors, to find out the main criteria for success in physics fights to have contacts with the students and to find out the motives for participation in a very challenging competition, to meet fellow teachers with interest in working with gifted students, to try out for themselves IYPT problems of previous years, and to explore Vienna and some of its science institutions.

For futher information please visit iypt.at/en/iypt2010/teachers.

Advance registration is required. Deadline for visiting teachers: May 21st.