About
This is the personal home page of Juho Vähä-Herttua, mainly to keep track of computer related activity and hobbies. I never thought I would have the energy and time to create a serious website just about myself, but here I am. The simple website stub I had made before got enough visitors that it makes sense to make it look at least a bit pleasant to the eye. Let's add a simple quote too in an attempt to make myself look smarter.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.Contact information
I prefer to be contacted through the internet for convenience. The most important contact information can be found from below
E-mail: firstname@lastname.fi
IRC: juhovh @ IRCNet, Freenode
IM: juhovh @ Skype, msn
It is highly recommended to use my PGP public key to encrypt sent email messages for better privacy.
NOTE: Most email clients still (as of 2010!!!) don't understand international domain names and the umlauts in 'ä' might cause trouble with email. In that case please try to replace both instances of 'ä' with 'a' instead, both domains are registered to me equally. I find this rather unbelievable, because it shouldn't be all that difficult.
Studies
I started my computer science studies at Helsinki University of Technology in 2003 and got a master's degree (diplomi-insinööri) in the summer of 2010. During the year 2007 I moved to China and started studying Chinese language and culture in Tsinghua University and later in 2008 I moved to Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications for a year to start writing my master's thesis, therefore I'm quite fluent in Chinese as well. I have some linguistics studies in University of Helsinki as part of my language technology major and currently I'm registered as a degree student in Helsinki School of Economics, now part of Aalto University just like HUT.
Work
Currently I'm working as a Senior Software Engineer at Futurice doing Lifecycle Management software projects. I have also worked part-time for my own company Visino and completed my non-military service as a research assistant in Aalto University Data Communications Software group. Years earlier I've worked for over three years as a part-time mobile software developer in Medixine Ltd. There I specialized in mobile Bluetooth and RFID technologies and integrating mobile clients with the server platform. I've also worked on many other small projects, most of them related to open source software. More about my work history can be seen from my Resumé
Leisure
My hobbies are quite common: watching movies, reading books and walking in a park just watching other people passing by. Of sports I prefer to play basketball, go to swim some breaststroke or just jogging somewhere with a nice scenery. Lately I've also somewhat concentrated on photography and hope to improve in it in the future. Programming and computers are naturally also a part of my hobbies, and I consider foreign languages and their peculiarities also a hobby. Hence majoring in computational linguistics.
Free Software
I have been active in several Free Software projects since I contributed my first patch in 2002. Already before that I had been using Free Software and the interest in hobbyist software comes already from the Commodore era of the 80s and 90s. To keep track of what I have been involved with, I try to list here some of the projects I'm related to and how, because after all I have to protect my precious copyright. :)
Project maintainer or major contributor
- XMMS2 - a music player where maintaining several plugins
- jmIrc - a chatting program for j2me enabled mobile phones
- shairplay - a cross-platform Apple Airport emulator
- tapcfg - a cross-platform configuration utility for TAP driver
- AaltoTLS - a standalone TLS/SSL implementation for .NET and Mono
- Nabla - IPv4/IPv6 tunneling and connectivity utility
- libasf - a general purpose ASF file format parser
- Centripetality - Assembly '07 game development compo winning entry, video here
- PoolFXP - a school project for an online pool game
Minor contributions
- VLC - several fixes mostly related to ASF and Mac OS X support
- mono - a small fix to make certain error messages print out the error
- TK4 Bloodshed - build scripts and small fixes for portability
- Linux UVC driver - several fixes to make SiGma Micro camera work
- Waf - a fix to work better on Solaris
- Xfce - a small keyboard fix in Xfwm
- linux-igd - some general helping around and patches
- X-CD-Roast - implemented CD info reading
- gGo - a tabbed mode patch when the program was under GPL
Derived projects
- Audacious - uses some mp4ff patches ported from XMMS2
- Rockbox - uses an ASF parser based slightly on libasf
- jmIrc Japanese - a fork to add support for Japanese input
- Haiku operating system uses libasf in their asf_reader module
