Short curriculum vitae of Wolfgang Friebel

I studied physics at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and specialized on the field of High Energy Physics. As an experimental physicist I took part in experiments at DESY, CERN and in Russia. My focus was the analysis of data from the experiments using larger computers. At the beginning the programs were mainly written in Fortran with parts in Assembler language for speed. Later I used a combination of perl and C++ to analyze the data. Around 1991 as head of the computer center at DESY in Zeuthen I helped converting the computing base towards a modern center with UNIX and distributed computing. The change towards Linux was started in 1995. Since 1997 custom designed, massively parallel computers optimised for simulating Quantum Chromodynamics were installed at Zeuthen. I also took part in the automation of workflows in the computer center, where the main language used was perl.

Several years ago I wrote a quick reference manual for Linux (user) commands, which still might be of some value.

I also developed a script to enhance the functionality of the browser less. It grew to an ever evolving capable script lesspipe.sh, which I do maintain.

In recent years I discovered the beauty of building marble run tracks using Gravitrax® together with children. To be able to reproduce what was built, I developed a notation for describing marble tracks and wrote a program to store, visualize and retrieve such descriptions locally.

To get an overview of my movie collections on DVD etc. I was using for a long time the program griffith. It was discontinued but in recent years a fork of the project is again in active development and meanwhile ported to python3. I contributed to the revived griffith plugins to analyze german movie sites.