Luke Maurits

Home

Welcome!

Using the links in the bar above you can:

Read my blog on assorted geeky issues,
Learn more about my research in computational cognitive science,
Read some things (essays, tutorials, etc.) I’ve written on various subjects, including cryptography, the internet, mathematics, programming and Unix,
Download some free software I’ve written, most of which is in Python, or
Check out my long-term projects

If you’re not after any of the above, there’s really not much here for you, but you can read on to find:

A bit about me
My resume
My Wikipedia articles
Some maps of countries I’ve visited
Some quotes I’ve enjoyed
My contact details
My PGP public key

About me

I am a young computer, maths and physics geek living in suburban South Australia with my wife Kirsty and two cats. I am [Research|working on a PhD in computational cognitive science] at the University of Adelaide (studying a range of questions on language learning and use), while doing web application development part-time for Thirty4 Interactive (who host this website). Before that I did software development and customer data analytics stuff at m.Net corporation, Australia’s leading mobile solution company, which was a very cool place to work.

I listen to heavy metal, read science fiction (cyberpunk especially) and occasionally fantasy, play RPGs (on the PC, PS2, or with pencil, paper and dice) and enjoy anime and manga. I have a strange fascination with abandoned places, like Chernobyl or Hashima Island, which scales right down to abandoned buildings and cemeteries. I love travelling, but spend a lot more time fantasising about being able to afford it than doing it. I am slowly accumulating some sort of competence at speaking German and (less so) Japanese. Random on-again off-again interests include Buddhism (particularly Zen), genealogy, martial arts (particularly iaido) and associated philosophy (e.g. bushido) and meteorology. If there was an English word that captured the Swedish concept of Fika, I’d be right into that, too.

If for some reason you want to know even more about me, there’s an excessive amount more information available here.

Resume

You can read my resume as web page or download a copy in PDF format. These versions don’t have my “real life” contact details on them, for privacy’s sake. If you have a genuine offer of employment, contact me via email and I’ll provide you with a phone number and/or postal address. Things you might hire me to do include:

Application development in Python
Simple web devlopment (no Javascript)
Small network Unix administration
Mathematics research

Current availability for employment: Unavailable.

Wikipedia articles

I’m a big fan of and occasional contributor to the Wikipedia project. Here are some substantial Wikipedia articles I’ve written from scratch, all of them on algorithms in computational algebra or computational number theory with applications to cryptography:

Travel maps

Here are some maps showing the various countries I’ve visited in my lifetime. The first one is global, the second one is zoomed in on Europe. For the purpose of these maps I am only countring countries I have actually experienced, not those I’ve stayed in airports or trainstations of waiting for connecting transport.

These maps are not very good at making it clear what the visited countries actually are, so for those of you who aren’t geography wizzes, I’ve been to: Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, England, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, and Poland.

World

worldmap?visited=ATCZDEPLUKJPMYAU.gif

Create your own visited country map

Europe

countrymap?visited=AUCZENGEPO.gif

Create your personalized map of Europe

Contact

Email

The best way to contact me, generally, is via email. My primary address is:

You can probably find references to other addresses associated with my name on the web (There are at least four associated with the University of Adelaide, and one with gmail). Some of these get checked regularly, others may not. My advice is to use an address other than that above only if you know for a fact that it works. Otherwise, or if you’re emailing me for the first time, use the @maurits.id.au address.

I strongly prefer emails to be sent to me in plaintext format, not HTML. HTML email is a complete waste of network and system resources, and a potential security risk. Please use plaintext whenever you can. Similarly, please refrain from sending me emails which have attachments in proprietary file formats, because I may not be able to open them properly or at all. This applies especially to Microsoft Office files, which are hard to guarantee the readability of even for other Office users, are incomprehensibly large for what they contain and present well-documented privacy and security risks.

Feel absolutely free to use PGP to sign and/or encrypt any or all email you send me. You can find my PGP public key further down on this page.

Instant messaging

I have a Jabber account that I try to keep signed in for most of the time – it’s lmaurits@jabber.org.au. Even if you’ve never heard of Jabber, there’s a good chance you actually have a Jabber account anyway – Google Talk and Livejournal Talk are both just Jabber in disguise. If you don’t have account from one of those places, you can get a free account from many places. If you’re wondering why I’m so hung up on this Jabber thing instead of one of those proprietary IM protocols you’ve actually heard of, like MSN or AIM, here’s a very simple introduction.

PGP public key

You can download my ASCII-armoured public key as a text file or just copy and paste the paste the text below to import the key.