By the way this is pretty cool: Structure101. Last week there was an interesting talk hosted by the "Zurich Developers .NET User Group" with the topic of "Rediscovering Modularity", which was to a great extent about the above software architecture  management tool. Aside from the fact that I managed to walk into a glass wall, [yes, really, quite the classic!], it was a great event and quite informative. And now I'm seriously considering giving the tool a try as it seems to be possibly what I've been looking for, for a while… If anyone here is using it/ ends up using it please let me know.

Labels: .NET, Coding, Computer Science, Events, Programming, Technology

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of the easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep….

Labels: Art, Feelings, Poems, Poetry

Yesterday noon my mom flew back to Toronto, which has left me with a black mood and a broken heart. You'd think with everything I've been through in my life, I'd handle it better… well not really. =(

The distance is murdering us. Everything that I have gained here, all that I love about here, everything that is positive about the collection of migrations I've made, at times none of it helps the way I feel. What I've lost, what I've left behind and what I have to ignore every single day is not a small load. In the perfect world, I would not have had to leave my birth country to start with.

*sigh*…….

Labels: Life, Sad

Ah, great, I just noticed now that the slides and all the relevant material from last week's "Understanding Eventual Consistency and Riak" are available here.

The event that was hosted by the "Zurich FLOSS and IT geeks", was as usual interesting, informative and well organized. Looking forward to their next one…

Labels: Computer Science, Events, Programming, Technology, Zürich

EPFL's "Salamandra Robotica II", pretty cool design! More about it here.

Labels: Design, Electronics, Engineering, Mechanics, Mechatronics, Robotics, Switzerland, Technology

And for the few people who were asking about the Haskell talk I attended last week, you can read about pretty much everything that was discussed here.

Previously due to my German course on Thursday evenings I couldn't attend any of the Haskell group's events. Now, happily, I can. =)

Labels: Coding, Computer Science, Haskell, Programming, Technology

A few weeks ago I attended a very informative [as well as extremely funny] tech talk titled "Neo4j And Connected Data".  During the presentation Jim Webber made a  mention of his new book called "Graph Databases", which is available to download from here.

During the past weeks I've had a chance to have a better look into the book, and simply put, I like it! =) For anyone interested in the relevant topics, I really recommend checking it out.

Labels: Academia, Authors, Books, Coding, Computer Science, Events, Programming, Technology

Few days ago I watched "Robot & Frank". One of the better Robot movies I've seen. I guess I mostly liked the fact that this movie, unlike many sci-fi/futuristic movies I've seen, is not trying to decide or state whether this kind of technological advancement has positive implications or negative ones. Instead, it's simply showing that it can have  pretty serious effects on the most private aspects of our lives, and our relationships, with others and even with ourselves.

Oh, and I loved the soundtrack! =)

Labels: Entertainment, Motion Picture, Movies, Robotics, Sci-Fi, Technology

Tomorrow at 12:00 noon [Switzerland time], year 2572 [1392] of the Persian calendar begins. Wish everyone a very happy Norooz, and a lovely start to the spring. Cheers! =)

Labels: Events, Life, Norooz

Labels: Electronics, Entertainment, Fun, Robotics, Technology

Well this is interesting. Apparently, recently a never published unknown tale of Andersen's has been discovered! The story is said to be one of his earliest works. Here you can read a translated version of the story. And here's the most informative article that I've so far found about it. I've read the story a few times already… for some reason I really love it.

Labels: Authors, History, Literature

<vexed rant>

Seriously Google, what in the bloody hell?

It's not just that Google launches projects with half-baked concepts, gathers a small user group, and then discontinues the service hanging the users to dry. But it's also that Google launches a good, useful, well developed service, throughout the years gathers a large number of users, and then out of the blue decides to shut the service down and make the lives of all these users complicated. =(

It wasn't just that they recently discontinued Friend Connect that me and some of my friends were actually using. It wasn't just that they disabled my G+ profile and therefore half of my Google services because they thought my name wasn't "real". Now they're going to shut down Google reader, which is probably the single web service that I use more than any others [with exception of my stuff on my own domain]. I'm angry, I'm furious, I'm exasperated, and I'm not the only one.

I've exported my feeds, and I've found a couple of possible replacements. Feedly is the one I've switched to as of last night. The Chrome version looks good and the Android version looks great. And still, there's so much they don't do, compared to GReader.

Ask me again why I don't like Google.

Meh.

</vexed rant>

Labels: Google, Horrible, Internet, Technology, Web

Due to my collection of genetic peculiarities, I've undergone quite a number of tests and studies throughout my life. However last night during the "Quantified Self" meetup, I realized I've never actually looked into my sleeping patterns and stages. Given my truly weird lifelong sleeping habits, I think it might be interesting to do so.
For as long as I remember, I've slept an average of 4 hours per cycle. As a child perhaps I would stay in bed longer, but the 4 hours were all the sleep I needed, and it's still the same. I can force myself into sleeping more, that actually can at times work, but it will result in something like what people usually experience when they don't get enough sleep. There have also been times when I've gone for a number of days with much less than that, or no sleep what-so-ever. And then I sleep for a much longer time, and all is well. The little sleep that I get is quite enough, and I've basically never had a problem with being tired, sleepy or out of energy during the day. None of this has ever had a negative effect on my health, mental sharpness and so on. The few hours that I sleep are usually deep, unbroken, and apparently quite fulfilling! [Some years ago there was a study about this, titled "The Sleepless Elite". Didn't offer much in terms of answers though…]
The other odd bit is the way I dream. I've heard in many occasions, including last night at the QS event, about people attempting to induce lucid dreams. There's been quite a good deal of speculations about the positive or negative results of doing that. The thing about me, is that I don't have anything other than fully lucid dreams! I dream quite a lot, I tend to remember my dreams clearly, and in my 29 years, I have never had a dream that wasn't lucid. I've been trying to figure this one out, talking to psychologists, neurologists, and you name it…. so far I've not come any closer to knowing why.
So with all this, it was very interesting for me to look at the sleep charts created by "Zeo Sleep Manager". The device detects and records your REM, Light and Deep sleeping stages [among other features…]. This is something I've never tried, and I do wonder, with my little "situation", how my chart would look like. Perhaps I should give it a try.
More on the QS meetup, it was also interesting to see Last.fm presented as a self tracking tool. I just realized that I've been doing this for quite a few years now… I listen to humongous amounts of music on daily basis, and I can't really tell you what kind of music "I like". Depending on my mood and state of mind, I could be listening to just about anything. What I'm listening to is a reflection of my psychological patterns, and for many years now, my close friends and I have been looking at my Last.fm charts to get an idea of "how I've been doing"! So yes, haha, Last.fm is in fact the perfect self tracking/study tool! =)
And that's about all I have to say for now….

Labels: Aasemoon, Events, Life, QS, Science, Technology

Oh, huumm, I forgot to mention… the IoT meetup last week, titled "IoT Entrepreneur Journeys", turned out to be pretty  fantastic. I was originally not planning on going, so I have to thank the friend who convinced me to go. =) Great crowd, great discussions… much learned.

Out of the 5 companies who's founders were present, [Evrythng, DecentLab, EnvEve, Koubachi, Yaler], I had actually never heard of Evrythng before. And I must say I found what they're trying to do quite exciting. So, check out their website!

Labels: Events, Technology, Zürich

About a year after all the buzz, and everyone [and most likely their dogs] having already watched "The Dark Knight Rises", Saturday night I finally managed to watch the movie. =D I had simply not found the time before, especially given that I've [please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me….] never really been that big of a fan of the Batman movies. Don't get me wrong, I've always had fun with the movies and the comics and heck, even the old TV series. =) I've just not really been a _fan_. At least, not till now.

The recent Batman movies [Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale] have been quite different from the older versions. There's now actually a plot, a real story, some fantastic character development. And now, with this latest movie, I'm actually a fan! For the first time in my life I've actually watched a Batman movie that I've really truly enjoyed enough to even feel like watching more than once. =D

Of course it also appears [at least so far] that this is going to be the last Nolan/Bale Batman movie, which is quite a shame. This has definitely been the best version of Batman so far, and I really would have liked to see more of it….

Labels: Comics, Entertainment, Motion Picture, Movies, Sci-Fi

Last week, as mentioned before, I attended a lecture titled "History of Functional Programming Languages", which was organized by the "Zurich F# Users" group. For the few folks who were asking me about it, here you can find the PDF version of the lecture slides. It was a pretty cool lecture, so enjoy! ;)

Labels: Coding, Computer Science, Events, F#, Fuctional Programming, Lectures, Programming

On Tuesday evening I attended the 2nd OpenStack user group meeting at the Switch building in Zürich. Out of the numerous presentations, the most interesting [well, the most relevant you could perhaps say...] to me were the "Heat" presentation, and the "CloudFoundry on OpenStack" one. If anyone here is interested in the topic[s] you can check out the presentation slides here. You can also view the video recordings of all the talks here.

Oh, yes, and there's of course pictures. And below there's a couple of pictures with me in them looking all sorts of dazed.

P.S.: YES, the pizza was great! [Thanks for the reminder! =P]

Labels: Cloud Computing, Computer Science, Events, Programming, Technology, Zürich

I just finished reading "How We Are Hungry" by Dave Eggers. The book is a collection of short stories, most of which are more like images of a situation than actual stories. I've read books in this style before and I've not always been a fan of them, but I really enjoyed reading this one. The very last story, "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned", which is told by a dog, is probably my favourite. =)

Labels: Authors, Books, Literature, Reading

This made me laugh, then cry, then laugh, then cry again…. One of "those" movies.

Labels: Entertainment, Fantasy, Motion Picture, Movies

The Erlang group meetup on Wednesday evening was pretty cool. I arrived to the local.ch building a tad too early and caused a bit of a commotion... well... what a surprise... anyway... =P The topics were "Erlang Ports, Parsing and Internal FS", and the presentation was comprehensive and easy to follow. And of course the discussions afterwards were quite informative. Even though I currently don't really have a proper use case for Erlang, I get tempted to come up with at least some sort of a hobby project using Erlang, every time I go to one of these events...

Oh, and here's something nice for anyone trying to learn Erlang. ErlangQuest is a set of challenges, from simple to difficult, the solving of each takes you one step further in understanding Erlang. Check it out!

Labels: Coding, Erlang, Events, Programming, Technology

On Tuesday evening I attended the "Zürich .NET Developers" very first event, with the topic of "Windows 8 development with MVVM Light", at the Microsoft Zürich building. I had a bit of a misfortune, or perhaps miscalculation getting there, as it started to wet-snow pretty heavily just before I got to the Wallisellen train station, and the 5 minute walk between the station and the MS building was quite sufficient for me to get thoroughly soaked. When I got to the door I was dripping, and the first thing I said to the gentleman who opened the door on me was "is there a bathroom here somewhere?". =)

But once I managed to get myself dry and comfortable, all was great. Laurent Bugnion gave a rather thorough and pretty interesting presentation about MVVM, as well as a nice demo of some of the cool features available for .NET development, on Windows 8. I might not be a fan of Windows 8 itself... well.... at all, but I'm definitely interested those development goodies.

Oh, and a friend just sent me these.... You can probably spot me in there. =P [Click for high-res.]

Labels: .NET, Coding, Events, Microsoft, Programming, Software, Technology

Last Tuesday I attended a really cool IoT meetup on the topic of "Internet-connected Art". The presentations were great, and a number of truly awesome projects were discussed. There's a list of the projects that were mentioned or talked about in the 2nd part of the evening here in this PDF, for anyone interested in any IoT related topics, I recommend having a look at these projects.

One of the project that somehow [I have no idea how] I had never heard about, and really caught my attention, is called "Delivery for Mr. Assange". It's an art project by the Swiss group called Bitnik. They sent a parcel to Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The parcel contained a camera and a whole load of batteries, so the parcel transmitted images of the whole delivery route, as well as the destination and Mr. Assange himself. Pretty brilliant, you can read all about it here.

Labels: Art, Digital Art, Electronics, Events, IoT, Technology

On Saturday night I watched "Donovan's Echo", thanks to the recommendation from a good friend. =) And totally loved it. Here's yet another movie that somehow never became popular, and no one seems to ever have heard of.

Labels: Entertainment, Motion Picture, Movies, Sci-Fi

Warning: Here be spoilers!

So it's been a couple of weeks since Fringe ended, and last night I had a chance to watch the series finale once more. I've been playing with it in my head, and I'm not a 100% certain how I feel about it. I think I enjoyed many aspects of it, but I also think that it wasn't, at all, enough.

I'm a big fan of how J.J. Abrams stories usually grow larger than life. The so many parallel story lines, the plots within plots, the insane developments of characters, I love it all. At the same time I think that there's a bit of a side effect to all this, which is probably more a business/channel policy issue than anything else. Given how the most interesting sci-fi series have one by one disappeared and any new promising series seems to get cancelled before even officially taking off, there's almost always not enough time for J.J. Abrams story lines to be properly brought to a satisfying conclusion.

It seems like J.J. Abrams stories grow so awesomely huge that tying up all the loose ends and answering all the questions alone will require a few seasons. So regardless of how well designed, how exciting and how all in all nice the finale might be, it's just never enough. A really painful example of that was Lost. I actually was one of the few people who did like the concept for the finale, but gosh was that just insufficient!

The Fringe finale was much better. It did offer some closure, and it answer some questions. However there's still way too much that's left to our imagination, and I even see some inconsistencies. For instance, I don't believe that Walter technically could disappear. I also think that the chunk of time that we never "saw", the period of time in which Etta was born and raised, was something that perhaps we were originally intended to see, due to some references in the series itself and also the comics. And I could go on....

Now I can only hope that there will be more comics to fill up all the gaps that the series has left behind, and offer some more explanations.

Labels: Entertainment, Fringe, J.J. Abrams, Sci-Fi, TV

Oh, yes, and I went to the "5th Swiss Big Data User Group Meeting" last Monday. I found out about it at the last minute thanks to a good friend, and I went there mostly to hear about "Splunk", indexing machine generated data et al. I found the presentation rather interesting... So now I'd like to know, is any of you folks actually using Splunk? Let me know if you do...

Labels: Events, Technology