Last Thursday evening I attended a very interesting presentation on the pretty cool new features of the upcoming GHC 7.8. Though I've personally not yet had the chance to play with the new release, I'm very excited about it, since apparently many of the features that were discussed for a long while are now finally included. As it was mentioned in the meeting, it's not that it's not a mess anymore, it's just that it's much less of a mess. ;)

Here you can find a PDF copy of the presentation slides [sans code]. [The talk was hosted by the Zurich HaskellerZ group.]

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

A couple of days ago I attended this really great presentation on "RabbitMQ Internal Architecture", which was hosted by the Zurich Erlang group. The presentation slides are available here, so if you have any interest in RabbitMQ, Erlang, or both, do check them out. =)

Labels: Activities, Coding, Erlang, Events, Friends, Programming, Technology

AOP is something that I've been hearing about for the past… well… forever, and it's always seemed that every time someone makes a mention of it, someone else goes about mentioning all the cons.  

I can't say that I've really looked that deep into it in the past, but I guess last night's presentation on AOP using PostSharp has made me re-think. I should probably at least give it a try… any opinions? Anyone else want to tell me about all the cons? =P [Cause that's what I've been hearing since morning….]

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

One of the more interesting events that I've recently been to, was the "Press Start To Play" at the Basel Toy Museum. The event that was hosted by the Webilea group, consisted of a tour of the exhibition, presentations by several game developers, and a good deal of play time. The venue was beautiful and altogether it was quite a fun evening.

My favourite presented game was "Ago", a very nice game for Android. Currently installed on my tablet. ;)

My collection of pictures from the event can be found here.

Labels: Activities, Basel, Coding, Digital Art, Events, Fun, Games, Switzerland, Technology, Toys

Well surprise surpriiiiiiiiise! =D New ASD demo it out and it just won 1st place at Euskal 2013. YES!

Labels: Art, ASD, Coding, Demoscene, Digital Art, Music

Last week I attended a talk titled "How polymorphic types give rise to free theorems", which was basically an introduction to what's explained and elaborated in these two papers:
- Theorems for free!
- Free Theorems in the Presence of seq

As much as this has nothing to do with anything I do, I still find the topic quite interesting, and do recommend the papers to anyone with an interest in Haskell, coding in general or math. =)

Labels: Coding, Functional Programming, Haskell, Math, Programming

Of all the Zurich Dev events so far, I think this last one [last week] was the most interesting to me. The talk was about "Scriptcs", which allows you to develop C# apps outside of Visual Studio, in any text editor. It's basically turning C# in to a scripting language, using Roslyn for compilation. This is something I'm going to have some fun with..

Slides from the presentation are now online and can be viewed here. Totally worth checking out!

Labels: Coding, Computer Science, Events, Interesting, Programming, Technology

Last week at the "Embrace the Cloud with F#" talk which was organized by the Zurich F# group, this was presented : {m}brace. It's a cloud computing framework in F#, and it's pretty cool. 

Labels: .NET, Cloud Computing, Coding, Computer Science, F#, Programming, Technology

Last Thursday the HaskellerZ group in Zurich held a talk on "Edward Kmett's lens  package", which I attended and enjoyed… and so I have been having some fun playing with the package. It's here for any Haskell enthusiasts reading this, check it out! =)

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

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

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

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#, Functional Programming, Lectures, Programming

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

Pretty cool. Related article here.

Labels: Artificial Intelligence, Coding, Electronics, Robotics, Swarm Robotics, Technology

Last week I attended an afterhours introductory lecture to the Clojure programming language [at the ETH as usual]. Currently my only knowledge of Clojure comes from a few Channel 9 talks, and this lecture gave me a better idea of what the language is all about. Now I'm finding myself getting more interested and looking for a reason to use it.

For anyone who might be interested, here you can find the lecture slides. 

There's a Clojure online REPL here. And interestingly enough there's even an Android version of the REPL available for free here.

P.S.: I now have a Clojure page on Verse.

Labels: Coding, Computer Science, Programming, Technology

Not exactly a new idea, but I get the feeling this one could get interesting/useful.

"We are an open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Anyone can contribute and each person who does makes us stronger. Together we can continue to drive innovation on the Web to serve the greater good. It starts here, with you."

Check out WebPlatform.org.

Labels: Coding, Internet, Technology, Web, Web Development

Due to requests from friends [since a very long time ago] and some recent developments, I finally sat down and came up with a way of having private content on Verse. The code and the solution itself are somewhat messy, mainly because a Wiki is basically not designed for private content [quite the opposite...]. But well, so far it looks like it works. It is now possible to have private categories, all items belonging to which would be private. Private categories can be accessed by certain user groups.

It should be kept in mind though, that this is basically like a lock on a diary. It is simply for the purpose of picking and choosing what content will be shared with whom, but it should not in any way be considered truly secure. So basically don't store your credit card numbers in there please.

Now, anyone who wants to use this feature, should tell me to set category[s] and user group[s] for them.

Labels: Aasemoon, Coding, Web Development, Website

Labels: Art, ASD, Coding, Demoscene, Digital Art, Music