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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As of last week, Microsoft Sho [the .NET Playground for Data] is publicly available for download. Check it out.

"Sho is an interactive environment for data analysis and scientific computing that lets you seamlessly connect scripts (in IronPython) with compiled code (in .NET) to enable fast and flexible prototyping. The environment includes powerful and efficient libraries for linear algebra as well as data visualization that can be used from any .NET language, as well as a feature-rich interactive shell for rapid development. Sho is available under the following license."

I've been trying it out a bit, and skimming through the book. I think there's a possibility that I just may like this thing better than R. There's also a rather interesting Channel 9 video on the topic. Here it is:

Labels: Computer Science, Data Visualization, Microsoft, Programming, Software, Technology

Pretty cool article I found on MS research today. Check out the awesome AI receptionist avatar!

"Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, has an equally distinguished receptionist. After eight years of working with him, she's developed a feel for his habits and routines. She can predict how long his meetings are likely to last, knows when he can't be interrupted and senses when he'll be running late. Not bad for an avatar."

Article here: Ability to 'see' advances artificial intelligence

Labels: Amazing, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Technology