Yesterday evening at the Transmedia Zurich event, we were introduced to 2 very interesting new location based games: "Rundercover" and "Gbanga Famiglia Rise and Fall". Even as the so called "cell-phone boycotter", I found both pretty cool / creative. I think this genre of game generally appeals to my need for being physically active while playing… The games are both being developed here in Switzerland, and they both have crowd funding campaigns that you can check out and then hopefully support. Here:

Rundercover website / Kickstarter

Gbanga Famiglia Rise and Fall on Indiegogo

P.S.: The mandetory back-side shot courtesy of these guys.

Labels: Events, Games, Pictures, Switzerland, Technology, Transmedia, Zürich

Recently I attended the launch event for "3D Hubs" in Zurich. I really didn't know anything about the service before that event, but I had in fact been wondering if such service exists. There are people with 3D printers, there are people who need something printed, it would be great if something connects them all to each other. And "3D Hubs" does exactly that. Check it out!

Also, there were some rather amazing printed items to see at the event. Here's some examples:

This glove was entirely 3D printed, all the links together!

The brown one was printed out of PLA filament containing wood dust. It actually smells and feels like wood!

Transparent PLA!

Pretty stuff! =P

Inside looks a lot like a real analogue camera!

Labels: 3D Printing, Activities, Events, Friends, Fun, 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

A couple of weeks ago there was this years "Winterthurer Musikfestwochen", which I attended for the first time. For some good 10 days there was fantastic open-air concerts in a couple of different venues in Winterthur, a total of 5 – 7 performances every day. I was there with friends as often as I could, and really enjoyed some truly awesome concerts. Here's some of my favourite performances of this year. I must add it's now easier to decide that since I've had time to listen to their albums… =)

Portico Quartet. Modern/Electro Jazz band from the UK. I have no idea how I had not listened to these guys before… I listen to their style/genre rather often, and I seem to know most of their "related" artists. In Wintethur I heard them for the first time, and I had my mind blown. I really truly LUVED their performance, and the guy on Contra Bass took my breath away. I've been listening to their albums since… far too much probably…. ;) [More pictures here.]

Wilber Calver and his Afro Cuban Celtic orchestra. Can you imagine that? Yes, a mix of Cuban Music and Celtic bagpipes! This is definitely among the most creative fusion music that I've heard in my life, and I really enjoyed the performance. I've also been listening to their albums since. [More pictures here.]

Hathors. High energy rock band from Winthertur, Switzerland. These guys shook the venue really. =) Also a first encounter for me, and quite an enjoyable one. [More pictures here.]

Daniel Norgren. Blues/Folk band from Sweden. Great music, great performance, great talent… And then of course at some point during the performance the guy ripped a guitar string, which he actually managed to replace without even stopping the performance! The song continued, probably a little longer than it should have been [;)], with their singing and the drums and the contra bass. And by the end of it, the guitar string was replaced and tuned. =) Way to go confidence! [More pictures here]

So these were my favourites, but there were many more great performances that we attended. Moop Mama, Luca Little, Min King, and many more…..

Labels: Events, Music, Switzerland, Winterthur

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 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

Last week I took part in IoT Zurich's city walkshop. Put simple, we went around the city making observations about various types of sensors collecting data about people and the environment, what kind of data was being collected and how open to public access these collections of data can be.

Regardless of the fact that it was raining frogs, the walkshop was very informative and quite a lot of fun. =) We even did a bit of snooping into CCTV feeds from various stores and such… ;) Looks like Zurich is quite a smart city, but as to how accessible the data is in general…. I think some work needs to be done in that direction.

In case anyone would like to look into the rout we took, here it is. Definitely worth checking out. And here you can find everything about the walkshop.  

And here's our little group….

Labels: Activities, Electronics, Events, Fun, Learning, Technology, Zürich

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

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

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

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

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

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