InVisible

With many greetings to our Chinese intern, Chengchen, who spent the last couple of days at our house and was a wonderful guest. Totally amazing guy - he came to complete his studies in CS at the university of Montpelier, France, 3 years ago - without then speaking a word of french. Now he comes to Zurich from spring to summer and he has already learnt the correct pronunciation of Grüezi, something most Germans can’t handle after having lived here for several years. ...

Constraints set us free. Or at least they can stimulate creative energy and make us try to do things differently. In todays improvisation workshop, Omri had us work with a lot of constraints: Make 3 pieces of music, 1 or 2 minutes each, where you are not allowed to make a sound that sounds as if it comes from your instrument. Improvise on the piano (something that is interesting to listen to) using just 2 notes. … using just one note ...

Last year I started to work at the ZHAW (were work means: part time, coaching student teams of two on a semester long software project). This year, I’m co-teaching a “Web Application Programming” course for the next semester. My colleague Beat kicked it off last week and I had two classes of around 18 students for 90 minutes each today. We went through the architecture of Rails applications (did I say, that the course is based on Rails - how cool is that?), MVC and some Ruby basics. I was worried in the beginning, that this was too little content for a lecture of 90 minutes, but I managed to spend all 90 minutes talking and introducing the students to Rails and Ruby. ...

Via Ned Batchelder comes this wonderful Regular Expression Puzzle (Click for PDF version) Each cell is constrained by three regular expressions, and according to the author of the puzzle, there is one unique solution to it. We spent around an hour at the office trying to solve it, but only managed around 20 or so cells. That is until JF, our CEO, came in. While he didn’t live up to his claim that he’d be able to solve it with his eyes closed, he managed to solve the puzzle at breakneck speed, finishing it at the dinner table. Highly impressive - and good fun! ...

Kickstarter is a huge time and money sink - all those nifty projects, great ideas, great artists… Last year I spent way too much money on nice projects, some of them turned out to be not so hot as thought (CordCruncher, I’m looking at you) But today, coming back from holidays, saw the letter with the Nifty minidrive, and earlier today I got the email with the link to download the beta version of Drifter. Last year I received the gorgeous album by Amanda Palmer (and got to see her live later) ...

I have a long fascination with augmentation through the use of computers. I fondly remember the evening at reboot 7 where we first watched the mother of all demos and then had a live video conference with Doug Engelbart, where he talked about his work on augmenting humans through computers (and his slight frustration that so few of his ideas had been implemented…) But my fascination goes back even further. I remember installing the remembrance agent in Emacs, playing with the Autonomy agent software that watched what you wrote and suggested texts and articles that were related to what you were writing. Later, Zementa analyzed what you wrote in Wordpress and suggested similar articles, images etc. ...