musings

This post has to do with rabbits (in a way) and is therefore the perfect start to a long easter weekend… I have been investigating message queues in quite a bit detail lately. We have switched away from Resque in Mobino a couple of months ago (mostly to problems with the resque processes loosing their connection to the Redis backend) and switched to a simple work queue implementation with RabbitMQ. This has been working rock solid for the last couple of months and we are very happy with that choice). ...

Thanks to my presentation on BitCoin, I have been invited by one of the German Pirate parties to mumble about my take on BitCoins in one of the following weeks. This is going to be interesting and I will keep you posted.

My friend and partner in crime (rather InVisible) Keith Bingman is leaving Europe tomorrow morning. I met Keith at Reboot 7 (or 8) in Copenhagen. We met again a year later and talked about working for me. Soon after, he started to work for my then company InVisible, and became a major asset due to this many skills. He turned into a CSS and JavaScript wizard very fast, and helped develop a number of great web projects. ...

I have been aware of BitCoin for over 2 years (at a time, when mining with a 8 core CPU still yielded a nice number of coins). I have seen the rise, fall and rise again of the exchange rate between USD/EUR and BTC and I have been able to buy a couple of “real” things with my Bitcoins (no, not on Silkroad. I have bought a projector, Art and mining hardware) ...

My friend and colleague Alvaro (who is responsible for the wonderful Mobino iOS and Android apps) has been working on an application of his own. Talking Stick launched today. It is a really simple app - that simulates a talking stick - the token that gives one power to speak. The app allows you to select number of participants, a mode for a discussion (several talk modes available) and then tracks the speaking time of everybody (and it also records what was said) ...

I finished week 3 of the Coursera songwriting course. This weeks assignment was to write a verse and chorus that confirms to certain specifications (stable verse, unstable chorus). The effect has to be achieved by using certain rhyme schemes or rhymes. For non-native english speakers like myself this was really difficult - as I have learnt last week, english is actually a rhyme poor language. There are very few “perfect” rhymes (love / above). ...