musings

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? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Today we did the tour from Weisshorn to Molinis, that Adi hinted at earlier this week. We started around 13:00 and skied almost 9km with around 1700 height meters. The first part was wonderful deep powder, the second part down through the forest (steep and very steep). Zoë had no problems at all, Tobias on the Snowboard managed well but was beaten and tired, Doris skied technically perfect but got tired in the middle and fell a couple of times. ...

0 phone calls (but one intended one that didn’t connect) 1 DM on Twitter 1 message on Viber 2 messages on Whatsapp 3 mentions on Twitter 3 4 5 messages on Skype 3 private messages on Facebook 3 messages on LinkedIn 4 5 emails 4 hugs 5 hand shakes 4 SMS 8 messages on Xing 17 posts on the facebook wall Thank you all (And I guess Facebook wins…)