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Tim Bray Out me onto reading Charles Stross with his review Robot Sex-Slave Blues of “Saturns Children”. In the meantime I have read most (or all) of Charlies books, and I love the different universes he has created (“the laundry”, “post singularity”, “near future” and “parallel worlds”) Unfortunately, Charlie only writes one book per year, so there’s always waiting for his next book. Fortunately, Charlie has a fantastic blog, and not only shares his insights into his writings, but also floats good thinking and interesting links. ...

My post on augmentation a couple of days ago felt kind of unfinished. I couldn’t really articulate how I feel about it - both very against and very excited about the possibilities of something like Google Glass. Thankfully, there are smarter people out there, and @zapgadget tweeted about this: Mark Hurst has written a good piece on the implications of something like Glass - not for the wearer, but for everybody else, not wearing it: ...

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. ...

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. ...