Blog

Title inspired by Rubén Parés-Selders and Erhard Karger

Just stumbled upon this gem of a responsive website. It uses your Laptops webcam and a JavaScript headtracking library to determine your distance to the screen. It then adjusts the fontsize of the website to fit. Great idea - and really neat. Reminds me of a discussion about an idea I had with someone random at Lift a couple of years ago. We talked about the computer being able to detect if the user was concentrated while working on the computer (determined by face recognition and eye tracking) and fading out all windows expect for the one you are working in. If, on the other hand, you are un-focused, the computer will show more or different windows (not sure, if this would help becoming more focussed, but it seems like a fun idea anyway) ...

We have arrived, Zoë and I already spent a couple of hours on the slopes (in wonderful weather). Nap in the afternoon, food and wine - now some Tatort and then (if we manage to stay awake) another episode of “Forbrydelsen III” Only expect light blogging the next few days

The family and I will be packing up tonight and heading to the mountains tomorrow for a week of sunshine (promised), skiing (expected), dwelling in the spa (relaxed) and pampered by be the hotel (appreciated) This is the third time we are heading to the Hotel Altein in Arosa and we are very much looking forward to it. The only thing missing now is to finish the packing, an event that causes endless screaming and shouting and loosing of nerves until finally we have all pieces needed (minus those we forget) in the different suitcases and rucksacks. The most difficult part (and the one that is strangest) is the amount of electronics that the family brings. An unscientific count shows these devices: ...

This is more a plea for help than a real blog post. Those of you that visit this blog with a browser might have seen the “Database connection error” page instead of the content. Usually, a simple reload takes care of the problem, and the you can read my ramblings. However this is annoying. More annoying, that I have exactly the same problem on another server with the same setup. Both servers are stock Joyent Smartmachines (small ones). Nothing special is configured on them, I have used the Webmin tools to configure the domains, setup the database and uploaded the Wordpress folders. ...

One of the first programming environments I worked with was the 6502 CPU and its assembler. I liked it quite a bit better than the Z80 (which didn’t hinder me of course to ask for a Z80 programming book as a birthday gift - my parents surely thought I was crazy) I never, really really, grasped assembler then (although later, one of my first big software projects was to write the DES encryption for 8051. The only source I found for DES was an obscure paper that described the algorithm in APL. I learned to read APL, and started to implement the algorithm in assembler. Of course there was no good tooling available, so I wrote a 8051 Assembler in Turbo Pascal. And while I was at it, I also wrote a 8051 emulator in Turbo Pascal. I vaguely remember if…then…elsif… elsif… end constructions that spanned several 100 lines of code in the inner loop of the emulator - at that time I hadn’t yet heard of lookup tables.) ...