Blog

The usual stuff - cut out the middle man. Been there, done that (at least if you ever bought a Dell computer). What about banks? Zopa is exactly that. A place where people can lend and borrow money. If you lend money, it get’s split up into a number of different “money-parcels” and as a borrower, you get your money from 50 different lenders. That way, risk is spread to a very acceptable level. The lender specifies the interest rate, the borrower decides if he wants to borrow it to those conditions. ...

For an upcoming Rails project, the plan is to use the sqlite database. On Windows, the whole process of getting this installed was easy. Download the DLL, do a gem install sqlite3& and be done. Not so on OS X, where I plan to develop. sqlite3 is installed by default, but trying to install the gem, I get a complaint about a missing sqlite.h file. Fair enough, it’s probably not there. So I download the tarball and do the “./configure && make && make install” dance. ...

A really interesting question. Can a Spam Filter play a game of chess? Matthias might be interested to try this at his job ;-) The tale of the spam filter that learns to play chess is very interesting. It shows, that seemingly simple algorithms can produce interesting results. via indy blog

Bitflux has compiled the Top100 list of swiss blogs. This humble blogs comes in at rank 99 (only a couple of ranks behind my blogging friend tanja) Interestingly, the Muga-Blog, one of the top business blogs in Switzerland doesn’t make the list. Is the Technorati ranking reliable? And when will our invisible business blog make the ranks? Technorati Tags: blog, switzerland, puppy

A couple of weeks ago, we moved to a house. A beautiful house, a lot of rooms, a huge garden, cellar - everything needed. This weekend, the kids were out of the house (on vacation or with grand-ma). Instead of just enjoying life doing nothing, my wife and I spent saturday and sunday going through the boxes, sorting the books, installing shelves in the cellar, opening boxes, rearranging furniture, hanging paintings and all the other things necessary to make an area, that was looking like the beginnings of a landfill area to something habitable for a family. ...

Where indeed? Check this puzzle, reportedly by Einstein. And yes, I know who own the fish, but I’m not going to tell you…. Technorati Tags: einstein, fish, puzzle