Aporkalypse Now!

… (w/o words …)

Filed under: Uncategorized

Ok, I’m convinced … or converted, rather

Any accidental reader of this blog can from now on consider me an “ex-subversion-user”, because of this:

Just like Torvalds, I hated cvs from the instant I had to use it the first time. Nevertheless, I forced rcs on my colleges at some point, later someone forced svn on me and I thought, “this is it.” Bitkeeper I don’t know.

From now on, I’ll be using git, and I have already started doing so.

I urge anyone seriously interested in a really distributed system to have a look at the video!

(gefunden auf Fefe’s Blog in diesem Eintrag)

Y.

Filed under: Computer, Concurrency, Software Development Cycle , cvs, git, Linus Torvalds, rcs, subversion, svn

Back again

I have been seriously ill lately, but I’m recovering.

So, after this rather involuntary pause, this blog will be more active again. Planned for the immediate future is a short series on the pros and cons of religion (I decidedly don’t use the word “faith”, because it isn’t as strongly linked to fear as is religion).

Stay tuned …

Filed under: Life Universe and All the Rest, personal

Neu! Jetzt auch auf Deutsch!

Da mir einige bloggenswerte Sachen in den Sinn gekommen sind, bei denen es keinen Sinn hat, die auf Englisch zu veröffentlichen, habe ich mich entschlossen, ein deutschsprachiges Blog – ebenfalls hier auf WordPress – anzulegen. Bitte hier entlang!

Because some things I consider worth blogging have absolutely no impact to the anglophone world, I decided to create a secondary blog in German.

I will still mostly blog here, though.

Filed under: personal , Blog

Vacation Reading List

I have been on vacation for the last three weeks now, thus the decline in my posting frequency …

The first thing I usually do when I know that I have a few weeks to spare, is to go out and buy a heap of books (mind-fodder, munch, munch).

Following is the list I purchased two and a half weeks ago – in no particular order, if I get the time, I will comment on one or the other when I have read them (I’m already through some of them … they’re written in green, the one I’m reading at the moment is in red):

• Bjorn Lomborg
  Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global warming.
• Michel Onfray
  Traité d’athéologie. Physique de la metaphysique.
  (Wir brauchen keinen Gott. Warum man jetzt Atheist sein muss.)
  (We Don’t Need A God. Why One Has to be an Atheist Now. – re-translation of the German title)
  (Treatise on an Atheology. Physics of the Metaphysics. – direct translation of the French title)
• Ray Bradbury
  The Martian Chronicles
• Philip K. Dick
  A Maze of Death
• Harald Lesch and Harald Zaun
  Die kürzeste Geschichte allen Lebens
  (The Shortest History of All Life – translation of the German title)
• Julia Friedrichs
  Gestatten: Elite – auf den Spuren der Mächtigen von morgen.
  (May I Introduce Myself: Elite – On The Trail of The Powerful of Tomorrow - translation of the German title)
  
• Dietmar Wischmeyer
  Logbuch, Das Schwarzbuch der Bekloppten und Bescheuerten.
  (Logbook, The Black Book of The Nutty And The Crackbrained - translation of the German title)
• Douglas Adams
  Mostly Harmless – Part Five of The Trilogy
  (Einmal Rupert und zurück - German title)
• Elie Barnavi
  Les religions meurtrières.
  (Mörderische Religion – Eine Streitschrift - German title)
  (Murderous Religions - translation of the French title)
• Manfred Geier
  Kants Welt – Eine Biographie
  (Kant’s World – A Biography - translation of the German title)

Yeah, I know, I read a lot, maybe too much at times …

Filed under: Atheism, Books, Humour, Life Universe and All the Rest, Religion, Science Fiction , Douglas Adams, Michel Onfray, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury

Optical Illusion

Wow, while tag-surfing during re-read of my last blog entry, I discovered this:

Filed under: Uncategorized , after image, optical illusions

Private Projects

I present a list of some of the private projects (not only programming, some of them involves hardware) I’m currently working on. This blog entry will also stay here as a permanent (and – hopefully – growing) page.

When I get around to it, I will create sub-pages pointing to more information regarding the particular project, but for now I will only list them here with my working title and a short description of what they’re good for (or will be at some diffuse point in the future).

Watch the pages-entry to the right.

So here we go …

Neuro.NET

That’s the one into which I have put most of my current effort. It simulates the functioning of a (smallish) brain by mimicking the inner workings of real neurons to the extent that I thought made sense. It has an unlimited set of types of neurons,

Filed under: Computer, Simulation , neural net, optical illusions, projects, time machine

C# (or .NET) Really Helps

Some time ago, I realized why I really like C# (or .NET, for that matter), now I decided to try and put it into words.

I program a lot. I mean, an awful lot, really. Just as a brick-layer layers an awful lot bricks, because that’s what he does all day. Modularity has always been one of my concerns, but it never really worked up to the point of really reusing code. I mean reuse as in: just use it again. Full-stop. And not, “oh, I did something similar some time ago, I’ll just copy ‘n paste this stuff into this project and adapt it to my current needs”.

Curiously enough, since I started to rely heavily on managed code and, more specifically, on C# instead of good-ole C++, ever more pieces have started to fall into ever more places where they seem to fit …

Filed under: Computer, Programming Languages , .NET, C#, cargo-cult programming, code-reuse

Dead Mice – What Cats Do At Night

During the warmer months of this and last year (since I abandoned my rented apartment in the city in exchange for my own house in a rather smallish village …), my two cats (Simba and Karlo) typically were and are out of office every night. In the morning, just about a few milliseconds after I have filled their feeding dishes, they come flying through the open kitchen window, arriving for breakfast and then sleeping most of the day out of sheer sloth to recover from the hardship of their outdoor jobs. During the nights, they occasionally waltz in to report on how their business is going.

This means that, during the course of an average summer night, I have to dispose of several (mostly/almost) dead mice; shrews, field-mice and what-not (where does one dispose of dead mice, or what remains of them, respectively?).

Filed under: Kittens, Life Universe and All the Rest , carnivore, Karlo, Kittens, massacre, mice, rodents, Simba, summer

Concurrency Helper – Classes

I have updated my concurrency-page.

Excerpt:

… If a thread does a Deqeue() on an empty queue, it is blocked automatically until someone Enqueue()s a new item into the queue. Several threads can access the ThreadBlockingQueue at the same time, regardless if it is a read- or a write-access …

Read more …

Filed under: Concurrency , C#, generic queue, SourceForge, synchronization, threads