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Neo4j And Connected Data

A few weeks ago I attended a very informative [as well as extremely funny] tech talk titled “Neo4j And Connected Data“.  During the presentation Jim Webber made a  mention of his new book called “Graph Databases”, which is available to download from here.

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During the past weeks I’ve had a chance to have a better look into the book, and simply put, I like it! =) For anyone interested in the relevant topics, I really recommend checking it out.

Tomorrow at 12:00 noon [Switzerland time], year 2572 [1392] of the Persian calendar begins. Wish everyone a very happy Norooz, and a lovely start to the spring. Cheers! =)

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  • Filed under: Events, Life, Norooz
  • Due to my collection of genetic peculiarities, I’ve undergone quite a number of tests and studies throughout my life. However last night during the “Quantified Self” meetup, I global_178140052[1] realized I’ve never actually looked into my sleeping patterns and stages. Given my truly weird lifelong sleeping habits, I think it might be interesting to do so.
    For as long as I remember, I’ve slept an average of 4 hours per cycle. As a child perhaps I would stay in bed longer, but the 4 hours were all the sleep I needed, and it’s still the same. I can force myself into sleeping more, that actually can at times work, but it will result in something like what people usually experience when they don’t get enough sleep. There have also been times when I’ve gone for a number of days with much less than that, or no sleep what-so-ever. And then I sleep for a much longer time, and all is well. The little sleep that I get is quite enough, and I’ve basically never had a problem with being tired, sleepy or out of energy during the day. None of this has ever had a negative effect on my health, mental sharpness and so on. The few hours that I sleep are usually deep, unbroken, and apparently quite fulfilling! [Some years ago there was a study about this, titled “The Sleepless Elite“. Didn’t offer much in terms of answers though…]
    The other odd bit is the way I dream. I’ve heard in many occasions, including last night at the QS event, about people attempting to induce lucid dreams. There’s been quite a good deal of speculations about the positive or negative results of doing that. The thing about me, is that I don’t have anything other than fully lucid dreams! I dream quite a lot, I tend to remember my dreams clearly, and in my 29 years, I have never had a dream that wasn’t lucid. I’ve been trying to figure this one out, talking to psychologists, neurologists, and you name it…. so far I’ve not come any closer to knowing why.
    So with all this, it was very interesting for me to look at the sleep charts created by “Zeo Sleep Manager“. The device detects and records your REM, Light and Deep sleeping stages [among other features…]. This is something I’ve never tried, and I do wonder, with my little “situation”, how my chart would look like. Perhaps I should give it a try.
    More on the QS meetup, it was also interesting to see Last.fm presented as a self tracking tool. I just realized that I’ve been doing this for quite a few years now… I listen to humongous amounts of music on daily basis, and I can’t really tell you what kind of music “I like”. Depending on my mood and state of mind, I could be listening to just about anything. What I’m listening to is a reflection of my psychological patterns, and for many years now, my close friends and I have been looking at my Last.fm charts to get an idea of “how I’ve been doing”! So yes, haha, Last.fm is in fact the perfect self tracking/study tool! =)
    And that’s about all I have to say for now….

    IoT Entrepreneur Journeys

    Oh, huumm, I forgot to mention… the IoT meetup last week, titled “IoT Entrepreneur Journeys”, turned out to be pretty  global_63313102[1]fantastic. I was originally not planning on going, so I have to thank the friend who convinced me to go. =) Great crowd, great discussions… much learned.

    Out of the 5 companies who’s founders were present, [Evrythng, DecentLab, EnvEve, Koubachi, Yaler], I had actually never heard of Evrythng before. And I must say I found what they’re trying to do quite exciting. So, check out their website!

    Last week, as mentioned before, I attended a lecture titled “History of Functional global_176059582[1] Programming Languages”, which was organized by the “Zurich F# Users” group. For the few folks who were asking me about it, here you can find the PDF version of the lecture slides. It was a pretty cool lecture, so enjoy! 😉

    2nd Swiss OpenStack UG meeting

    On Tuesday evening I attended the 2nd OpenStack user group meeting at the Switch building in Zürich. Out of the numerous presentations, the most interesting [well, the most relevant you could perhaps say…] to me were the “Heat” presentation, and the “CloudFoundry on OpenStack” one. If anyone here is interested in the topic[s] you can check out the presentation slides here. You can also view the video recordings of all the talks here.

    Oh, yes, and there’s of course pictures. And below there’s a couple of pictures with me in them looking all sorts of dazed.

    P.S.: YES, the pizza was great! [Thanks for the reminder! =P]

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    The Erlang group meetup on Wednesday evening was pretty cool. I arrived to the local.ch building a tad too early and caused a bit of a commotion… well… what a surprise… anyway… =P The topics were “Erlang Ports, Parsing and Internal FS”, and the presentation was comprehensive and easy to follow. And of course the discussions afterwards were quite informative. Even though I currently don’t really have a proper use case for Erlang, I get tempted to come up with at least some sort of a hobby project using Erlang, every time I go to one of these events…

    Oh, and here’s something nice for anyone trying to learn Erlang. ErlangQuest is a set of challenges, from simple to difficult, the solving of each takes you one step further in understanding Erlang. Check it out!

    On Tuesday evening I attended the “Zürich .NET Developers” very first event, with the topic of “Windows 8 development with MVVM Light”, at the Microsoft Zürich building. I had a bit of a misfortune, or perhaps miscalculation getting there, as it started to wet-snow pretty heavily just before I got to the Wallisellen train station, and the 5 minute walk between the station and the MS building was quite sufficient for me to get thoroughly soaked. When I got to the door I was dripping, and the first thing I said to the gentleman who opened the door on me was “is there a bathroom here somewhere?”. =)

    But once I managed to get myself dry and comfortable, all was great. Laurent Bugnion gave a rather thorough and pretty interesting presentation about MVVM, as well as a nice demo of some of the cool features available for .NET development, on Windows 8. I might not be a fan of Windows 8 itself… well…. at all, but I’m definitely interested those development goodies.

    Oh, and a friend just sent me these…. You can probably spot me in there. =P [Click for high-res.]

    Last Tuesday I attended a really cool IoT meetup on the topic of “Internet-connected Art“. The presentations were great, and a number of truly awesome projects were discussed. There’s a list of the projects that were mentioned or talked about in the 2nd part of the evening here in this PDF, for anyone interested in any IoT related topics, I recommend having a look at these projects.

    One of the project that somehow [I have no idea how] I had never heard about, and really caught my attention, is called “Delivery for Mr. Assange“. It’s an art project by the Swiss group called Bitnik. They sent a parcel to Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The parcel contained a camera and a whole load of batteries, so the parcel transmitted images of the whole delivery route, as well as the destination and Mr. Assange himself. Pretty brilliant, you can read all about it here.

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