Last week I attended a talk titled “How polymorphic types give rise to free theorems”, which was basically an introduction to what’s explained and elaborated in these two papers:
– Theorems for free!
– Free Theorems in the Presence of seq

As much as this has nothing to do with anything I do, I still find the topic quite interesting, and do recommend the papers to anyone with an interest in Haskell, coding in general or math. =)

Sometimes I feel that no matter how long I stay here and how much like home Switzerland feels, in a specific way I will always feel like a tourist here. I simply never get enough of the beauty of this place! It doesn’t matter if I’m seeing something here for the first time, or if it’s a place I pass by every single day… the view here never fails to amaze me! =)

Last week I had a chance to have a nice walk around Zurich guided by my friend Gian-Andrea. Some things I had seen before, some I hadn’t… altogether it was a very enjoyable evening. Below’s a couple of pictures of that evening… and rest of the pictures are here.

So during the weekend in between my notebooks and my tablet I managed to see just everything I cared to see from Comic-Con 2013 [and not really get anything else done! =P]. Aaaaaand it’s been exciting.

J.J. Abrams’ “Almost Human” series is going to be here in a few months, and I really can’t wait to see it. The series is about Androids, and seems to have a very Asimov theme and feel to it. Oh, and Karl Urban is the main guy apparently. Enough said.

Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D”, created by Joss Whedon, is also right around the corner. It turns out Agent Coulson is alive and kicking, which is an awesome surprise. can’t wait for this one either.

As for panels and such, I think I’m now officially a much bigger fan of the Nerd HQ panels than the official Comic-Con ones. Nerd HQ panels are very very different, they’re a lot less formal, a lot less directed and formatted and just a lot more fun to watch. This year’s Nerd HQ panels were again awesome, and my favourite one was most likely the one with Tom Hiddleston, a.k.a. Loki. =) Here’s that:

The Nerd HQ Doctor Who panel was also awesome. Honestly Steven Moffat [now known as Steven Fat] is absolutely hilarious:

And on the same channel you can find the panels with Joss Whedon, Richard Madden, 2 panels with Nathan Fillion and a whole bunch of other really cool one.

Thanks to some good friends I was also able to have a look at several of the official Con panels. I absolutely LOOOOOOOOOOVED Loki’s appearance on the Marvel panel, that was just bloody awesome! =D  I also really enjoyed the X-Men panel, and of course the Doctor Who panel hosted by Greg Ferguson was quite entertaining. 😉

But of course I have to do a bit of ranting too. =P For one thing I don’t know who gave permission to these people to produce another idiotic 300 movie. Unbelievably disappointing.

But the real disappointment is of course how Marvel seems to have picked up an axe to go after their own Cosmic story arcs altogether. I have been waiting for a “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie to happen for many many years. Now that it’s finally going to happen, they have taken the writing from Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, and handed it to Brian Michael Bendis, who really, really is NOT the writer for this. And of course James Gunn is directing…. right. And basically the same thing has happened to Nova… So now I wonder if this is really the end of Marvel Cosmic, or at least anything that was good about Marvel Cosmic… or will it somehow be rescued, I guess we just have to wait and see.

This afternoon, after a couple of super-hectic weeks, I [+fiend of mine] finally found the chance to visit Carmen’s painting exhibition in Reinach, Basel. =) It’s a really lovely collection of paintings [the colours are very special], and I really enjoyed being able to look at Carmen’s works up close. So for anyone who enjoys looking at beautiful paintings, I recommend checking the exhibition out.

You can find the information and address here, and you may have to hurry since the exhibition is only ’till July the 5th. The place is not difficult to get to via public transport [Tram], just make sure not to get off the tram too early as the SBB website suggests, instead get off at “Landererstrasse” as the exhibition flyer suggests. 

And you can view a few more pictures here.

Of all the Zurich Dev events so far, I think this last one [last week] was the most interesting to me. The talk was about “Scriptcs“, which allows you to develop C# apps outside of Visual Studio, in any text editor. It’s basically turning C# in to a scripting language, using Roslyn for compilation. This is something I’m going to have some fun with..

Slides from the presentation are now online and can be viewed here. Totally worth checking out!

This keeps popping up in conversations… so… time for a blog post.

I have a Twitter account, mainly because nowadays not having one can make life a tad complicated. There are many people and organizations who’s Twitter posts are the only real way of staying in the loop with them. But I don’t really use Twitter, and I really do not in any way like the service.

What appears on my Twitter page is actually my Facebook activities that get forwarded to Twitter via this brilliant little tool: IFTTT, and I basically log onto the service every once in a very very blue moon. That being said, if I’m following you on Twitter, that means I DO see your posts. How? Well… that’s where it gets complicated and here’s also one of the major reasons why I don’t like Twitter.

You see, Twitter actually has user feeds. Or “had”, to be more precise. They were never highly advertised, didn’t show up on the user pages and didn’t get detected by browsers, but they were active and I generally developed the habit of subscribing to the RSS feeds of the people I follow, and checking their updates on Feedly [or previously GReader], which is what I actually do check pretty frequently. This wasn’t working too badly, but a while back, Twitter made some changes to their API which resulted in a change in the general format of the feed address. Major pain, as I had to re-subscribe to all the feeds. Now, as of last week, Twitter has officially retired their REST API 0.1, and with it, their RSS feeds!!

Of course someone already came up with a service to take care of this problem [probably using Google Scripts or something similar], so now you can use “Twitter-RSS” to generate Twitter RSS feeds… well… obviously. But then this also means one more round of re-subscription to _all_ my Twitter contacts, yes, all the 80-something of them.  But the real disaster is of course happening to anyone who ever wrote a piece of code using the V0.1 API…. and from what I’ve seen, it’s a good number of people. Ask me again why I just luuuv Twitter.

So anyway, you can see my Facebook activities on Twitter, and I can see your Tweets via Feedly, which works but is slightly dysfunctional, and a tad ridiculous. So, if you would like to keep in touch / stay in the loop with me, how about just trying my Facebook instead? As much as I’m not a big fan of Facebook, for a long list of reasons, it’s what I’m currently actively using. 

Last week at the “Embrace the Cloud with F#” talk which was organized by the Zurich F# group, this was presented : {m}brace. It’s a cloud computing framework in F#, and it’s pretty cool. 

Last week I took part in IoT Zurich’s city walkshop. Put simple, we went around the city making observations about various types of sensors collecting data about people and the environment, what kind of data was being collected and how open to public access these collections of data can be.

Regardless of the fact that it was raining frogs, the walkshop was very informative and quite a lot of fun. =) We even did a bit of snooping into CCTV feeds from various stores and such… 😉 Looks like Zurich is quite a smart city, but as to how accessible the data is in general…. I think some work needs to be done in that direction.

In case anyone would like to look into the rout we took, here it is. Definitely worth checking out. And here you can find everything about the walkshop.  

And here’s our little group….

Map of the Internet by Peer 1: Discovered this app this morning and I’ve been playing with it here and there all day. As the title suggests, it’s a 3D interactive map of the internet, and it’s quite nice to play with. =D