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.

On Saturday night I watched “Donovan’s Echo“, thanks to the recommendation from a good friend. =) And totally loved it. Here’s yet another movie that somehow never became popular, and no one seems to ever have heard of.

Warning: Here be spoilers!

So it’s been a couple of weeks since Fringe ended, and last night I had a chance to watch the series finale once more. I’ve been playing with it in my head, and I’m not a 100% certain how I feel about it. I think I enjoyed many aspects of it, but I also think that it wasn’t, at all, enough.

I’m a big fan of how J.J. Abrams stories usually grow larger than life. The so many parallel story lines, the plots within plots, the insane developments of characters, I love it all. At the same time I think that there’s a bit of a side effect to all this, which is probably more a business/channel policy issue than anything else. Given how the most interesting sci-fi series have one by one disappeared and any new promising series seems to get cancelled before even officially taking off, there’s almost always not enough time for J.J. Abrams story lines to be properly brought to a satisfying conclusion.

It seems like J.J. Abrams stories grow so awesomely huge that tying up all the loose ends and answering all the questions alone will require a few seasons. So regardless of how well designed, how exciting and how all in all nice the finale might be, it’s just never enough. A really painful example of that was Lost. I actually was one of the few people who did like the concept for the finale, but gosh was that just insufficient!

The Fringe finale was much better. It did offer some closure, and it answer some questions. However there’s still way too much that’s left to our imagination, and I even see some inconsistencies. For instance, I don’t believe that Walter technically could disappear. I also think that the chunk of time that we never “saw”, the period of time in which Etta was born and raised, was something that perhaps we were originally intended to see, due to some references in the series itself and also the comics. And I could go on….

Now I can only hope that there will be more comics to fill up all the gaps that the series has left behind, and offer some more explanations.

Oh, yes, and I went to the “5th Swiss Big Data User Group Meeting” last Monday. I found out about it at the last minute thanks to a good friend, and I went there mostly to hear about “Splunk“, indexing machine generated data et al. I found the presentation rather interesting… So now I’d like to know, is any of you folks actually using Splunk? Let me know if you do…

Ok I am officially excited about this! As it turns out, not only Mr. Abrams is directing “Star Trek : Into Darkness”, he’s actually going to be directing “Star Wars VII” also!! Wow wow wow! Full article here.

Dydd Santes Dwynwen Hapus, to all my Welsh friends and anyone else who celebrate this day. =)

Yes, [Dennis! =P] I did go to the Webilea event in Basel on Wednesday [and don’t even ask me how I was in Basel on that day…]. I didn’t write about it because I’m not sure what to say, haven’t quite developed an opinion. It’s entirely possible that I was way too distracted and mentally busy on that day…

At any rate, I found the topics interesting and the presenters knowledgeable. The venue was nice and the food was great. 😉 However I also felt that the presenters may not have been terrible well prepared. Also it might have been more interesting [at least to me] if there would have been fewer presentations, but a more in-depth representation of each topic would have been provided. As it was, it felt to much of a “cram” to me.

Anyone I know planning on going to the next one?

So is it going to be this, or what we’ve already seen on the colour E-Ink side?

Article here.