Emerging Patterns

Vacation!

Nils — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:22:00 +0100

Finally I got a few days of vacation, I went to Saas Fee for skiing with some friends. The first day I was skiing, which was wonderful. The snow was smooth, the sun was shining and my skiing skills were not as rusty as I was afraid of. The second day I tried to learn snowboarding, which was quite a painful experience. I didn't get hurt seriously, but i fell down quite a lot. I also tried to learn another half day of snowboarding and managed to do some curves right, however I still fell down too often. To really learn snowboarding it would take a week or so I guess.

Check out the Gallery Pictures were taken by Guerkan

Computers and the human brain

Nils — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:32:00 +0100

I just read the introduction Chapter 19. - "Learning in Neural and Belief Networks" of AI A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig and am already very impressed.

Comparing brains with digital computers
Computer chips can execute an instruction in tens of nanoseconds, whereas neurons require milliseconds to fire. Brains more than make up for this, however, because all the neurons and synapses are active simultaneously, whereas most current computers have only one or at most a few CPUs. A neural network running ori a serial computer requires hundreds of cycles to decide if a single neuron-like unit will fire, whereas in a real brain, all the neurons do this in a single step. Thus, even though a computer is a million times faster in raw switching speed, the brain ends up being a billion times faster at what it does.

Currently I'm very busy with school and work. I wish I had time to read the whole book and implement the exercises in a programming language..

Student

Nils — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:45:00 +0100

Found this on the German Wikipedia:

Rechtsstellung der Studenten

Angehörige der Universitäten, also Studenten, Professoren aber auch Angestellte wie z. B. die Buchdrucker, galten bis ins 19. Jahrhundert nicht als Bürger der Universitätsstadt, sondern ihrer Universität. Deshalb wurden Studenten, die etwas anstellten, von Seiten der Universität bestraft und kamen nicht in das Stadtgefängnis, sondern in den Karzer der Universität.

Aus dieser Situation ergaben sich vielfach Konflikte mit den Stadtbewohnern. Studenten waren berüchtigt für Alkoholkonsum, nächtliches Lärmen und wilde Streiche. Von der Universität wurden sie dafür vergleichsweise milde bestraft, weshalb sie bei der städtischen Bevölkerung oft unbeliebt waren, selbst wenn man an ihnen gut verdienen konnte.

Unfortunately it's not available in English.

Porsche 944

Nils — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:09:00 +0100

Some time ago a friend of mine bought an old Porsche 944I on Ricardo (an online auction website for Switzerland, similar to Ebay)
The car is not at all silent, but accelerates fast :-) Also it looks cool. It has four seats, but unfortunately the seats on the back are way too small. I saw an old German advertisement, which said: "The backseats are are quite comfortable for kids". So all in all the car is cool, but just fits for 2 adults.
Also checkout the wikipedia article

One Piece

Nils — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:41:00 +0100

Usually I read geeky and complicated stuff, mostly about computer science, which is of course interesting. But sometimes when I'm tired, I also like to read (or look at pictures) something that does not require much thinking, like One Piece.

For those who don't know One Piece, I'll quote the wikipedia article:

One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu?) is a fantasy anime and manga series created by mangaka Eiichiro Oda. One Piece focuses on a ragtag crew of heroic pirates called the Straw Hat Pirates, formed and led by Captain Monkey D. Luffy. Luffy's greatest ambition is to obtain the world's ultimate treasure, One Piece, and become the Pirate King.

IMHO it describes well what One Piece is.

The comic is originally written in Japanese, so I cannot read the original version. There are translations in English, German and some other languages I think. I read the German translation, since more episodes are translated in German. If you speak German, you may have also a look at OPwiki. It's a wiki about One Piece made by fans.

Physics Guy Rap

Nils — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:59:00 +0200

Now this is great Nerdcore. Here are the lyrics.

Gutsy Gibbon

Nils — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:28:00 +0200

This is yet another geek post, however Ubuntu is going to be usable also for people with zero Linux skills.. I promise, the next post will not be geeky..

This weekend I tried out the beta version of the new release of Ubuntu. And I was quite surprised: Everything worked out of the box on my Dell Dimension 9150, INCLUDING compiz-fusion Also it needed one click to install Flash in Firefox and some more to install the proprietary codecs to watch videos.

Congratulations to the Ubuntu developer team! :-)

However I did not try out suspend and hibernate, since it's a desktop computer, I don't need it.

It's also good to see that Deskbar is now included by default. Deskbar is basically Quicksilver for Linux. And the idea behind Quicksilver is that, instead of clicking around, you just type in what you want to do. (after pressing a shortcut) This can be: The name of a band, song, a URL, a filename, the name of a website (which is bookmarked), the name of a program, or just something you want to lookup on wikipedia or a search engine. After typing, you can select from a menu what you want.

So far the good news, however there is also a downside: Deskbar does not support typo correction: For example if you missed one character, or swapped 2. It should correct you, like google does. Peter Norvig (Google's research director) has written agood article about it. Also Deskbar cannot compare the input with it's database based upon the edit distance. In English: If you type in "foxy" instead of Firefox, then the letters "fox" match Firefox and therefore Firefox should show up in the menu, but it does not. I'm not sure how difficult or CPU/memory consuming this would be, but I think it should be possible to implement this.

Deskbar also supports a history, but it does not show up on the top of the menu. I think, that Deskbar should order the items by edit distance and history. For example: If you decide to call Firefox foxy, then it will probably show up on the top, because there is another item, which matches foxy better then Firefox. But if you then repeatedly choose Firefox when typing foxy, then foxy should move up to the top. It's also too dumb to recognize that certain commands should run in a shell, for example if you type ssh somewhere.com it does not work.

So far my experience with Gutsy, since everything works well here I can recommend trying it out.

Ong-Bak

Nils — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:19:00 +0200

I watched "Fearless", a film starring Jet Li, some time ago and was very disappointed. Jet Li's (sword-) fighting skills were completely destroyed by the massive use of CGI and jumps with invisible ropes. The fighting scenes and stunts looked completely ridiculous.

When I heard that Ong-Bak did not use any CGI or rope tricks, then I knew that I had to see it. And I was not disappointed: the stunts and the fighting scenes were outstanding.

Update: I also watched the "Making Of", it's quite interesting, they studied every stunt very long before performing it in front of the camera.

Pi

Nils — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:58:00 +0200

Just in case you are wondering where I got the name from. I watched Pi about a week ago the second time.

Pi is about a number theory freak, who is figuring out a system to predict stock prices. The main figure, Maximillian Cohen, is a mathematical genious, but also a complete freak, obsessed with the goal to describe everything in nature with math. To reach his goal he takes drugs and works all day and night (this reminds me a bit of the biography of some mathematicians like Paul Erdos)

The film is in black and white only and therefore looks very old, also the computer that max uses is very old. To my surprise the film was made in 1998, which is not that far ago.. The soundtrack is mostly techno drum 'n bass, which fits well to the movie.

I can highly recommend to watch that movie, it's interesting, exciting and has some relation to the reality. (youtube has it, in case you don't know where to get it)

Firebug

Nils — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:27:00 +0200

Firebug is really an innovative and very useful tool if you do web development.

For now I used it for 2 things:

Debugging AJAX and JavaScript: If you alter the pages HTML with js (eg you send back js from an AJAX request, which alters the html), the page source displayed by Firefox does not change. As a workaround, you can use the Firefox's DOM inspector and copy it from there. However with Firefox you can track and debug Ajax much more comfortable
Editing Style Sheets: Editing CSS with a text editor and a browser can be quite painful, you have to edit it and then reload the site (and if you don't like it you have to do it again and again) Of course there are WSWYNG tools, but a good alternative is using Firebug. You can edit the css within the browser and see the result immedate. Also a cool feauture is that it displays the color of the RGB code if you move the mouse over it. So far I just miss an feature, which let's me save the edited css (and select all did also not work..)

Ah yes, I almost forgot. It also lets you execute js code in an interactive shell, similar to Ruby's IRB or the python shell.

You can get Firebug from here: http://www.getfirebug.com/