llongi's blog

The last post was in 2013, and the one before that inaugurated 2012 with a "Happy New Year!". That's several Happy New Year's since then, and much has changed in the meantime.

I moved from Dietikon to Zürich in 2014. New apartment, new roommates. I completed my Bachelor's degree in Informatics, Software-Systems in 2015. Finally.

I started working for a great company in 2013, iniLabs Ltd., a spin-off from the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) here at the University of Zürich, that works on neuromorphic hardware, specifically bio-inspired vision sensors. Had the opportunity to work with IBM's TrueNorth development team on integrating the sensors with their platform in 2013-2014 as part of the DARPA SyNAPSE project. Met lots of great people, went several times to California (US), partecipated in the 2015 Telluride (Colorado, US) Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, met even more awesome people. Two fun years working on embedded hardware, low-level C libraries, VHDL FPGA logic and Java GUIs, everything I ever wanted. And it's all set to continue, as we're currently expanding our offering of neuromorphic devices.

On the open-source front, I started contributing to usb4java in July 2013 due to my work at iniLabs, where we use it extensively in the jAER project to talk to the vision sensors in a performant and platform-independant way, as well as in the Flashy project, a tool to update firmware and logic on our sensor devices. Also almost all of the code I've worked on is available openly from the jAER project or the iniLabs GitHub pages. In 2013 I moved my own projects from self-hosted SVN to Git & GitHub, including the source for this blog. Great service.

After over a decade of self-hosting, I moved everything over to Google Apps. Very happy with not having to care about any of that anymore, I just didn't have the time for server maintainance.

Photos of San Francisco, Colorado, New York, Yellowstone, London and other places I visited can be found in the new gallery, powered by Google Drive. I took most of them during the 2015 road-trip through central US with my good friend Diederik Moeys, a PhD here at INI.

I've gone through all the pages in the blog here and updated them, so they should reflect current reality better. I'm hoping to keep the blog more up-to-date in the future. I've promised myself I'd use it to document the resurrection of my oldest hobby: N-scale model trains. More on that soon.

As previously announced I went to the Within Temptation concert in Zürich at the Volkshaus.
A venue I've never been before, but it was very comfortable, all seated places.
The music and the band were great, being part of their "The Unforgiving" tour, they played most songs from their latest album, and mixed in some old classics like "What Have You Done". Great show, congratulations!
Only negative was the long wait till they started playing, 1:20 after the official beginning of the concert, about 45 minutes of which were taken up by the opening act, can't remember their name, didn't like them much, and found them wholly inappropriate given what came after, it was some kind of (kinda-hard) rock, as opening for a gothic metal band? Oh well, I was probably just anxious for WT to start playing. :)
I took two videos:

• Faster (Removed because of file size limitations)
• What Have You Done (Removed because of file size limitations)

as well as some photos. The quality is terrible, I forgot my camera and had to do with the cell.
While I was uploading these, I noticed a few older StreetParade 2011 photos too.

And, this time from the real camera, I added the photos from the Computer-Linguistik week-end in Flumserberg.
That was incredibly fun, got to know lots of new people, it was a really great idea.

And while we're talking about great music, take a look at "Nickelback - When We Stand Together", amazing song, great video, profound message. Waiting on the new album!

Seeing as all exams for this semester are finally done, today I busied myself by sorting all the accumulated papers and notes. Since they might be useful to somebody in years to come, I decided to scan all the Zusammenfassungen (summaries) I did during the last two semesters at UZH and post them on-line.
I've created a separate page to hold all my UZH related work, that I'll update as the years go on.

I've been cleaning out my library, making space for new, exciting books, and in the process found several books and materials, I got for ETHZ classes back then, or even now at UZH, but mostly never even opened ...
All are in a good state, sometimes some usage traces, very rarely a manual annotation graces the pages.
Books for sale are the following, mostly in English and German, a few in Italian, prices are negotiable:

Books:

• Maurice Herlihy/Nir Shavit, "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming", 1. Edition (English, 15 CHF)
• David Harris/Sarah Harris, "Digital Design and Computer Architecture", 1. Edition (English, 15 CHF)
• David Kirk/Wen-mei Hwu, "Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-On Approach", 1. Edition (English, 30 CHF)
• Mark Lutz/David Ascher, "Learning Python", 2. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 10 CHF)
• Larry Wall/Tom Christiansen/Jon Orwant, "Programming Perl", 3. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 10 CHF)
• Jennifer Robbins, "HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference", 3. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 5 CHF)
• Eric Meyer, "CSS Pocket Reference", 3. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 5 CHF)
• Lothar Papula, "Mathematik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler, Band 1", 11. Auflage (German, 30 CHF)
• Lothar Papula, "Mathematik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler, Band 2", 11. Auflage (German, 30 CHF)
• Lothar Papula, "Mathematik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler, Band 3", 5. Auflage (German, 30 CHF)
• Klett Verlag, "Physikalische Formeln und Daten", 1. Auflage (German, 5 CHF)
• Hansen/Neumann, "Wirtschaftsinformatik 1: Grundlagen und Anwendungen", 10. Auflage (German, 25 CHF)
• Schreyögg/Koch, "Grundlagen des Managements: Basiswissen für Studium und Praxis", 2. Auflage (German, 25 CHF)
• Howard Anton, "Lineare Algebra: Einführung, Grundlagen, Übungen", 1. Auflage (German, 20 CHF)
• Tim Converse/Joyce Park/Clark Morgan, "PHP5 & MySQL: La Guida", Mc Graw Hill (Italian, 5 CHF)
• Bergamaschini/Marazzini/Mazzoni, "L'indagine del mondo fisico", Volumi A-F (Italian, 30 CHF)
• Giuseppe Ruffo, "Fisica per Moduli", Volume Unico (Italian, 15 CHF)
• Amartya Sen, "Globalizzazione e Libertà", Mondadori (Italian, 5 CHF)

Materials:

• KKarten, "BWL I - UniZH", HS 2011 (German, 15 CHF)
• KKarten, "BWL II - UniZH", FS 2011 (German, 15 CHF)
• Scherer, "BWL I - Grundlagen des Managements Script", HS 2010 (German, 5 CHF)
• Wehrli, "BWL I - Einführung Marketing Script", 10. Auflage 2010 (German, 5 CHF)
• Bernstein, "Informatik im Unternehmen/für Ökonomen I Script", HS 2010 (German, 5 CHF)

It is possible! ;)
Instead of going through the "public" WLAN and then using the VPN, you can just connect to the "uzh" SSID and use its WPA2 encryption.
This usually works much better, on "public" I sometimes loose the connection or can't connect at all...
I found this out by just trying to connect to it using my UniAccess Login-Data and the same encryption-scheme I used for the "eth" network at ETHZ, which is basically WPA2 Enterprise with IEEE802.1x Authentication, and look there, it worked!
I have no idea why the ID (Informatik-Dienste) don't mention the possibility of using the "uzh" network, as it is clearly superior in its implementation and security. Here the WICD encryption-scheme file I use, based on the one by a friend of mine (Lukas Manser) for the ETHZ network.

/etc/wicd/encryption/templates/uzh

name = UZH Network WPA2
author = Luca Longinotti
version = 1
require identity *Identity password *Password
-----
ctrl_interface = /var/run/wpa_supplicant
network = {
    ssid="$_ESSID"
    scan_ssid=$_SCAN
    proto=WPA2
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    pairwise=CCMP TKIP
    group=CCMP TKIP
    eap=TTLS
    identity="$_IDENTITY"
    password="$_PASSWORD"
    phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
}

One can probably extract the relevant information from here even for other OSes. Have fun!

Update:

It seems on the 20th of October (according to Google) UZH updated their pages to mention the possibility of using the "uzh" SSID and WPA2, and added instructions for it here. They also mention that in the future it's going to be the main SSID and to migrate to it, if possible. So now it's official!

I've left ETH Zürich behind me, as I really didn't feel their theory-heavy curriculum to be right for me, and I'm now a student at the University of Zürich, following the "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science RO 2008" courses, specializing in "Software-Systems", which I hope will be a much more practice-oriented course.
The first year is together with the students specializing in "Business Informatics", so I also have a few business-related classes, such as Financial Accounting and IT in Companies, which I don't mind, as I find them quite interesting and useful. After the first week I can honestly say I like the place, there's a very friendly athmosphere and I've met a lot of nice and fun new people.