Happy 2011!
From Berlin, Germany, a loud HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I wish a great 2011 to everyone, full of laughter, smiles and success!
From Berlin, Germany, a loud HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I wish a great 2011 to everyone, full of laughter, smiles and success!
Last day of 27C3 (but not last day in Berlin!), the weather is the usual: foggy and damn cold.
I thought to visit the Fernsehturm tomorrow, but that doesn't make much sense if the fog covers the city and
you don't even see a mile in the distance...
I managed to get a 27C3 T-shirt, but no jacket, as those were all sold out right away, at least in my size,
like no one could predict that people would buy jackets when it's -10 °C outside, and that IT guys mostly
aren't an S or an M size. :(
Arrived at about 12:20 at the BCC, managed to get the same places as yesterday, and it seems to me that today
there are less people around.
We'll go grab a bite at Las Malvinas, it's a steak-house near the hotel, and it looks like they have some really great meat. I'll probably not blog anything until after I return to Switzerland, because WLAN at the hotel is very expensive. By the way, it's offered by our very own Swisscom! Yeah, Swisscom does hotel WLAN in other countries, surprising!
Today we slept in even longer and arrived at the Congress past 12:30...
Found a nice place upstairs, facing Alexa. Ate lots of awesome Belgian butter waffles!
Between exploring Lighty's configuration syntax, eating a very good curry&rice from the BCC's catering and getting more waffles from Alexa, I missed a few talks in the evening.
Day 2 of Congress started late, sleeping is important!
At around 11:00 we were there again, and again upstairs, which I personally prefer: it's much more open,
there's a better view of outside (I know it's strange, but I kinda like those things called windows :D ) and
better lightning. Network seems to work better than yesterday, LAN works fine, WLAN on the phone too, and
the streams are mostly stable.
We then went to get some food at Alexa (hmm Nordsee, fish, yeah!), to be ready for the expected highlight of the day:
After that, we went back to the Hotel, where we watched four episodes of "Two and a Half Men" on the television (awesome, I hadn't seen those yet!), and coded a little; I managed to finish the Rig stack and queue and write much better documentation for them.
Hello from Berlin, where we arrived after a good 8:40 travel time on Sunday evening, 1:30 behind schedule...
At least ICE trains are very comfortable and have power outlets. ;)
The first day of congress was a mixed experience... On one side the new ticket-presale system had the pleasant
effect of eliminating the usual Monday morning queue to get tickets, on the other hand I'm not so sure it
managed to reach the goal of keeping the participants to a manageable level, every conference room is routinely
full, every table in the hackcenter and upstairs too, and lots of people have to sit on the floors just to get
some kind of place (especially in the evening)... I really hoped that if they actually limited the number of
tickets with the presale system, they also would have based the number of them on the sum of real, available
chairs in the building (or just a little more), seems that was wishful thinking.
I also can't really support the table reservation system for groups in the HackCenter, you get entire tables
reserved by projects that no one ever heard of, and which are not there most of the time, but leave an incredible
mess of hardware and junk to occupy the table. Which brings me to another point: looking at HackCenter tables,
one can come to only one conclusion: hackers are freaking messy! There's bottles, caps, paper, junk, half-eaten
food and everything in between lying around, people just leave it there when they go away, and it's not like
there isn't a trashcan every 10 meters or even less... Use them? If you don't find one, organize one? Just
keep the place tidy, please.
Also the first day was plagued by infrastructure problems, LAN works well, WLAN was mostly unusable (either
you got no IP or it was so slow to be unusable, things seem to be better now), the streams initially didn't
really work (sound just disappeared at random, even over DVB-T at times), in the evening they actually worked
very well over DVB-T, over LAN I couldn't (and still can't) watch 10 minutes without it dieing and me having
to restart it.
So let's come to the talks, which are the main reason I'm here:
After that we went to eat, got a really great pizza at an Italian place on the Fernsehturm square, right
besides the Rathaus. Food really costs less here.
After we were back at the BCC the real fun began:
And then the good stuff came:
I wish everyone an awesome and merry Christmas, have lots of fun (and presents)!
On another note, exams finally ended, I'm pretty confident about most of them, so, yay!
Yeah, me and a friend will be present at this year's Chaos Communication Congress.
I'm keeping up my "every-two-years" schedule, went to the 23rd, 25th, and now 27th Congress.
I managed to get tickets at the last sales window, thankfully, since we already got the rooms and train
reserved and paid for before we even knew that they changed the ticket selling system this year...
So I missed the first two pre-sales, but managed to get two tickets on the last one... It would not have been
fun to go to Berlin and just watch the Congress from outside!
We'll be in Berlin from the evening of the 26th to the morning of the 2nd, which means we'll also be celebrating
New Year's Eve in the big city of Berlin, that ought to be lots of fun! ;)
Let me know if you'll be there too, see you there!
I was just reading this months CACM and I just wanted to share the editorial with you.
It has a great explanation of the P vs. NP problem and its importance, and, for those that didn't already hear,
the alleged proof that P != NP has been verified incorrect, so the problem is still open (and you can still
get the 1 million $ for solving it!).
It also makes a great point about Computational Complexity being an important theoretical field, but that it
isn't always that relevant and/or helpful in practical algorithms design, which is a point I completely agree
with, for example Big-Oh-Notation sure is useful, but reality teaches us that those pesky constants that we
can "just forget" are actually quite important. And, while we're at it, let's not forget about actual resource
usage, like memory, when comparing algorithms.
Great quote from the article to conclude:
An old cliché asks what the difference is between theory and practice, and answers that "in theory, they are not that different, but in practice, they are quite different."
Went to ExpoVina again this year, awesome as always, great wines, great people and great company! ;)
The port wines at Amarela were incredible, and as usual it isn't only wine you get to taste there.
Had to order the chocolate-pepper, yum!!! And the bread with the right olive oil... delightful!
Bindella also got all the good Italian dessert wines, and "Vigna Senza Nome" was even at a reduced price!
On another note, I went to watch "Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - Part 1" yesterday evening at the Abaton,
which thankfully has extremely comfortable seats, as I alternated between moments of sleepiness (thankfully much
fewer than in the 5th and 6th movies!), and moments of "Gaahh wtf eh?"... I admit to never having finished reading
book 7, as it just sucked so much, and the film reflects that, completely random items quest, coupled with teenage
angst, and let's add a few mythical artifacts just for fun, and don't get me started on the magic, that's probably
my biggest gripe with the HP films: the magic effects just SUCK, it's always just random lights and explosions
that do comparatively little damage (only cool explosion I saw was Hermione using Bombarda once, why don't you
always use it, if you know it, wtf? And Voldemort's lightning spell towards the end). Basically I find the magic
much too tame, I mean, if you can control energy and the elements, make it go Boom! more often... And the flying
black clouds of Death Eeaterness, the LOLZ, I can't remember anything in the books that justifies that... Will
have to wait till July 2011 for the second part, which I'll probably still watch in a masochistic attempt at
completing the set. :)
In the end there thankfully is fan-fiction, much of which I find better than the original books, and there
are other, much better fantasy series to keep one's self entertained, The Dresden Files, The Mistborn Trilogy,
and the king, The Lord of the Rings.
Continuing my series about useful software I use daily, I decided to finish it up quickly by just posting a few names, links and descriptions.
I'll soon start posting about my latest software project, Rig, which I have been working on for quite a while, so stay tuned!
Quick events guide: