Yesterday another WebCamp took place in Ljubljana and it was the best *camp event I’ve ever been to. Congrats to all involved in making it happen, you guys rawk.

For some strange reason though I seem to have done almost nothing but hang out in the hall and only caught little bits and pieces of the talks here and there.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that I learned is that nobody writes good software anymore. Hell, why would you make your algorithms and page generators run faster … just slap some caching on there! First you make it cache all database calls. Then you start saving straight to cache too and sort of make commits to the actual storage happen a bit later when they don’t bother the user. If that’s not enough you can still just “cache” the whole output of your app in a static html file and serve that. And so on.

HELLO guise!? Bad sign ™ if you need to store the whole output of your software so it runs sufficiently well? O.o What are web developers smoking these days … I want some.

That’s the impression I got anyway from so many talks about optimisation and caching …

Another very cool talk, although I wasn’t in geek-mode enough to listen in on the whole thing, was by @refaktor who showed some funky simplistic server thingies that can perform real-time communication amongst each other. I did see the demo and it was very pretty. Hope he puts the code and talk somewhere public so I can give it a study some time.

I happened to steal two sessions of people’s time. The first was a public release of LazySharer that went alright I guess, some things went wrong but it all turned out well in the end.

And in a spur-of-the-moment kind of inspiration I also made a talk where we did nothing but watch stupid and silly youtube videos. We burned through our 20+10 minutes and ate away at half of next talk. Sorry Jure, hope you had enough time to talk about XMPP.

Seeming as how stupid videos were a marginal enough success for my tastes I got together some people and we set up a booth of sorts in the hall where we then played Monty Python and other silly videos for the rest of the day. Well actually we sort of got bored with it and then other people started playing whatever they wanted to see. It was great fun.

The WebCamp concluded a bit early because there were no more talks people wanted to give and half the public went MIA. So then the real party started because all the boring people had left.

Imagine this scene: 30-ish people, two cases of beer, a lot of pizza, 70 sooper chocolate muffins.

Yeah it was a blast. Apparently spiking those muffins with extra sugar and cocoa was the best idea we ever had at Preona. People went berserk for those things, eating three or more and stealing them for home consumption. Hell, if all this Synaptic Web stuff doesn’t work out for us we’ll open a muffin bakery.

Later on when almost everybody had left the evening evolved into Hekovnik’s first movie night. Inglorious Basterds on a huge LCD and four people on a sofa munching on stuff. Fun times.

Although those people having a brainstorming session on the other side of the room were a bit loud at times

PS: there were three pizzas (out of 40) left over and no muffins (out of 70). I think this is a great achievement.

Ah, finally, we can breathe again!

The last couple of weeks … was it two, was it three? Can’t really tell, feels like I’ve left the office just yesterday while at the same time seeming like it’s been years since I last set foot in the office to do any real work.

This my friends, this ejection from the stream of time, this rejection from life, this abortion from the normality of our daily lives, this horrible feeling of floating in time like naught is happening but what you can see on your immediate palm …

… this is what exam season does to you.

For me it is, luckily, already over. Some of my best buddies have another week of wartime ahead of them. Waring with evil warlords, waging battle with delusional teaching assistants. To them I wish good luck! Good luck I say!

To the rest of us I say, Gidday mate! Finally, finally we have come out of that Vietnam that is the few weeks of exams. Those stressful days when your future hangs precariously at a balance and your parents are wagging their eternal finger into your face “you better pass those exams mister lest we reject you from the family unit and make you get a real job”

But alas dear mother! Alas I say! Alas! For I have passed three out of five exams and that means I’ve got a 60% success rate and not even all of those were a weak mere pass! Nay! For I am victorious! Victoriously have I come out of that hell that is pure suffering.

Could’ve done better though. Crap.

PS: said season also fucks with your mind.

This whole week I’ve been doing a lot of maths studying. Things like parametric curves, LaGrange theorems and funky functional sequences.

Naturally I’ve developed a bit of a love for pretty mathematical objects, so I wanted to share some with you.

1. Our first contestant is the cardioid. She’s a bit chubby on the sides but has a heart of gold.

2. The second contestant is an implicit heart and was contributed by a bloke on Facebook whom I believe has had this saved somewhere because it would be just mindblowing if he even know it from heart, let alone could create it.

3. This little nugget followed from my experimentation with parameters of a curve I don’t know the name of … it’s a flower if you haven’t noticed.

4. The Butterfly Curve is well known in some circles, but I found it by stumbling around wikipedia like a drunken madman

5. There are likely to be other contestants I have yet to discover.

So, which curve do you think is the most beautifulest mathematical construct?

Lately we’ve been hearing a lot, and I mean a bloody metric shitload, of rumours, speculation and other fun things about the soon-to-be-announced Apple tablet. You know how those Apple fanboys get, the first time hype started building about this thing was several years ago, but lately it’s been getting soooo pervasive you just knew it was the real deal this time.

Of course after all this hype the features I expected were:

• the casing is made of solid gold
• it can make me a sandwich
• it brings coffee
• it fits in my pocket
• it is very very useful
• it can wipe my arse after I take a dump
• it can fly me to the moon and back
• it works like The Guide mk.2 (If you don’t know what this means you should be ashamed of yourself)

So let’s see what Apple gave us:

• oversized iPhone that can’t make calls

Errr … what!? Seriously Apple? Seriously? This!? Really!? We’re doing this again!?

Ok look, I love Apple, hell I even want an iPhone. And I really believe the devices they create are marvelous pieces of technology that work very well. But this fucking piece of crap is the biggest technological let-down I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.

I mean seriously, what the fuck was Apple smoking when they designed this thing? They’re supposed to be this sooper innovative company performing feats of magic right before our eyes, but instead, they take all the old technology, add nothing of the new, and call it the next big awesomest thing.

Fuck off Apple. Call me when you start making useful and exciting stuff again.

At least with the Newton it was marvelous technology that was too far ahead of its time, the iPad is just boring, mundane and boring.

Oh and you can tell they know it’s boring and useless because it’s PRICED THE SAME AS THEIR OLD PRODUCT!

My little bugger of a sister had a birthday today and I decided to break tradition and make her a cake. It was very omnom and almost purdiful!

You know how it is said every programmer needs to learn how to do parallelisation and funky stuff on multi-core multi-processor beast of machines? And how such machines aren’t even really beasts these days, they’re our run of the mill desktop and portable computers.

This is the world we live in.

It’s getting worse by the hour!

Very soon the first thing a young programmer will hear out of a lecturer’s mouth will be “Thread-Safe“.

But there’s something we can do about that even today. First of all, we can kiss threading good bye. Sure it’s sweet and yes it sort of works. But ew! It’s like trying to make a marine corps do their job with everyone’s finger in someone else’s arse. That’s the problem with threads you see, they keep picking each other’s arses and noses and then nobody can do any work.

Multi processing to the rescue!

Running an algorithm in several processes is the only thing that makes it run on several processesors in parallel and it gives each process its own memory space and everyone is nicely contained in their own little world. But fuck, now you can’t exactly pick another process’s arse when you need to … like when eating through a common queue of tasks.

And then python’s multiprocessing module, library, thingy, whatever it’s called, comes into play.

It. Just. Makes. Everything. So. Fucking. Easy!

This weekend I was working on a scrobbler for Delicious. Basically this thing is supposed to go through a user’s Delicious history, scrape every website it finds, send the results to three different semantic API’s and build connections between the tags those API’s return and the ones the user used to tag the particular link.

Now obviously there’s a lot of downtime involved here for every iteration. You’re easily looking at 10 solid seconds of waiting per website. This means that scrobbling 838 pages (my stress test) would take about two and a half hours. With multiprocessing it took something like 20 minutes.

The beauty of this approach is that I’ve never ever ever done anything in parallel. And yet I could do funky things like worker pools, queues, semaphoring and a bunch of other stuff I’ve only heard of in fairy tales until now … in an hour.

So there you go, an investment of a few hours for learning from scratch and some tweaking to create a ten-fold increase in speed.

After tonight’s midterm I simply couldn’t resist driving around and about Ljubljana in this magnificent snowy weather we’re having. It’s very rare to get a chance to drive in conditions where everyone is nice and calm. Nobody honks at you, nobody tries to swerve around you and do stupid things, nobody is in a hurry. It’s just fucking awesome!

Not to mention the snow and the occasional drift around a corner! Orgasmic! Oh!

Although winter services could be a little more vigilant, I got thrown all over the place driving through tracks others made. There was snow up to 20 centimeters deep someplaces! On main roads!!

Anyway, had fun, was awesome, got stuck in the snow on the parking lot at home. That was a big lol, but a surprisingly large amount of people I don’t know decided to be helpful and we got the car into a parking space in no time.

Now and anon I like to fire up a game when I’m feeling a dash unmotivated to do pretty much anything. Most often I simply don’t have time to play, so when I do play I want the game to be something fascinatingly epic but in such a way as can be enjoyed ten minutes here, twenty minutes there, an hour over yonder. NOT something you have to play for three hours straight before you get in the groove.

Two nights ago I discovered Machinarium through a hapless link in a msn chat.

I was instantly hooked, the art is simply amazing, the level of detail beyond all comparison. The gameplay itself. Oh! Don’t get me started, I could *gasm all over at the mere thought of the brilliance therein.

Basically you play a robot that goes through a few adventures and solves many a puzzle in a beautifully designed world to, well I dont’ know what yet, haven’t gotten that far. It would seem though that it’s got something to do with love because whenever his memories are shown they’re about a lady robot.

It is also one of the hardest puzzle games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. Shivers, Monkey Island, Abe’s Oddysee/Exoddus? Don’t get me started, weaksauce in comparison to Machinarium! Downright bloody weaksauce! Often you will encounter a proper logic game, one as can be bought in stores sometimes, you’ve got to solve just to open a door.

Other times you are left solving five puzzles just to get to an item that solves a previous puzzle.

The best thing though? It’s absolutely DRM and any and all copy protection free. Buy the game, get the downloads for all OS’s and a soundtrack! Yay! How could I resist? So I didn’t, I shelved out the few euro it takes and it was possibly one of the best moneys ever spent.

Big game publisher, if you are reading this, yes, yes I do only buy games if they come without DRM. Sometimes I consider buying a big-name game, but usually get disappointed by the process half-way through and bail.

Perhaps it’s not the best of ideas to talk about one’s recreational drug experiences publicly, but everyone who reads this blog is a junkie anyway so it doesn’t matter. (ie. they’re caffeine drinkers! *gasp*)

So last night I gave my first ever proper try to psychoactive substances – namely shrooms – and kicked off my psychonaut carrier with a boom. Since I don’t know how much I actually took, I’ll just describe some of the experiences that stuck in my mind and perhaps someone can tell me what happened.

Before you get too excited, there were no religious revelations, no openings of the mind and I most certainly didn’t start climbing down any rabbit holes. But by god was it fucking amazingly awesome fun!

1. A lot of the experience felt like it wasn’t happening in real time, but more like I was remembering it from a distant future – this happens to me almost every time I’m intoxicated though, the shrooms perhaps just intensified the whole experience.
2. Time stopped. This might have been just because somebody put a large stopped clock in the middle of the room, but nevertheless it was exactly like we were all stuck in a time bubble and it would be 10:37 for all eternity.
3. Perceived paralysis – don’t know what exactly caused this, but most of the time I couldn’t feel my extremities and felt quite odd from the waist down. This might be my deep phobia of paralysis popping up – but I didn’t perceive it as frightening, just as bloody exciting.
4. Perspective distortion – this was quite … odd … everything was in a strange perspective and just plain wrong. It didn’t make sense and as a result I felt very strong vertigo whenever I tried to do anything.
5. We are world – perhaps the most emotional sensation from the whole trip. Simply put I felt like I was always in a world of my own, or sometimes “our” own. When I went to get a drink, the faucet pulled me in and the sink felt like the whole world, like there is nothing else. Basically, whenever my visual surroundings changed it felt like the whole world became those surroundings.
6. Extreme naivety – this was of course closely followed with extreme naivety. When somebody said that we’re in a mountain cabin, I was convinced, downright certain of it, that just on the other side of the door there was at least a meter of snow keeping us inside.
7. A bit of paranoia – I’m often a fairly paranoid individual when I get into a bad train of thought, but this was different because it was backed by some pretty solid fears. Like when people made funny and sarcastic remarks of some sort I felt like bashing their head in and shouting Don’t tell me this things! Not now!
8. But the worst was perceived incontinence – of course this ties into paralysis and paranoia, but I swear perceiving my legs’ warmth as something external and having wet socks from the leak  in the bathroom made me feel like I was constantly pissing all over myself. Luckily in the morning I didn’t find any evidence to back this perception. Phew.



Image by Getty Images via Daylife

9. Synesthesia – this was definitely the most fun. We were watching a movie and after a random comment from someone I discovered, to my surprise, that I wasn’t perceiving room temperature as a physical effect in my body, but rather as the colour hue of the movie. So when I was hot the movie was blazing red and when I was cold it was frozen blue. Quite funky.
10. Complete and utter sensual overload – it sucked a bit to be forced into leaving the party just because I vomited a few times – knowing the very early physical symptoms of imminent vomiting was SO helpful, thank you House MD – but I just couldn’t take it anymore. There was too much everything. Too many sounds, too much music, too much television. Everything was moving in strange directions and being funky … like for example the edges of items buzzing around into a blur. Wtf was that.
11. Pretty fractals – when I got home into a calm, dark and quiet environment and went to sleep all was well. There were many patterns and weird things flying around to keep me company and I could still hear the music.
12. Sleep confusion – now granted I’ve often had this happen without being on drugs, but it’s still fun when it happens because of drugs as well. It’s the strange feeling when you notice your body falling asleep, but your brain does not. The sleep paralysis is a bit scary, but it’s still quite a lovely feeling. You’re both asleep and awake. Mindboggling!

There we are, that’s all of the experiences I can remember to write down. This list is going to be valuable to me in the future to help me kickstart these memories against because I don’t intend on doing psychonautics too often. Expensive and time consuming – two things I can’t afford.

PS: no hangover whatsover. Such, perfect, utter clarity the moment I woke up this morning at 3pm.

PPS: psychonautics are far more fun than sex … and I’m known far and wide as a total perv.