It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. As usual, my inspiration for stuff like this is extremely periodical. Since last time I posted, me and my wife have been in the process of moving from Sweden to the UK. We’re leaving for Bristol tomorrow morning, to be more specific. Our current plan is to live and work there for approximately half a year. We’re going to be posting updates on a common blog I set up for that.…
I’ve been wanting to write down my thoughts about SpaceX for a while now. More precisely, ever since I read Phil Plait’s article about visiting the SpaceX headquarters. The accident last Sunday, where a Falcon 9 burned up shortly after takeoff, triggered me into sitting down and actually write them down. Plait’s article is really worth a read if you haven’t done so. In it, Plait summarized his discussion with Elon Musk about the reason for starting SpaceX.…
Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ keynote at PyCon 2015 has got to be one of the best keynotes I’ve watched in a very long time: As you’ll learn when you watch the keynote (yes when, not if, go do it now!), he is a core contributor to Django and an ultra runner. You really should watch the keynote before reading my thoughts — they will seem even more like incoherent ramblings if you don’t.…
I listen fairly religiously to the Hello Internet podcast with Brady Haran and CGPGrey. In the most recent episode, they discussed the recent UK election and how badly the UK voting system works to fairly represent the actual distribution of votes. This piqued my interest so I thought I would investigate how well Sweden performs in this regard. Right off the bat (after refreshing my memory on how our voting system works…), I realized this wouldn’t really be a fair comparison.…
I’ve had a really bad first impression of the new Photos app for OS X. My scenario is a bit of a corner case but it shouldn’t be a hard problem to solve if Photos were even a tiny bit less stupid about a couple of things. Scenario I don’t want to use Photos to actually organize my pictures on the file system. I also don’t want to use Photo’s iCloud sync.…
This post resonated quite well with me and explains why I have a harder time learning Mercurial than I had learning Git.
This is a great article on TechCrunch about how the technology industry is a bit weird. A lot of stuff made me laugh throughout the article.
And we we were all faced with the hilariously terrifying possibility that technology is now moving so fast that the US government can no longer distinguish a rogue state with nuclear weapons from a gang of trolls in it for the lulz.
Another one:
Maybe this kind of florid bureaucratic surreality from their online guardians is why both the US president and the UK’s prime minister have called for math to be banned, lest their surveillance states be blinded. No, really. Encryption is just math, folks. And making math illegal will obviously stop terrorists. Right?
ISIS guy 1: I know, let's use cryptography to hide our messages! ISIS guy 2: We can't, it's against the law in the UK. ISIS guy 1: Oh, OK.
— Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) January 12, 2015
When I graduated from university last summer, my fiancée and her family were very nice and bought me a smart watch as a graduation present. Knowing that I’m a bit picky about my technology items, instead of buying one directly, they gave me the money to buy the watch I wanted. I had my eyes on the Motorola Moto 360 which meant that I had to wait for a a couple of months since it wasn’t available here in Sweden at the time.…
The radio-show-turned-podcast This American Life recently did two episodes on how the views of police officers and civilians can differ. This American Life usually produce very good podcasts but these episodes really struck me as extraordinary. Everyone should probably listen to them. I’ve embedded the SoundCloud player with the two episodes below so you don’t even need to search for them.…
This autumn, I worked as one of the teaching assistants in EDAA25, the C programming course at Lund University’s Computer Science department. This mainly involves grading the programming assignments the students are required to hand in during the course. After grading a lot of solutions, I’m amazed by how many students have difficulties structuring their code in a reasonable and readable way. Many solutions barely work, or rely on undefined behaviour to work, but even the correct ones are extremely difficult to read and understand.…
A while ago, I found the Kickstarter campaign for the documentary about Micah True and decided to contribute to it. As part of the pledge, I was given preview access to the film and I just watched it. It’s a great film that commemorates Micah True’s life and the race he arranged in the Copper Canyon in Mexico beautifully. The documentary should be coming out later this year so keep your eyes on its website if you’re interested.…
SD:s Björn Söder, nu vice talman i riksdagen, har hamnat i blåsväder efter att ha vädrat sin ganska obehagliga människosyn i en intervju i DN. Efter att ha sett kommentarer flyga runt lite på Twitter bestämde jag mig för att bryta min sedvanliga regel att inte läsa om politik (jag har högt blodtryck så det räcker redan) och ögna igenom artikeln. Jag reagerade speciellt på ett svar han gav: Om många Malmöbor inte är en del av den nationella gemenskap som du och ditt parti vill bygga – vad vill du göra med dem?…
I’m on my way home from tonight’s Rust Skåne meetup in Malmö. There were two presentations, one by Jakub Bukaj about Rust’s road to version 1.0 and one by Jens Nockert which dug into the worker queue implementation in Servo. Jakub’s presentation contained a lot of good information but was unfortunately a bit time constrained. Jens’ presentation was a bit more free-form, he basically highlighted different parts of the file implementing Servo’s work queue.…
I have been wanting to get into the habit of writing more often, mostly just to improve my own writing (since I doubt anyone would read what I write anyway). I also have some ideas about writing some form of fiction but that will probably not happen in the near future (if at all). I will basically follow the same rules that Gina Trapani’s post about short-form blogging laid out. I might add to those rules later if I actually do keep this habit up (I know myself and I try to be realistic).…
I recently watched CGP Grey’s video titled Humans Need Not Apply and I have some nitpicking to do. While I agree with his general premise, robots will take over more and more jobs and as a society we need to discuss the consequences of this, I disagree on some specific points about the robots he mentions. Particularly about self-driving cars (or autos as Grey calls them, which I will adopt for this post).…
The Future is Ours from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.…
After trying to use Spotify Connect for a while now, I feel frustrated enough to write some lines about it. Spotify Connect is a fairly recent feature of the Spotify apps that is supposed to let you control Spotify running on another device, as long as both are logged in to the same account. My use case is to have my Nexus 7 laying connected to the speakers in my living room and avoid having to go to the device and unlock it every time I want to change songs/volume etc.…
Seeing as the European Parliament election is coming up on May 22-25, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on what the parliament is doing and get better informed about their work (because an informed voter is basically a must in a democracy and everyone does their best to live up to this, right?). I started following some people on Twitter who are better informed about this than I am.…
Couldn’t agree more.…
Question: What do you do when you have two upcoming exams? Answer: You get bored and start doing a performance tests between C and Python! The Metric I decided to implement something quickly to find the 10001:st prime number (2 is the first prime). This implementation is not the fastest or the best performing one as far as I know, but since the object wasn’t to implement a fast algorithm I went for the easiest thing to implement.…