The end scene of Mary Poppins sprang to mind as I began to write these lines: the wind turns, and it is time for Mary to leave. And so will I soon turn my back to Apple and Google as software providers.

My relationship with Apple is tumultuous and irregular …

My mom is a hoarder. Or maybe was. I don’t see her often. But she keeps stuff. She lives alone in a big house, and over the years she had accumulated enough stuff that she could start a bed & breakfast business, furnishing all her guest rooms with her accumulated …

Recently I designed a utility for my research. To implement this utility I needed a programming language that: 1) is appropriate for fast prototyping, 2) supports asynchronous, low-latency event handling, and 3) supports efficient in-program multi-way channel polling.

So far I could find, only Go fits the bill, and so …

Sometimes life gives you lemons. Then you make lemonade. Today, the lemonade is an act of sharing. Three of them.

Before you read the following paragraphs, do yourself a favour.

Read this comic strip now.

Read it? No? Then please read it. Otherwise this post will make no sense whatsoever …

In a story I read recently…

I have a habit to peek at printouts that have been left at our common printer for more than a few hours. Yesterday, I found this.

At a first glance, this text reads like a badly written short essay on the applications of logic. But there was no title, no …

Video games are awesome, but not enough people know how to make them.

I believe society should invest in teaching how to make video games. The experience of playing video games and watching others play them is an intensive source of diversified cognitive and social experience. This experience advantageously replaces …

Dear M.,

I hope this message finds you well. I am sorry I have not written for so long; sorry too we have not seen each other for nearly a year now. Yet I continue to think fondly of you, and the memory of our times together still warms up …

Whomever has enjoyed my company more than a few times will know I have a particular sensitivity to the adjective “normal” when used to qualify human behaviour. However, until today, I was at a loss when asked to properly explain why it grates me so much.

What makes today so …

A sad truth, but also a gem of an insight:

In some ways saying a man is gay is like saying he is white. That is meaningless. A red-haired Scot is white, but so are Armenians, Arabs and Italians. There is a wide range of physical types and appearances all …

Last week I implemented my first “useful” genetic algorithm (GA) to solve a mapping problem. Lesson learned: don’t mistake “good solution according to the algorithm” with “good solution to the problem.”

Two weeks ago, I learned that my research group will trade one large room for two smaller rooms …

I did it again.

It’s like self-gratification: can’t hurt anyone, reliable pleasure, kept me busy for a while, pleasant relief afterwards.

Really, I ought to have been working on new, abstract, sexy-sounding research directions to advance my career.

Instead, I spent a half week programming and engineering. And …