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Archive for the ‘interlude’ Category

The future is now

January 5th, 2012

For New Year’s Eve, my significant other and I watched Quadrille . An elder man sat next to me and instead of patiently waiting for the play to start, he took his smartphone and played a game.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine had a heart attack. As he felt a strong pain in both arms, he called for help. Less than fifteen minutes later firemen arrived and took him to the hospital. As soon as he arrived he was promptly directed to the operating theater. There, the doctors inserted a needle in his arm, acceded the heart, removed the thrombus and placed a stent. Two days later he was dismissed. Except for his daily medicine intake and a very small scar near the wrist, it’s impossible to know he had a heart attack less than a month ago.

Cars no longer need people to be operated and robots move like humans. If you combine both, it’s not difficult to imagine fully automated delivery services. For example, you could order an item online and have it delivered to you without any human intervention.

And as I type these words, a man-made object is leaving the solar system...

Happy new year 2012. Welcome to the future.

Parrots

November 5th, 2011
Parrots

Parrots are wonderful creatures of Earth. How many animals can you actually talk to?

Not that many.

One might retort that parrots only stupidly repeat what they hear.

A valid point, except it's completely wrong.

Parrots are amongst the most intelligent birds on Earth. Some species are even able to associate words with meanings. The African Grey Parrot, in particular, has a degree of intelligence comparable to dolphins and great apes. They understand our language to the point they can form sentences and even display a sense of humor.

Owning a parrot is a huge responsibility as it's likely to outlive you. Overmore, it will be depressed if you are gone missing for too long, is bored or hasn’t been bred properly.

Surely, the last thing you want is to have a bird looking at you with sad eyes as she loses her feathers.

On the other hand, if you have the time, dedication and patience, one day you will be able to walk around with your pet seating on your shoulder.

As she shares witty comments with the audience you will realize one thing: you just made one huge step toward becoming a mighty pirate.

Up and down

April 15th, 2010

The server is going up and down as we tune it for maximum performance. We apologize for the poor service quality.

On the move…

April 11th, 2010

It's really a shame for a company that does its best to provide its customers with fast, reliable and clean software to have a very slow web server...

We had to fix that.

We've spent a whole week end configuring a dedicated server to host the official company's website as well as this blog.

Of course it runs FreeBSD and nginx!

BoostCon 2010

March 16th, 2010

The BoostCon is a Boost centric conference, but it's actually much more than that. It's probably the best C++ conference in the world.

A bold statement?

Contrary to what the name of the conference might imply, it's more C++ centric than Boost centric. A lot of talks revolve around the boost libraries, but there's also content related to the language itself and the challenges we all face.

The advantage of the Boost tropism is that the topic stays on "real world issues". No endless debate about how to phrase a new feature in the C++ standard, no endless theoretical speech about a problem that only exists when you program in a zero gravity environment on a computer that might be invented in 2030 if LSD gets legalized.

I was at BoostCon 2009, not only the content was accurate, advanced and of high quality, but it was extremely relevant.

"Spot on" is actually the term that comes to my mind.

Would it be only for the keynote by Andrei Alexandrescu and the introduction to software transactional memory I would have been happy to do the trip.

You know these conferences where you have some days filled with "so-so" talks, and you go to that talk about optimizing memory usage on a system you've never heard of because all the other talks look horrid, and the guy just read his slides with a vocoder tone, and you start firing up your laptop and suddenly the conference room becomes a very expensive WiFi spot.

Well BoostCon is nothing like it.

What's more bound to happen is that you're going to regret you still don't master mitosis, because you'd really like to learn more about smart pointers and Spirit, and both talks happen at the same time, and they are both given by really great people.

You'll fly back with the head full of new ideas to tackle the issues you've left at home (I'm not talking about how to get the exoskeleton in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Зов Припяти, because it's really just a matter of harvesting artifacts like there's no tomorrow), rested and energized by the intense intellectual maelstrom.

The conference is located in Aspen, Colorado.

I'll nitpick and say although the site and the city in itself are really a great, great place to have a conference, it's a bit inconvenient if you live outside the USA. From my European point of view, American conferences located in Boston or New-York are be more convenient.

If you're serious about C++, fly your team to the BoostCon. It's an outstanding investment.

Registration is just one click away