10 years Ago

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.10

Published by marco on in Movies

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of almost 1100 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Auf der anderen Seite (2007) — 8/10
This starts the story with a Turkish widower Ali, who lives in Germany.... [More]

Books read in 2015

Published by marco on in Books

Don Quixote (1605)

by Miguel de Cervantes

I liked part two even better than part one. Part II of the book starts with a discussion of the first part of the book, which in this second part has appeared as a publication already famous throughout Spain. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss this book with a bachelor who is very familiar with it, questioning and probing to determine that it reflects the truth…but not too much of the truth. This part is really very nicely written and the... [More]

Wool by Hugh Howey (2011; read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Wyrd Sisters (Discworld Book 6) by Terry Pratchett (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

The Martian by Andy Weir (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O’Neill (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Ark by Stephen Baxter (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Requiem for a Dream: A Novel by Hubert Selby Jr. (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (read in 2016)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictio...Universe by Charles Yu (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon B... 1) by China Miéville (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.9

Published by marco on in Movies

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Bullitt (1968) — 6/10
Steve McQueen and Jaqueline Bisset star in this at-first groovy movie with a kickin’... [More]

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.7

Published by marco on in Movies

  1. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)7/10
  2. Terminator Salvation (2009)6/10
  3. Cloud Atlas (2012)9/10
  4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)8/10
  5. Inherent Vice (2014)7/10
  6. Harry Brown (2009)6/10
  7. Don Jon (2013)8/10
  8. Hot Girls Wanted (2015)6/10
  9. 25th Hour (2002)7/10
  10. Lord Jim (1965)6/10
  11. Strange Days (1995)9/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to... [More]

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.8

Published by marco on in Movies

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Last Tango in Paris (1972) — 7/10
It’s Paris in the 1970s. A young woman passes an older man on a bridge,... [More]

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.5

Published by marco on in Movies

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) — 7/10
This is a slow—some might say well-paced—and careful introduction... [More]

Trump’s reason to run

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

I was digging and sorting and deleting old bookmarks the other day and came across this clip from the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. I don’t want to take anything away from him with the analysis that follows: Seth Meyers really knocks it out of the park for his whole 20 minutes or so. Really good material.

But there’s something I noticed. I’ve cued up the following clip at the point in his presentation where I feel he may have influenced the future of the U.S. of A. without even... [More]

Prank: a psychedelic video

Published by marco on in Fun

This video reminds me a bit of the work of George Plimpton—especially the sound effects. Super-strange story of a prank gone wrong…or right? It’s hard to tell. There really are no words. The animation is top-notch and the sequences are definitely not something that most of could conceive. Somewhat Lovecraftian in places. If you’re a fan of animation and strangeness, check it out.

A Prank Time by JaimeR (YouTube)

11 years Ago

API Design: The Road Not Taken

Published by marco on in Programming

“Unwritten code requires no maintenance and introduces no cognitive load.”

As I was working on another part of Quino the other day, I noticed that the oft-discussed registration and configuration methods[1] were a bit clunkier than I’d have liked. To whit, the methods that I tended to use together for configuration had different return types and didn’t allow me to freely mix calls fluently.

The difference between Register and Use

The return type for Register methods is IServiceRegistrationHandler... [More]

Phrasing. BOOM.

Published by marco on in Fun

Imagine my surprise when I opened the article Great Tits Sing with Syntax by Abbas Raza (3QuarksDaily) and discovered it was about Japanese birds.

In case you’re interested, the 3QuarksDailly post links through to the full article These birds use a linguistic rule thought to be unique to humans by Rachel Feltman (Washington Post)


The title is a reference to a tag line from Archer, which the lead character utters at every possible opportunity, whenever someone says something that could be misconstrued as even vaguely sexual in nature. Archer’s seventh... [More]

Earthli is now 100% HTTPS

Published by marco on in earthli.com

With the help of Letsencrypt, all of earthli.com is now accessible only via HTTPS.

What does that mean?

  • For your day-to-day use of the site, nothing. Any data you send to or from earthli is now hidden from prying eyes.
  • All traffic is end-to-end encrypted between your browser and the earthli server. This includes your password, when you log in.
  • Although almost everything on earthli is still open to the public, encryption now truly protects areas that have restricted access.
  • It means your... [More]

Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk (read in 2015)

Published by marco on in Books

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

v2.2: Winform fixes and Query Improvements

Published by marco on in Programming

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

Voxxed Zürich 2016: Notes

Published by marco on in Programming

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs.


This first-ever Voxxed Zürich was hosted at the cinema in the SihlCity shopping center in Zürich on March 3rd. All presentations were in English. The conference was relatively small—333 participants—and largely vendor-free. The overal technical level of the presentations and participants was quite high. I had a really nice time and enjoyed a lot of the presentations.

There was a nice common thread running through all of the... [More]

Finovate 2016: Bank2Things

Published by marco on in Programming


At the beginning of the year, we worked on an interesting project that dipped into IOT (Internet of Things). The project was to create use cases for Crealogix’s banking APIs in the real world. Concretely, we wanted to show how a customer could use these APIs in their own workflows. The use cases were to provide proof of the promise of flexibility and integrability offered by well-designed APIs.

Watch 7–minute video of the presentation

The Use Cases

Football Club Treasurer

 Activity Stream in the AppThe first use... [More]

Trump wouldn’t be the first fool, psycho or moron

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

Since Trump won the primaries, the press and representatives on both sides of the aisle in America have stepped up their level of panic to at least DEFCON2. Nearly everyone who’s anyone is pulling on the handbrake as hard as they can to prevent the ever-more imminent disaster of a President Trump. At this point, the entirety of the press has nearly forgotten that Hillary and Sanders are even running in the other party’s primary because Trump is doing such a good job making Trumpzilla/the... [More]