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Name Marco von Ballmoos
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Home page https://earthli.com/users/marco
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The (only) developer at earthli.com.

Contents

3752 Articles
113 Comments

10 years Ago

The Martian by Andy Weir (read in 2015)

Published 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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)

API Design: The Road Not Taken

Published 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]

11 years Ago

Phrasing. BOOM.

Published 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 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 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 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 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 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 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]

The Winning Ticket in 2016

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The Trumpdozer rolls on, showing the world the real America. The article How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) makes the case that Trump is the logical result of the American electoral process, which is not to be confused with the presidency itself, which while often cruel and capricious is not really a joke. People die because of it. As Taibbi says,

“The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the... [More]”

Mind of My Mind (The Patternist Series...k 2) by Octavia Butler (read in 2015)

Published 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]

Mini-applications and utilities with Quino

Published on in Programming

In several articles last year[1], I went into a lot of detail about the configuration and startup for Quino applications. Those posts discuss a lot about what led to the architecture Quino has for loading up an application.

 Some of you might be wondering: what if I want to start up and run an application that doesn’t use Quino? Can I build applications that don’t use any fancy metadata because they’re super-simple and don’t even need to store any data? Those are the kind of utility applications... [More]

The FBI vs. Apple

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The news is that the FBI has requested that Apple comply with a court order to crack a single iPhone—that belonging to one of the suicide killers at the San Bernardino massacre last year.

A lot has been said about this case that is wrong. I’ve read a few articles and comments from relatively knowledgable sources and what they have to say makes a bit more sense than the typically hyperbolic interpretation in the major media—and, of course, social networking sites.

The Law is Bigger than You... [More]