[digital:meditation]

Soundtrack: Coax – “Aura Reading” (off the pretty good “Blue Enigma” album released on Kahvi Collective).

I have to admit I haven’t been dealing with the “machine meditation” idea I used to play with rather often back then, on Flickr, before it eventually became a place not that much fun to be anymore. At the moment, one or the other ’round here (?) might have noticed, the frequency of picture posts on this page has somewhat decreased, as well… which is to a certain degree due to the fact that my day-job projects these days are (fortunately…) pretty challenging, leaving little time for much else… and, to some degree, it’s also due to the fact that I am sort of unhappy with the tools at hand… I do not really want to completely move to a platform like Flickr again, for obvious reasons. Same way, however, I do not mainly and only want to post images as Manu (@calacirya.de) does, so I stopped using / maintaining my PixelPost installation a while ago, same as I didn’t want to run two different installations / tools anymore… just to end up learning that wordpress, though generally capable of doing so, still has a bunch of disadvantages being (ab?)used as a photoblog engine. Oh well… whatever. I’d better stop ranting and enjoy the music…

Aus überfälligem Anlaß Lese-Empfehlung: Wer den ultimativen Br***f*** sucht, wird mit diesem Werk seine helle Freude haben. “Gödel, Escher, Bach” von Douglas Hofstadter ist zwar kein Fachbuch (dafür ist Stil, Sprache, Methodik zu unkonventionell und absonderlich), aber nichtsdestotrotz eine Quelle von Inspirationen, ein Buch mit einer Dichte von Aha!-Erlebnissen pro Seite, die sich kaum überbieten läßt. Der Preis dafür: GEB liest man nicht im Urlaub, im Liegestuhl oder abends bei Kerzenschein und Wein. GEB liest man konzentriert, mit einem Stück Papier und einem Stift daneben, wenn man daraus ‘gewinnen’ will. Wer sich darauf und auf Hofstadters bisweilen sehr sperrige Gedankenwelten einzulassen bereit ist, der erlebt einen furiosen Ritt durch den kompositorischen Anspruch Bachscher Musik, die surreal-rekursive Natur von M.C.Eschers Bilderwelten, die Implikationen von Gödels Unvollständigkeitssatz, Idee und Theorie formaler Sprachen und noch so einiges mehr. Ein Trip, der sich definitiv lohnt, aber, wie gesagt, anstrengend ist. Ich selbst “arbeite” seit einer ganzen Weile an dem Buch und stelle immer wieder fest, daß mehr als ein paar Seiten nach einem halbwegs normalen Arbeitstag einfach nicht drin sind. Und das Buch ist umfangreich… ;)

soundtrack: melting clouds – “teneleventwo”

I have just recently sort of fallen in love with the visual appearance of urban lighting, with the “contrast”(?) of dark concrete/steel facilities, rusty installments to spread clear, clean, warm light. Does it look warmer at night when you don’t see the rust and the dirt?

Once in a while you tend to stumble across music accidentially, music which seems way out of the genres you usually deal with… and yet, it works. Something like this happened to me when discovering Botany Bay on jamendo.com, a platform I have been frequently using the last couple of years for various reasons. Reading tags like “pop”, “triphop”, “postrock” or “folk” weren’t really what I was looking for, but I decided to listen to it nevertheless, and, after listening to “inhale” and “moon child”, I knew I wouldn’t be likely to get this music out of my player anytime soon. Ordered both albums (as I didn’t want them to be in my collection “just” as mp3 files burned to disc), enjoyed the cover artwork, enjoyed the music, even though, as my musical tastes tend to differ, I can’t listen to the same stuff all the time…

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Soundtrack: INBloom – ‘Underskin: Mechanical Ritual (off the ‘Cloud Trails’ album). More pale, noisy machinery, trying to explore sort of a concept of “functional core” in abandoned technical facilities sure to have done something meaningful before…

Well, some of the readers of these pages will have noticed that, carefully speaking, my enthusiasm for Microsoft technology is pretty limited. “Limited” indeed is the right way of putting it: While I have a clear opinion about most of Microsofts monopoly regarding desktop and office software (which, in the end, makes me avoid both as good as I can, and thanks at the very least to Ubuntu GNU/Linux, right now I can do that pretty well… ;) ), I then and now always considered Microsoft .NET, as a development and runtime platform, a pretty good thing, maybe the best technology the Redmond folks came up with to date, and definitely a technology that could have offer wholly new options to both Microsoft and the rest of the world if licensed and distributed a little more openly. Anyway, leaving licensing and personal considerations related to this aspect aside: These days I earn a living mainly off working with Java and overally am pleased with this as an environment. However, as “integration” is what I mostly deal with, I finally had the chance of dealing with Microsoft .NET and C#, and had a rather pleasant trip…

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Ever wondered how to get your computer to do more than just clicking on an icon, leaving you to enter some data into some application window (browser, mail client, …) and be more or less pleased at its overall outcome? Ever wondered how on earth to get your computer actually processing your data, solving your problems in a way more suitable for your every-day work? Maybe even tried to, careful as could be, get closer to the idea of “writing programs” for your machine but so far hesitated, scared by the overall complexity and skills set required to get this done?

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Whoever is reading this weblog more or less regularly will have noticed that I am an enthusiastic user of NetBeans for most of my development needs, and this holds true even now that, given a current project of ours, I have to switch IDE at least once daily, as we do a project based on Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform and NetBeans, as comes as no surprise, is not too good a tool for building applications which are more or less built atop the Eclipse RCP core (well, getting deeper into things and especially talking about RAP application deployment, you’ll figure out that Eclipse itself also leaves a lot to be desired here, but that eventually is another story).

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