Ambient Techno is my Friend. — Journal

Move Along, Nothing to See Here

Statement available here and there. You might as well just read those instead of spending your time here :)

All The Modern Things

Coming into contact with, while deliberately trying to avoid, indistinguishable magic.

I finally picked up The God Delusion, which I ordered shortly after I've arrived in Vienna. While I'm still in the process of reading, I can already recommend it if you're interested in the topic. If you're unsure of your position, expect some emotional trouble and confusion — of the good kind. It already fiddled with some of the non-answers/non-decisions I've so far kept (although I'm not dealing well with the sometimes overly agressive comments), and made the picture in my head a little bit clearer, as it's surprisingly easy to follow.

On a sidenote, you might want to skip the preface before you read it, as Dawkins comes off as a total prick by being utterly convinced by his own arguments. It's scary.

Did I mention that the British version has an awesome cover? People stare at it when I enter the subway.

Saturday night Markus, Dieter and I went to the Café Sperl where I accidently discovered a cellphone number inside of a no-smoking pyramid. So I called and asked if it would be helpfull to black it out. It was indeed, as Adam, who occasionally teaches German/Russian at the Sperl (where a simple breakfast that's hardly making your tummy full costs €7,something, gotta love Vienna), has gotten weird phonecalls recently and was thankful for my offer.

Having no internet access at home, no fridge, no washing machine, no TV or anything else that gets you to be a slacker is the best thing since sliced bread. I'm getting around a lot more, meeting more people, I turned out to be incredibly spontanous, and finally get to have time for those pops in my head that were torturing me for years.

I like being back. Wien Modern helps, as does the Arditti Quartet.

Progress and Joy with Helma

Having done hardly any JavaScript, and having had no real contact with Helma whatsoever, I was expecting the worst. But I'm surprised.

Since last week, Helma is the Object Publisher (I did not forget you, Zope *winkwinknudgenudge*) I'm confronted with for most of my workdays, to make a living. To those not familiar with it, imagine an object oriented framework for use with ECMAScript v3 a.k.a. JavaScript, that uses object relational mappings, and is built on top of Java.

It sounds pretty bloated, yet it's surprisingly lightweight and extremely easy to handle. Spent most of yesterday with writing my first application with it, experimenting a little, etc. Today I cleaned up, and was surprised by the result — I like that code better than what I produced with Aaron Swartz' web.py. My only objection is the syntax of JavaScript as I'm not much of a fan of { }'s and ;'s. So except for not being written in and scripted with Python, I really have to say, congratulations to Hannes Wallnöfer, this is really the closest to what I want from a webframework!

Actually, I should tell him in person, as right now, I'm sitting in the Metalab, listening to him and my boss. at the Helma Workshop:

Switching?

Since I have a new employer who's running this weblog service (hello), it's kind of logical to at least try around more than I already have anyway. Might even switch.

I mean, there are quite a few people that are using it already, more than I realised.

Just have to wrap my head around the skins to make it look a little bit more like that thing that isn't even finished. Enthusiasm!