Mėnuo Juodaragis 2013 – A baltic festival of music, culture and brotherhood

The Mėnuo Juodaragis is a yearly event taking place in Zarasai, Lithuania (the location of this festival since 2007). This year in its 16th edition, the festival is host of multiple folk and rock bands, and while among them are present some foreign bands, the greatest majority comes from eastern Europe, particularly from Lithuania and Latvia. What makes this festival peculiar is that it is not specifically themed with music. In fact, every year it has a different leading theme, and the one of this year was as following:

This year, the theme of the Festival is dedicated to our Baltic brothers Latvians – on the Lithuanian-Latvian border we call on both nations to gather in an open-air feast to explore unique music, arts, mythologies, history and many other similarities and differences between the Lithuanian and Latvian nations. 

The festival is also enriched by various cultural appointments. Since listing them here would be non-exhausting and redundant, I would send you here in the programme section to take a look. You can also see every previous edition of the festival, since they keep an archive of every past edition’s internet page.

The trip

Coming from Łódź, Poland, we found no other way to get there but via train/bus. Coming from Warszaw, there is a train taking you over the border with Lithuania called “Hańka” that depending on the day goes directly to Sestokai (Lt) or stops in Trakiszki where there is a shuttle bus waiting for the train and taking passengers to Sestokai (6h trip). From there, the best option is to go in Kaunas, which is the second biggest city after Vilnius (the capital city), where you can already take a bus going to Zarasai. The only alternative would be by bus or by car ( or ok, if you are brave enough on foot, tricycle, skate, etc..).

Arrived in Zarasai in the night, when the festival was already started (unfortunately, I wanted to attend the opening rites), we luckily found some people that going there as well showed us the way. The entrance to the festival, a bridge connecting the island and the city, is some hundreds of meters distant from the bus terminal. Arrived there, and mounted the tent (and took a coffee from the Vero Cafe stand), we went immediately to see what’s up on the pinewood stage, one of the three stages; the stages are, namely, the Pinewood stage (in a forest), the Great stage (in the “main square” of the island), and the Northern stage, smaller and embedded in another little brush farther from the other two.

First evening of concert (day 1)

The first nice group didn’t arrive late: Otava Yo ( Отава ё ) is a Russian folk band, surely variegated and worth to see at least once! But better more times! They gave me a good impression and as first group we see from the beginning to the end it was also the best, for me. I love violins, and I totally appreciate gypsy music, from which they have some heavy influence (probably already present in traditional Russian folk); that instrument Alexey Belkin was holding was also somehow attracting my curiosity, but there it looked very usual (the “Gusli” or Russian Psaltery), What’s more, as they themselves state in their bio (“we are not very serious about that, so if you find something you didn’t expect to hear, that’s exactly what we wanted”) they don’t look like the usual band you see on stage. Can be not like that, but they make you think that what they play is something with which they have fun, and not something they have to do for some contract (and seriously, I’m not criticizing any band).

Given we very tired, we went sleep soon after having seen the Changes (USA), which although nice to listen gave some sleepy mood (and they were just finishing when we arrived). We remained first some time seeing some old Latvian movie (was really fascinating to me, all those black/white images and mute), and I was really feeling nice. Although the very cold climate (it was also night, something like 2-3 am) the mood was optimal to see concerts, and people around didn’t really look like worried about the climate, instead was possible to spot some campfires and groups going around with quietness and not really many drinkers like other festivals;

I must emphasize the terrible humidity of the night, and hot climate of midday. In the night it wasn’t possible to sleep because we were more busy trembling, it looks like 2 covers weren’t at all enough, but that is absolutely needed something covering from below and above, like a sleeping bag. A very heavy sleeping bag. And I had just discovered the “hole” in my tent, supposed to be some sort of window to let the air entering, but without something to tap it. Solution for this: hang a string from a pole to the other of the tent over the little window and used a t-shirt as tent. It worked and after some time tiredness caught us (around two hours after).

Second day

Despite my will to go to attend the morning exercises early (at 9), we woke up at 12. I was a bit annoyed by this, also because like that you lose some very important parts of the festival (but falling asleep at 5 probably was fatal for the time). That day early was programmed the start of two sport tournaments, volleyball and horn football, tours around the city and around the Lithuanian-Latvian border (very near!), various lessons and other niceties (and exercises!). So I’ve decided that we should run to eat and assist concerts, given that we had a lot to see!

First of the day in the Northern Stage were Laukis, lovely-appearing a cappella vocal group singing in traditional costumes. They didn’t really impressed me, but still it was a very nice way of saying good morning. Grodi followed them, keeping up the good folklore themes and continuing to enjoy the attending public. Despite the good rhythms, the present atmosphere was the main attraction for me: this stage was in the middle of the trees, and following some stomped path is possible to reach, in a couple of minute, the lake. From here the view is wonderful; the sun mirrors in the lake and the city surrounding the lake looks like shining.

Textual intermezzo: some time before we went to the city to take something at the supermarket, and I could find, of course, things I didn’t really know how to call, or that I couldn’t spell or understand, and things which were the usual thing in a little supermarket: again, many things common to Poland, and in the end I just took water; I wanted to keep eating those tasty things from the spots in the island, like the-things-I-do-not-remember, vegetarian/vegan, from the Hare Krishna’s people and also dishes from the eating spot (and the beer, artigianal and SO good!).

Same place as before, Northern Stage, followed Justina Mileškaitė, a woman with a truly beautiful voice and appearance. I suppose that the language she was singing in was Lithuanian, and the show went on very fast – not a single note wasted. She plays acoustic guitar and Zither, and the elements of his music are mostly folklore; follow Baltos Varnos, a group of three girls playing guitar, speaking poetry and words of wisdom, mostly with folk style. The last group of today on this stage is then  Garsinė izoliacija,  which unfortunately after a while made me feel sleepy, so I moved to the central stage after this to watch the next performances (and get a beer) of Miglas Asni, some genuine young folk from a group of energetic people, playing a cheerful rhythm which I’ve personally enjoyed; Gilė, probably one of the “folkiest” there, most numerous groups there (and that make you smile, so happy music), they are a group of students from Kaunas (let’s say a club) and Vilki, wolves, a group of men who attempt to reconstruct true ancient Latvian warrior songs, to me a bit remembering other groups, overall during the live (their dresses overall).

I don’t remember very well, the following concerts, but for sure I’ve appreciated Aistė ir SKYLĖ, the group I was mostly waiting for, and AUĻI, truly nice to see live, and a pleasure to hear, never boring!

Third Day

The saddest day of the month! 😦 We will leave the day after.

But before, other concerts to attend: MIDULA – a dream of guitars and voices, RIKŠI, which made people dance on the whole prairie aside from the stage, happy and danceable group, taking some sun on that cloudy day and  Chorus LIEPAITĖS, the nicest surprise of that day – many wonderful voices singing traditional songs, something that I’ve never experienced before and I’ll always remember.

The following afternoon, was just the most painful, probably: waiting for the night, we were going around seeing the last parts of festival, some talks, some new views of the lake, some photos to the local inhabitants (ducks and squirrels) and walking around waiting for the night, when we would leave the place and go to wait for the bus to Kaunas, beginning the return to home on various buses and trains.

Comments

I feel totally bewildered writing this like a normal review: such a place cannot be really described by usual writing, like for other music festivals: this is in fact not only a music festival, I want to stress this point, this is more of a cultural festival, where you can truly meet some traditional places, meet different customs. I have also to admit that living in Poland since more than one year I’m already accustomed to many differences. Here I think is not that different, seen from a superficial point of view, because I didn’t really met many people from here and I didn’t enter in any home. Anyway this festival pulled up my spirit, and it will account for the best folk festival of my life. Now, anyway, I’m learning Lithuanian and I’m enthusiast about it!

PS: I don’t want this to be exhaustive, and neither this to be a complete review: I wanted to give a glimpse of what this festival look like for a foreigner, and give some useful information on how to arrive there. Also, my memory is not that good so if the reader was there and found any error or something that would be worth mentioning please email me 🙂

Reflections – October 2013

Once upon a time (ok, 8 years ago more or less) I became interested in programming, as soon as I got to know how programs were built. I still remember my awe and wonder when I found out that my need for speed, itunes, and various programs were written. I couldn’t really imagine it at that time, and neither much time after, reading about Java, C, web techs, it was really an alien thing. Then I got into it. I hsad a crash course of Java, then I had wanted to learn PHP, to make websites. Well, I did learn at home. And the main point was that, I was fascinated by programming problems.

Problem solving, I loved it, I just didn’t want to go sleep and keep trying, coding, solving problems, “puzzles”. At that time I had a lot of time to practice (was the period of holidays from school) and at a certain point a friend-of-a-friend asked me to do a little thing for him, some website with a 5-page menu and really few things in each page, plus a catalogue (in my mind: “5page+connection to the db, wow, challenging!”) and after nights and nights and also some daylight i had something working. But it never launched.

Where I wanted to arrive is, now I don’t solve problems anymore. I just assemble plugins. I’m a kind of assembler of parts. Your approach “don’t reinvent the wheel” transformed into a race to the best plugin, a framework that can leverage on that library that depend on that and that library and that does a wide range of things but that is bugged exactly like the other 4X10^***00 libraries.

It actually didn’t want to become a post of critiques, but in the end it became. And I’m sure that it just will be increasingly worse and worse, and can be seen from Github’s trends. I love programming, I probably just don’t like what is doing the capitalistic market with it. It’s making it become Just Another Slave-science of money, probably.

Peace.

Puscifer – All Re-Mixed Up

In this article I’m going to cover the new released album from Puscifer, All Re-mixed up, that despite I appreciate and sometimes worship, I have this time something to say about. It was officially released to the public some days ago, the 27th of August (2013).

This album is a collection of remixes from various other artists, everyone somehow connected to the Puscifer project. The album in its entirety stands out for the ability of go through very different genres and at the same time maintain the consistency of Puscifer’s “brand” – Keenan’s composition – which is not always recognizable by the sound, but from the quality of the work. Also, every track doesn’t have something really new being a remix, but still is a nice experiment and probably one of the Maynard’s favorite phases of music creation, work out again what has been already done and propose it in a new key, as permitted by the digital age.

Dude, it’s Puscifer. You can go all that way around the globe and back if you want

1. Monsters (Deconstruct) by Mat Mitchell – Surely one of the remixes which are the least distant from the original version, it’s actually a good job – sounds are very complying and this remix is definitely an enrichment to an already wide collection of nice artworks. The remixer is a man that already worked with Maynard in all his projects – Tool, A Perfect Circle and the one in object Puscifer.

2. The Green Valley (Verde River Maestro 507 mix) by Rani Sharone – To me the best remix of the album, maybe because the most in agreement with Puscifer style; richness of percussions, beats and a dominant rhythm that takes you away. The remixer is a bassist and composer, playing for Otep and other bands, in fact most of the track is fulfilled with bass strings.

3. Monsoons (JLE Motorik mix) by John Eustis AKA Telefon Tel Aviv – Changes the style but not the poetry, this remix is quite intellectual and although changing completely the sound of the original, it remains romantic, slow and celebrating. This work has been edited by one of the main talented guests of Puscifer, Telefon Tel Aviv. He is another big name in the electronic music, known for his band projects and for touring with Nine Inch Nails.

4. Telling Ghosts (Giorgia O’Queef mix) by Carina Round – also the-girl-on-the-cover  – A remix deep and enigmatic more than the track itself, maybe too minimalist for me but still a valid content, precise in what it wants to say. The sounds are clean and don’t leave any doubt about the originality of this work. Although who did it is a guitarist and singer, so not recalling the style of the the remixer, it keeps the ongoing theme of the disc. Carina toured with Puscifer in his previous tours as supporter of the band, and sometimes as part of the band itself. She has worked also with names like Brian Eno and Billy Corgan; And as Maynard said, yes, she brought testicles to it.

5. Horizons (Dream of a Lie remix) by John Fryer – A bit too much of surrealism and sudden change of style, and for me totally another sound, and I can say lighthearted, that this could be left out of the album. While the other tracks are always more or less taking a certain footprint, this doesn’t fit in the flux of onirism that this album offers.  John Fryer is mainly a producer of many big names since 80’s, from Fad Gadget to Paradise Lost and from Fields of Nephilim to HIM, he collocates in a very various range of successes, but sure, this is not one of them.

6. Man Overboard (11AD remix) by Alain Johannes – Background voices opening – and let the show begin! Peculiar new additions to the instruments, slow ongoing effects made of this track one of the best of the album, maintaining the original main voice intact. This cigar-box guitar player (multi-instrumentalist, actually) is also a vocalist and has been involved as producer and as part of the band in various rock projects.

7. Toma (Burn Out remix) by Five Knives – For sure the most energic/industrial here, keeps alive the listener while going through all these trip-hop melodies, maybe a bit too much quiet respect to this. Or maybe is this track too much? Turns out, not at all – it surprisely keeps the same velocity, staying in the row with what is to adhere. The remix is entitled to the whole band, Five Knives are probably the most out-of-theme band, doing some kind of industrial punk rock, but they succeed in softly leaving a trace of them, without twist or contort the harmonic order of tracks.

8. The Rapture (JLE Needs Service mix) by John Eustis – Here we have another masterpiece from him. I must say that I really liked how it manipulated the tempo, giving a completely new view of the lyrics.

9. Conditions of My Parole (F.U.B.A.R. remix) by Sir Mix-A-Lot – A mix more focused on the sounds and styles, continuously varying and changing the theme, in the while maintaining the initial tempo, and probably because the original one is my favorite song of the original album, I didn’t like this that much. Sir Mix-A-Lot is a producer based in Seattle.

10. The Weaver (Virtual Vacuum remix) by Aaron Harris – A piece much more ambient than the others, delicate, emotional, following a pattern of “Waves”, as recalled by the song’s title. The name of the remix, Virtual Vacuum, can perfectly define it. Aaron Harris is mainly a collaborator of Danny Carey (drummer of Tool), and this was the only connection to Puscifer, before this remix.

11. Oceans (Green Mussel Mix) by Zac Rae – So sweet, so cute, so “pianine”. Is in my opinion an “extremization” of the original sound. Very slow and emotional, beautiful and “shiny”. I would suggest it as a lullaby, so sweet keys and melody. Zac Rae is mainly the keyboard for Pedestrian, although he did many works by itself, just take a look on Discogs. Among collaborations, we can spot alos Aerosmith and Lana Del Rey, always as Piano/Keyboard.

12. Tumbleweed (Delusions of Grandeur mix) by The Beta Machine – A history of drums and guitars, a very technical remix. This band is an american two-men rock/electronic band, which has been hanging out with Puscifer’s producers (among these, Mat Mitchell).

To wrap up – I believe that this is an album to take by itself, since is not a direct work of Puscifer, but a re-edit of Conditions of My Parole done by other artists released under the name of Puscifer. I included some words also about authors because I believe that this is an album not only made of music but also made of different people and differences they represent, more than music per se.

Things I learned after 5 years of web

Things I am not:

• a web designer.
• a web engineer.
• a web professionist, generally
• a web enthusiast

I don’t think I can be described with such simple terms. My background is quite “anomalous”:
I started studying html & css when I was 15 yo (more or less, 6 years ago) and few weeks after I had to accelerate and learn also PHP, cause of some kind of job from a friend, to do a website for him. Yes, I was the proverbial cousin that does a website for 200 $.

After a while I realized that I had some kind of potential, since programming ( at least imperative ) turned out to be straightforward to me. It actually made me somehow happy.
Some months after I found a fixed position in a small company, and there I started to learn also to use Javascript and jQuery, still by myself (I neither had books, just the Internet).

I will stop here the story, In short, now I can use 10+ programming languages and some other frameworks with relative ease and without any difficulties in learn new other technologies. When I’m asked to do something, I just do it. A couple of days to refresh the syntax if I’ve somehow forgot it, and BAM! ready to solve new challenges.

And now I’m here learning about FP (Scala) and playing around with Ruby and Prolog, and I’m having some jobs regarding Rails and Backbone.js (but looking forward to find something with Akka and Lift)

And I was forgettin’ – I’m attending a bachelor course of Physics 🙂

1) If you want to be a better, or still, a good programmer, ALWAYS accept challenges,

and possibly, if you are studying at university, don’t limit your knowledge to the syntax, or keywords. Generally, if you want to learn it for real, you should discover the insights of the language you are facing, how to use combinations of operators, functions, interfaces, learn how to loop, make common operation of reading/writing, defining REST interfaces in the idiomatic way. If you are facing a new paradigm, always try to follow such a paradigm and don’t fall in temptation writing with imperative style! Possibly, also, learn to use the most used legacy version, don’t stick only to the newest. It gives usually more material to start with.

2) Learn to self-study. It’s a way better mode to study a language.

You know why when you do it, but mostly it gives you more the feel of the language. Possibly search for a getting started, watch on programmers.stackexchange.com, StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and generally all over the internet infos about it. Recent articles from already expert of it are usually the best.

3) Books, eBooks, online courses, are of course an help, but you have to use them or they will turn out to be useless. We all are lazy, that’s why Ruby has been invited ( 🙂 ), and this is a critical point to stick with. If you keep downloading pdf, now try to cancel them all, and promise to yourself that if you will download it, you will take time to read it, and them download another. If you feel like it won’t help, remove it and stick with another. It will

4) Accept a job just if you don’t feel any risk and you feel sure about it, otherwise it will turn out to be an hell. Try to see what usually is requested, watch for code online, get a feel of what it is and (5), then start to search for a job with your new favourite technology

5) Learn to develop a better debug! This will be always the most important thing. Every technology stack/environment chosen for a determinate project has its own way to show errors. Learn which are the common errors you will face, and then it will be much easier to correct all your design.

6) Use Chrome or Mozilla, if you are a web developer, and learn to use the developer tools. it will be SOOOOOOO much better then to interact and debug with the code executed in the browser.

7) Write code and comments in english. PLEASE. Once I had to upgrade a legacy system and comments and code was in german language. And it wasn’t nice, although I know it.

Probably I missed some things, but this is all comes to mind at the moment. Thank You for reading, Cheers!

PS: Should I put the number in the title or is too much “out” like this?

I know my english is not that good, and as a student I recognize there can be many error – if you feel like a grammar nazi and you want to correct me, please PM 🙂

To develop an intelligent development

Thinking at today’s advancements in programming and AI, can be quite reasonable saying that the quantity of languages, frameworks, and runtimes makes available to us a really wide choice of answers to the question “What I can use to develop this application?”

How many programming languages exist? Some hundreds.

How many frameworks exist? Many more.

So I suppose that now would be the time to talk about “intelligent development”. What I mean with this term?

I want to assert this first: I don’t have much experience. I made few projects with various methodologies, languages, frameworks, and what I end up with is always the same thing, which technology to use. And the choice many times isn’t easy, usually someone restricts the choice to the technologies which are already known, or generally that are rapidly assimilable.

Here I want to make a point. I would like to theorize, and I’m sure is possible to realize in practice, a possible new element in the available choice of technologies. An intelligent entity, which get automatically better by itself, without the need of massive improvement, rewrite or change of environment. The developer or maintainer won’t be necessarily modifying it, but just in case of profound changes.

Let’s tell the truth: we have enough of new frameworks developed everyday, more or less following the same philosophy. A well-known example is jQuery: since is born, many frameworks rose in its same period. Then it came the time for MVC frameworks. We have server side javascript ( and about all this matter I wrote another post )

I think that basically it should have the following characteristics:

• Integrable with existing technologies
• Devoid of error generation (must be intelligent also in that meaning)
• Not necessarily easy to use/apply, but it must work in the long term

And features. Apart from all the niceties of modern development, it should:

• Advice the developer during the development of an app of possible faults of the algorithms written
• Be able to check the running program in real time, gathering statistics, usage data,  error launched in the life of the app
• Search for straightforward solutions to arising errors/deadlocks of the system, or immediately contact
• Have the ability to change files in the code through an agent, if it is required from its functions
• Have a central brain external to the system checking from the integrity of this sort of “programming intelligence”

A system cannot be written by itself (Still), but can change itself, as we can possibly experience every day.

This proposal comes from some reflections during my readings and practice of AI theory, one of my current hobbies.

 

Note: this is just a first draft for this article, possibly I will enhance it in the near future

Lights & Motion – Reanimation

Artist: Lights & Motion, Album: Reanimation, Year: 2013

I want to open a new category on my website about music, my master passion. This is, at the time, the biggest revelation for me.

The artist behind this beautiful record is Christoffer Franzen, who self-taught music production to make up this.

Probably to a superficial eye, or to a first listening of the cd, someone can say “Well, why the album is called ‘Reanimation’ and not ‘Lights & Motion’ ?”. Because going in a straight order, the album doesn’t really describe lights and motion, but is actually made of it. What the album describe is Reanimation of a soul, from staying “Home” to  “Dream Away”. In my personal interpretation, this album is much more than another successful piece of work in the post-rock scene, instead it’s a wonderful attempt to describe a whole range of emotions, from responding to a “negative” (not really, but to best describe it I have to use this word to mean “less positive”) situation, fight against the odds, to shining in a multitude of cheerful moments.

This album describes what should be happiness, lights glaring at the chords of a guitar that – as the author says – saw many sleepless nights. It can be said that this album is a production of what had to go outside of the author’s mind before. He said:

“At the beginning, I really had nothing except for a vision of something vast, heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. I didn’t think in terms of music, but in terms of other things that inspired me, things that painted a picture in my head that I could see so clearly.”

And indeed I feel this. This epic record will remain probably a classis of this music genre, given also its wide celebration and initial enthusiasm from the increasing ranks of followers. In this songs, piece of dreams are put in form of notes, and beats narrate about waves of wonderful images. In my opinion the masterworks are “Drift” and “The March”, where you can’t just stop feel pleasure and other nice sensations, where bodily breathing stops and music breathing starts. “Home” is an intro to beauty, and “Dream Away” is the new reborn. But I’m indeed completely fuzzed by the whole album, track after track, listening after listening. In this music the heart has been put, passion, love, happiness perspires from the Tempo of the drums, and effects contour the rhytm.

While I write this, a second mini album, Save Your Heart has been announced on Fall of 2013: http://www.deepelm.com/elist/ann_syh.html

Listening and buying a digital copy of the album

Like him on facebook, maybe ;)?

Google and Quantum computation – in other words, the future is coming and is in our browser

This is an Op-ed I wrote for Coursera. I think is a nice piece of writing and I would like to know what you think about it.

Different fields in science should begin to collaborate more deeply. In modern days, I can see only benefits in this approach, also because scientific research is in a point where new discoveries can be easily related to other branches of science. When in 90s people were approaching computer science, it was different. The thinking was different. There weren’t so many problems to solve about portability and graphics, but more thinking on computation, which was really needed to science. Today the industry reached enough computational power for the consumer, and  now the thoughts are more directed to the other ways to approach more computational power, mainly optimization of algorithms and consumption of energy. When I approached programming for the first time, the world was rapidly changing, it was requiring brand new programmers with new skills, able to perform with many languages in the least time possible (it was five years ago), but then it recently changed and is asking, “Who is going to master the best this language?”. It is too much even for me, still not 22, to run after such thing.

But Google has the possibility. In the IT scenario this company is my favourite, and is where one day I would like to have a full time job. It was running the year 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin started their research project about a new kind of search engine. Nowadays in 2013, Google Inc. is one of the richest and fastest growing (still) companies on the planet. They offer a terrific range of products for free to the public, priceless. Their incoming are based on publicity, mostly.

On this scenario, the news of Google buying a Quantum computer to optimize their algorithm, is not a surprise at all. They constantly innovate, and to spend such an amount of money (probably different hundreds of millions) they must be worth it. If they believe they are worth of it, I believe it as well. The goal is to “study how quantum computing might advance machine learning” says Hartmut Neven, one of the main responsible for the research department in Google. Quantum computing is a really fresh, new field all to explore, and I think probably the next big thing of the next years in computer science, probably worth to invest in. Unluckily by now is for big companies only, probably for the fact that a quantum computer costs so much.

In the article, they speak also about Machine Learning. This field is nicely related to Google since it started to be active in computation. It’s about the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, or how I personally prefer, where different fields like Probability, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science start to collaborate and become “something better” together, creating algorithms aimed to help every other single scientific field. Modern abilities of machine learning are outstanding and is the demonstration that different fields should collaborate more often and more actively. Why?

For the progress. For a better world. These concepts not always collide, but we probably should help them doing so, and the solution is collaboration among branches of science. I don’t think that physicists and mathematics would go so far without the help of each other. Surely more aid is given by mathematics, but physics is still a fundamental compass for science. Biologists and computer scientists should start speaking the same language, because crossing their knowledge will be crucial in future for both. For computer science, because nowadays it needs a (spinta) towards integration with biological systems. For Biology, because it needs more help from the computational point of view, and more automation helping geneticists and biochemists in their experiments. Progress should be not abused as term, we have progress when we discover something new and useful, or something that can help us reach a final answer. All the rest, in my advice, is mere discovery.

What about the younger generations of engineers and scientists? They are, unluckily, increasingly oriented to have a nice and well paid job, rather than join research and help to create a better future. In my humble opinion, they should be taught analytical thinking and problem solving, because nowadays are abilities more and more missing from curricula, and education should adapt to the violent came into play of computers and generally new technologies increasingly substituting human’s mind in automatic operations.

How can computer science evolve? After Quantum computation, I can’t really say where this field will go. Probably the future in science is the joint research of different fields, and if we assume it possibilities are infinite.

Bibliography:

Op-Ed article about http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23554-google-and-nasa-team-up-to-use-quantum-computer.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Dennis Ritchie: The mathematical brain behind the heart of Unix

This is a Writting Assignment I made for a course on Coursera, the grammar isn’t perfect and perhaps is not readable english, but I wanted to share this with the world.

Dennis Ritchie: The mathematical brain behind the heart of Unix

Many computer scientist, as much as in the past as today, rely on Ritchie’s previous work. He created the C programming language and rewrote with it the UNIX operating system. Why is it so important? Well, we should return to Ritchie’s life to understand. As always, history helps to comprehend, and here is the case. I will present now a very short biography.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie born in 1941 in New York. Grown up in Summit, New Jersey, his father was a scientist in Bell Labs, the mother a homemaker. The part of his life of our interest is the period after his graduation in Harvard University, when has obtained the degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics. In 1968 he started to work at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and the year after he received a PhD from Harvard for his doctoral thesis “Program Structure and Computational Complexity”.

Between 1969 and 1973 the C programming language was developed, also if only in 1978 Dennis Ritchie and his mate of adventures Brian Kernighan published the first edition of The C programming language. By 1973 they rewritten the Unix operating system, giving a direction change to the Computer Science field (at the time not existing as we know it today), because of several reasons. For the sake of shortness I will here remember the most important one: they gave to the world the first high-level programming language, meaning something that was not written with symbols and numbers but something in English language. The years after are just them of a rising star: he continued to drive the increase of computer functionalities with additions to Unix. From the 80s on, he received several prizes and acknowledgements of his work together with his collaborator Ken Thompson, first of all the Turing Award in 1983. He has been found dead on the 12th October 2011, at the age of 70.

“Ritchie has credited his success partly to the fact that he did not have a computer background and therefore had an open mind to possibilities that others might not have thought existed”. This is creating itself expertise. Is just wonderful. He created talent and inventiveness, he built a whole career on passion, for him and for the coming generations of programmers.

We can learn many beautiful things from his life. He never clamorously gave up on something and wherever he is depicted as a nice person, someone you could query for help and share your passion with. From him we can learn deep passion and practice, which both merged can create unique things, visible in all great talents which have been and will be in the world.

“Dennis was well loved by his colleagues at Bell Labs, and will be greatly missed. He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man.”

What he did is not coming from a gift or talent, but from hard work,  constancy, engagement about the proper passion and knowledge. Computer science did not exist to the extent we are familiar with nowadays. Dennis Ritchie’s invention was a crucial factor to the development of the computer science. Also, it’s widely known that the type of expertise is commonly derived from the type of intelligence, and here we can see how an instructed Mathematics graduate could be a pioneer in a new field , being both a revolutionary inventor and a new expert in the field. This last thing comes as always and as stated by Coyle and Colvin with a lot of advantages, but these advantages have to be taken with paws and tooth, through years of practice. In his case, it took less than ten years from the starting point to the revolution.

I’ve chosen this person because particularly relates to my job and I find myself in him. His hard work contributed – or to better say – gave a fundamental pilaster to computer science with his invention. I’m a software developer and student of Physics, and I hope one day to leave my sign in the world with some kind of invention in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And based on his path, I can trace my own future success, seeing how he is related to expertise – or better – how can I get inspired from him and how can I develop my form of expertise from this. My history is some way connected to Coyle and Colvin’s ideas too, because of my “talent”, which is actually developed. It consists of problem solving, I have a great ability in find solutions to problems in programming, and I also do it very fast respect to other developers. How?  Years of passion and hard practice night and day in analytical thinking and programming.

Which has been the reaction of people to this, both the insiders and not? Certainly there has been an immediate influence from this invention, at that time there were already a certain amount of families, schools, laboratories where small desktop computer entered. What’s happened suddenly after this fact?

Probably it has been a starting point to consider Computer Science a real science. Or at least, it helped. Expertise was needed at that time overall in universities, where computers where waiting for someone who could exploit their potential. So these rising scientists could be a point of reinforcement for Colvin’s ideas too, meaning that these people were just trying and trying all day and all night, trying to figure out the capabilities of computers, how to make them more useful, able to compute faster, how they could help men in their daily activities? How computer could simplify tasks, automate things and such? How can we use such power then to help other fields like medicine, biology and the like? Expertise was needing other masters, experts who could educate other experts. And maybe not just enlarge the group of IBM’s workers.

 

I think I still can’t express how much he has been important to us. Nowadays, the influence of C can be seen in almost every programming language widely used in industry, retaining many primary structures and idioms of the language itself (Some examples: Java, C++, Python, Ruby, PHP). Nonetheless, there are also some programming language that are much away from it, like Prolog and functional-oriented languages (here is full of key-terms of computer programming, but I couldn’t exclude this part, I apologize if it sounds completely obscure to You, reader). He influenced a lot future generations of computer scientist, and I think it is amazing that a single man was responsible for all this. Of course with some help from his colleagues, we don’t want to forget:

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.⁵

Luckily, we will have this unforgettable trace of him until the world will exist.

Bibliography:

[1] http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Mi-So/Ritchie-Dennis.html

[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20119811-92/dennis-ritchie-father-of-c-programming-language-dies/

[3] Kernighan, Brian W.; Ritchie, Dennis M. (February 1978). The C Programming Language (1st ed.)

[4] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/

[5] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/dennis_ritchie.html

New time, new ideas, new shoes

Quiet, silent eve. I’m with a nice person and we’re enjoying in our way some peaceful moment.

It’s 10 pm in Poland now, I’m solving some physics exercise (about, motion of particles in uniform magnetic fields, I would say quite challenging and funny) and thinking about at “what I can do to enjoy more this?”. I mean, I already love science and stuff, but how can I feel this, mine?

The answer is simple, involve some programming in it. The question that naturally comes out is: How? What I can do more than the other people in more than 50 years of Internet development? I don’t like to copy, essentially. I’m one who wants to be original, in some way.

Put something of myself, essentially. I like to help people, students, friends, overall when is about science and someone’s curious about it. I want to write for people and not for the search engines 🙂 so I’m not sure of who will read this post before one month, I don’t even know how someone will reach it. But I’m sure that if you are still reading you must be a patient and overall, interested person =)

I have many ideas, and to converge them in a unique project would be difficult. The MeerKatDev project is more social than commercial and it involves more research than take-money-to-home. Many of my future coding release will be about help to understand science and to have fun with it, far more better than just sit and study compulsively formulas. Practice can help a lot and with actual technologies I can do many pretty things. What I need is just time, if you search about me on the web you will find few things and with nothing inside. I would like to fulfill them of nice mazes as soon as possible, but I currently attend university and it’s not so easy for me.

I know I can do that. I can count on myself and maybe, I hope, in future on foreign developers, to make the web a good place to learn.

Since I want to put myself out because I believe that share stuff with others it’s good for a  spiritual and cultural growth, I will put also some opinions of what I read (books) and what I listen (music) and to make it interesting to who’s interested in culture generally. This must be a place for curious and interested persons.

Freshmen from NULL

Hello Internet, world, reader, whoever you are

I like here. New year’s coming, and new things need to be done (still, IMHO). The end of the world is behind us, we survived and I’m happy of it. Or not, still to decide.

Whatever, in next posts I will talk about everything is my passion, meaning science, math, world of programming, music, an many more things. I’m passionate of the most strange things and people, discovering new hidden worlds and such.

“Judgement day is not coming soon enough” =)