Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

A new time…

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 | Personal | 1 Comment

Tags: children, life

Clothes

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

Is it just me, or are a lot of brand clothes websites absolutely abysmally designed, usability-wise? Flash players required, mostly it is impossible to link to images and some annoying ‘music’ is blaring out your speakers if you haphazardly find your way onto one of these sites. Hugo Boss and Falbe are two of the more egregious examples of this annoying behaviour. Bertoni, Eton and many others, follow closely by only featuring a bunch of ‘fancy’ photos in a flash application. Honestly, what were they thinking?! Slightly better is the Burberry website, but that was the only half-decent brand site I found in over an hour of searching!

Another problem is the Danish outlets (I hope for your sake that things are better in your country!). They have been designed mostly with the same mindset, except they are even worse, several of them do not even show anything but a page of brand names they sell! Kaufmann and Din Tøjmand are among the worst, Tøjeksperten barely climbs above them by actually having a PDF version of their catalogue available online.

Please, design shops and clothes outlets, the web is not another TV station showing commercials 24/7 where consumers passively gawk at your magnificent creations. We want instant feedback, we want to be able to easily link to apparel so we can show it to friends, get opinions, easily find stores that carry the clothes, so we can go to those stores and try the clothes on to see whether they fit us. It would be absolutely perfect if you could see whether the apparel is in stock in a specific store so we don’t have to wade all the way across town to find another outlet that might or might not happen to have it in stock. It is time you join the digital decade, it’s the thing in fashion.

Tags: design, life

Life is good

Monday, November 19th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

DMC-FZ3, 35.0 mm., 1/60 sec., ISO 100, 2007-11-19

Japanese tea cup. White tea. Life is good.

Tags: life

Programming

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

When did the fun go –
and all the joy?
Whereto, I have forgotten.

Tags: life

Wedding

Friday, September 21st, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

So, after being together for over eight years, Ida and I got married on the first of September in an old village church by one of Ida’s former colleagues. (No, placing the information on my blog is not a way to help me remember my anniversary, for those of you who might have thought so).

The day was joyously spent together and with all our best friends and family. Thank you to everyone who has sent greetings and their best wishes. For the curious there are a lot more photos up here.

Tags: life, wedding

A joyous proclamation

Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

After nearly eight years together, my fiancée and I have decided to get married in the early autumn. Here’s to hoping for a long and prosperous life together with the most magnificent person I have ever met.

Tags: life, wedding

A new time

Friday, October 20th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

So, when I said in my last blog post that I was back in the blogging business, I had, of course, counted on the fact that we were moving on the first, and that my telephone company couldn’t hook me up with Internet at the new place for almost two weeks. The best way to come back to the blogging business is to leave it abruptly again, making everyone wonder where you’ve went, driving up traffic when people pine for your next nugget of information (or something).

It has, unfortunately been pretty much overcast constantly since we moved in, so you’ll have to do with a slightly dark image from the back side of the house. We’ve bought this lovely house in a nice suburb north of Copenhagen, just next to a school and a stone throw from a nursery, so the stage is set for the next aspect of life.

We’re still getting settled in, so until we’re finished with that, I’ll postpone the indoors pictures as everything is a bit cluttered. My desk is still in a temporary position in the middle of the living room so I can do some work. Hopefully everything will have gotten in order within long. We’re fortunate that there’s also a lot of nature around, so I’ll be sure to take a few snapshots from the lake nearby as well if I can manage to remember to bring the camera when we go for a walk.

Apart from us moving, then Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 unto the world and since it fixes a lot of issues with formatting the layout of my website I have taken the chance to do a nice spring cleaning and make my site look pristine on IE7 and FireFox. If you’re on an earlier version of Internet Explorer and my site suddenly looks very strange then… well, that’s why.

Lastly, I’ve written another fascinating project in partial fulfillment of my masters degree in Computer Science, which you can see here (PDF). It is about creating a language for specifying typefaces (fonts) for the computer. If you want bit more of a description of the project, look at the research page.

So, to a new time…

Tags: life, university

Love, poetry and romance

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

I’m slowly getting used to having time to focus on studying again without having to work all the time. It’s bit of a strange sensation, really, and quite pleasing. I had forgotten how great it feels to be a student. Now, as the topic might suggest, this post isn’t about me studying (if it was I’d have a serious problem with my priorities, I think).

Those of you who know me or read regularly know that I’m engaged to a wonderful woman, Ida, and that she bakes some awesome cakes. Ida is very remarkable in that she manages to deal with my odd interests and seemingly unlimited interest in boring computer stuff. She deals with it so gracefully that her only complaint ever has been that I don’t seem ready to declare my love to her more publically, so being the geek I am, what better way than to say it with my latest poem to her on my blog?

Considering I don’t get a lot of female readers (apart from my mother and Ida) the rest of you, go do something nice for your significant other. We don’t need a poor commercialised excuse to do so, right?

Tags: life

In the world of the living

Friday, February 10th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Over the past two years I have worked as an intern for a realtor company doing systems analysis, design and education of developers. There have been the usual ups and downs with fun projects and some not-so-fun projects. But there are other things in this world than working, namely trying to finish your degree. For those of you who have been following for a while then you might mutter it’s about time, those of you who haven’t been following will probably mutter the same as those pesky kids who just study are annoying, or something. So, goodbye work, and thanks for all the cake.

So what am I doing back at the ol’ university? I don’t think I’ve written about that much lately, so let me bring you up to speed. I’m working on my masters degree in computer science, specialising (so far) in programming language theory. As part of one of my courses we were required (more or less) to write a paper on a topic within types and programming languages and make a presentation on it. I chose to write a paper on static verification of downcasts in an object calculus that vaguely reminds of Featherweight Java by Igarashi, Pierce and Wadler, which is a minimal, functional core of Java (and C# for that matter). I try to portray further uses of the static verification in my paper, namely on how you could potentially use the static verification as a guide to translate from a monomorphic program into a corresponding polymorphic program without the downcasts – that is translated into a program in a language that has parametric polymorphism. This means, for C# 1.1 to C# 2 translation, for instance, that there are a lot of places where we can remove boxings and unboxings of value types and hence improve performance radically. Furthermore, as far as I can see there will be further analyses that can be useful with the subtype expression flow modeling that is being used in Smith and Wang’s DCPA algorithm (if all of this cannot be done as easily by reduction to let-polymorphism, I’ll have to look at that sometime). But, I digress. You can find the paper here in PDF format, if you are interested.

Finally, Ida and I have started to look around to buy a house, so I’m sure there’ll be some fun updates on the tormenting trials of buying a house, getting a mortgage (particularly with the amount of increase in value of houses there has been lately, it’s crazy!) and whatnot sometime in the not too distant future.

Back to Hoare’s CSP algebra…

Tags: life, university

A journey of a thousand headaches

Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

So time has passed once more since my last post, but I have been keeping busy in the GNU/Linux world here. With some minor struggle I have involved myself in the bleeding-edge of the mono project, and I now have mono, monodoc, monodevelop, gtk# (and companions) all running well and nice. I even managed to get the latest version of libgdiplus compiling (with some serious hackery) and as such the WinForms library seems to work as well. All is bliss.

Not to rest on my laurels, I have commenced a new project with Noah Adler to wrap Xlib in C#. Expect some updates on this in the future (yeah right, like that’s ever going to happen).

Otherwise things seem to be going like a clockwork – Ida is busy studying, I’m busy working, the weather is getting warmer, picked up biking again, it’s sunday. Life is sweet.

Tags: life