An Anki experiment

More and more, I'm starting to rely on Spaced-Repetition systems (SRS) for learning. That's WaniKani for Japanese Kanji and Vocab, Memrise for good courses they have (like the one on Morse Code) and Anki for everything else I want to remember, like Spanish Vocab, books I've read, Latin expressions or the Nato phonetic alphabet. Once I've mastered a course, it will also be migrated to Anki for maintenance.

At the moment, I'm only have thousands of cards, but I'm quite curious how long-term maintenance is going to work once I reach tens of thousands and more. For one, reaching a …

Fighting Link Rot

Gwern's post on [cached]link rot got me thinking. Periodically checking links to see if they are broken is nice, but not really an adequate solution - content might already have disappeared by the time I realize. Besides, websites change a lot, in a year a site might look very different from what I linked to originally. This might be acceptable if I'm linking to the site in general, but unacceptable if linking to a very specific post.

Since I had a free Sunday morning anyway, I set out to create a [cached]Pelican Plugin that would automate this process for …

New Backend, New Style

After being fed up with the intricate dance necessary to set up Ruby to get Octopress to run for quite some time, I decided that it was finally time to migrate to a better blogging system. A replacement was quickly found: [cached]Pelican. It's based on Python, quick and easy to install (no annoying version incompatabilities) and has a lot of nice plugins and themes.

Which gave me the excuse to go hunt for a nice clean theme - I had been jealous of all those minimalist blogs. So here it is, new blog, new theme, and - next post in a …

Our minds are slaves to our bodies

Just now, I was practicing Spanish on Memrise. I used to speak each word aloud while writing it, but I had stopped doing that over the summer to not annoy other people in my hostels. So imagine my surprise when I started doing it again and my mood completely changed within a minute - from kind of meh and relaxed to full of energy and happiness.

Why full of energy? I tend to move through words pretty fast, thus speaking at that speed is quite energetic and fast too. This looks like a promising approach to alter my own mood, to …

Travel and your normal goals

I'm sure there's a lot of you like me, traveling at every possibility you can find, trying to explore all there is of our small and yet so large planet. And just like me, you probably have a lot of other goals too - trying to learn that new language, working out more, spending half an hour every day practicing this new skill.

The thing is, at least for me, it's very hard to combine the two. Being away from home almost every single day for the last two months, I've noticed that I hardly studied Japanese or Spanish - maybe a …

Finding myself by going away

It's been a month now since I've started traveling, all on my own. To be honest, I hadn't given it much thought before I set out - I was just too busy with exams and moving out of my flat in Vienna. Even on my flight to Tokyo I didn't really think about it, I was too busy sleeping and reading guidebooks, being all excited about going that far away.

Even for the first days, I didn't really notice - I was too busy meeting people, even got quite a crush on my second day here. But when things didn't work out …

Units of Measure for Real

I'm almost done with my thesis now, as you might have noticed it's about a Units of Measure system in Scala. I will do a more detailed post on it sometime in the future, but I figured I might at least release the pdf of the thesis now. So here it is!

Units of Measure - A Scala Macro System

I finally finished my Units of Measure system for Scala. The source is - of course - on [cached]GitHub, and I'm putting the finishing touches on my thesis about it, but for a quick view please refer to this presentation:

Fleeting Thoughts

Often I wish for a way to instantly capture my thoughts at any given moment so I can pursue them later on, when I have more time on my hands. Just now, I realized that wouldn't actually work as intended: My whole state of mind would be different then, so the thoughts would play out differently, I'd come to different come conclusions.

This presents me with a conundrum: Sometimes, there are too many interesting thoughts to pursue all of them. How do I pick? Do I try to recapture those that I didn't pick at a later time?

Units of Measurement - An Overview

Last time, I talked a bit about how you might implement parts of a Units of Measurement system in Scala (stay tuned for the rest of the implementation). Since this is going to be the topic of my Bachelor's thesis, I've made a presentation about Units of Measurement systems in other languages, specifically F#, C++ and Haskell. You can view it right here:

or download a pdf (without the snazzy transitions).