ByteLabs

Professor Alan Bundy has initiated a series of seminars on Computational Thinking. Thus every first Wednesday of each month at 4pm, one can attend some very interesting seminars from various fields of computational thinking. Today Prof. Vicki Bruce gave her talk ‘About Face’ and how our understanding of face perception has been influenced quite profoundly by computational developments. It was very interesting and I’m already looking forward to the next presentation which will talk about the area of ‘Computational Linguistics’.

This weekend we went to Arran Island. It was a really cool trip organized by the ISC. We left an Saturday morning at 6:45 and I almost didn’t make it cause my alarm didn’t go off. But luckily Christian called me at 6:50 in the morning asking where the hell I’m at so I got up and in about 8 minutes I got dressed and made it to the bus. First we went to Adrossan and waited there for the ferry which took us to Arran Island.

After a pretty busy week it is time to sum up what happened. Well, just in case you wondered if I’m doing any actual work at Uni I can assure you, I am! There is a paper about Computational Linguistics I wrapped up this week which basically evaluates two statistical N-Gram Taggers. Well, if you don’t know what that is, nevermind, if you are interested though, you can go ahead and read the paper.

The last couple of days of mid semester break, Christina and me had to do stuff for work. She had to prepare some lessons and I had to do Uni related things. But we weren’t just working, we also went up on Arthur’s Seat and got hit by a really bad rain cloud and lots of wind :(. Nevertheless we went all the way to the top where we made this impressive picture. As you can see it has already stopped raining and sun was coming out again juhuu, but we were already soaken wet.

Here at the Uni of Edinburgh I started to learn Python because it is the defacto language used in many courses. Python is really nice and easy to learn but to my suprise I stumbled over Ruby again and a lot of things happened since I heard of the language some years ago. First of all there is really good documentation out there speeding up the learning curve and emphasizing Ruby’s features. There is a very powerful open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups. Just take a look at this :)

My favourite OS ‘vendor’ released a new version of their superb operating system OpenBSD with many new features. This has also been announced on undeadly. Hopefully I will soon find some time to upgrade my laptop.

Time flies by and we are already at day 3! The weather doesn’t really like us because it is raining all the time and the weather forcast doesn’t get any better. But that’s the way it is in Scotland so we just cope with the situation. Yesterday (Sunday) we walked down Princes Street, Edinburghs version of Londons Oxford Street.

Today we went to see the Edinburgh Zoo. Even though the weather was very Scottish (rainy), it was a really cool trip. There are many different animals in the Edinburgh Zoo like: Penguins, Zebras, Meerkats, ... and Britians only Koalas. After the Zoo we went to Portobello Beach because instead of heavy rainshowers we only had light rain falling from the sky.

It was really pretty but we have to go there once again when it is not raining. As usual we made some pictures which are available at the obvious place.

Last friday afternoon I was anxiously awaiting Christina at Waverly Station. She arrived by train from Watford, where she is working as an assistant teacher at two schools. The first evening we went to the Bannermans right across the street and catched up on what was going on in the past 6 weeks.

After a real English breakfast we went to the Royal Museum of Scotland and had a wonderful day insinde, because outside it was raining!

Then we headed on to Edinburgh Castle and went down the Royal mile to Hollyrood Palace and enjoyed the Scottish flair of the city as Christina has never been here before!

Just have a look at it yourself.

Today we went to see Falkland Palace and East Lomond Hill. Falkland Palace is in the middle of nowhere one hour from Edinburgh but it is really worth a visit. East Lomond Hill offers some nice hiking routes. Christian, Ulrike and myself were trying to get from East Lomond Hill to West Lomond Hill.

Unfortunately there was not enough time to achieve our goal but at least we tried really hard :) – as usual you can take a look at the gallery to get some impressions of that trip.

The workload at uni is slowly increasing and since I finally got all of my books I’m starting to catch up on all of the reading assignments. This weekend should suffice though to get all of my reading done.

Today I went on another trip with the ISC, namely to Pitlochry which is considered by many to be the gateway to the highlands. The town is set at the foot of Ben Vrackie’s mountainous slopes and is on the eastern shore of the River Tummel.
In the morning we made an interesting tour through the local Blair Athol Whisky distillery and even got the chance to taste a little bit of the self made 12 year old single malt Blair Athol Whisky.

Now I’m not a big Whisky drinker but I have to admit that it was pretty good!

Afterwards I went on a little hike with Ulrike, a really nice girl from Berlin whom I have met on the bus that morning. We kinda explored the surroundings of Pitlochry. There are really many beautiful hiking paths but unfortunately we only had enough time to walk along the shortest hiking trail.