ByteLabs

After a wonderful and quiet night in a huge bed, we – Christina and I – got up, had some breakfast and went to London. First we wanted to go see Madame Tussauds but the queues were so big that we decided to do something else.

Instead we went to see Chinatown. There we went to a little Chinese shop were we explored many new food varieties. I even got myself some chilli noodle soup. From there we headed on to the german film festival where we saw a very good movie.

After the movie we went back to Chinatown and wondered around a little more before we went on to a very nice pub to get some good food.

On the 25th of November at 6 o’clock in the morning I left Edinburgh in order to go see Christina in Watford, north west of London. I was travelling by train and it took me about 6 hours to get to Kings X station where Christina was already waiting for me. First we went to get some hot chocolat in order to catch up on each other and then we went to see Camden Town, one of my favorite places in London.

Since I am a really hungry person (everyone who knows me will agree on that one), we went to one of the many little food places at Camden. By looking at the picture it is not hard to guess that we went to a Chinese place. After it got dark we decided to go to Watford, where Christina lives. We took a train from Euston Station which took us to Watford Junction. At Watford Christina gave me a guided tour through town and showed me around. At night we went to a local pub for a well deserved pint of Guinness. At the pub I also met one of Christinas friends, namely Katherine (I hope I spelled her name correctly). We had quite a good time at the pub together.

Many people in Austria from our informatics department as well as from the Paedak are abroad at various different places of the world. Thus I thought it would be nice to present a little bit of “home feeling” to everyone and the product is this little page here. It shows live images from the “Hauptplatz” in Linz where the “Christkindlmarkt” is going on at the moment. There is also a Java Applet which allows you to control a webcam which is positioned on the top of the A.E.C.

Of course there is also an upto date image of our campus at home and one from the Landstrasse.

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.