Last week i attended the We Are Developers Conference — an impressive 8000 people, really fun, really interesting. I attended mostly talks about machine learning and that stuff, since those things will keep me busy the next months, or years. But just for the fun of it I also was at John Romero's "DOOM’s Development: A …

When working in the area of computer science, the term "cybernetics" adheres indeed to some strange mysticism. Everybody knows that it's a branch of applied science coined by Norbert Wiener, but what it is all about remains in the dark. Of course the prefix "cyber" is ubiquitous, the background of the science remains …

What if. What if the plain old good news paper was a cutting-edge start-up? Well, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld you can have that. The book starts in this world, where it is already well known that news can be money, but nobody came around the idea of making this a retail business. Neither did William de Worde, so …

I read this book back in school. i should have. Well, I did, kind of. But my memories of it were kind of scarce, so I did something i rarely do, I read it a second time. And I have to admit, now being able to make somewhat better use of the English language makes the experience much more enjoyable. The book is an …

This time we are in the middle of it. Sam Vine from the Ankh-Morpork watch is visiting Uberwald - resembling some outstanding areas in Central Europe from Bavaria to Siebenbürgen. Dominated by a subtle balance of vampires, dwarfs and werewolves there seems to be time for same changes. A new "Low King" is to be crowned, …

This book is a few years old, it was published 2011; nevertheless it covers two topics that were pretty dominant in the last year. One is islamic terrorism, unfortunatley the major topic for many people last year, and ransomware — what at least was breathtaking for some of the IT crowd. So, the plot is about an IT …