rolisz's site

New year, old goals

Same same, but different, but still same

My attempt a year ago to set public goals was quite successful. I achieved most of them and the average completion score was 0.7. I took a break in the second half of the year, but now I'm well rested and I want to start again.

I learned some things that work and some that don't. For example, tracking number of books read is not too useful, at least not in Beeminder, but tracking number of minutes spent reading is much better. This way, if you are reading through a really thick book, you are not derailed as easily. Also, tracking pro­duc­tiv­i­ty can be done really well …continue.

2016 in review

Wow, this post is finally done on time! Yaaaay!

This year was the first time I had a goal for writing on my blog, at least for the first half of the year. In January I set up a goal to write 3.5 blog posts per month, for the first half year and I stuck to it. In the second half of the year I took it easier, so I posted on average only twice a month. In total I posted 33 times, which is more than the year before, when I posted 30 times.

The number of pageviews went down by 21%, from 46 thousand …continue.

Shalom from Israel

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem

Three jeeps, filled with mostly young and idealistic Westerners and driven by former Special Forces members, are going along the mine fields between Syria and Israel. They arrive to an abandoned Syrian hospital, with some soldiers in front of it. They go up to the rooftop, through the crumbling hospital, carefully going up staircases that have been bombed. Once they get up, their tour guide says "See that building 300 meters away? There's an Al-Qaeda sniper looking at you from there! Don't worry, if he wanted you dead, he'd have shot you a long time ago.".

That was just a short part of my trip to Israel. I …continue.

Noh hai la vot!

Me in a t-shirt with Che Olos On Sunday there are parliamentary elections in Romania, so I'm doing my civic duty of encouraging people to go and vote.

După cum probabil ați auzit, mâine, 11 decembrie, sunt alegeri pentru deputați și senatori. Eu o să merg mâine la vot în Berna, cum am fost și acum doi ani, la alegerile prezidențiale. Și vă rog și pe voi să mergeți să votați.

Ieșiți la vot, pentru că încet, încet, parcă lucrurile în România se schimbă. Și până acuma toată lumea știa că se fac mișmașuri peste tot, dar în ultimii doi ani și DNA a aflat și a și arestat oameni pentru aceasta. Deci, …continue.

Going places...

Old view ...but not too far.

Last month I exchanged the view that can be seen in the above image, for this one:

I moved from Langnau am Albis, where I have lived for two years, to Wiedikon, a district in Zürich. The old place has been officially the place where I've lived the second most in my life :| I'll miss it, I had lots of good memories there.

But I got bored of the long commute (half an hour by train), so I moved to a place 8 minutes walking from the office. And the week after I signed the contract, I found out that my team …continue.

Maltalavista

Malta

View from the hotel

Last week I was in Malta, on an offsite with the new (extended) team. It was possibly even better than in Nice.

Because I switched to this team "late", I couldn't find flights together with the rest of the team, so I went a day early, but I stayed at the same hotel. Several other people also came early, including the admins who organized it, so I wasn't bored there. Also, turns out that be­friend­ing the admins is quite useful! And they are super nice as well!

It was hot in Malta. During the day it went up to 28 degrees. It's nice to …continue.

Data and Goliath

Data and Goliath

Bruce Schneier is a well known American security researcher, who has written several books about this topic. Data and Goliath is his latest book about it. I bought it last year, but I only got around to reading it last month (one more win for the reading goal for the year \:D/). First ob­ser­va­tion: while the book is thick, with 383 pages, a third of it are notes, so it's not that long actually.

While I've heard about various privacy issues and about the mass sur­veil­lance revealed by Edward Snowden, I never really did anything about it. I had an adblocker installed, but that was just because …continue.

Good bye, Alida

Alida

I’ll miss your funny quips. I’ll miss the long dis­cus­sions we used to have about about the craziest topics (like the dif­fer­ences in mentality between people who are interested in the humanities versus the sciences). I’ll miss going to eat greasy, yummy food with you (Chez Papa was reeaaallly good. And just as unhealthy). I’ll miss your en­cour­age­ments. Even though you had leukemia and had been through an awful lot of suffering, you still had the energy to lift others up and give them advice.

You were a brilliant girl, who turned many heads and then put them in their proper place. In just 22 years of …continue.

Searching for something?

This post is "cu dedicatie pentru Ciprian de la Bistrita", who has asked for a search feature for some time now

I didn't have a search on my blog for quite some time, because it's a static website, without any dynamic backend (except for comments, but those are well isolated, on a subdomain). But Javascript and the browsers are getting more and more features every day, so it's now possible to do all of this clientside. You just have to go to the search page (also linked in the menu).

I had three options:

  • Acrylamid has a builtin feature that builds up at com­pi­la­tion some …continue.

Two years at Google

Collage of last two years

A bit more than two years ago I was anxiously heading towards the reception of the Google Zurich office. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very excited. One year ago, I was oncall, dying of heat in my home. Today, I am on my last oncall shift as an SRE, rejoicing that it’s not too hot and that I finally have some quiet time to clean out my bookmarks and my inbox.

The last one year was very different from the previous one. The list of new ex­pe­ri­ences continued, but not all of them were positive. There was the weird re­al­iza­tion that I …continue.