June 1, 2025
Playing with LLMs locally # After a talk by Nick Burch at Berlin Buzzwords I finally got started playing with LLMs locally. The easiest way to get started for me: llm tool by Simon Willison :)
Backstory # Back when it came out in winter 2022 I started playing around with ChatGPT - mostly to generate texts from individual terms given as what teachers in German primary schools call “learning words” - usually they are handed out for pupils to get prepared for a dictation (written to check spelling skills): It’s a lot more fun to prepare for theses tests with fun texts than with mere lists of words :) Back then the results were impressive - but also frightning given the implications for ease of generating mis-information, fake social media profiles, spamming search indeces and more.
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March 23, 2014
Note to self: Backup bottlenecks # I learnt the following relations the hard way 10 years ago when trying to backup a rather tiny amount of data, went through the computation again three years ago. Still I had to re-do the computation this morning when trying to pull a final full backup from my old MacBook. Posting here for future reference:
Note 1: Some numbers like 10BASE-T included only for historic reference.
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January 5, 2014
Children tinkering # Years ago I decided that in case I got the same question for at least three times I would write down the answer and put it somewhere online in a more or less public location that I can link to. The latest question I got once too often came from daddies (mostly, sorry - not even a handful of moms around me, let alone moms who are into tech) looking for ways to get there children in touch with technology.
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January 16, 2013
Linux vs. Hadoop - some inspiration? # This (even for my blog’s standards) long-ish blog post was inspired by a talk given late last year at Apache Con EU as well as from discussions around what constitutes “Apache Hadoop compatibility” and how to make extending Hadoop easier. The post is based on conversations with at least one guy close to the Linux kernel community and another developer working on Hadoop.
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September 24, 2012
Note to self - link to 3D maps # After searching for the link the third time today - just in case I happen to be again looking for Nokia’s 3d maps: http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html is the non-plugin link that works in Firefox.
September 5, 2012
FrOSCon - Git Goodies # In his talk on Git Goodies Sebastian Harl introduced not only some of the lesser known git tooling but also gave a brief introduction as to how git organises its database. Starting with an explanation of how patches essentially are treated as blobs identified by SHA1 hashes (thus avoiding duplication not only in the local database but allover the git universe), pointed to by trees that are in turn generated and extended by commits that are in turn referenced by branches (updates on new commits) and tags (don’t update on new commits).
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August 29, 2012
FrOSCon 2012 - REST # Together with Thilo I went to FrOSCon last weekend. Despite a few minor glitches and the “traditional” long BBQ line the conference was very well organised and again brought together a very diverse crowd of people including but not limited to Debian developers, OpenOffice people, FSFE representatives, KDE and Gnome developers, people with background in Lisp, Clojure, PHP, Java, C and HTML5.
The first talk we went to was given by JThijssen on REST in practice.
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August 16, 2012
Spotted this morning… # in front of my office:
Ever wondered how accurate navigable map data for your Garmin, your in-car navigation system (most likely), or maps.nokia.com are created? One piece of the puzzle is the car above collecting data for Navteq, a subsidary of Nokia.
August 2, 2012
On Reading Code # “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” –Stephen King
Quite a while ago GeeCon published the video taped talk of Kevlin Henney on "Cool Code". This keynote is great to watch for everyone who loves to read code - not the one you encounter in real world enterprise systems - but the one that truely teaches you lessons:
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July 18, 2012
Need your input: Failing big data projects - experiences from the wild # A few weeks ago my talk on “How to fail your big data project quick and rapidly” was accepted at O’Reily Strata conference in London. The basic intention of this talk is to share some anti-patterns, embarrassing failure modes and “please don’t do this at home” kind of advice with those entering the buzzwordy space of big data.
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