Introducing my work mates

since people keep asking me about them, I'm introducing my 'work mates' to you. They are currently the major source of my current joy or frustration, causing hope and despair,s and look like this:

 This specimen is a msb430 sensor mote, aka Scatterweb mote. I'm programming fancy C on this little device (it's marginally smaller than on the pic, with a muuch longer antenna ;) which stars the unbelievable amount of 55KB flash memory and 5KB of RAM!
Their tinyness is misleading: these devices are not harmless at all (especially the pins can be really mean when assembling and disassembling the thing), and they are said to be especially tricky when they turn up in groups (which happened in my case...) and try to communicate with each other. They seem pretty human at that point - shouting over other mote's words, not understanding anymore because there are too many motes speaking at once, not listening, repeating what others said etc... and it's my job to teach them how to communicate in the right way.

so what now?

this

Replace the code in the InitializeComponent method in the Mainform.Designer.cs file (hidden by default in the “Windows Form Designer Code” section) with the following code.

or that:

Der Inhalt der Methode darf nicht mit dem Code-Editor geändert werden.

2D flickerfree in c#

very useful bit of code for double buffering. it's preventing flickering when drawing 2d c# graphics.. just saved my day ;)
for the full program see here

internship

currently i am in my first week of my summer internship. after some minor starting issues, i am finding myself actually enjoying my work (even despite it being difficult and really exhausting) because i feel i can work at my own pace.
i'm in a student office again; kinda reminds me of my work for bachelor's thesis :) it's really nice to meet some new people again. they are really friendly, a bit chaotic, playing a very particular version of table tennis during the lunch break - just of my kind ;)
the office is on the first floor of a wall seperating two construction halls. quite an interesting place, really... looking out of the windows, there are loads of machines and people cutting and hammering. sometimes there is quite some noise, sometimes there is a short black out and some of us will be found cursing because their desktops just rebooted (rumour has it that occasionally even some hard drives didn't survive these 'attacs').
as you can see, so far things are really well. the only draw-back is the fact, that i have to work for 9 hours a day + travel time around 3 to 4 hours.. so i am very very tired when i get home; too tired actually to do much anymore. i hope i will get used to it so things are less exhausting.
so far some impressions :)

Why life's like a puzzle

• if two pieces do not fit, they were not meant to be united.
• if two pieces nearly fit, they still do not really.
  
• if you force two pieces together you will only distort the picture and they will be missing somewhere else.
• each piece has it's own place, but the search for it can be long and difficult. at least it is bound to lead to success if one doesn't give up too early.
  
• everybody feels the emptyness of a missing piece. when it is finally found things fall into place and are cleared up.
• filling in gaps holds some surprises and might change your point of view.
• sometimes you can fit together a lot of pieces because you simply see the connections.
• sometimes you can not find any sense in all the chaos.
• either way, you keep going until you are finished.
  

But nothing compares to you

I personally think that unneccessarily comparing oneself to others is one of the main sources of people's unhappiness. However, I never manage to make up my mind in wondering if on some occasions it is a necessary tool for motivation to change oneself. It's probably about the reasons we have for comparing ourselves as well as the grounds on which we base our comparisons (i.e. if it is things we can change or not).

Regarding things we can not change I found some nice quotes (as usual I apologize for my rather crude translation, it's not so poetic but I still hope it catches the essence).

The first one is by Abbas Paphnutios

"An welchen Ort du auch hinkommst,
vergleiche dich nicht mit anderen
und du wirst Ruhe finden."

[Wherever place you go to,
do not compare yourself to others
and you will find peace]

The other one is by Charles de Montesquieu

"Wenn man nur glücklich sein wollte, wäre es ja bald getan:
aber man will ja glücklicher als die anderen sein,
und das ist fast immer schwierig,
weil wir die anderen für glücklicher halten,
als sie wirklich sind."

[If one only wanted to be happy, it would be an easy task:
but one always wants to be more happy than others,
and this is quite difficult
as we tend to take the others for happier
than they really are.]

Both I think point out a spectrum of thought which I find thrilling and worth to be tried in real life. Happy experimenting!

Speed applying - aka JIT submitting

The new alternative of speed dating:
The trick is to wait with starting your online application just one hour before midnight and then submit 1 minute before, heavvily relying on your internet connection and all sending and receiving servers.
Some more adrenalin can be added by forgetting about some invalid data in some boxes which then have to be searched for in a fever.
Enjoy, but don't hold me responsible if it doesn't work out.

And there shall be jazz

or at least this is my plan after yesterday's success in improvising with piano and violin together with my cousin. I always wanted to try this but never could work up the confidence (especially not in public) as my very classical music education formed a safe but rather rigid corset to my experiments. And with improvisations... what if in the middle of performing you suddenly loose each other, the harmony, or the idea?!? what a terrifying idea! but - as so often in life, it does take surprisingly little for ending up in entirely new waters. and, consequently, once you end in there you have only two options - to sink or to swim... we opted for the latter and the result was simply fascinating! (probably more so for the two of us performing, as we had never before given it a try... what a mistake! ;) therefore, I have decided to try myself taking some more steps in that direction. if anyone of you has a good recommendation or tip for how to proceed, they would be appreciated very much.