Diskurswelt.de

For those of you looking for a nice desktop wallpaper, I cannot recommend the numerous high-resolution paintings by David Lanham enough.

Being an avid tea drinker, my favourites are very obvious: Tea for Two and Tea for Three. But check out the others and be assured to have a few good laughs!

(And if desktop wallpapers are not your thing, you can order prints.)

Today, I have a few lines of code for you:

def derivative(f, h=0.000001):
    return lambda x: (f(x + h) - f(x))/h

sqd = derivative(lambda x: x**2) # first derivative of f(x) = x²
print sqd(12)

Beautiful, isn’t it? Although this is CS101* material, it never ceases to amaze me. (In Scheme this is more aesthetically pleasing, but I thought that more of you would be able to read Python.)

* e.g., Einführung in die Informatik offered by Prof. Guido Wirtz (University of Bamberg)

I just realized that during the last five years, I shared flats with almost twenty different people. That’s quite a number! Here they are in chronological order:

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I am not tied to an operating system; it works everywhere.

I can use my favorite text editor to write, namely vim or gedit.

I can use other powerful tools that I am already familiar with, e.g., grep and wc.

I can structure my document into different files and folders, as many as I want.

I can easily put my files under source control, experiment and collaborate with others.

I will still be able to read the files in 30 years time. After all, LaTeX files are just flat text files.

I can focus on content instead of presentation and use semantic markup.

I can stand on the shoulders of giants when I need to create, e.g., a glossary.

I can rely on the insights of far more able typesetters but am still able to control the details if it is necessary.

I can write once and compile to PDF, DVI or whatever I feel like that day.

I can automate tasks by integrating LaTeX into scripts or build tools.

I may even be able to recompile the document in 30 years time.

I do not even have to pay for it.

I love it.

It feels good to know that tomorrow, when I wake up, I can diverge from the daily routine of the last few months. I won’t be sitting at the desk in my room, a cup of coffee and a text editor being my only company. I won’t ask myself the question whether the last three sentences are good enough. And most certainly, I won’t worry which chapters still require some refinement. Why is that?, you ask.

Well, I handed in my master’s thesis today. Consequently, this new year’s eve does not only represent the end of 2011, but also the end of my studies of Information Systems at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg. I still have to defend my thesis in a colloquium on January 18th and could fail in theory, yet it feels as if everything were already over.

The chapter Life and Studies in Bamberg closes. A few more pages, a few more paragraphs and there will be a new heading. What will it be?

I am excited to find out.