Here at Neurobat we consecrate one day per sprint as a *Lab Day*, i.e. a day when, not unlike what Google does, we are free to work on whatever we want. Today was Lab Day and I took the opportunity to brush up my Lisp skills by writing a game, inspiring myself heavily from Conrad […]
I’ve been a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique for almost a year now. No, I don’t go as far as actually having a ticking timer in my office in front of my co-workers, and I don’t necessarily plan the day in advance, but I do try to break up my work in 25-min iterations […]
Just a quick note to myself: When you use Sweave and produce high-quality plots in both EPS and PDF formats, you sometimes want to include them in Word or OpenOffice documents. You can’t directly include PDF files, and you can only include EPS files when they have a preview, which Sweave will not do by […]
I firmly believe that scientists and engineers—particularly scientists, by the way—should learn about, and use, version control systems (VCS) for their work. Here is why. I’ve been a user of free VCSs for a while now, beginning with my first exposure to CVS at CERN in 2002, through my discovery of Subversion during my doctoral […]
I’m not sure anyone else is saying this, so I will: I think **there is a clear and unambiguous scriptural mandate to reduce our current energy consumption**. Now before you dismiss this post, this author and this blog as just another bible-thumping fanatic, remember that in certain countries, certain political parties profess strict adherence to […]
Yesterday marked my first day as Chief Technology Officer at Neurobat AG, a young company formed in Switzerland to industrialize and market advanced building control algorithms, such as the ones commonly researched and developed at my former laboratory, the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory at EPFL. This also marks the end of almost three […]
About two weeks ago I posed the following question on the Bldg-sim mailing list: Where can I find a list of publications relevant to the field of building simulation? I’m particularly interested in refereed journals and books. The ensuing thread has been extremely helpful, in particular Shanta Tucker who pointed me to the IBPSA website. […]
I always try very hard to keep my posts within the main topic of this blog, namely computers in the context of building automation and simulation. Occasionally I fail, like for today’s post. I’d like to tell you about a software company co-founded by a friend and fellow Toastmaster of mine, David Portabella. The company’s […]
As you might know, my primary background stems from the field of academia and research, but over the past years my interests have focused increasingly on software engineering. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear to me today that if I had known what I know today about software, I would without doubt have been […]
I spent most of the day today debugging a very mysterious error we encountered when trying to programmatically call a web service over SSL from Java. Here is the source code with which we managed to reliable reproduce the error: import javax.net.SocketFactory; import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory; import java.io.*; import java.net.Socket; public class SimpleSSLTest { public static void […]