The mythical man month

Finished this book. It is a book about software development management and is considered by many as a classic. It is definitely an interesting book, somewhat out of date but  most of it is still current. Another interesting fact is that it provides some insight to the way software management and development was done in 1970s. Definitely worth the time.

Edinburgh science festival

This year i attended three event of the Edinburgh science festival. The titles are:

•  Sugar on the dock
•  The living brain
•  The science of in the Game of Thrones

All of them were in Summerhall Main Hall, and were quite well organised. They were sponsored and supported by various universities, and scientific, like the societies university of Edinburgh and the Physiological society.

The Sugar on the dock, was an interesting session, that described the various types of sugar in existence, their use today, the effect on our health and the suggested daily intake of sugar by WHO (thats 10%). One of the facts that i didn't know about is that diabetes is linked to obesity with a different weight threshold for each individual.

The Living  Brain, discussed the effect of aging in the cognitive processes. The tl;dr is that it deteriorates, but the starting point depends on the person. The smarter you are, your cognitive processes from a higher point, meaning that the overall decline will take longer. Which is good.

The science in the Game of Thrones, was the most popular of the three events, and also the most impressive, since it revisited various scenes of the series, from a scientific point of view. We discussed if wildfire is possible (with live demo of setting fire to a miniature fleet), if dragon fire is possible (no demo here), if a skull can be crushed with bare hands (demo with a sheep skull) and more.

All in all it was fun, and i learned a couple of things it didn't know :)

Fullmetal alchemist

Finished this series of anime. Not bad at all,  quite interesting series with lots of action and we'll made graphics

Simple rest with scala

If you are interested in writing simple rest enabled Web apps and are looking for a sinatra like framework in the java world, scalatra may be the answer.
It leverages the rich feature set of scala and the rich community of java. It uses jetty by default making it easy to use without complicated setup but I guess that the end product could be used in a traditional container server quite easily

Programming scala

Finished this book (almost). Oh boy this book goes deep. Deeper than I would like for an introductory book. That is good and bad at the same time. It is an investment. It also presents best practices in a number of cases and provides elegant solutions in a number of problems.
So I will say that it is a good book to read more than once.

Motorworld

Finished reading this book by top gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.
This is a book about his experiences while filming the Motorworld episodes around the world.
It makes for a nice relaxed reading especially if you are a motorsports fan. It is not heavy on technical details and Clarkson's humour makes it really easy to read.

Salt in masterless mode

It seems that salt supports a standalone, isolated "masterless" execution mode. The only thing needed is salt-minion and the state/pillar files. For more details check this out. No extra services are needed.