Some time ago in this blog we discussed Neuroscience and we hinted at the question of brain simulation. But what does it actually mean to simulate the brain?
Continue reading “Hold on to your seats for the brain simulator”
There is trouble brewing, or: Openssl issues on Ruby with Homebrew
This post is to describe an issue I’ve run into using < 2.3 versions of Ruby on OSX with rvm and brew.
Don’t even get me started on working with older versions of Ruby — we have some maintenance projects running in ruby-1.8.3! Even modern Rubies may give you a hard time, however, and this is one of the times. Actually, I am writing this post as a reminder for me because I ran into the same problem twice now, and what is worse, the second time it took me nearly the same amount of fruitless googling to solve it as it took the first. And the solution was the same! So, let us proceed with order.
Continue reading “There is trouble brewing, or: Openssl issues on Ruby with Homebrew”
Donkey Kong and the secrets of the brain
I don’t know about you, but for me there are few topics as complex and as fascinating as the human brain. How it evolved in us as a species, how it develops differently in each individual. How this small, low-power biological device can store memories for years, carry out complex tasks, explore large decision trees in a matter of seconds or compose the 9th Symphony in D Minor. How it enables the existence of the individually unique bundle of thoughts, feelings and self-awareness that is consciousness.
Ruby Days
As many people found out with dismay, this year’s Rubyday coincided with another big event, the Codemotion here in Milan. In Mikamai we rolled out a ‘divide and conquer’ plan, so while @fusillicode was -super-efficiently as usual- covering Codemotion, three of us set out for Florence. Continue reading “Ruby Days”
Write it on the walls! Vertical text in your LaTeX Beamer presentations
Ok, so probably you have heard about LaTeX before. Possibly you have used it for writing your neatly typeset, formula-crowded thesis. Eventually you may have heard about Beamer too, the LaTeX package for presentations.
I take it as a near-impossibility that you have actually used Beamer for creating a presentation, what with Office-like products being so easy and convenient, or Prezi being so astonishing and cool. But keep reading! For by the end of this article you will be wondering why you haven’t tried it yet.
Continue reading “Write it on the walls! Vertical text in your LaTeX Beamer presentations”
The Q in your QA, or: how to ensure code quality, part I
Code quality is an elusive objective. In principle, everyone agrees to it, but the means to achieve it are varied and opinions on them even more so. In what will hopefully be a series of posts, I’d like to share some thoughts on the matter.
Today we’re going to focus on the QA practice of code reviews or CR. Code review is a process of peer evaluation in which code written by a developer is inspected by another person to look for defects and improvements.
Here in Mikamai we introduced CRs some months ago as a step to improve our QA process; we have found this practice to be mostly beneficial, and we feel ready to share our take on the matter in the form of giving our answer to some Frequently Asked Questions about this topic.
Continue reading “The Q in your QA, or: how to ensure code quality, part I”
MIKAMAYHEM turned 4 today!
A special thank you to all our readers 🙂
Why don’t women do IT?
Women’s presence in the IT workforce is appallingly low, a fact so renowned it even deserves its own wikipedia page.
As with all socio-cultural phenomena, it is difficult to pin it down to any specific reason; however, education and gender-related stereotypes have been blamed among the major causes of women’s lack of interest in IT careers.
