known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
My master thesis has been finally published online. It is called Impact Analysis of Different Consensus, Participant Selection and Scoring Algorithms in Blockchain-based Federated Learning Systems Using a Modular Framework, and it was supervised by Nirvana Meratnia.
August is ending and with it, most people’s summer vacations. It’s time for school, university and work again. However, I did not have that much of a vacation yet.
Today I had a bit too much time that I decided to work on my website. In the morning, I made a few tweaks to the home page in order to make it more useful: added some contact and social media links, as well as links for some pages on my website that are not included in the navigation bar. I think I achieved a neat result.
July is ending for most of us in a few hours and August will start. This is when most people go for vacation and have their summer holidays. Let’s look at what I’ve been doing during July, which has been a very very busy month - I feel like I’ve been saying this every month.
I have recently noticed I have been writing ‘recently’ posts since September 2020. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to have been that long. Today, I am trying a different format. Sometimes I’m not sure on how to organize this monthly posts and I see some people posting bullet-list weekly or monthly posts so I decided to try.
A few months ago, I released an article where I showed most versions of my website before I started integrating IndieWeb into it. I think it is nice to have an overview of how your website evolved with time. So today I present to you all the major changes to my website after IndieWeb.
A few weeks ago, I thought crossed my mind: buy an e-reader. It wasn’t the first time. In the beginning of this year, I read many books and I remembered considering it back then. However, that wasn’t the first time either. So I just decided to go with it and ordered a Kobo Clara HD.
A few days ago, we had the Lustrum Gala of Dekate Mousa, the photography association and it was a very nice experience! During the gala, we all had the opportunity to see the Lustrum Exhibition! Today at 8pm, the exhibition officially opens for the public at the CKE in Eindhoven.
I’m so proud to have 3 of my pictures hanging there, even though it’s such a small thing. If you are in Eindhoven during this and next week, don’t hesitate! It’s free and there’s very very very nice works.
Today I had quite some adventures with Matrix and decentralised messaging protocols. I thought about self-hosting an instance so I tried Synapse, which is the de facto Matrix implementation with all the features available. Quickly I understood that Synapse was too slow for a very tiny VPS so I tried Dendrite which claims to be much more efficient.
So… It run, but it was consuming 100% of all the 2 cores of the CPU of my VPS and yet it didn’t manage to load previous messages of the chats (perhaps that’s a limitation as it doesn’t have all the features yet). As that was a continuous high consumption for over 2 hours, I decided to take it down and create an account at a hosted Matrix instance. I chose tchncs.de, which is hosted in Germany. I didn’t want to go for the default matrix.org because that’s where everyone is and that goes against the decentralisation aspect of the thing.
When - and if - the protocol matures, I hope to see a more efficient implementation tailored for single users or small communities that can still do federation with other instances without dying. I also added my Matrix contact to my contacts page ✨
May was a loooong month in the sense that a lot happened. It is crazy to think that we’re now starting the sixth month of 2022, which means that we’re nearing the first semester of this year. It feels like it just started.
April is quickly coming to an end and… what a month it was! From Portugal to London, from thesis progress to assisting in classes, from movies to musicals, April was a packed month!
Now that I’ve crossed the English Channel (or Canal da Mancha, in Portuguese) by train twice, I must say that it was a very nice experience. From Rotterdam to London, it takes approximately 3h30m, including a ~30 minutes stop in Brussels.
However, I also have some notes that may not apply to everyone: (1) it would be much quicker to get a flight directly from Eindhoven that takes 1h to get to London, (2) the security and border procedures at Rotterdam are quick, (3) the security and border procedures in London are a bit slower, (4) you need to be some time in advance at the station, just like the airport.
Nevertheless, it was a good experience and I would recommend it! It’s much more comfortable than a plane and better for the environment. Unfortunately, it’s also much more expensive! If you buy it in advance though, it can be worth it!
This is going to be a relatively short post, even though many things happened last month. The first three months of 2022 are completed and there’s now only 9 to go. That’s quite scary. Time flies!
Since I created this website’s colophon (also known as meta page), I’ve wanted to also created a page that show cased how this website evolved over the years. I created this website when I was 14, in 2014. At first, it was just a bunch of HTML pages written by hand. Within the first year, the website moved from pure HTML to WordPress and then to Hugo.
This is the sequel of Before the coffee gets cold and I enjoyed it just as much. I keep the same rating I gave to the first book. It was just as good, a perfect continuation of the first book. Deeply magical and sentimental.
