Monthly Archives: March 2012

this-tor-node-is-causing-you-grief

Posted on by
Reply

In the last couple of days I experienced strange visitors on our holiday apartment site. They came through a TOR network and were trying to create users on the page. Apparently they understood that it was a Drupal site, because they had the right URL and everything.

I had never heard of TOR before, so I’m quite amazed to see visitors from the dark side of the internet. On the other hand, its a pain-in-the-butt to delete the 30+ users that they create on a normal day. Does anybody out there have experience with these types of attacks?

FRA Airport

Posted on by
Reply

So here I am, ready to board my flight to Washington for EclipseCon 2012. Will be interesting: A new venue, new city (never stayed in the area before). I have a free day tomorrow, so I should check Anne Jacko’s About Washington page tonight. My current favorite is the Smithsonian, but I’m not sure yet. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that looks interesting. I’m just not sure what security will look like after the events in Toulouse earlier this week.

One of my favorite talks will be the Ford/BugLabs keynote. While the example in the the press release sounds rather uninteresting, I believe that the experiment can produce a whole bunch of cool gadgets for the car. One issue will be how much they open up the car’s infrastructure to be tinkered with: This is where the interesting information is! A cricket radio doesn’t really get my interest so much – why wouldn’t I use the normal radio?

As with every Eclipse conference I don’t expect that I will attend a lot of sessions. But for sure I’ll try to attend as many sessions as possible around the safety critical tooling topic. And I hope to also catch up on what is happening in CDT – as much as I can actually understand it.

Other than that, many chats, many people, many beers.

Chess In Paris

Posted on by
Reply

Just came back from Paris, where I’ve spent the last tow days. We were invited to present Polarsys to the Chess, an Artemis funded research project.

I came across quite a few of these projects lately, some of them funded by the EU, some of them funded by Artemis, ITEA or some other agency that I knew or didn’t know. And all of them seem to do some sort of the same thing. At least that what it looks like to me. When I ask, they try to explain to me what makes them so different.

Anyway, many of them seem to spend considerable time on stuff that others have already build or are in the process of building. Some platform components here, some persistency frameworks there. And neither I nor they know if they can use the other project’s results, because they just don’t see them.

If I’m right with my assessment, then we look at a huge waste of taxpayer’s money here. How could this be stopped? Really simple: The funding agencies just need to tell them that they need to develop in open source. Creates visibility as well as accountability. Or is that a problem?

Gersfeld Calling

Posted on by
Reply

Went up to Gersfeld today, it was about time. Have not been there for a month or so. Things look like they are all right, all the holiday apartments are in good shape, a few repairs will have to be made before the season really starts.

For the place in Gartenstrasse we’ll get rid of a big chunk of the veggie garden and build a nice gazebo where our guests can sit outside for breakfast, dinner or a glass of wine in summer. Other than that, we’ll leave things as they are this year.

Booking pipeline looks all-right, would be good to have more foreigners again. I love to show the Rhoen mountains to our guests from abroad.

Garbage Clown

Nice walk in the village today, with the first day of spring-like weather. Only the poor guy in the picture had a bad day.

Checking Out Plugins

Posted on by
Reply

Whole bunch of stuff here. Likes for pretty much every social network, auto-posting to Twitter, Facebook and Google+, spam protection and what else.

Now that I went to getting all the credentials, the tokens and the very secret tokens I’m getting sort of tired. And I’ve given 10 bucks to Aksimet for protection. They have this weird  registration site where you see a smiley looking at you sadly until you give him money. The more money you give, the happier he is looking. Actually, it’s probably not so stupid if I think about it. Don’t we all want to make somebody smile?

Anyway, in a second I will know if my post to Twitter works. Bear with me!

Jackpot

Posted on by
Reply

Looks like I got lucky. Mike just recently told me that he would like me to attend this year’s Open Source Think Tank in Napa Valley. This by itself is already great! What I have heard from others that have attended was very interesting, and the 2012 issue is around topics like OSS user communities that I’m very involved with.

And then I made my flight reservations. And another cool thing happened: Looks like Lufthansa is now using the new A380 on the route from Frankfurt to San Francisco. And I will be on it!

First on A380

 

The Shared Pasture And The Butcher

Posted on by
Reply

The small village in the mountains had a problem. While the farmers had to work hard to do the fields, they had no space left to have their cows out during the day.

So the solution they decided on was that some of the public wasteland of the village was turned into a pasture where they could all have their cows grassing during the day before they had to take them home to the farms.

That was a brilliant solution: Not only had they all shorter ways everyday with getting the cows in and out, but they also could share the cost for a boy watching the cows.

They also decided that they would get together regularly and see what  they need to do keep things going, and they also decided that they would share the cost for the boy and the work around the pasture.

All worked well, and all the farmers were quite happy. But after some time the butcher of the village came along and said that he would like to see that the cows should be treated differently to make the meat leaner. But since he would not own cows he didn’t really feel that he should participate in supporting the shared effort of the others.

The farmers talked about it for a while and then came to the conclusion that the butcher should pay the same as they would for the common. While he was not directly using the pasture he was still a beneficiary of the improvement, and he also wanted to give direction on how to use the pasture.

They wet back to the butcher, and after some discussions he understood that it would be to his advantage if helped to his business if he would help to improve the common.

Everybody  in the village lived happily ever since.

Also check out Elinor Ostroms’s work.

 

Fuzzing Around with Stats and Such

Posted on by
Reply

Spend quite some time to set up all my blogs and stuff, to post to Facebook, to collect statistics, to get away from Google Analytics and so on. Wanted to go to bed early last night, but guess what – I got really sucked into this time trap.

But I have achieved a couple of things, and I’m pretty happy with my progress:

So I had fun. But the night was over way too early.

Watching McIlroy

Posted on by
Reply

The commentator just finished whining that Tiger Woods had to go home today. Golf world will come to an end, if Tiger doesn’t play anymore, nobody will watch anymore and the golf business will fall apart.

Oh well, if the golf world is so stupid, so be it. I haven’t missed Tiger much in the last couple of month, because there was so much to see! And the best is Rory McIlroy. Watching him is fun, he appears to have fun, he plays to win, but he’s also ok if he doesn’t get everything right.

He is having fun competing, he is having fun playing golf, he is even having fun chatting with the by-standers. No idea why they miss Tiger. A guy that is so tense that the gras dries out when he comes to close.

And there’s a bunch of guys out there besides McIlroy that play fantastic golf these days. I don’t miss Tiger too much. If he comes back, ok. But he is by far not as much fun as Rory.

CeBIT and Me

Posted on by
Reply

We have a love hate relationship. Or, I should actually say, I have a love / hate relationship with CeBIT, I don’t think that CeBIT cares.

Standing at that booth for a whole five days is exhausting, frustrating, stimulating, all of it together or one after the other.

First time I’ve been here was in the 80th of the last century. At that time I was only invited to set-up, and others were doing the booth duty. My feelings were hurt, and I wanted to be one of the guys that are allowed to talk to the participants. But no. I had to go home on opening day.

Then I got to work for IBM, and I actually *had* to go. I started to experience the exhaustive side, the adrenaline side and the experience of hanging out for too long in the evening in Greek restaurants around Hannover in the evenings (really, there’s hardly anything else you can do there – do you remember, Mike?).

Now, working for the Eclipse Foundation, we actually have a little pavillon together with our members. In the very busy hall 2, just in the center of the Open Source pavillon, you could find us. When the show started, I was thinking that this should be my last CeBIT. But know, even with all my muscles on fire and back, legs and feet hurting, I’m hoping that we’ll be back in 2013. Weird, eh?