Visiting Ancient Sites

Posted on 11.05.2012 by Ralph Mueller

Last week, I had to go to Italy for some an Eclipse meeting in Naples and then another one in Florence. Departure to Rome on the Sunday and the May Holiday on Tuesday gave us a chance to visit a couple of places before, between and after the business meetings.

It started off on the Monday with a visit to the Forum Romanum. Having learned Latin for many years in school, the place is sort of familiar, and it’s always fun to visit. And not only this, I actually like to see ancient things a lot more than the religious places, which are usually overladed with the symbolisms of a belief I’m not really keen on. It’s actually true for the pagan religions of the ancient times as well, but there I can ignore it.

Next was the Colosseum, and this time we actually decided to stand in line and pay the fee of € 7 to get in. It took us about an hour to walk around, and that was time well spent! Saw a lot, learned a lot. The Colosseum has an onsite walk that explains the facility as well as the different building stages and the life in a day of a Roman while attending the games.

It is pretty amazing to wander around this place and imagine that down in the arena people were fighting for their lives while on the seats families where having their meals warmed up on open fires, playing with their children and doing beauty maintenance. That’s at least what can be deducted from the items found in the sewers.

Next stop was Naples, where we had May 1st to visit both Pompeji and Herculaneum. Both of them got destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvio in AD 79. While I had visited Pompeji before, it was very interesting to visit Herculaneum, a much smaller site that is also less frequented by tourists. And you actually have a chance to stroll through the modern town attached and have a normal coffee or beer 🙂

Different to Pompeji Herculaneum provides a good look at the structures and buildings, as they were not as destructed as in Pompeji. The picture below shows a look at a Roman fast-food restaurant.

Again on this part of the trip my Latin lessons came back, and I’m looking forward to reading the letters that Pliny the younger sent to his friends, describing the events in AD 79.

As a side note: We staid in an old and quit hotel close to Pozzuoli, called Delle Therme. Completely outdated, but has a lot of charme if you can live with ancient beds:-) And the best: We ran into a photo shooting where we made the actress pose for us in her 60’s outfit.

Next stop was the Eclipse Day Florence. The event was very well organized, and the line-up of speakers was great. But I think that might be easier if you have to offer a location like Florence.

Before this post gets to long: Florence is great, I will go back and take a couple of pictures there!

My traveling compagnon Mike visited Italy for the first time ever. When we departed in Rome he told me that he was really impressed by Italy.

And guess what: The food was great in all the places we went, so my scales were the only onces who didn’t appreciate Italy.

Cold As April

Posted on 23.04.2012 by Ralph Mueller

Still not seeing a lot of spring here in Zwingenberg. And I hear it’s pretty much all over Germany. Statistics show that we ~~had~~ have the coldest April in years.

The farmers like it. The cold weather was accompanied by quite some rain, and we all know that a rainy spring is the farmer’s delight. They all look forward to a good harvest if the next couple of days continue with some rain and the sun and warm weather comes out in early May.

I’ll miss the beautiful time here on the Hessian Bergstrasse. Spring is just gorgeous here in the Rhine valley. We still have many apple- and cherry trees, and the blossoming is phantastic.

But I’ll be in Italy and participate in a meeting close to Naples and then attend the Eclipse Day in Florence. And I admit: Things could have been worse for me!

Dear Lufthansa

Posted on 15.04.2012 by Ralph Mueller

Just read today that you folks have problems with your Miles & More program. You thought if you make people use more miles to fly you would easily be able to get your liabilities down. And then your customers started to sue you. That is just not fair!

Well, another way to get rid of people and obligations is to work on the service. Old cheese, broken soda dispensers, oddly shaped arm chairs that make your back hurt after 30 minutes of sitting: That will get your lounges empty in now time. And really – your service in the lounges is too good to be true! You don’t believe this works? Just check the setup in the photo that I took in SFO. And guess what – there’s not too many people in here!

So how about the following deal: You don’t de-value our miles, but you cut down on lounge cost. Are you ok with that?

Open Source Think Tank (Thursday)

Posted on 13.04.2012 by Ralph Mueller

Day One turns out to be very interesting, despite of being pretty tired from jet lag.

Earlier today a panel discussion how communities should be managed and treated with a lot of insight from very experienced community managers, then introduction to GENIVI project and initial workshop work. While most of the questions we are supposed to work on have obvious and simple answers (“YES”, “NO”), developing the reasoning in the group shows a large bandwidth of experience and opinion.

The keynote of the day came from Chris Vein, who is CTO for Innovation in the Executive Office of the President. The most interesting talk was on Open Governance, what the different departments are doing to innovate the way they are serving (and want to serve in the future) the individual citizens of the country. He gave a couple of examples from NASA to the department of food and drugs how open source empowers the government agencies. I hope that the talk will be available for public consumption soon. It will certainly give other organizations an idea how far OSS is already spread throughout the governments of the world.

Now I’m listening to the next case study presented by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs – an open source project comprising a full-blown system for large hospitals.

Looking forward to more!

Easter Snow

Posted on 09.04.2012 by Ralph Mueller

Last week I was in southern Spain to prepare for the golf season and to take a couple of days off after EclipseCon 2012.

The most discussed topic was the weather: As to be expected the temperature was just between 16 and 20° C, we saw some rain showers and the nights were not as warm as in the mediterranean summer. This is totally in sync with the weather that you can expect at that time of the year, but the complaints were all over the place.

Just not fair, the people said. I have one week of vacation, and then the weather sucks so badly. So the whole resort was full of whining about the luxury problems that the resort’s patron’s. I actually have no complaints. The rainy day we had we took off and spent the better part of the day in Seville. Even on a cloudy afternoon the Alcazar of Seville is worthwhile spending the whole afternoon! And the other days I was working on my golf game, with reasonable success.

And now I’m back home in Germany and went up to Gersfeld for a late Easter celebration with my family. And guess what: It snows! Do I hear complaints?

Forgetting is Costly

Posted on 03.04.2012 by Ralph Mueller

Every year the same stupidity.

Golf season starts and I have a hard time to remember what I did right and what I did wrong in the last season. I took notes last year, bit it doesn’t help: The ‘muscle memory’ just fucks up and has lost all its data.

So back to the pro-ette I go and spend a good amount on Euros. She is pleased, and she has expected me already. She says that way she is happy and I am happy. We go through the exact same routine as last spring. And things start to work again, its now only a matter of practicing the same thing over and over. And get some playing practice. And lose a couple of pounds.

So it appears that the weakness of my muscle memory serves a higher purpose.

Barbara, you are so lucky!

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

Posted on 28.03.2012 by Ralph Mueller

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 23.03.2012 by Ralph Mueller

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 20.03.2012 by Ralph Mueller

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 17.03.2012 by Ralph Mueller

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.

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.

Ralph Müller – Zwingenberg

A Guy from Zwingenberg, Germany