Tag Archives: Eclipse

Saving Money and Having Fun

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Are you tired of hotel breakfast? And paying for WiFi? WiFi that might not even exist in your room, because it’s only available in the lobby? Well, I am.

Think about a standard hotel like the Holiday Inn at Gare de’l Est in Paris. You pay 15 € for the breakfast (scrambled eggs from powder, bread that would need some more baking, sweet stuff all over …) and you pay 10 € per day for the WiFi access. WiFi really works only in the lobby and bar area, in your room you have to buy cable access, which adds extra cost. And if you own an nice computer like I do, it won’t even feature an ethernet plug anymore …

The alternative is really simple:

In the morning, step out of the hotel, go around the corner. Here you find bars and brasseries with excellent breakfast offers (2 * coffe, omelette with ham and cheese) for 9 €. And the WiFi is free and fast.

Same is true for the evenings. Rather than staying in your hotel room, hang out in the bars and restaurants. Work and eat for less, and sometimes it even happens that people start talking to you. In any case, while doing your email you can take a break and watch the crowd.

Enjoy.

Ch’ti

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So tonight I was heading to northern France, to present at the Java User Group in Lille. My idea was to fly into Bruessels and take a car from there to meet the folks around 18:00 at the meeting location of the Ch’ti Jug to talk about Eclipse and such.

Now it turns out that this was a really bad idea. The plane I took from Berlin to Bruessels: Well it started late. The excuse the pilot made was that his cabin people had miscounted the number of people on the plane. So they unloaded some luggage, then they found out that the people were actually on the plane, then they re-loaded the luggage.

Execution cost some time, so we started about 45 minutes after the planned departure time. Oh wee, I thought, good that I had planned for some extra time.

Turns out that the traffic jams around Brussels were not in my calculation. They ate up all the buffer that I had planned. But there was a chance! My little TomTom navigation app on the iPhone was telling me that I will be only 3 minutes late. Little did it know!

Just 20 kilometers before Lille my For rental car gave up. No comment, it said.

So what’s left: I can only apologize to folks in Lille. If they still want me, I’ll be back!

Airborne Platforms

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On Friday Christian Campo and myself visited a startup company in Kassel, Germany.

They design, program and manufacture what they call intelligent autonomous vehicles, the next generation copters. The idea is that the hexa-copters can be used for unmanned surveillance missions that needed way more expensive methods in the past: One example that Joerg Lamprecht, the CEO of the company describes involves these vehicles inspecting building status or taking high-precision arial photos.

Hexa-Copter

Visiting Kassel

As with all the other manned or unmanned vehicles I’ve been dealing with lately, these machines rely heavily on the software that comes with them. While there’s a whole bunch of other issues like robustness, weight and construction, the big challenge is to provide software that doesn’t need an experienced pilot to fly around a building and take head-photos.

Logically, the company has a couple of cool software developers to provide a platform system for the copters that integrates all access to navigation, flight control, camera adjustment and such. On the other hand they are very interested in developing apps that can be used on top of the platform. These apps could be maneuvers such as loopings or turns, or it could be even more complicated tasks like ‘fly around this building in a spiral and measure it’.

Time was flying by, and just before we had to leave Joerg took us to their manufacturing hall to see a bunch of young kids building the copter platforms. After the visit I was wondering what the banks and insurance companies have to do in the future to keep their developers from running away and doing cool stuff like Aibotix is doing.

Both Christian and I look forward to the arrival of the IoT!

 

Visiting Ancient Sites

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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

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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!

FRA Airport

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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

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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?

The Shared Pasture And The Butcher

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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

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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.