Friday, October 21, 2005

EuroOSCON

Yesterday night I returned from Amsterdam where the first edition of the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention took place between 17 and 20 October. It was really a great event with exceptional organizers, well prepared speakers and lots of interesting discussions and, above all, a friendly and relaxed atmosphere.

I could arrive to Amsterdam only Tuesday morning, so I lost the two helpful tutorial sessions on Monday. However I didn't want to skip classes on the first day of school. When I entered the main conference room Tim O'Reilly had just started his speech about the technologies on the "O'Reilly Radar" so I just sit down and listened, which is how I spent most of my time ... Listening to great talks.

At the beginning of each day there were a couple of 15 minutes keynotes which almost everybody attended, then there were the 45 minutes sessions organized into 10 different tracks: Linux, Java, PHP, Python, Perl, databases, security, emerging topics, products & services and, last but not least business. Other than the Java track where I attended almost all sessions, on the other tracks I attended only a few or even none of the sessions. Other than the keynotes and sessions there were also several panels, many friendly discussions and MAKE's fair.

The participants were pretty heterogeneous from students to businessmen and from open source gurus to unknown minor contributors (like me). At first I was pretty uncomfortable not being known by anybody there (other than Marc and Kathy) but socializing and making friends was easy. So easy that some of us we ended playing Werewolves and Seers (a.k.a. Mafia) in the lobby of Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky.

-- to be continued --

Sunday, October 16, 2005

First Day of School (Tomorrow)

The inevitable is about to happen: tomorrow is the first day of school. We knew that this had to happen some day but we were still hoping ...

OK, so what will happen tomorrow? At nine o'clock we have a special presentation lecture held by the professors of the Computer Science department. Every professor will present the lectures he will teach this semester so this will be very interesting when still in doubt about the lectures one will chose. Here are the lectures I want to take:
  • Software Engineering - Zeller and Hertel (9Cr)
  • Semantics - Smolka (9Cr)
  • Paralel and Distributed Programming - Reinhard (6Cr)
  • Data Stream Processing Seminar - Koch and Olteanu (8Cr)
  • Soft Skills Seminar - Meyer-Ross (4Cr)
  • German - NN (6Cr)
At first I was thinking of transfering some of the credits from Romania in order to make the first semester more easily digestible. However after thinking a little more I decided to do all my credits here. The thing is that it is not that hard to do 90 credits in two semesters and I hope learn a lot in the process. Should it be to hard I can always return to this decision ...

Thursday, October 06, 2005

International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science

Three days ago I moved to beautiful Saarbrucken, Germany in order to do a M.Sc. in Computer Science. The financing comes form the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, more exactly from the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science. They were also very helpful and found me accommodation in a flat that is pretty close to the University. I will move there on the 18th of October, and until then I am living in a very beautiful 3 room apartment in the same building. The institute also provided me a magnetic card that can open many doors, and especially the one of the master student's lab, where I usually spend most of the time.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Nice Quotations

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. -- Alan Kay

The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come. -- Peter Ustinov

Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. -- Albert Einstein

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. -- John Lehman

XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more.

There are actually 5 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics, benchmarks and release dates

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion -- Parkinson's Law

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. —Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless"

Picasso once said, Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Motto: Mana doru-i tainic colo, inspre tine,
Ochiul imi sclipeste, genele-mi sunt pline,
Inima mi-e grea;
Astfel, totdeauna cand gandesc la tine,
Sufletul mi-apasa nouri de suspine,
Bucovina mea! -- Mihai Eminescu - "La Bucovina"

SYNASC Afterthoughts

From 25 until 29 September, I participated in Timisoara, Romania the 7th edition of the Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing. Well, what can I say? It was a very well-organized event in probably the nicest city in Romania. Timisoara is however very far away from my home-town so I had to travel 15 hours by train just to get there, and other 15 hours to get back. The trip was however quite enjoyable, because of the good company and the fact that I could sleep for most of the time.

SYNASC is one of he largest conferences in my country, comprising six different workshops this year: Computer-Aided Verification of Information Systems (CAVIS), Symbolic Grid Computing (SGC), Natural Computing and Applications Workshop (NCA), Petri-Nets and their Applications on Workflow Management (PN&WM), Workshop on Theory and Applications of P Systems (TAPS), and, of course, the Workshop on Agents for Complex Systems (ACSys), where I presented my paper. SYNASC also had other smaller sections on Data Clustering & Image Processing, Scientific Computing Systems & User Interfaces, Data Mining, Cryptography & Compression Algorithms and, finally, Distributed and Parallel Computation. So it was a very large conference indeed, with people coming from all over the world, taking about interesting topics.

My presentation was in the first day, together with the other talks about software agents. It was not a big surprise that the interest in agents was quite low (judging by the low number of papers at least). The hype is in different fields now such as
Natural Computing and P Systems, while agents are just a big unfulfilled promise. And with less and less people working on software agents the chances of having autonomous intelligent agents one day in the future are also getting slimmer. But these are things I happen to be familiar with for some time, so there was no reason to be sad about them. There were very interesting talks in many other areas, and I attended around 50% of them. When I was not attending talks, I was wondering around the city, meeting old friends and making new ones and sleeping ... a lot of sleeping. We also had a trip to the Recaş vineyard where we were thought how to taste wine like professionals, and a very fancy conference dinner.

Overall, I had a great time at SYNASC, and I am considering of going again next year.