Luiyología

My Year 2020 in Books

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Any Goodreads user has access to a yearly report with some statistics and basically the covers of all the books read in one year. In order to have it the user only has to set the books as read and the read date to any time in that year. Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2020 in Books from Goodreads, as I did for my read books in 2018 and 2019.

Data

	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015
Book read	42	56	54	54	57	63
Pages read	6,353	8,037	7,511	9,388	12,136	7,855
Average length (in pages)	151	143	139	173	213	125
Average rating (1-5)	3.6	3.6	3.7	3.9	4.2	3.3

Evolution of my reading stats over the last years

The featured image goes to James Rhodes, as I liked a lot his autobiography. You can read my review in Goodreads but I will summarize it here with the first sentence: Instrumental is a terrible book and at the same time a wonderful one. Knowing the James Rhodes from nowadays, and knowing already a bit about his past, it is even more emotional.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

My TOP 10 read books in 2020

Instrumental by James Rhodes (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Factfulness by Hans Rosling (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Rey Blanco by Juan Gómez Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
El Tío Curro: La Conexión Española de J.R.R. Tolkien by José Manuel Ferrández Bru (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (you can read my review in English in Goodreads)
Cicatriz by Juan Gómez Jurado
The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russel
Si escuece, cura by Esther Samper (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)

FOSDEM 2021, the first virtual FOSDEM

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Due to the pandemic this year I could not make my yearly pilgrimage to Brussels, but I was still able to attend FOSDEM as it mutated to an online conference for the first time. It has not been the same, but it is still an experience I cannot miss.

For those of you who don’t know FOSDEM, I will keep my usual description. It is the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to Open Source development and communities. It’s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem. It’s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with names and faces you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.

Being online, this year the interaction was limited to Matrix and IRC Freenode channels in parallel to the live streaming, and Jitsi for the streaming. Everything is open source, and scaled amazingly.

As @fosdem regulars we are really excited our software is used to facilitate this year's uncoventional edition. Kudos to all organizers! 🚀
— Jitsi (@jitsinews) February 6, 2021

I already wrote about it in previous years:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2018: Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2019: Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2020: Saturday and Sunday

The numbers of this 2021 edition are slightly lower than in 2020 in terms of content, but it’s amazing they could almost maintain the volume of activities and this time reaching to a worldwide audience:

682 speakers in 773 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
51 different devrooms
hundreds of hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
52 online stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Fedora, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, Jenkins, …

To make it more impressive, take into account that FOSDEM is organized by volunteers, everything is community driven and it’s free to attend. You don’t even need to register beforehand.

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

Getting the Most from Modern Java, by Simon Ritter (@speakjava)

Simon Ritter gave an overview of the most recent updates in the Java language: better switch statements in JDK 12, a preview of the text blocks for JDK 13, simpler Data classes and Records in JDK 14, sealed classes in JDK 15, more on Records, pattern matching and sealed classes in JDK 16…

Overall a good overview by Simon, as usual. I lost the count of his talks that I have attended.

10 Ways Everyone Can Support the Java Community, by Stephen Chin (@steveonjava)

Another popular speaker to explain different ways to support Java, not only with coding. Some of the ideas were:

Contribute to OpenJDK: Find something interesting, discuss your intended changed and finally submit a patch
Join the Foojay community, a new online community for friends of OpenJDK
Join or sponsor a Java Users Group, you can find JUGs almost everywhere although now most of them are online. Even before the pandemic you could already find a few virtual JUGs.
Follow a Java Champion in twitter (I just checked and I’m following almost 20).
Join a specialized Slack channel, write articles in your blog, participate in an unconference event, …

The Death of Openness and Freedom?, by Matt Yonkovit (@MYonkovit)

Matt reflects on how the huge success of Open Source also brought imitators, as in another sectors like sci-fi movies. But success in Open Source has different implications, depending on the project. Matt also comments in the recent problems that we have seen in different communities, from more or less embarrassing licensing changes to projects moved to “as a service” exclusive business models.

The talk is a good overview of the different models, advantages and disadvantages of them. A thought provoking talk with lots of interesting insights.

The Democratization of Databases, by Bruce Momjian

Bruce started with an overview of what democracy or representative democracy means, and the specific advantages of other systems like an autocracy might have in sectors like the military or the space exploration. Software is usually better under democracy as it allows rapid adjustment of goals and expands the pool of talent.

According to the speaker, Democracy in open source works a bit differently. It is a mix of democracy and meritocracy, where voting can be problematic but bad decisions can quickly be reverted. The main drawback is that the plan or road map is not reliable.

Finally, the talk focuses on the PostgreSQL community, and how they operate and evolve.

Mozilla History: 20+ Years And Counting, by Robert Kaiser

Nice summary of all the important milestones of Mozilla by KaiRo. Lots of nice memories:

the origin of the name (mixing Mosaic and Godzilla as in Mosaic Killer), that was later renamed to Netscape
How the Firefox web browser was born
How the Mozilla Foundation started, alongside the Mozilla Corporation
The Mozilla Manifesto, written in 2007
Rust, Firefox OS, Mozilla Hubs and many other things…

Database Performance at GitLab.com by Nikolay Samokhvalov and Jose Finotto

Interesting overview about how Gitlab copes with their massive amounts of users and their strict SLAs, focusing specially in the PostgreSQL database side. I got several interesting inputs from the talk, from automated database health checks (and how they do them), to best practices for the engineers (how they learn and get insights of their usage), how they experiment using thin clones, etc.

25 years of MySQL - A Retrospective, by Dave Stokes (@stoker)

Dave Stoker, community manager at MySQL, gave an historical overview of MySQL since its beginning.

We start with @stoker ! 25 years of @MySQL #FOSDEM2021 #MySQL #mysqldevroom https://t.co/yC4A7gWOwt pic.twitter.com/J15LDat4EO
— lefred - @lefredbe.bsky.social (@lefred) February 7, 2021

It was a nice presentation, with the sense of humor you expect in this nostalgic exercises.

Telegram Bot For Navigation, by Ilya Zverev (@ilyazver)

I have attended several talks by Ilya, some of them online and others here in FOSDEM. He always deliver insightful content, this time focused on how to provide navigation capabilities without relying on a map or a web. Ilya explained that he moved a few years ago to a neighborhood with little data mapped in OpenStreetMap. Instead of mapping all the different venues/places surrounding him individually, he tried another approach. He built his own Telegram bot, first to search for venues and then to add new places.

The main missing part is that the data surveyed using the tool is not being loaded or synchronized with OSM. Hopefully he will include it in the bot roadmap soon.

Making Documentation a First-class Citizen in Open Source Projects, by Ray Paik and Sofia Wallin

Ray and Sofia analyzed the problems that we usually see in open source documentation: lack of consistency mainly. They also explained how a few years ago a cross community group was created with the goal to provide a common way for documentation handling in the LF Networking project.

They gave also several recommendations, for example:

Include the Documentation as part of your definition of done, being a key part of your product/project
Keep the documentation where your code is
Keep an “edit this page” button or equivalent to make contributions easier. This is key during on-boarding processes or just to lower the entry barrier
Recognize contributions, organize documentation specific events

Mental health and free software, by Brendan Abolivier (@BrenAbolivier)

This topic is very delicate, and this is part of the problem. As Brendan explained in the presentation, mental health should not be a taboo. The speaker also added the disclaimer that this is not a specific issue of Free Software, but he focused the talk on this based on his experience.

Free Software usually implies a strong interaction with a community. This sometimes implies staying up late to close an argument or to finish up a pull request, putting a lot of pressure on this. The speaker argues that it can be worse in FOSS compared to other sectors because the emotional aspect is much more important, and everything is happening in public places. On addition to this, joining a big FOSS project also implies a bigger public space and an additional difficulty to take the initiative.

He closed the session with different ways to mitigate the problem depending on your role in a certain moment: maintainer, contributor, employer/manager, etc. The overall recommendation is to try self-care activities, to be generous with your personal time, to be gentle with yourself and to reach a therapist if needed.

Open Source is More Than Just a License, by Don Goodman-Wilson (@DEGoodmanWilson)

The speaker reflects on the differences between the colloquial and institutional descriptions of Open Source, after a few projects have claimed they are open source although they are not. This is partially caused on the emphasized importance of the license over other factors.

According to the speaker, focusing Open Source in just licenses is only necessary when you only want to to mitigate risk management or to reduce costs. Open source should be more about collaboration, openness to participation, pursuing goals that are community-driven, etc. Choosing one license or another should be just a mean to an end, not the end itself.

The speaker proposes using a Ethical Source Definition for software, that summarizes in:

Benefits the Commons, meaning that it can be distributed freely and anyone can use or modify the software
Created in the Open, developed in public view and accepting public contributions
Welcoming and Just Community. Clear rules of governance need to be published and enforced
Puts Accessibility First. It needs to be available to everybody
Prioritizes User Safety
Protects User Privacy
Encourages Fair Compensation

In summary: licenses are important and useful, but put your community first

Penpot, design freedom for teams, by Pablo Ruiz (@diacritica)

Penpot was presented in FOSDEM last year (as UXBOX, its previous name), and one year later Pablo is back in FOSDEM to announce the alpha version. As he did last year, he starts the presentation explaining why they came up with this, and how they discovered they could not find a suitable open and free tool so they managed to create an outstanding one.

Then, he directly started a commented demo using Penpot to re-design the FOSDEM website. It was amazing to see the current maturity of the tool. He completed the demo explaining some integrations they are working on between Penpot and Taiga, taking advantage of the fact that they are the creators and core developers of both tools.

Pablo Ruiz presenting Penpot in FOSDEM 2021 - CC BY-NC-SA License

And that’s all. See you (hopefully in Brussels) in FOSDEM 2022!!

My Year 2020 in Games

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome again to this yearly post, where I try to analyze my gaming behavior during the last year. You can read about my previous years:

2019
2018
2017 (in Spanish)
2016 (in Spanish)
2015 (in Spanish)
2014 (in Spanish)
2013 (in Spanish)
2012 (in Spanish)
2011 (in Spanish)

Data

	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	Total since 2006
Total amount of plays	88	73	101	84	98	1222
Different games played	21	33	61	72	55	440
Games with 2 or more plays	9	9	14	9	15	190
Amount of gaming sessions	62	37	43	36	35	464

Evolution of my boardgame plays over the last 5 years

Games played per year until the end of 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Retrospective

I will organize again the analysis in categories, as the time I spent in RPG or video games is becoming much more relevant.

Boardgames

In 2020 I have played more than in the previous years, and mainly to long games.
I recorded 62 gaming sessions, more than 5 per month, to just 20 different games.
My h-index as a player is now 12. I expected to raise it this year, as I have played intensively to a few games.
I have played 48 scenarios of Gloomhaven in 41 sessions. That is more than half the games I’ve played in the whole year. I love it, and perhaps I should write a spoiler free post in the blog about it.

Role-playing games

With just 8 sessions, mostly online due to the pandemic, we closed in June our Storm King’s Thunder campaign for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
For the moment, we haven’t started a new campaign, with D&D or not, but I hope we will be able to do it as soon as the situation allows it.

Video games

This year I have played more video games than ever, for sure.
In Steam I have played:
- Mostly Tabletop Simulator. I have more than 150h only from 2020.
- I played for a while to This War of Mine. Interesting and challenging, I will probably play again when in the proper mood.
- I finished Firewatch. An intense and well written story. Some passages ended up being too repetitive but the game is short overall.
- I completed The Darkside Detective. Interesting and challenging puzzles, good laughs with a nice design and a fantastic retro based characters and stories.
In January I bought a second hand Playstation 4 from a colleague (without knowing about covid-19 yet) and since April I used it a lot. I have completed:
- Marvel’s Spiderman. The positive things make the negative ones irrelevant. It’s just awesome to swing around Manhattan and I spent hours just doing it.
- Journey. Cute and short game, and both things deserve recognition sometimes. Perhaps too short but take it or leave it.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Dozens of hours, my favourite game so far. Some side quests are repetitive but in general I engaged a lot with the character. Being a huge fan of the novels also helps, but it’s not a requirement to enjoy the game. I played Witcher 1 and 2 just to play this, and it was totally worth it.
- Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, including Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Being a completists, I need to play (if I can) all the saga. After having played (and loved) several Tomb Raider games, this was a perfect match for me and I was not disappointed.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III. I only played the campaign, only single player and no zombie scenarios. Having said that, I liked it and perhaps I could play it again.
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. I enjoyed the spaceship missions and the overall campaign story, but as I played it just after Black Ops III, it was too repetitive sometimes.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda. My first interaction with Mass Effect, and I liked it a lot. Dozens of hours to avoid leaving any single rock unturned, and it was worth it.
- Dragon Age Inquisition. My first interaction with Dragon Age, and it is not going to be the last one. It reminded me sometimes to Pillars of Eternity and Baldur’s Gate, but the story is perhaps more solid and the overall atmosphere is more dramatic. The only thing that I disliked was all the gear evolution related parts, it was confusing and often useless.
Despite having a new PlayStation, I have tried to play in Stadia as well, as a PRO subscriber. I haven’t used the subscription so I finally cancelled it. In 2020 I played.
- Destiny 2, I like the game and I’ve spent several hours but I haven’t engaged yet with it.
- Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year celebration. Only with the opening scene I know I will play it again in the future. It’s probably my favorite Tomb Raider game and I love all of them.
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I bought it with a discount without removing my subscription as it looked like an Uncharted game in the Star Wars universe, and it’s more or less like this. I enjoyed being a Jedi and learning to be one, but I didn’t like the lack of fast travel. Exploration it’s a big part of the game, and it’s nice and challenging, but once you get lost in a labyrinth a few times it starts to piss you off. The end is awesome, that’s for sure.
- Either on Steam, PS4 or Stadia, I plan to keep playing as much as I can also this year. Perhaps eventually in PS5, who knows?

FOSDEM 2020, 20 Years of FOSDEM

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been almost a month since I returned from another intense and thought-provoking weekend in Brussels, although it still feels like it was just yesterday. I couldn’t write this before, as I have been quite busy both at work and at home.

FOSDEM 2020 poster - CC BY-NC-SA License

For those of you who don’t know FOSDEM, it is the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to Open Source development and communities. It’s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem. It’s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with names and faces you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.

I already wrote about it in previous years:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2018: Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2019: Saturday and Sunday

The numbers of this 2020 edition speak for themselves, improving all the figures from previous years:

more than 8,000 attendees in only two days
781 speakers in 817 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
71 tracks in 35 different rooms
more than 400 hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
63 stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, the Apache Software Foundation, OSI, the Eclipse Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, Mattermost, Mozilla, Jenkins, …

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

How FOSS could revolutionize municipal government, by Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper (@divadanese) complete career is amazing: former CTO at Wikimedia Foundation, board member of the Open Source Hardware Association, board observer at Mozilla and board member at Open Source Initiative,… She gave at FOSDEM a very interesting and inspiring talk about the growing presence of FOSS in public administrations.

She started with a brief historical review of relevant projects, highlighting LinEx in Extremadura and Code For America. This initiatives to provide an open alternative for a specific purpose have sometimes failed. In the last years several projects are becoming popular with a common pattern: acting locally to impact globally.

For example: Jason Hibbets (@jhibbets) makes small FOSS projects for his regional county in Raleigh, North Carolina. In Baltimore, a city that was hacked and had to pay a ransom to recover its servers, the amazing people from the St. Francis Neighborhood Center lead by Jacob Green are adapting an international open source platform to provide city services, webs and other functions.

This international open source platform is Lutèce (@LuteceNews), developed by the City of Paris. Lutèce is a 12 years old modular and extensible platform, covering hundreds of city services. Through several projects, mainly built in Java EE, it covers from basic web capabilities to voting systems or workflow functions. Awesome.

Lutèce facts presented in FOSDEM 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

The Selfish Contributor Explained, by James Bottomley

Throughout the years I’ve attended several times to James Bottomley (@jejb_) talks, and it’s always worthy. This time the talk was focused on how Open Source begins as a selfish activity. According to James, managing engineers has always been a problem, even before software exists, because they tend to be opinionated. It’s better to keep a technical motivation than a managerial motivation, but scratching your own itch provides a strong self motivation.

In his first announcement explaining that he was working in a new operating system, Linus Torvalds wanted just suggestions as he expected to code everything by himself, but he was flooded by suggestions and eventually patches. All successful projects run into scaling issues, so how your community or project deals with contributions is essential. Linux solved this success issue with tooling, first with BitKeeper in 2002 and later with Git in 2005.

The Ethics Behind Your IoT, by Molly de Blanc

Molly de Blanc (@mmillions), Strategic Initiatives Manager at Gnome and President of the Open Source Initiative, explained how the Internet of Things is creating new risks and potential security issues due to the lack of free and open alternatives in the ecosystem.

She explained several examples, mainly focused on home surveillance, smart locks and smart doorbells. Smart locks are enabling a new type of abuse. If hacked (or a violent ex-partner) someone can lock you out, open without your consent, etc.

Molly de Blanc presenting at FOSDEM 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Freedom and AI: Can Free Software include ethical AI systems?, by Justin W. Flory & Michael Nolan

Justin (@jflory7) and Mike (@_ nolski _) gave another interesting talk about Ethics and Open Source. They started with an historical overview of GNU, the FSF and the GPL, to explain why the four essential freedoms, written by Richard Stallman in 1986, need to be adapted for AI systems. To create awareness about this, the main initiatives are the AI Now Institute and Partnership on AI.

They continued their presentation introducing some new Freedoms applicable to AI:

Freedom to… audit automated decision-making systems
Freedom to… deliver accountability and responsibility
Freedom to… appeal a decision

They also suggested how we, as a global community, could respect and enforce these freedoms: reproducibility, liability and responsible design, and specially human centered appealing mechanisms.

“Human futures are a combination of data and software.”

In a time where software is often free, companies are selling how people behave. What a strong way to frame this point. #FOSDEM pic.twitter.com/mFYoczki0f
— Matthew Broberg (@mbbroberg) February 1, 2020

Organizing Open Source for Cities, by Jacob Green

The second talk I attended about the same topic, this time from Jacob Green (@jacoblyopen), founder of Mosslabs.io (@Moss4Cities) and open source strategist for both the City of Paris and Johns Hopkins University.

He explained with more detail how to enable a sustainable and free innovation in our cities, through structured collaboration and community. We need a clear, but flexible, institutional interface or framework to advance in cooperation and scaling. He showed some examples from his own initiatives in Johns Hopkins University, the City of Baltimore or the City of Paris with Lutèce (already mentioned in my summary).

The next generation of contributors is not on IRC, by Matthew Broberg

I was curious about this talk by Matthew Broberg (@mbbroberg), technical editor at OpenSource.com. He explained how the communication channels can be more or less inclusive, and how they impact the community itself. He claimed that he does not get IRC, but felt great after creating easily a Github user and having solved an issue in a friendly manner. Most of the modern capabilities are not in IRC, and that is why the communities are shifting to new platforms.

Also, he highlighted that we should move more to asynchronous communication tools, depending on the purpose. He explained how for some people that communication platforms are the third place (after home and your workplace) where you need to feel comfortable and secure. He stressed his message explaining how different projects or companies are distributing their communication needs.

Matthew Broberg about the communications platform adoption in FOSDEM 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

The Ethics of Open Source, by Don Goodman-Wilson

Don (@DEGoodmanWilson) offered the audience another view about the theme of my FOSDEM, Ethics and Open Source. Free Software gives freedom to everyone, and it can be argued that it creates opportunities for the already privileged part of the society. It exacerbates existing injustices, encourages exploiting volunteer labor force. This is reflected in the Paradox of Openness, the tension between encouraging knowledge sharing and ensuring sufficient protection for those who share.

We cannot settle with Open Source (as it is described today). It’s necessary but not enough to ask if something is Open Source, we need to ask ourselves other questions like:

What are the forces that have led us to this point?
What do we owe to each other as people?
How do we evolve as a community?

Engineers, Call Your Policy People!, by Astor Nummelin Carlberg & Paula Grzegorzewska

Astor and Paula from OpenForum Europe (@OpenForumEurope) explained their mission, connecting FOSS communities and projects with policy makers (specially in the EU). They explained what they learned during the recent campaign against the Copyright Directive, and how they created the SaveCodeShare.eu portal.

Regulations affect for profit business, but what happens with Open Source? Activism and FOSS advocacy is needed for the future of Europe, but policy makers need evidence. They help collecting use cases showing the impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation. If you can provide one of those examples, please contact them.

Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism, by Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson (@baconandcoconut), Director of Community Operations at Software Freedom Conservancy (@conservancy), shared her view about ethical software in the most vindictive talk of the weekend. FOSS still depends on funding, and affinity is key. It’s easy to see the ROI in big FOSS projects, but how can we justify (and measure) helping people as the main business model?

Rainbow capitalism… is still capitalism. Open Source exploitation… is still exploitation. How can we fix things from the inside? Encouraging self-reporting, organizing strikes or walkouts if needed, but mainly building our own alternatives. We should bind our future and our software to ethical choices. She closed with two interesting thoughts: What policy changes are needed? Should we require ethical audits and ethical boards in the companies/projects?

UXBOX, the time for an open source online prototyping platform has arrived, by Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz

Me dear friend Pablo (@diacritica) presented UXBOX (@uxboxtool) in the Open Source Design devroom. He delivered a complete presentation of the project, from the inception a few years ago in a πWEEK at Kaleidos to the current state of development, after receiving funding and important offers to help from external contributors from the community.

UXBOX is the first Open Source solution for design and prototyping. It is based in open standards like SVG, open source licenses, and with a multiplatform and multidisciplinary mindset.

And that’s all. See you in Brussels in FOSDEM 2021!!

My Year 2019 in Games

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome again to this yearly post, where I try to analyze my gaming behavior during the last year. You can read about my previous years:

2018
2017 (in Spanish)
2016 (in Spanish)
2015 (in Spanish)
2014 (in Spanish)
2013 (in Spanish)
2012 (in Spanish)
2011 (in Spanish)

Data

	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	Total since 2006
Total amount of plays	73	101	84	98	84	1146
Different games played	33	61	72	55	71	430
Games with 2 or more plays	9	14	9	15	13	186
Amount of gaming sessions	37	43	36	35	30	401

Evolution of my game plays over the last 5 years

Games played per year until the end of 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Retrospective

This time, I’ll organize the analysis in categories, as the time I spent in RPG or video games is becoming much more relevant.

Boardgames

2019 has been the year with less plays since 2009.
I’ve played only 33 different games this year, and incredibly most of them were new (to me).
I recorded 37 gaming sessions, 3 per month.
My h-index as a player is still at 11. I expected to raise it this year, but I haven’t since I almost played new games.
I have played a lot less to boardgames. Nothing unexpected as this year I haven’t been able to attend Tierra de Nadie (TdN) or any similar convention. Not attending TdN implies at least 25-30 plays less.
On the other side, the number of gaming sessions is not that different. And makes sense as I’m playing more to longer games.
Only In 2019 I have played 19 times to Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, in several sessions with up to 4 straight plays. I’m enjoying it a lot (as the rest of my playing group), so we are continuing with The Hunt of the Ember Crown expansion. I’m even considering starting a solitaire campaign to compare.
I did not fulfill my desire to complete in 2019 all the published games of Unlock! and Exit, but I played 5 and I have bought almost all of them so it’s a matter of time.

Role-playing games

We are still maintaining our monthly Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign. I’ve only skipped a couple of sessions because of business trips or similar issues, and despite that I’ve attended 10 sessions.
I’m sure we will continue with this in 2020 and beyond, if nothing important changes. We will see what happens when we complete the Storm King’s Thunder campaign.

Video games

This year I’ve used Steam from time to time. Chronologically:
- I completed Baldur’s Gate II
- I played for a while to Icewind Dale
- I finished Life is Strange: Episode 1
- I also completed The Witcher
By the end of the year I acquired Stadia Founder’s Edition. I started trying it with Destiny 2 but definitely enjoyed my new Stadia with Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition.
Either on Steam or Stadia, I plan to play as much as I can also this year. For the moment, I’m continuing with Rise of the Tomb Raider

My Year 2019 in Books

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Any Goodreads user has access to a yearly report with some statistics and basically the covers of all the books read in one year. In order to have it the user only has to set the books as read and the read date to any time in that year. Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2019 in Books from Goodreads, as I did one year ago for my read books in 2018.

My 2019 in numbers

I read 7,878 pages across 57 books, a 114% of my 50 books read in 2019 goal
That’s 20 novels (not taking into account comics or short stories)
The average length was 138 pages
My average rating was 3.6 (up to 5)
The longest book I read was my nth reading of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The featured image goes to Nnedi Okorafor, as my main discovery of the year after reading her Binti trilogy. She has won a Hugo, a Nebula, a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

My TOP 10 read books in 2019

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
El paciente by Juan Gómez Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Los girasoles ciegos by Alberto Méndez
Loba Negra by Juan Gómez Jurado
The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor
Sumalee: Historias de Trakaul by Javier Salazar Calle (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Big Things Conference and Commit Conf 2019

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I had the opportunity and the privilege to deliver three different talks, in three consecutive days, in two international events: Big Things Conference 2019 and Commit Conf 2019. This crazy coincidence forces me to write one single post to summarize my experience in both events, including an overview of my three talks.

Taking advantage of this, I have also created a new section on this website to publish the main public talks that I’m proudly giving. For each talk you will find some basic data, a link to the slides, and also a link to the video for those that are recorded and published.

Before continuing, I want to thank Pablo Ruiz Subira publicly again for letting me complicate his life. I encouraged him to give a talk, and he has not only done it (three times, if we also count a Meetup talk in October) but also at a great level. It has been especially hard for him to prepare all this, at a time when his family (with a small child and a newborn baby) deserve much more attention than everything else.

With Pablo before our packed full session at Commit Conf 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

TLDR; Delivering three talks in just three days is tough, but as usual the feedback from your peers makes the effort worthwhile. I’m very happy with how the three talks turned out, and despite skipping several slots to prepare things and talk with as many colleagues as possible, my selection of talks was also nice and I learned a lot.

Let me summarize some of the talks I attended (this time, including my own):

Big Things Conference 2019

Big Things Conference 2019, previously called Big Data Spain, is one of the most relevant conferences about Big Data and Artificial Intelligence across Europe. This was the 7th edition and the first one with the new name and branding but they continued with the format of the past events with an interesting balance between technology, business propositions and innovative ideas. According to the organizers this year they had more than 2,000 attendees and 92 talks in just two days.

Staying Safe in the AI Future, by Cassie Kozyrkov (@quaesita)

Very interesting and appropriate opening keynote by Cassie, focusing on the problems and lack of reliability that we can introduce to the data if we don’t put enough care. I took with me several good tips to apply and nice definitions like Algorithmic bias, that occurs when a computer system reflects the implicit values of the humans that created it.

Cassie Kozyrkov at Big Things Conference 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Solving Natural Language problems with scarce data, by Álvaro Barbero Jiménez (@albarjip)

This talk by Álvaro was one of my favorites of all the conference. He delivered a complete overview, explaining a lot of concepts and providing valuable learnings. Thanks to him I discovered interesting things like FastText and Bert.

Álvaro Barbero Jiménez at Big Things Conference 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Operationalizing Data Science using the Azure stack, by María Medina (@mariamedp)

María gave a very good overview of the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning stack, focusing specially on what she called the MLOps approach, using Azure capabilities to build a complete CI and CD pipelines for your ML models.

María Medina at Big Things Conference 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

From Big Data to Artificial Intelligence. Descriptive Vs predictive, by Marco Benjumeda

Marco explained what could be the dream job for a soccer fan, working for a company that provides advanced analytics and insights for top clubs related to performance (past and expected) of any soccer player. He did not gave a detailed explanation on the technology side, but instead showed with passion all the capabilities provided by the tools (one by one) they are building. Interesting talk, although it could have been marked as business instead of technical.

Marco Benjumeda at Big Things Conference 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

From HBDM (Human-Based Data Management) to AIDM (Artificial Intelligence Data Management), by Óscar Méndez (@omendezsoto)

Óscar gave a nice opening session for the second conference day. In summary, he explained the importance of trusted data as a concept to build on top of the rest. He also stressed the relevance of a strong business data layer, abstracting business users from the data assets complexity.

A couple of good remarks, although he lost me with the frequent marketing messages and some bold assumptions about what others are (or aren’t doing).

Omni-Channel Customer-Centric Strategies in a Modern Architecture, by me and Pablo Ruiz Subira (@prsubi)

I’ve been working with Pablo on this topic during the last months (I could say years even). Before last Summer we decided that this could provide valuable insights for others working on similar things, so we sent a proposal. We wanted to deliver the talk we would have loved to receive a couple of years ago.

The talk is about the design choices, strategies and patterns that we strongly recommend to build a modern, flexible and powerful communications architecture. It contains theoretical concepts, detailed tips and an opinionated section with several lessons learned by us during this (ongoing) effort. Key messages:

You cannot be relevant if your strategy is not customer-centric, learning from the behavior and responses of your customers
You cannot be coherent if your strategy is not fully omni-channel, with advisory, commercial and operative communications serving the same purpose and strategy
A micro-services architecture will help you, but focus on a proper isolation of responsibilities regardless your overall architecture design
Big Data capabilities will be required for an advance and mature proposal, but it is not the first or most important component

With Pablo Ruiz at Big Things Conference 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

You can check the slides in my talks section, but the complete message is not in the deck so consider waiting for the video (the session was recorded by the organization).

I will not judge the value or success of the talk, but we are very happy with the result and the execution. The feedback that we have received is also very positive so I suppose it was worthy also for the audience.

Commit Conf 2019

Commit Conf 2019 is also one of the biggest conferences in Spain related to software development. The contents are more generic and the public is completely different, as the target audience are developers or students. The numbers for 2019 were impressive: 9 tracks in parallel (+ 3 workshop tracks), more than 2,000 attendees and 140 talks/workshops.

Design principles for an Event Driven Architecture in an Event Driven World, by me and Pablo Ruiz Subira (@prsubi)

Second talk of the week for Pablo and me. First slot after the opening keynote in one of the largest spaces of the conference, and the room was packed full with people even in the floor and against the lateral walls. It’s quite thrilling to start a conference like this.

This is not strictly a talk about what we do in ING (although we do most of this) and neither is about encouraging anyone to build micro-services. Our objective was to explain, for those that have already decided to build a micro-services architecture, the benefits of going one step forward building a complete Event-Driven Architecture.

We explained several concepts, with theoretical and practical explanations combined with real examples: Event taxonomy, correlation, inference, reference data management, choreography, orchestration, data lineage, data segregation, …

Thats me (interested in what Pablo says) at Commit Conf 2019
Source: CommitConf - CC BY-NC-SA License

This time our engagement with the audience was much bigger, most probably because in Spanish we are more fluent and comfortable but also because the audience in Commit Conf is much more technical. The questions from the audience complemented perfectly the message, as a proof that they got the content perfectly to the point they were thinking on the next level and the corner cases.

The slides can be found as well in the talks section, but again if you are interested it’s probably better to watch the recording as it is already online (in Spanish):

Again, very happy with the result and our execution, and the feedback we are receiving is impressively positive.

Design principles for an Event Driven Architecture in an Event Driven World. Gran título, gran charla de @luiyo y @prsubi #commitconf pic.twitter.com/ZXzJ0vXJrx
— César Alberca (@cesalberca) November 22, 2019

En un mundo hiperconectado, las bases de datos de grafos son tu arma secreta, by Javier Ramírez (@supercoco9)

Yet another talk about graph databases, and again about the basic concepts. I was suspicious, and the talk was clearly tagged as beginner content, but I attended anyway because I like this speaker. I discovered later that the deck was more extensive for longer sessions and sadly (for me) we skipped most of the slides I was more interested. Having said that, I discovered Gremlin and how Amazon Neptune works, and both look nice.

Very good talk by Javier, reinforcing my eagerness to go deeper into this topic (as soon as I can park the other million things I’m dealing with nowadays).

Python para administradores de sistemas, by Alejandro Guirao Rodríguez (@lekum)

Alejandro, apart from a very good friend, is also an extremely good speaker. He always prepares the contents thoroughly, and he is clearly gaining confidence talk after talk, conference after conference. Proof of that was the intro and closure playing the ukelele, as an analogy of Python as a multi-purpose simple but powerful and joyful instrument.

I loved the storyline putting the audience under the skin of Nerea, explaining how she can deal with diverse and different problems in her daily job as system administrator using just Python. Alex gave not only the examples but also useful references to the standard libraries and modules used on those examples.

I can not imagine how this talk could have been improved in content or execution. You shouldn’t miss it.

Alejandro Guirao at Commit Conf 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Micronaut y GraalVM: La combinación perfecta, by Iván López (@ilopmar)

Any talk by Ivan is sure success. He knows how to communicate and knows how to develop the storyline of the presentation, usually including a final demo to consolidate the message. In this talk the content was as usual very detailed and tremendously interesting, stressing how Micronaut matches perfectly with GraalVM, because of the reflection-less, AoT compilation and reactive design of Micronaut.

Spring and other frameworks are waking up, but Micronaut clearly has a nice starting position in the race to dominate the next era of micro-services.

Iván López at Commit Conf 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

¿Quién manda en tu lenguaje de programación favorito? 2019 Edition!!, by me!

The last and for sure the most difficult of the three talks I delivered. I already gave this talk in Codemotion 2015, but in just four years the ecosystem has changed completely so it was not just doing a few small updates. Just collecting the contents takes weeks, arranging them together in a comprehensible and interesting way (at least attempting to) takes more weeks… I will consider offering this talk to other upcoming events to make up for the invested effort. The good news is that I love this topic and I really enjoy researching for it.

I have always wondered why we always focus on the technical details, forgetting about the ethical aspects of technology. Back in 2015 I chose to focus on programming languages, but the approach can be applied to other concepts. This talk is not about which programming language has this or that capability, or which one has more functional traits. What I wanted to analyze is how ethical, diverse and healthy is a programming language and the community around it.

In this talk I explain what can be measured and analyzed regarding ethics and governance in programming languages, and I present a critical analysis of fourteen different languages (two more than in 2015), not just the most popular ones but specially those with some special peculiarity. Furthermore, I can spend hours talking about this but I need to be fast and concise to end in about 35-40 minutes.

Thats me talking about Clojure at Commit Conf 2019
Source: CommitConf - CC BY-NC-SA License

The slides are already online and the storyline should be easy to follow, but if you understand Spanish I recommend you to watch the video:

Again, I’m very happy with the final materials and my execution, and the attendees gave me a extremely good feedback. I’m very glad they enjoyed it as much as I did.

¿Quieres un buen modelo de Machine Learning? Empieza por el procesado de datos, by Axel Blanco (@drimmark)

A well structured talk, it’s a pity that he did not enter into something more detailed but it’s fine as the talk was labeled as beginner. As a suggestion to improve, sometimes the talk was more like a commercial presentation about what Keepler (his employer) offers (both to customers and engineers).

Axel presented the basic concepts of Big Data and Machine Learning, explaining the life cycle of the data and highlighting the importance of the data processing step not only in traditional data warehousing environments but specially in Big Data architectures where any inconsistency might introduce a terrible bias. Very interesting insights about when to apply batch or streaming processing.

Axel Blanco at Commit Conf 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Déjame que te hable de Perl 6, by JJ Merelo (@jjmerelo)

JJ Merelo at Commit Conf 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

After my research about Raku (formerly called Perl 6) for my own talk and knowing JJ Merelo since long time ago, I was curious about this presentation. JJ is very involved internationally in the Perl community and now especially in the Raku community. Neither the talk nor the speaker disappointed.

JJ made a nice overview of the important traits that a modern programming language needs to have, and reviewed each of them with a different language: Scala, Julia, Kotlin, Python, TypeScript, Elixir, F#, Rust, … When we were all wondering where Raku would appear, the speaker showed us how all those capabilities are also in Raku.

As a consequence, he ended his talk promoting Raku as an unbeatable language for teaching and learning, since with it you can use and understand modern patterns and usages.

Construyendo Cultura de Datos, by Rodrigo Quintana and Javier Serrano

Rodrigo and Javier explained how their employer, Clarity, is nurturing a Data Culture across the company, including a complete transformation in the structure of the teams. They also showed, with total transparency, their technology stack both for for traditional services and data science.

I was surprised to see the similarities between what Clarity does with their client companies data and what we do with different platforms. Well structured and very well explained talk about strategies, languages and technologies they use in their daily challenges. I hope to see other Clarity talks one day in more detail

Rodrigo Quintana at Commit Conf 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

And that’s all. See you in Big Things Conference 2020 and Commit Conf 2020 !!

Tolkien 2019 in Birmingham

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Showing off my double nationality - CC by-nc-sa License

If you are reading this you probably know already that I am a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, to the point that I joined the Spanish Tolkien Society (Sociedad Tolkien Española) almost 20 years ago and I usually don’t miss any of their events.

Since recently I also belong to the Tolkien Society, and after having missed for probably important (but now forgotten) reasons Tolkien 2005 and Tolkien 2012, the last major events that they organized, I was not going to miss Tolkien 2019. In 2005 the gathering marked the 50th anniversary of the complete publication of The Lord of The Rings. In 2012 the conference was held to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. This year the Tolkien Society celebrated in Birmingham its own 50th anniversary with the largest celebration of Tolkien ever held. More than 550 attendees and more than 150 activities including talks, panels, workshops, signing sessions, music, theater,…

I have a lot of things to do but I don’t want to miss the opportunity to write here some quick impressions of my experience there. (last minute edit: Quick is an euphemism, as I have spent several hours writing this article). Also, Pablo has published (in Spanish) a fantastic summary of his own experience in Tolkien 2019 and the scarce overlap between our experiences there has encouraged me to complete the article as much as possible.

TL;DR: The good part: I attended around 40 activities, most of them top quality content, and I realize now that more than a third of them had a female speaker. That is a lot. I met in person lots of interesting people, and had the opportunity to spend time and learn from people that I admire. The bad part: I didn’t like the venue, the corridors were too small, it was full of steps and only two of the rooms were big enough for an event like this with >500 participants. The lack of a lunch break not only forced everyone to skip good contents, but also made it much more difficult to meet other people and do proper networking.

The STE delegation with other friends from Spain also attending Tolkien 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Let me summarize some of the talks and activities I attended:

Activities

Heirs of Tolkien? The Major Contenders, by Tom Shippey

The opening keynote was delivered perfectly by Tom Shippey, it was the ideal kickoff for an event like this combining interesting facts and humor. I admire him since long time ago, but even more after having met him in person during the last XXIV Mereth Aderthad. Reading Beowulf together while drinking beer creates some bonding, who could have imagined it.

Shippey, with his usual simple (but effective) slides, started with the slogan of the Deustche Tolkien Gesellschaft: Ohne Tolkien, Keine Fantasy (without Tolkien, no fantasy) stressing how this motto is still correct nowadays. Tolkien was the first author to achieve mass market success with ambitious and top level quality high fantasy, something that was even more difficult in the previous century. Mass market success in fantasy works is more common nowadays, and this is only because of Tolkien’s legacy.

He commented that he is working in a taxonomy of fantasy authors, and also explained who could be a worthy successor of Tolkien. In his opinion only three authors are candidates in quality with their own genuine style: George RR Martin, Stephen Donaldson and Michael Swanwick, all of them heavily influenced by Tolkien. This part was related to the talk he gave in May in Spain comparing the characters, works and values from Tolkien and Martin.

Tom Shippey explaining the fantasy types identified by Farah Mendelsohn - CC by-nc-sa License

To the origins of fairy-tales, by Enrico Spadaro (@EnricoSpadaro7)

Enrico reminded us the relationship of Tolkien with fairy-tales, and explained the folklore tales that the Professor received as input for inspiration, being the most acknowledged of them the Kalevala. The speaker then explained that the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault were not the first ones to write fairy-tales in Europe, as there was an Italian author Giambattista Basile that was the first one (that we know) to include fairy-tales tales in Lo Cunto de Li Cunte. His tales included the first appearance of Cinderella, Rapunzel or the Sleeping Beauty.

On the nature and corporeality of Elves and Fairies according to Tolkien, by Massimiliano Izzo

Very interesting and well documented talk, about how Tolkien speculated on the real nature of elves and how this vision evolved through his life. Metaphysical and sometimes even philosophical discussions that will deserve a quiet read when the proceedings are published.

Four Brethren Heroes of the Gondolindrim - Egalmoth, Ecthelion, Glorfindel and Legolas : A mythic and linguistic exploration, by Andrew Higgins (@asthiggins)

Andrew Higgins explained very briefly how these four important characters are related to heroes from the Classical and Medieval works Tolkien could have known. He commented how Tolkien could have thought the names for each of them, linking as usual the meaning with the character. Again, it will be nice to read the final paper in the proceedings.

Two Realms: Finished and Unfinished Business, by Ted Nasmith

This was the first of many talks focusing on the illustration of Tolkien’s works. This time, Ted Nasmith himself showed us some of his recent commissioned works related to Middle-earth and at the end also to The Song of Ice and Fire. It’s impossible to articulate in words what he showed us: lots of illustrations including preliminary drafts or color tests that I would happily put in my walls.

I specially liked a couple of his recent works: Rhosgobel, Durin’s Crown and the Mirrormere and most of all Turgon at Fingolfin’s Cairn. Wouldn’t mind at all if someone wanted to buy me one.

Ted is not only a gifted artist but also proved to be friendly to his fans and methodical in his work.

Ted Nasmith showing one of his awesome drawings of Treebeard - CC by-nc-sa License

Leaf by Niggle, by Puppet State Theatre (@PuppetStateThtr)

Richard Medringtone from the Puppet State Theatre showed us how one single person on stage can grab the attention of the audience for more than an hour. He is clearly a top professional in acting, and the adaptation of Leaf by Niggle fitted his style perfectly. The stage setting, despite being minimalistic, was adequate and the protagonist made good use of almost all its elements. I loved the play and will see it again without hesitation.

Clothing in Tolkien’s world and what we can see through its historical analysis, by Dr. Ester Torredelforth (@Torredelforth)

Ester, Doctor in medieval art and fashion, made a brilliant exposition of the facts that can be understood or extracted from the way Tolkien describes clothing details. Se used several designs prepared by herself to support her lecture, describing how Tolkien must have known with a decent level about medieval fashion and its utility and symbolism.

Aratalindalë - The Making of a Myth, by Maggie Percival

I was not sure about this talk, but I’m glad I finally attended it. The purpose of the lecture was to describe the process she and some other colleagues from the Tolkien Society followed to prepare the Masquerade for the London WorldCon of 2014 where they won several prizes including Best overall. They prepared a group costume entitled Aratalindalë that included eight Valar as they are described in The Silmarillion.

Maggie explained with lots of details the reasoning after all the designs including the selection of fabrics and how they combined traditional dressmaking skills with modern technology using LED lights in the costumes with certain level of animation designed for each Vala. There are several pictures online but I haven’t found the full video where all the lighting features can be seen properly.

Tolkien and Italy, by Oronzo Cilli (@Tolkieniano)

Oronzo described his research about the relationship between Tolkien and Italy. He traveled there at least a couple of times and apparently there are several details that show he enjoyed and was influenced by the Italian culture. For example, it is known that Tolkien joined the Oxford Dante Society.

Tolkien’s Library, by Oronzo Cilli (@Tolkieniano) with Tom Shippey

One of the editorial releases of the year related to Tolkien studies and scholarship. The book is just a list of what could have been part of the Professor’s own library, and for each item Oronzo describes if the entry comes from a primary source, a secondary source, etc. Quite interesting if you are curious about the type of works Tolkien owned or had read. As new evidence appears, the list will have to be expanded with new entries.

The room was full also because Tom Shippey wrote the foreword and also participated in the lecture.

France 1913. Tolkien’s first job, by Jose Manuel Ferrández Bru (@JosManuelFerrn1)

My colleague from the STE is becoming a regular for these types of events, and no wonder it’s like that with the quality and amount of research he has been doing over the last years. This time the lecture was about how a very young Tolkien got a job as tutor of a bunch of kids during a trip to France. Without spoiling the details, let’s say that the task was suddenly complicated and could have disrupted Tolkien in a unique way.

Jose Manuel Ferrández Bru explaining the intricate relationships of the Martínez del Río Bermejillo brothers - CC by-nc-sa License

The Two Towers of Birmingham, and other follies, by John Garth (@JohnGarthWriter)

It was believed that a couple of towers from Birmingham (Perrott’s Folly and the Edgbaston Waterworks tower) may have provided the inspiration for the Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings. John Garth started his keynote explaining why he does not consider this argument very solid. First of all, which two towers? Minas Morgul and Minas Tirith? Orthanc and Barad-dûr? It’s still ambiguous. Garth reviewed all the early designs that we have from Tolkien about those towers, analyzing the evolution of them.

The lecture also served somehow as a teaser for his next book, titled for the moment as Tolkien’s Worlds.

LOTR on Prime panel, by Shaun Gunner (@ShaunGunner) with Brian Sibley, Dimitra Fimi (@Dr_Dimitra_Fimi), Anke Eißmann (@khorazir), Jeremy Edmonds (@TolkienGuide) and Marcel Aubron-Bülles (@The_Tolkienist)

This panel was promising, first of all because the selection of participants was very well balanced with writers, scholars and artists offering different perspectives about their expectations. Of course they did not give any factual data, and probably that is the reason they were there in the panel giving their opinions freely and not Tom Shippey that is directly involved in the project.

I specially liked the contributions by Brian Sibley, who was fully engaged in all the Peter Jackson films, and Anke Eißmann, who is eager like me to see in the new series a more daring production compared specially to The Hobbit films. Let’s hope they don’t try to imitate the style of Game of Thrones.

Alan Lee’s Sketchbook, by Alan Lee (@AlanLee11225760)

Despite the main room was completely full, the organization switched off the lights for the audience and everyone was in absolute silence listening to the careful explanations by Alan Lee. It was almost magical and completely amazing. We could see dozens of sketches explained from the genius himself, from watercolor exercises to architectural blueprints. Lee’s view on Middle-earth is engraved in the mind of many people (including mine) and we were very lucky that his vision was also omnipresent in Peter Jackson’s films.

There was also time for him to answer a lot of questions from the audience, and perhaps the most interesting were related to their relationship with other artists like John Howe.

Alan Lee explaining one of his drawings about Orthanc - CC by-nc-sa License

Orchestra Concert, by The People’s Orchestra (@ThePeoplesOrch)

After enjoying a couple of beers in a nearby pub we came back for the concert, and we were very lucky as we were able to take seats in the front row just behind the Orchestra director. We were entertained not only with the soundtracks of all the LotR and The Hobbit movies, but also with several other compositions from our vast geek popular culture. Both the orchestra and its conductor demonstrated an impressive quality and charisma, one could see the effort to please the audience.

The People’s Orchestra is a charity apart from a standard symphony orchestra. They provide professional musical training and even work opportunities for unemployed people. Impressive.

Grendel’s Mother and Tolkien’s Women, by Jane Chance (@janegalv)

The speaker was humorous and kind with the audience, taking into account she delivered the talk without any kind of visual support very early on Friday morning. As the recognized expert in the field that she is, Jane spoke clearly and concisely about the role of Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf. After that, she managed to link the topic with the attitude of Tolkien about women in his professional academical experience. The talk was interesting but I could not connect some dots on the spot, hopefully I will with the proceedings.

Pauline Diana Baynes - An artists inspiration, by Jay Johnstone (@jaystolkien)

After having met Jay in the Dealer’s Room and having enjoyed his own amazing pieces of art, I was curious about this talk. I expected him to explain not only his admiration for the artist but also his opinion as a passionate collector. I received what I expected, by far.

Pauline Baynes was a prolific and very special artist. She illustrated or contributed to more than 200 books, gaining international fame as the first illustrator and cover artist of some Tolkien minor works (Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major, …) and Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. As an example of masterpiece, the speaker showed us the illustration she did for a Nursery Rhymes book, in which she featured 56 different characters from the collected tales in one single page.

I learned in the talk that Pauline illustrated Farmer Giles of Ham by pure chance, according to Jay Tolkien was visiting his editors to complain about the artwork proposal he had received and luckily a sketchbook by Pauline was open over a table.

Jay showed us some less known drawings and we were amazed both with the artwork and Jay’s explanations during the entire hour. He clearly infected me with his passion, I entered the room knowing Pauline Baynes only a little and left as a new declared fan.

Artists in Middle-earth: illustrating The Lord of the Rings, by Marie Bretagnolle (@MarieBreta)

The abstract of the talk announced that Marie Bretagnolle was going to compare two of the most important British editions of The Lord of the Rings, also the only ones with commissioned illustrations inside. First the 1977 Folio Society edition, and the second by Alan Lee for the 1991-1992 Centenary edition.

Marie delivered a clear and interesting talk, comparing the illustrations in both works and analyzing the importance of each drawing depending on the location. For example, the artist needs to take into account that an illustration that appears before the passage that is portrayed can provide inspiration for some readers but it can also work as a small spoiler for others.

Maria is also to blame that I just spent a small fortune in the Folio Society website.

The source texts for Tove Jansson’s illustrations for The Hobbit, by Sonja Virta (@SonjaVirta)

Third talk in a row about illustration. This time the content was focused on the controversially illustrated Swedish edition of The Hobbit in 1962. It was (or is) controversial for the somewhat gloomy tone of the drawings but specially because Tove Jansson presented Gollum as a huge moster. The speaker explained her thorough research on the topic, and the influence that the first Swedish translation of 1947 could have had in Tove Jansson for the 1962 edition.

The Shape of Water in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, by Norbert Schürer

Another pleasant surprise, thanks to the good work of the speaker. Norbert explained with high detail the research he is doing about the influence of the water in Middle-earth. He started the paper after discovering that there was not a lot of scholar work about it, despite the water is omnipresent in The Lord of the Rings in all its forms/states: liquid, solid and gaseous. I’d add another shape to his list of occurrences: the absence of water. After all the tragic journey of Frodo and Sam towards Mount Doom, the absence of water is what finally makes them realize that there is no possible return.

The speaker described as well the taxonomy he is working on, based on the type of representation of the water in each moment: figurative, purely instrumental, only geographical and intentional. This is again a paper I will enjoy reading again once the proceedings are published.

Bilbo, Ulysses and the Greatness of the Unknown, by Gloria Larini

Bilbo and Ulysses, two great characters in two epic adventures. The speaker, taking advantage of her knowledge in Latin and Greek literature, compared both characters and how they embarked on their adventures. For example, both go for the unknown but the initial step is quite different. Ulysses has no choice but Bilbo on the contrary is suitable for the enterprise (at least according to Gandalf).

Another interesting difference between the stories is that Homer did not include the journeys in the narration, but Tolkien does.

Memory, Lore, Knowledge, by Thomas Honegger

Another quite interesting talk. The speaker explained the concepts, remarking the difference that Tolkien made among them. For example, regarding memory we can find live memory (Gandalf, Galadriel, …) and dormant memory (the ring verse, old Gondor lore). The main part of the talk was about the difference (almost opposition) between knowledge and lore. In Middle-earth, knowledge is perceived as negative (Saruman is the main representative) but Lore is usually positive (Ioreth, as the best example). Lore cannot be learned, it needs to be handed over or it will be lost. That is why knowledge can increase, but Lore can only decline.

The Hobbits and I: My Travels in Middle-earth, by Brian Sibley

I knew Brian Sibley since long time ago, what I didn’t knew (shame on me) is that he is still an active tolkienist and such a prolific writer recently.

This keynote was merely self-biographical, as Brian explained in a careful and detailed way his career and complete evolution. He focused first on his biggest hit, the 1981 BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings, to finish with his recent projects including the chronicles of the making and movie guides of the two trilogies by Peter Jackson, the awesome The Maps of Tolkien’s Middle-earth book with John Howe and even an authorized biography of Peter Jackson.

Brian Sibley showing the audience how he receive a book signed (and fixed) by Tolkien - CC by-nc-sa License

‘I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me’: Natural Growth in Writing The Lord of the Rings, by Christina Scull

Christina Scull gave a nice lecture about the creative process of Tolkien. The quote in the title is from Tolkien himself in one of the letters, in which he explained how his own understanding of the characters was changing along the writing process. No surprises here, being Tolkien a huge perfectionist and having spent writing The Lord of the Rings more than 10 years.

Listening to Christina was a delight but for those that did not attend, calm down as it won’t change much respect reading the paper yourselves.

Banquet

I don’t have much to say about the banquet, except that maybe in any hypothetical next event I will consider seriously not attending. We had a good time and it was fun, but it was due to my companions at the table. Being used to the STE gala dinners, I found this banquet insipid and uninteresting. I can live with only three brief toasts and no songs, but the self buffet format was annoying with some starting dinner while others had already finished… it was almost impossible to interact with people from other tables. On top of all this, it was absurdly expensive even for UK standards.

Anyway, I did like a gesture that I will try to copy in our Spanish association. During the banquet, probably the time with more people in the same place, they gave commemorative badges to those who have been members of the Tolkien Society for 10 (a splendid generation!) and 25 years. It is a recognition that is always welcome and appreciated.

Ten Years of Books in Tengwar, by Tsvetelina Krumova

Tsvetelina Krumova thinks that Tengwar should never be written by a machine, as it goes against its nature. According to this reasoning, that I fully share, she began 10 years ago to transcribe some books using Tengwar. She brought some copies to show us and the result is astonishing, even ignoring the infamous amount of hours this woman has spent writing. She also described how the activity itself of writing in Tengwar forces her to focus so much, that she is using this also as a kind of relaxing or meditation experience on a daily basis.

I took another important thought of this talk. Despite the amount of pages and studies that we have today it is still not possible to cook like the elves, to fight like them or it is not clear how could we dance like the elves did. But we can write exactly like the elves, even if we need to write Tengwar in English or Spanish. Food for thought!

One of the books written marvelously in Tengwar by Tsvetelina Krumova - CC by-nc-sa License

Taniquetil: A tale of two cities, by Denis Bridoux

I took some risk, choosing this talk instead of a Sword fighting showcase or a Dwarven Beard workshop, but now I know that I did right.

As Denis was researching on Tolkien’s Taniquetil drawing for the Aubusson tapestry, he realized that there was a mystery to solve in the drawing. At the foot of the Holy Mountain, next to the coast, there are two very very small cities, so small that people usually don’t notice them. Would they be Tirion and Alqualondë? The descriptions in The Silmarillion don’t match adequately with the drawing, despite the low level of detail.

It started to make more sense when he noticed that the watercolor drawing by Tolkien is dated in 1925 when he had already written most of what was published as The Book of Lost Tales (written in 1916-1919 according to the speaker) but not yet the main contents of the Quenta Noldorinwa (written in 1930). This could explain how the drawing depicts more clearly a book that was, in fact, published later.

An Archaeology of Hope and Despair in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, by John Whitmire

This lecture presented the research that John Whitmire is doing, with permission from the Tolkien Estate, using the still unpublished materials in the Tolkien Collection of the Marquette University. His study is about the use of Hope and Despair (as absence of hope) centered in the Characters of Aragorn and Arwen.

The lecture, that will also deserve a slow read in the proceedings, described how he organized the contents in different strata or layers during his research according to the known archaeological practice.

Stratum A is the tale “of Aragorn and Arwen” from the original manuscript
Stratum B1, B2, B3,… are the different revisions of the original manuscript
Stratum C is the fair copy of the tale after all the B revisions
Stratum D is a more refined version, where we find Ivorwen identifying Aragorn personally as hope and Elrond calling Aragorn directly Amir (that means hope)
etc.

The Dim Echo of the Catcher, by Nils Ivar Agøy

In this lecture Nils, that receive during the banquet a badge for belonging to the TS since 25 years ago, describes his research about the connections between Tolkien’s comments on the Nodens Celtic deity and his own legendarium. It is known that the Professor studied about this, to the point he wrote a paper about the name of the Nodens deity and probably traveled several times to the excavations. The speaker described some parallelisms and the presence in The Silmarillion of mentions to a catcher or hunter deity. Interesting read.

Tolkien and His Publishers, by Wayne Hammond

Wayne Hammond with his wife Christina Scull are a reference about Tolkien and his work. They have published several key books about the art of Tolkien in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (that I eagerly possess) and the most important Reader’s Companion and Companion and Guide.

The speaker shared part of this vast knowledge, this time focusing on the relationship of the Professor with his publishers and editors. He told some anecdotes in an entertaining way, including a couple about Tolkien being famous among the publishers for making very slow progress. It was really interesting hearing his comments about the economic negotiations, in which Tolkien apparently was very successful as it is clear now, specially for his heirs.

Illustrating Tolkien panel, by Shaun Gunner (@ShaunGunner) with Alan Lee (@AlanLee11225760), Anke Eißmann (@khorazir), Jenny Dolfen (@JennyDolfen), Ted Nasmith and Jay Johnstone (@jaystolkien)

This panel is another hardly repeatable thing that happened in Tolkien 2019. Only John Howe or the Hildebrandt Brothers could match them in quality and/or popularity. Shaun did a good job distributing his own questions and the ones from the public, so we could all enjoy an interesting session with genuine views and the most relevant opinions of the industry.

Tolkien and the Classics, by Claudio A. Testi with Tom Shippey and Thomas Honegger

Claudio Testi, with the help of Honegger and Shippey, presented a new collection of essays that explore the relationship between the Professor and Classic authors. As they explained, the goal is not always to find connections where there are none but to do the exercise just to assess the result, as is usual in comparative literature.

The collection is organized in three sections:

Tolkien and Authors from Antiquity
Tolkien and Authors from the Middle Ages
Tolkien and Authors from the Modern Period

Masquerade

The Masquerade itself was nice, with some great costumes and/or performances and the rest more or less fine. I have to say that the best part of the evening was during the interlude, when some organizers presented several performances. There were three of them, two portraying the Professor and another one about Sauron motivating his troops, that were hilarious. Sadly I don’t remember the names, sorry.

The parody of the BBC radio show Just a Minute was fine but maybe too long, but I understand that the format was perfect to allow waiting more or less time until the judges agreed the winners of the contest.

The result of the Masquerade contest is the least important thing, but I did not like that they gave prize to practically all but 2-3 participants. I don’t think it would have been very difficult to give 2-3 more prizes and a weird situation (at least for me) would have been avoided.

Geopolitics in Tolkien’s Works, by Lamont Colucci (@LamontColucci)

After reading Colucci’s bio I was curious about the talk. I have to say that my worst fears were fulfilled and in the end the talk was 75% a generic International Relations lecture with a not very subtle American imperialism tone, and 25% how geopolitics and strategy reflect in Tolkien’s works. He stressed that in Middle-earth wars are never won with magic, they are always won or lost with medieval style war tactics and strategies that apparently Tolkien understood and was able to articulate.

Colucci gave us interesting quotes like “as Americans we feel that we are Gondor, keeping other actors like The Shire in peace” followed by another statement about the willingness of the US to prevent Russian invasions to Sweden despite the Swedish do not want to belong to NATO.

Gandalf for President: the Politics of Tolkien, by Shaun Gunner (@ShaunGunner)

Second lecture of the day about politics, that also left me with bittersweet feelings. Shaun, current chair of the Tolkien Society, explained what could be the political inclination of Tolkien based on what we know about him and his context. Based on his research he claimed that Tolkien was in favor of the Scottish independent movement despite feeling proud of his country and idealizing England as The Shire. According to Shaun, the Professor was against all kinds of communism or imperialism, to the point that the idealistic Shire was a Benevolent Anarchy with the Thain acting just as a ceremonial figure without real authority.

The speaker also tried to explain why Tolkien is beloved by millions of people from the whole political spectrum. Related to this, he also said that the Tolkien Society was created in the sixties to claim Tolkien back from the hippies.

Power and Choice in the Second Age: A Political Primer, by Sarah Rachel Westvik

Luckily this third talk was not as opinionated as the two previous ones. The speaker, a student of International Relations, analyzed all the political context and tensions that we can see in the Second Age. She grouped the explanation in realms to cover Númenor, the Elven kingdoms (Lindon, Eregion and Greenwood), Mordor and the Ainur. Nice presentation from an eloquent speaker.

Five or Six Ponies?, by Jessica Yates

A plan of the house of Crickhollow, by Jessica Yates - CC by-nc-sa License

The premise of the talk was intriguing. In the 2004-2005 revision of The Lord of the Rings, the editors changed Merry’s line: “There are six ponies in a stable across the fields…” to “There are five ponies…”. The reasoning for the change was that the original six ponies were for five hobbits plus a pack-pony, assuming that when Tolkien reduced the number of adventurers to four, he forgot to alter that line. Apparently there has been some debate about this change, and Jessica researched as much as she could to solve the mystery.

As part of her research, Jessica draw (and shared copies with the audience) a plan of the house of Crickhollow. I won’t spoil the surprise, if you want to know the answer wait for the proceedings.

Tolkien, Folklore, and Foxes: a thoroughly vulpine talk in which there may be singing!, by Dr Dimitra Fimi (@Dr_Dimitra_Fimi)

Shippey’s was probably the best opening keynote and undoubtedly this was the perfect closing keynote. Dr Dimitra Fimi taught us and entertained us smartly and passionately.

The keynote started remembering the audience about the Rhyme of the Troll, the verses that Sam sung to the rest of the fellowship when they encountered Bilbo’s trolls. Dimitra didn’t just remind us about the song, she sang and encouraged the audience to sing, so we sung. It was fun and easy.

Then she reminded us that the rhyme is based on a traditional English folk song called The Fox. She encouraged the audience again, and the audience carried it out enthusiastically.

But obviously a folklore song was not written in our English. She researched further until she got the original lyrics in Middle English. As you can imagine Dimitra no longer had to ask us to sing, although this time not everyone could pronounce properly but that was not important. Try to imagine a room with 400-500 people of an average above 40 years singing in Middle English. We only lacked a beer in the hand.

There is no better way to finish this article than with a recording of Tolkien himself singing the Rhyme of the Troll. If you are still here, please enjoy:

“Rhyme of the Troll”

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by! Gum by!
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.

Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: ‘Pray, what is yon?
For it looks like the shin o’ my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin’ in graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin’ in graveyard.’

‘My lad,’ said Troll, ‘this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o’lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Thinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll,
For he don’t need his shinbone.’

Said Tom: ‘I don’t see why the likes o’ thee
Without axin’ leave should go makin’ free
With the shank or the shin o’ my father’s kin;
So hand the old bone over!
Rover! Trover!
Though dead he be, it belongs to he;
So hand the old bone over!’

‘For a couple o’ pins,’ says Troll, and grins,
‘I’ll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o’ fresh meat will go down sweet!
I’ll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now! See now!
I’m tired o’ gnawing old bones and skins;
I’ve a mind to dine on thee now.’

But just as he thought his dinner was caught,
He found his hands had hold of naught.
Before he could mind, Tom slipped behind
And gave him the boot to larn him.
Warn him! Darn him!
A bump o’ the boot on the seat, Tom thought,
Would be the way to larn him.

But harder than stone is the flesh and bone
Of a troll that sits in the hills alone.
As well set your boot to the mountain’s root,
For the seat of a troll don’t feel it.
Peel it! Heal it!
Old troll laughed, when he heard Tom groan.
And he knew his toes could feel it.

Tom’s leg is game, since home he came,
And his bootless foot is lasting lame;
But Troll don’t care, and he’s still there
With the bone he boned from its owner.
Doner! Boner!
Troll’s old seat is still the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner!

See you in the next Tolkien gathering!!

Greach 2019

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Greach 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

This week I could attend another fantastic Greach Conference, an international conference that in previous years was focused on the Apache Groovy language and ecosystem (Grails, Gradle, etc.) but this year has expanded the scope to other technologies related to the JVM like Micronaut, GraalVM, Spring Boot, Kotlin, Android, …

Greach is a non-profitable event held in Madrid since 2011 (I think I’ve missed only one edition). This year for the first time the organizers were Sergio del Amo y José Miguel Rodríguez, with some help from colleagues and a lot of sponsors.

TLDR; The conference was, as expected, great both in content and speakers. It’s a must for me, specially being held here in Madrid. This is still a Groovy lovers conference, but this year Micronaut was omnipresent. Some speakers also put the focus on GraalVM and Kotlin as technologies to follow closely. I will.

Let me summarize some of the talks I attended:

Talks

JVM Frameworks Keynote, by Andrés Almiray (@aalmiray)

Andrés gave an interesting overview of the JVM Frameworks ecosystem, starting with some history. He reminded us all when Struts was the king of the hill, and how it surrendered to Rails, Grails, etc. The microservices appeared and the frameworks evolved as well. Spring Boot has been the dominant player for a while but everything changed last year with the appearance of Micronaut. Others are following the same approach, like RedHat with Quarkus.

A perfect kick-off for a conference centered on frameworks.

Andrés Almiray with a microservices frameworks taxonomy - CC by-nc-sa License

Micronaut State of the Union, by Graeme Rocher (@graemerocher)

Graeme gave an overview of the features and roadmap for Micronaut. He highlighted several times that it is perfect for Microservices and serverless functions, but not only for them as it’s also suitable for bigger applications. The goal of Graeme and his team is to break the correlation between lines of code and startup time and resources consumption. He also emphasized their fight against reflection and the consequent reflective data caches, essential in other frameworks like Spring Boot, that have several inconveniences in performance and start up time.

He also explained why Micronaut behaves amazingly good with GraalVM, but clarified that they are mainly focused on the performance with the standard JVM that most people still use. He ended with an interesting live demo about the Bean Introspection API, released with the last 1.1 version.

Graeme Rocher explaining Java's problems for Frameworks - CC by-nc-sa License

Boosting your applications with distributed caches/datagrids, by Katia Aresti (@karesti)

Katia explained how Infinispan works as a cache or data grid, both as a library or as a external service, and how to configure it in distributed systems. With examples using Harry Potter (sometimes confusing) analogies she also explained concepts like redundant replication or consistent hashing. She finished with a demo using Infinispan, Eclipse Vert.X and Quarkus.

Reactive for the Impatient, by Mary Grygleski (@mgrygles)

Mary explained what reactive programming is and gave an overview of the the current Java options for this. She spent most of the time with the theoretical basics and terminology to finish with a quick overview of the main alternatives. I’d have preferred more details or examples in the last part, as I am already familiar with the basic concepts, but the talk was overall useful and interesting.

GraalVM with Groovy & Kotlin, by Alberto de Ávila (@alberto_deavila)

Alberto explained how to use GraalVM, the architecture basics (the GraalVM compiler, the Truffle API, etc.), and how to use Groovy and Kotlin with it. It was an interesting and well documented analysis, focusing on the current limitations and the potential benefits. It’s quite promising despite GraalVM is still far from being production ready.

Alberto de Ávila explains the GraalVM Architecture - CC by-nc-sa License

Accelerating CI, by Felipe Fernández (@felipefzdz)

Felipe’s talk was quite interesting. As a Gradle Enterprise developer he explained basic and advanced recommendations in order to achieve a faster and more reliable CI. He explained how to parallelize workers, how to design an effective pipeline structure and how to avoid maintenance waste in general. He ended with a couple of very good recommendations: measure everything and treat your CI as code, always.

Grails State of the Union, by Graeme Rocher (@graemerocher)

Another interesting status review of Grails by Graeme. This time it was focused on how Grails is already benefiting from Micronaut, and how to take advantage of those benefits using Grails. He encouraged all the Grails plugin developers to migrate them to Micronaut so they can be used not only from Grails but also in other use cases.

Graeme Rocher explains the differences between Micronaut and Grails - CC by-nc-sa License

What’s new in Asciidoctor, by Schalk Cronjé (@ysb33r)

My first choice on Saturday morning was to learn all the new things that Asciidoctor is introducing. Schalk explained clearly lots of new features, making everything much more simple and intuitive. Curiously, Schalk released during the conference version 2.0.0 of the Asciidoctor Gradle plugin, written entirely in Groovy.

I’m not using Asciidoctor enough lately and I regret it, as it’s fantastic.

What’s new in Gradle 5?, by Andrés Almiray (@aalmiray)

Andrés summarized all the new things that are coming with Gradle 5.0, highlighting Kotlin DSL 1.0 integration for those who are ready to use it. Gradle 5.0 will have better dependency management and several build performance improvements related to composite builds, build cache management and build scans. He even demoed some of the features, I specially liked how the Gradle build scans functionality looks like.

Creating Micronaut Configurations, by Iván López (@ilopmar)

This year Iván was not organizing the conference, he even had time to attend lots of talks, but he delivered as usual one of the most useful talks. He reviewed how Micronaut configurations work and explained in detail how to create a new one. There are several different options to extend the framework via configurations and looks quite easy.

(Automated) Security Testing in a DevOps world, by Kevin Wittek (@kiview)

This was one of the most interesting talks of the conference, at least for me. Kevin explained very clearly how to evolve from the traditional development pipeline to a more DevOps oriented one. Apart from some general recommendations he described all the possible security checks and validations that can be done, when and how to do them. He also created awareness about the lack of an open source reliable catalog of known vulnerabilities.

Kevin Wittek with a Linus Torvalds quote - CC by-nc-sa License

Micronaut performance, by Miguel Ángel García Gómez (@MiguelAngelGG82)

Miguel Ángel showed a comparison he made in terms of performance between the main microservice-oriented frameworks that we have now in the market: Micronaut, Spring Boot and Vert.x. He added a fourth option (Micronaut running on GraalVM) although he confessed that he could not measure everything properly with it due to the lack of compatibility between GraalVM and Prometheus.

He showed the audience the results of his benchmark. The overall winner is apparently Micronaut+GraalVM despite the uncertainty related to the lack of good measurements. Among the other three options, some of them are better in some tests, but none of them is clearly better. Perhaps with larger and/or more challenging benchmarks the degradation in any option(s) could make the difference.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s SDKMAN!, by Marco Vermeulen (@marc0der)

Marco, creator of this awesome SDK manager tool, explained the current status of SDKMAN and the next features. He also explained the architecture behind the project, and the main challenges it faces. He also made some very interesting comments about the initial decision to write it in bash to have only curl and zip as dependencies, and how he is now considering a rewrite in a different language.

How I Automated My Barn with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Mongo and the Cloud, by Todd Sharp (@recursivecodes)

My Greach conference ended with an interesting talk by Todd Sharp. He explained how he managed to create a complex combination of technologies to learn about them and also about some features of the Oracle Cloud offering. He lives in a small town and has a barn with a pig and some chickens, so he wanted to automatize as much as possible the repetitive tasks related to the barn. He started with some sensors and now he is in the way to not only read but also perform some actions like fill a water bowl, open/close the doors or detect predators in the surroundings.

He was very funny and, although the demo didn’t perfectly work and made him lose some time, he could explain the complexness of what he built and the technologies he learned in the process.

Todd Sharp explains the architecture of his barn automation project - CC by-nc-sa License

And that’s all. See you in Greach 2020 !!

FOSDEM 2019: Sunday

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My Saturday finished having a great dinner with friends and lots of laughs in one of our favorite restaurants in Brussels.

FOSDEM 2019 poster - CC BY-NC-SA License

As usual, my Sunday at FOSDEM started again very early. Lot’s of things to see in a complete set of new devrooms/tracks. This year I focused my second day in the Community and Geospatial devrooms.

Before continuing, if you want to read my summary of the previous day you can follow this link: FOSDEM 2019: Saturday. You will also find there general info and details about the event itself.

Again, I will summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

Supporting FOSS Community Members with Impostor Syndrome, by Sage Sharp

The purpose of the speaker was to share advice and tips about how to support people who experience impostor syndrome, focusing on people from underrepresented groups. Sage gave a quick introduction to the concept to go then directly to the topic. I received several good recommendations: normalize questions, how to give praise, what deserves praise, etc.

We have seen lately lots of talks about the syndrome itself, it’s quite good to hear about how to counter it efficiently. As the speaker said, we as technical and resourceful people, should be able to improve this.

Companies and Communities, Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?, by Deb Nicholson and Nithya Ruff

Companies and Communities have different systems of rewards and penalties. Companies focus on single minded views, and the alignment to the goals is rewarded. Communities focus on personal motivation, even if it’s something that is not profitable or even shippable in the short term. Companies fire people and people leave companies normally against the will of the employer, but in communities everyone leaves voluntarily and usually they can return happily.

Diversity is good in both worlds, to have it and to show it. The speakers gave a very good advice to companies, recommending to send diverse people also to events and conferences, not always the same group of people. Respect also is essential both to a Community norms or a Company culture, this could be enforced in both worlds with a good Code of Conduct.

Another very interesting and useful talk, describing the differences between these two worlds, and how can they benefit reciprocally.

The Open Source Community: its past and future, by Nick Vidal

Open Source is more than everything a continuum, it has been with us for more than 20 years now and it will hopefully stay around many more. In the last years we have celebrated the 20th and even 25th birthday of lots of projects: Debian, Redhat, FreeBSD, … The speaker summarized the history of Open Source, starting with its definition, highlighting the recent complicated stories in Redis or MongoDB.

The historical overview was great, but I particularly appreciated a message about Open Source being based on the gift economy, with gifts far beyond code like openness, freedom and community.

FOSDEM 2019 - Nick Vidal reviewing the Open Source history - CC by-nc-sa License

Continuous Integration to compile and test Navit, by Patrick Höhn

It was great to learn about Navit (a complete car navigation system with its own routing engine), but regardless the project itself the speaker gave great recommendations to improve the Infrastructure aspect of an Open Source project. Infra is usually a challenge in FOSS projects, as most contributors are interested in the project and not the infra part. Resources are needed to host any service, and those resources require funds.

There are several continuous integration platform that offer a free tier for FOSS projects, including platform specific tests and static code analysis. There are also good alternatives for Device Farming and GUI( testing frameworks.

Linking OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, by Edward Betts

One of my favorite talks of FOSDEM 2019, not only because the talk was clear and useful but also because the project behind is a perfect example of a pet project that becomes larger and larger as the main contributor starts discovering additional potential. The current status is awesome and the future looks even better.

Edward Betts has created OSM <–> Wikidata matcher, a powerful tool to link OpenStreetMap data with Wikidata articles (a Wikimedia tool with structured data). There are several benefits for doing this, being the main ones having labels in more languages, OSM data linked to more wikipedia articles and Wikimedia Commons. The tool is not fully automated to avoid false positives being linked, but the tool provides a great assistance.

As an active Supper Mapper and software engineer, I should start doing tools like this. Most of my edits in OSM are totally manual and for some use cases the impact is much more important when you automatize to make more efficient the time that you are contributing. In the short term, I will consider contributing as much as I can to this project.

GraphHopper Routing Engine - New Features, by Peter Karich

Peter gave a nice and clear presentation about GraphHopper, a powerful and fast Java library and web service for routing. The speaker explained the last improvements in the tool, as well as in the routing algorithms they use: Dijkstra, A*, Landmarks and Contraction Hierarchies. The talk included several demos calculating very quickly continental scale routes very fast and efficiently, including alternative routes.

Hikar - Augmented reality for hikers, by Nick Whitelegg

Another awesome project I discovered in FOSDEM. Nick explained the current status related to geospatial Augmented Reality (AR), tools are scarce and normally closed-source so he, as a developer and hiker, thought about a free tool to cover this gap: Hikar. It is an FOSS Android app aimed for outdoor and geographic AR, that overlays footpaths from OpenStreetMap on the camera feed and generates virtual signposts with relevant POIs around the user.

The talk described the technical complexities, the data related issues (elevation is critical) and problems related to the realism of the path and signpost placing. Very interesting and inspiring talk.

FOSDEM 2019 - Nick Whitelegg presenting Hikar - CC by-nc-sa License

Hundred thousand rides a day, by Ilya Zverev

I already attended and reviewed a talk by Ilya Zverev last year and I enjoyed it, and it was worthy again this year. Ilya explained how he is improving the routing algorithms of his current employer and at the same time he is detecting and fixing problems in OpenStreetMap. The main problem for OSM are sources, there are not so many (because of licensing problems) and they get old, so using only certain sources means that we are mapping the reality of yesterday instead of the world as of Today.

He created a set of tools to validate calculated routes, comparing them to the actual traject of the drivers. Using a basic code of colors is easy to check what streets are used in what direction, what turns are abnormally avoided, etc. With this tool, they can notice very fast changes like blocked roads with constructions or reversed streets (temporal or definitive). In order to have reliable data the tracks are as fresh as possible.

FOSDEM 2019 - Ilya Zverev with a visualization of gpx tracks in different colors depending on the angle - CC by-nc-sa License

He gave some ideas for himself or for others to start similar projects: checking highway classification, missing turn restrictions, speed limits, etc.

Open Source Geolocation, by Zeeshan Ali

Zeeshan explained the history of GeoClue, an open source geolocation service for GNU/Linux. The talk was focused on the main challenges they faced and how they addressed the privacy issues related to share the users’ location with other applications.

OpenStreetMap for emergency prep: The view from San Francisco, by Stefano Maffulli

Stefano moved to San Francisco some years ago with his wife, and they were scared about the next earthquake. The found there a lot of people with the same concerns and some organizations providing support for this. For example the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT), a group of civilians that take lessons from the fire fighters about how to spot and use water hydrants or police call boxes, to locate the nearest hospitals or schools, or to avoid places with hazardous materials like car repair shops, construction sites or gas stations.

They used OpenStreetMap as the base for emergency related preparations, as almost everything is mapped or can be mapped in OSM.They improved the map data related to the Emergency Response tasks using trained NERT volunteers, so they could even research the most and lest vulnerable neighborhoods in the city. They are now adding additional features related to other catastrophes like heat or cold waves.

FOSDEM 2019 - Stefano Maffulli presenting his OSM based project for emergency preparation - CC by-nc-sa License

Very interesting project, even for non preppers.

OpenTrailView 360, FOSS StreetView for hikers, by Nick Whitelegg

Nick again on stage to explain another interesting project, OpenTrailView 360 a FOSS StreetView application for hikers. He explained how the tool started in 2010, the problems he faced to gather proper images and how he resumed the project in 2013 when the Sphere pictures appeared in Android phones and this last version (OTV 360) born in 2018 after the appearance of affordable 360 degree cameras.

Nick explained the challenges he faced and the tools he could use from the FOSS community: Mapillary for street-level imagery, GeoJSON Path Finder for client-side in-browser routing, and Pannellum to display the panoramas in the browser. The demo that Nick showed us was very promising, another project to follow closely.

2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances, by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall

The closing keynote was delivered by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, a software and hardware freedom advocate, developer since 1969 and the current Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute.

2019 not only marks the 50th anniversary of Unix, but also the 50th of the ArpaNet/Internet and the Apollo 11 Moon landing. ‘maddog’ summarized the evolution of Unix, Linux and the Free Software movement in those 50 years in a hilarious but interesting way. A packed full Janson auditorium enjoyed the jokes a lot, so it was a great way to to compensate the sadness of leaving FOSDEM again.

FOSDEM 2019 - Jon 'maddog' Hall in the closing keynote - CC by-nc-sa License

And that’s all. See you in Brussels in 2020 for the 20th anniversary of FOSDEM!!

FOSDEM 2019: Saturday

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a week since I returned from another intense and thought-provoking weekend in Brussels, although it still feels like it was just yesterday. This year, apart from attending FOSDEM (as I intend to do every year) I took a very early flight on Friday to visit new (for me) places in the city. In just one day I visited the European Parliament Hemicycle, the House of European History, the Parlamentarium and the Museum of Natural Sciences. My most productive Friday in months, for sure.

FOSDEM 2019 poster - CC BY-NC-SA License

I already wrote about it in previous years:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2018: Saturday and Sunday

The numbers of this 2019 edition speak for themselves, improving all the figures from 2018:

more than 8,000 attendees in only two days
730 speakers in 788 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
63 tracks in 47 different rooms
more than 400 hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
65 stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, Python Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, OSI, the Eclipse Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, O’Reilly, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, VideoLAN, Mozilla, …

FOSDEM 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today?, by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler

Bradley and Karen are the President and the Executive Director respectively of Software Freedom Conservancy. They focused on people like themselves (and me) that seek to use only free software in our daily tasks, and the compromises that we sometimes need to do in order to achieve certain goals.

Karen explained her concern when she had to put herself an implantable defibrillator with proprietary code inside, with no access to the code even if the manufacturer somehow recognized that it could cause trouble for pregnant women because their algorithms were not properly tined for that situations. She had to suffer some unnecessary electrical shocks during her pregnancy and could not do anything about it. Another common example they gave is about modern websites that force the users to activate JavaScript in order to load in your device complete applications with proprietary software on it.

Some use cases for the general public have several free alternatives but for others there is no alternative so the users are forced to use privative applications. The main call to action of this keynote was for all the open source developers to re-think and re-prioritize our collaborations to close this gap and improve our general freedom.

This was a good opening keynote, although knowing very well the speakers since a long time ago I expected more explicit suggestions (or accusations).

FLOSS, the Internet and the Future, by Mitchell Baker

Mitchell, Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, insisted in her keynote on some of the key messages from the previous one. She explained how a handful of organizations (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) are a clear threat to privacy and openness despite having their core codebase full of FLOSS software.

She showed some of the projects that Mozilla is offering to increase the privacy rights of the users, for example the Facebook Container extension that isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of the web so they are not able to track you everywhere.

She also commented an experiment, trying to track every advertisement that appears in the web to see who is paying for that ad (someone is paying, always) and why this ad is being showed to you. Is it because I’m a man? Is it because of my age? Is it because of some specific behavior?

The keynote ended with some comments about the Addition Economy that rules the world in which we live and the effort that is still needed to fight against hate and violence in social networks. She explained how the rejection of those problems is part of the DNA of the FLOSS communities, and how we need to translate those values to the society using handy and attractive tools for users.

The classic OpenSUSE beer - CC by-nc-sa License

Blockchain: The Ethical Considerations, by Deb Nicholson

We hear a lot that Blockchain is the future but what kind of world do we want to see blockchain make? We no longer live in a world where we can forget or ignore the consequences and the social impact of our work. Deb explained some of the most controversial aspects of this technology:

Do the upsides (transparency, distributed control, etc.) compensate the downsides?
Will Blockchain just make the richest people richer?
If not all the contracting parties understand or can even read the contract… is it legitimate enough?
What will happen if a corporation or group of them owns the majority of the nodes?
Can we maintain this using just solar powered energy?

Mattermost’s Approach to Layered Extensibility in Open Source, by Corey Hulen

Corey, CTO and co-founder of Mattermost, explained how their platform enables extensibility by their users. He claimed that almost 100% of what you see in the UI is accessible via standard REST API calls. Another important aspect to enable extensibility is that the complete data model is open enabling easy load, extraction and manipulation. Client side customizations for the interfaces, extensible APIs, incoming and outgoing webhooks and powerful plugins.

I expected more architectural contents but the talk was clear and very detailed so I learned a couple of nice concepts anyway.

GDPR and the right to data portability, by Laurent Chemla

The right to data portability was intended as a way to enforce competition and to give back to the public some control over their personal data, but it fails in both situations. The regulation does not include a standard implementation or interface so everyone is dealing with this in a different way.

Some of the usual suspects (Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft among others) created in 2017 the Data Transfer Project (DTP) to create an open-source data portability platform, maybe it’s time for a public and central organization to take over the project in order to set it as a global standard.

Enough: How journalism can benefit from free software, by Veronika Nad

Enough is a set of tools, cloud-based or self-hosted, as well as a community composed of technical people and journalists to empower journalists and Human Rights Defenders when protecting their privacy and their sources.

It provides an easy to use platform for non technical people to securely share any kind of data, typically a leak for a global audience. It is linkable from other platforms to serve as a common source, making it possible for anyone to communicate (if needed) securely and confidentially with the source of the data leak. It also includes training contents to teach the participants how to use PGP, TOR, VPNs and similar stuff.

I will consider contributing to the platform, at least to improve the website they have using Hugo.

The clusterfuck hidden in the Kubernetes code base, by Kris Nova

I am not a Kubernetes expert but I learned a lot in this talk. The speaker explained in a pleasant and concise way all the anti-patterns that are present in the Kubernetes code base.

Java Language Futures, by Brian Goetz

Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explained in a fast but clear way all the new features that are coming to the Java Language. He briefly explained the new release cadence (releases every 6 months), project Amber, Valhalla, Loom or Panama to focus later into the details of some relevant improvements.

I want to highlight the enhancements in the switch (preview feature for v12), patten matching and value types.

OpenJDK Governing Board Q&A, by Mark Reinhold, Georges Saab, Doug Lea, John Duimovich and Andrew Haley

As usual in FOSDEM, the complete OpenJDK Governing Board offered themselves for an open Q&A session. Georges Saab (Chair, Oracle), John Duimovich (Vice Chair, IBM), Mark Reinhold (OpenJDK Lead, Oracle), Prof. Doug Lea (SUNY Oswego) and Andrew Haley (Red Hat) kindly answered all the questions from the audience.

I will summarize my Sunday experience in FOSDEM as soon as possible, but this article is already long enough to be published.

Stay tuned!!!

My Year 2018 in Games

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome again to this yearly post, where I try to analyze my gaming behavior during the previous year. I have been doing this since 2011 in Spanish, but this time I will do it in English as with the rest of my posts. You can read about my previous years (in Spanish):

Evolution of my game plays over the last years
	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	Total since 2006
Total amount of plays	101	84	98	84	81	117	161	1039
Different games played	61	72	55	71	52	81	80	397
Games with 2 or more plays (in the year)	14	9	15	13	14	19	40	175
Amount of gaming sessions	43	36	35	30	44	41	36	365

Games played per year until the end of 2018 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Analysis

In this yearly post I used to include a graph with the games played by month, but it turned more or less complex and meaningless as the trend was clear year by year. I tend to play more or less the same along the year with some peaks in the gaming conventions.
In 2018 I went back to the 2016 numbers in amount of plays, with a higher amount of different games played.
I’ve played 61 different games this year, 41 of them were totally new (to me). A very high proportion.
I recorded 43 gaming sessions, almost 4 per month.
Again, in 2018 I have zero hours recorded in the Steam platform. I miss it and I will give it some priority in 2019.
My h-index as a player is still at 11. Reading carefully the data, I expect to go up at least one level in the next period, as I have several games near the h-index frontier.

Retrospective

I still enjoy a lot playing boardgames, role playing games and video games so I will keep this as one of my main leisure activities for 2019
In January 2018 we finished Pandemic Legacy Season 1 the campaign we started back in 2016, but after that I haven’t played any other legacy game. I still love cooperative games and I would not reject starting one with a stable playing group, maybe the recently announced Journeys in the Middle Earth?
I am becoming addicted to escape room inspired board games. In 2018 I have played several Unlock! and Exit and for 2019 my goal is to play all the published games of those two families
I managed (with my party and DM) to maintain since March a monthly Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign, and I only missed one session because of a trip. That is very good news for me and for the entire group, we are enjoying it a lot so we will hopefully continue with the same frequency and passion.
I’m still eager to play prototypes, but since early 2018 I am no longer a member of Asociación Ludo. I was not involved at all so, although I miss some of my colleagues there, I decided to leave after realizing that the association does not benefit from me if I’m only providing economic support. I will consider returning when I’m capable of offering more :-(

My Year 2018 in Books

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2018 in Books from Goodreads:

I read 7,224 pages across 56 books, a 112% of my 50 books read in 2018 goal
The average length was 129 pages
My average rating was 3.7 (up to 5)
The longest book I read was Patria, by Fernando Aramburu

The amount of works is not very important (because some of the 56 are comics or short stories) but still 56 books means almost 5 books per month, that translates to one book per week approximately. Not bad, taking into account the other million things that I do (or intend to do) every week.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

I have included in the ranking three books by Juan Gómez Jurado, including the Top 1, so he deserves to be in the featured image of the post obtained from La Opinión de Málaga.

I’m currently reading El Emblema del Traidor also by Juan but when I finish it I will begin my 2019 reading again books by or about J.R.R. Tolkien. I miss it.

My TOP 10 read books in 2018

Reina Roja by Juan Gomez-Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (you can read my review here in the blog)
Patria by Fernando Aramburu (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (you can read my review in English in Goodreads)
El rayo que no cesa by Miguel Hernández (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Poeta en Nueva York by Federico García Lorca (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Espía de Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado
Ndura: Hijo de la selva by Javier Salazar Calle (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Contrato con Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado
Intemperie by Jesús Carrasco (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)

The German Romantische Strasse

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure to make again an awesome road trip with my friend Agatha, this time through the German Romantische Strasse. It is not the first (and most probably will not be the last) trip together, you can read about my trips with her through Scotland, Austria, Brittany or Normandy (and we have made a few more).

I’m adding the German adjective to the title because last year I also traveled through the Austrian Romantikstrasse. We discovered after that trip that a similar one existed in Germany, so it was about time to travel the german one at least to compare. For your information, there are similar routes in Japan, Korea and Brazil. I neither confirm nor deny that now I want to follow those as well (damn completism).

I really needed some holidays to disconnect (this year has been difficult and complex in several ways) and I love to travel in December through central Europe to feel their passion for the X-Mas season and the mulled wine or glühwein as they call it. Sadly we couldn’t plan a lot in advance (again) but we could at least prepare a draft planning of the places we wanted to visit in those eleven days. We planned (and booked) a couple of days for Dachau and Nuremberg at the beginning of the trip and some days in Munich at the end, 2-4 days depending on the required time for our main priority: The Romantische Strasse.

Map from the official website: 29 towns in 460 kilometers

In 11 days I drove 1.035 kilometers, we visited 20 towns/cities, I took almost 1.200 photos and we found 30 caches!!

Let me summarize our experience in the main stops of the trip. Let’s start!

Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site

After having visited Auschwitz and Mauthausen more or less recently, I was not as impressed as others can be with Dachau but that is only my bias, because Dachau Memorial clearly is worth of a visit.

The preserved part of the original camp is minimum, so the special attractive of Dachau for me was the permanent exhibition located in the former maintenance building, the biggest standing building from the original camp. The explanation about what Dachau was, how it worked and its role in the overall strategy of the Nazis is quite detailed and interesting. They were so proud of the (awful) results that they exported it to other concentration camps as the Dachau model.

At the end of the original concentration camp there are several religious temples of different religious faiths. Some of them were closed but in the end they mainly aim at religious people from that specific faith. Nothing to do with the spectacular memorials in Mauthausen, for example.

Dachau - Memorial sculpture by Nandor Glid erected in 1968

Nuremberg

We spent almost 1,5 days in Nuremberg, a wonderful place that exceeded my expectations (and they were high). Everything was invaded by tourists because of the seasonal stuff so we happily joined the flock and we walked calmly through all the X-Mas Market stalls, with special attention to the Glühwein ones. We walked a lot through the city center and I loved almost everything that we saw: the Henkersteg (Hangman’s Bridge), the Maxbrücke, the Ehekarussell, the Handwerkerhof (Craftmen’s Courtyard) and lots of other beautiful streets and buildings. The only locations that we visited properly were the Imperial Castle and the Toy Museum.

The Toy Museum would be interesting just for the fact of having an entire building packed full with toys (some of them new but mostly vintage). Children will enjoy it but also adults of all ages, going through several cabinets of what could have been their toys. One section was entitled for the evolution of the toy concept, where they emphasized the current phenomenon with children flooded by short-lived play stuff, often endangering their creative playing skills. An interesting thought that I mostly share.

The Imperial Castle is probably the main attraction in Nuremberg. As almost everything else it was vastly destroyed in the II World War but they successfully rebuilt the entire complex as it was before the war. The exhibition is quite interesting, combining clear explanations of the elements of the Castle in their historical context with information about the Holy Roman Empire and the role of the city in that late Middle Ages. I still raise my eyebrows remembering the visit to the Tiefer Brunnen (The Deep Well), you should not miss it.

Haupmarkt and the Frauenkirche of Nuremberg in X-Mas time

I loved to see Nuremberg in X-Mas but I will try to visit again in another season as there is a lot more to see.

Würzburg

In Würzburg we repeated the tactic. We arrived in the evening to see the city after dawn, and in the next morning we visited the main attraction: the Würzburg Residence, a clear masterwork of German Baroque.

Würzburg Residence main entrance

Here we found again some of the places closed (some of them closed for the entire winter) but in overall the town looked fantastic and also worth for another visit at least to see the Gardens and the Marienberg Fortress (that was closed for the entire Winter).

Tauberbischofsheim

After leaving Würzburg we made a quick stop in Tauberbischofsheim. We could just visit the Saint Martin church as the rest was closed for the winter, but the visit was worthy anyway. The medieval old town is fantastic and very well preserved, including an interesting Neo-Gothic town hall. We left after a quiet meal watching an intense rain fall through the windows.

Tauberbischofsheim Market Place panoramic

Bad Mergentheim

We left Bad Mergentheim after one evening and part of the next morning without been able to visit the Castle of the Teutonic Order and the Teutonic Order Museum but in overall it was again a nice visit because the old town was splendid, specially with the seasonal lights and stalls. The heavy rain continued so we had little more to do.

Weikersheim

Weikersheim was one of the biggest surprises of the trip. The old town was also cute, but I want to highlight the Weikersheim Castle, a fabulous Renaissance palace with Baroque gardens.

The 40 meters long Knights’ Hall at the Palace is the most astounding thing that I have seen in ages. It is dedicated to hunting and secret worlds, and any visitor will be amazed by dozens of life-size three-dimensional figures of wildlife animals made in painted stucco, mostly of those that could be hunted in the surroundings but also including exotic pieces like an elephant. The wooden ceiling is also entirely covered with pictures of hunting scenes mixed with local legends. A unique place.

Statue from the Dwarf Gallery in the Weikersheim Castle

We enjoyed a lot the Castle, if any of the other places that we found closed are similar the Romantische Strasse will clearly worth a second visit.

We also visited the Sternwarte Weikersheim Observatory, just in case it was open, but we were unlucky again.

Röttingen

Röttingen was another quick visit before lunch. Their well preserved medieval fortifications and old town deserved a visit. The Brattenstein Castle looked nice, it was closed but we could at least see that it also serves as a small open air theater. Another interesting place in seasons with better weather conditions.

We also discovered a sun-dial hike trail around the town, with a different type of sun-dial in each stop. Nice also for longer stays.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Rothenburg ob der Tauber was probably the town that I enjoyed the most from the entire Romantische Strasse. It does not have an iconic place (like a fine Palace or a landmark Castle) but the entire old town is somehow magical. The battlements that surround its huge medieval center can be traversed (and we did it) for a length of 2.5 km, allowing anyone to surround from the heights almost the complete perimeter.

We only visited one Museum out of pure curiosity, the German Christmas Museum. The Museum itself is interesting but not an unforgettable place, but the free-entry Christmas decoration shop behind (or around) it is completely amazing and singular. In fact, the Museum is inside this huge shop that belongs to a famous German company that sells Christmas decorations in several stores across Germany and in some other locations worldwide. This one is the head office and it is open all year long, claiming to have the world’s largest selection of traditional Christmas ornaments. It totally deserves a visit, if you are disciplined and you can resist the temptation to buy things like crazy.

During the highly advisable Night Watchman walking tour we heard some interesting stories. One of them caught my attention so I will summarize it for you, after having confirmed its authenticity. March 1945, II World War is about to end but some German soldiers are barricaded here taking advantage of the huge city wall. Lots of bombs are dropped killing dozens of people and destroying >300 buildings, several watchtowers and part of the wall. In that moment the U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, knowing (allegedly) about the beauty of Rothenburg orders to stop immediately the artillery attacks and gives three hours to a small group of American soldiers to negotiate the surrender of the town, or it will be bombed massively. At that moment in time Rothenburg was not as touristic as it is today and it was pure luck (almost miracle, according to the watchman) that the mother of Mr McCloy had a painting of the town at home that the Assistant Secretary of War had seen several times as a child, hearing wonderful stories about the place. The local Nazi commander, agreeing on the importance of preserving the city, betrayed Hitler’s direct orders and committed treason surrendering the city. Since November 1948 McCloy is also honorary citizen of Rothenburg.

The Watchman gave us also another thought provoking insight: Rothenburg was severely depopulated in the 17th century by the Thirty Years’ War and a bubonic plague outbreak and its economy was a mess during a couple of centuries. It was not until the end of the 19th century when several artists from the german Romanticism visited the place with the first tourists and some regulations were created to prevent major changes in the old town. In some way, as he told us thankfully, all the current economic wealth is thanks to a long lasting extreme poverty that preserved the 16th-17th century state.

I really need to stop writing about this place if I want to finish this chronicle, but before going to the next one let me show you the most picturesque, photographed and painted place in Rothenburg.

The most picturesque, photographed and painted place in Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Dinkelsbühl

We stopped at Dinkelsbühl during the lunch time, in order to eat something nice there and apparently we made a usual plan, according to the huge amount of restaurants that Dinkelsbühl has. After lunch we made a nice walking tour though the city center with some daylight surrounding the whole town center inside and outside the city wall.

There are interesting places to see/visit here like a 3rd Dimension Museum but my suggestion is to at least walk calmly through it, passing through some of the splendid gates of the wall: the Wörnitz gate, the Segringen gate, the Nördlingen gate or the Rothenburg gate to name the most beautiful ones.

One of the nicest streets in Dinkelsbühl

Nördlingen

We arrived in Nördlingen in the evening, so again we walked through it at night, to enjoy the seasonal decoration and the X-Mas Market delicacies, and we walked it again calmly in the following morning.

Again, as in Dinkelsbühl and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, this is the third fully walkable battlements that can be traversed (the only three in Germany) surrounding, in this case for more than 2.5 km, an almost perfectly preserved medieval town center. I suppose that reading this summary it all sounds quite similar but in reality each town had its own personality and touch, so our visits were not overlapping with the previous ones but adding a lot to a great overall experience.

The amazing battlements of Nördlingen

The city was built in the middle of a meteorite impact crater, so they have the the Rieskrater Museum dedicated to the crater explaining some geological facts. Another important museum in Nördlingen is the Bayerische Eisenbahnmuseum with more than one hundred original railway vehicles. We could not visit them but for a longer stay here they are quite interesting.

Augsburg

We spent the rest of the morning in Donauwörth (nice but nothing remarkable) to finally arrive in Augsburg again in the late afternoon.

Augsburg was for me, undoubtedly, one of the most special stages of the trip. The seasonal markets were again everywhere with a noticeable quality in the products and decorations, even in the Glühwein (I plead guilty of tasting them all) and the city itself is gloriously beautiful. Lots of buildings and scenes breath history through their doors and walls.

Again, we could not visit everything we wanted (for example the Mozart House, where the composer’s father Leopold was born and the musician visited several times) but the places we visited were amazing. The Maximilian Museum of decorative arts was remarkable, the Cathedral was nice but the most clear must see of the town is the Goldener Saal (Golden Hall) in the Town Hall, a >550 square meters hall with large murals and numerous ceiling paintings all of them richly adorned with golden frames and decoration. Astonishing. During the visit we learned that it was badly damaged during the II World War and it was renovated and redecorated between the 80s and 90s, according to historical photographs and blueprints.

In the shiny Goldener Saal (Golden Hall) of Augsburg

Landsberg am Lech

Landsberg am Lech was a last minute addition to our trip. We initially discarded it but we finally went there and we did not regret at all. It is a small town, with little to see apart from its nice streets but at least I wanted to visit in person a picturesque tower that is located there: the Mutterturm.

What we found was a lively town center with several people enjoying the X-Mas market delicacies (yes, lots of Glühwein again) that forced us to extend our stay. In our way back from the car, after putting a new parking ticket, a fabulous sunset with a bright rainbow totally surprised us. A perfect spot with the perfect timing.

Sunset panoramic of Landsberg am Lech, the rainbow appeared later

Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau Castles

The municipality of Schwangau would not be a stop on any route if it were not for the two wonders that it has in its touristic suburb of Hohenschwangau: the Hohenschwangau Castle and specially the Neuschwanstein Castle.

with the fabulous Neuschwanstein Castle behind

The Neuschwanstein Castle is one of those worldwide known locations capable itself of receiving millions of visitors from all around the globe. According to Wikipedia, more than 1.3 million people visit the castle annually making it one of the most visited places in the world. I’m not surprised, especially after having visited the Castle personally.

Visiting Neuschwanstein is a comfortable and amazing experience. Our german friends have managed to allow its thousands of daily visitors to enjoy the castle without queues, almost without big crowds and without being shoved. In order to do this you just need to book your ticket in advance for a very specific day and time (they claim that you will not be able to enter if you arrive slightly late), as the castle can only be visited with a guided tour that lasts about 40-45 minutes.

As an alternative, and that is what we did, you can always go to the official ticket center in Hohenschwangau to buy a ticket for any tour with available capacity for that the same day. We took the risk, arriving the ticket center almost an hour before the opening time, and the plan worked perfectly. With only a dozen of people in front of us (maybe a hundred behind when the doors opened) we were able to get the tickets we wanted for both castles at the most appropriate time slots for us.

But there are thousands of pages and books about the place and the logistics, so let me focus again in my experience there.

Neuschwanstein is the perfect climax for the Romantische Strasse. It is an incredible combination of the best architectural techniques and craftsmanship with the overflowing imagination of the most creative artists of that time. The overall theme are the operas of Richard Wagner based as well normally on medieval legends: The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan and Isolda or Parsifal among others. As you probably know the castle was commissioned (and paid out of his personal fortune) by King Ludwig II of Bavaria that was admirer and later friend and (so they say) even lover of Wagner himself.

I left the castle, after the non-stopping breathtaking tour, with the feeling that everything was perfectly located, designed, painted or illuminated, to the smallest detail. If at some point I become a millionaire, and that is difficult because I do not steal neither play any lottery, I think I will build a similar castle themed in fantastic genre legends. Dreams are cheap.

Bonus recommendation: Even if you hike to the castle don’t forget to go further up to the Marienbrücke, a spectacular steel bridge (originally made of wood) that crosses a huge gorge from where you will have the best perspective of the castle. The bus that takes you to the castle for non-hikers has its closest stop to the castle near the bridge.

Panoramic of the Neuschwanstein Castle as seen from Marienbrücke

Hohenschwangau Castle is a 19th century palace built by King Maximilian II of Bavaria, and childhood residence of his famous son King Ludwig II. According to the Wikipedia, Hohenschwangau has 300k visitors per year, far away from the astounding numbers of Neuschwanstein. It’s clearly not as spectacular but having visited the location it does not make sense to me that 75% of the visitors leave Hohenschwangau without visiting this second marvel.

Hohenschwangau Castle from below

You can also (and probably should) visit the Museum of the Bavarian Kings. It is nothing compared to the Castles but will give you more insights and an interesting context if you visit it before going to the Castles. Also, you don’t book any specific hour to see it so you can use any free time slot during the day to go, quite convenient.

Munich

I will be very brief, because this post is already too long and also because I am quite sure that I will go back sooner than later for a detailed visit because I loved the city.

The famous Town Hall of Munich surrounded by X-Mas

Munich, the famous capital of Bavaria, could not and did not disappoint us. It has a well deserved appreciation from tourists, and during the X-Mas it is perhaps more remarkable because it is one of the most popular Christmas destinations in the region, along with Nuremberg. Again, we could not visit some of the main attractions but visited some amazing places and we enjoyed ourselves strolling though its streets and X-Mas market stalls.

Upon arrival we visit the Nymphenburg Palace, a wonderful Baroque palace surrounded by a huge garden in which we could only see a corner. It was raining and sometimes snowing during our visit so the garden will probably be also my first visit if I go back again to Munich during the sunny part of the year.

The Palace served as Summer Residence for the Bavarian royal family for centuries, King Ludwig II was born there in August 1845. The visit is really worth it as you can enjoy several rooms and pavilions with lots of artworks and rich decoration. My favorite attraction there was the Gallerie of Beauties of King Ludwig I, a set of really nice portraits by the same painter (Joseph Karl Stieler) on behalf of the king to 36 beautiful women from all social classes of Munich. The audio guide described the best-known works with all the relevant context but a few others made me curious, maybe one day I will research more about it.

We also wanted to see at least one of the many important art galleries of the city, and I think it was a great choice to visit the Alte Pinakothek. The Old Picture Gallery name refers to the time period covered by the collection, as they also have the Neue Pinakothek nearby. I was amazed by many great painters, most of them new to me: Carl Spitzweg, Gabriel von Max, Walter Crane, David Wilkie, Ludwig Richter or Johan Christian Dahl to name just a few.

I could not remember all those names to the point that after visiting the museum I made the complete tour again very very quickly taking photos of the pictures and the inscription plates of my favorite ones to discover more at home. I made it walking very fast, almost running, so even a nice elder man stopped me to say: “see, they sell the collection catalog in the shop so you don’t need to picture everything and leave if you are in a hurry”, I explained him that it was my second round and that I was in love with the museum and we laughed for a while.

Bonus recommendation: Do not visit this museum without using the audio guide, it was one of the best ones I have ever used. Not only they described the masterworks, they did it with nice music along with the texts and sometimes mixed with stories that gave a complete new meaning to the picture. At least the one in English, I always use the English one as sometimes it is more carefully prepared or detailed.

The other remarkable and marvelous location that we visited was the Munich Residenz, the larges city palace in Germany where you can visit more than 130 rooms and pavilions. It is impressive not only because of the size but also because of the importance and beauty of the collection. Many things to highlight: The Hall of Antiquities, the Ancestral Gallery, the Grottenhof, the Royal Apartments, the Golden Hall,…

A complete panoramic of the Munich Residenz Antiquarium

As my twitter followers know (more details in this thread), we had an unspeakable amount of Glühwein during this trip. They served it always and everywhere in ceramic or crystal mugs, avoiding the usage of non re-usable cups that normally end up in the floor or overflowing trash cans. They charged a 3-4 € deposit so you were also free to keep it as a souvenir. Furthermore, in each town (and in the bigger towns even in each market stall) they served the mulled wine in a different mug, some of them nicer than others. We were tempted to keep all of them, but it was not scalable (neither in money nor in luggage requirements) so finally I just kept three from my favorite towns of the trip: Nuremberg, Augsburg and Munich:

Three Glühwein mugs from my favorite towns of the trip: Nuremberg, Augsburg and Munich

And that is all!! I hope that you enjoyed the guide!

Featuring my new Travel Curriculum Vitae

Sun, 26 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was eager to introduce this section on this site for a long time, after seeing it on my favorite travel blog: Dendarii.es, written by my dearest Yami. Yes, it’s about travels since I enjoy more and more traveling and reviewing my trips.

My Curriculum Vitae as a traveler contains two main parts:

A Leaflet map with all my visited countries with a link to the review that I could have written here in the blog.
A chronological list of all the trips that I have made (as far as I remember)

Looks like I’ve visited 18 out of 193 countries (among those recognized by United Nations), almost all of them in Europe. Looks like the time has come to expand the range of my trips.

Copying the model in dendarii.es to this blog took about 10 minutes. Updating it with my trips took a few hours (researching in calendars, several digital photo albums and even Google Maps Timeline) but the greatest effort (at least in time) has been the aesthetic redesign. I could have left the styles as they were but I’m happy with the result.

I hope you like it, you will always find a link to it in the header.

Scotland: a brief opinionated guide

Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure to make an awesome road trip through Scotland with my friend Agatha, my travel companion lately. You can read about our trips together through Austria, Brittany or Normandy.

It was my second time in Scotland, after a great trip three years ago to visit mainly Edinburgh. So, this time the Scottish capital was discarded as a destination and the goal was to visit as much as possible of the rest of this beautiful country.

In six days we drove around a thousand miles and hiked almost 40 kilometers, without taking into account the countless walks through cities and towns. And we found more than 25 caches!!

What to expect from this guide

Again (and it’s starting to be an issue) we had to prepare the trip in just a few days. Some places were more or less familiar to me and for years I’ve had a terrible desire to visit the Isle of Skye, but apart from that all the initial research was full of positive surprises.

Let me show you the initial map of Scotland must visit destinations prepared by Agatha, except the Isle of Skye prepared by myself. Sadly we couldn’t visit all of those places because we decided to do as much hiking as possible and we took it very easy in general, but we managed to visit almost all of them.

Map with the main places to visit in Scotland, mainly prepared by Agatha

Let’s start!

Day 1: Loch Lomond National Park, Puck’s Glen & Oban

We landed at Glasgow International Airport very very soon to make the most out of the first day. We lost some of this advantage struggling with the car rental company. In the end the experience with them was OK but it started horribly bad. They gave us a car smaller than expected (and booked, and payed) but at least it had automatic transmission and in the end it was comfortable enough for two and very appropriate and comfortable to drive on normally one lane roads.

Our tiny Huyndai i10 - CC BY-NC-SA

Our first destination was Balloch, on the southern shore of the beautiful Loch Lomond, the largest inland stretch of water in Great Britain by surface area. We visited the castle gardens and walked through the main road (including our first beers of the trip, mine without alcohol). Balloch is a popular destination because lots of ferries leave from there to navigate the lake. The only ship that we boarded was The Maid of the Loch, a beautiful paddle steamer (the last to be built in Britain) that is coupled to the pier and serves nowadays as a cafeteria. Apparently is being restored by a charity whose aim is to return her into operation again.

The next stop was Luss, a touristic small town a few kilometers up the lake shore. The center of the town was very beautiful, specially the surroundings of the Parish church, but there was a disproportionate amount of tourists. Before leaving we had a nice lunch in a quaint restaurant, including the best chicken chipotle wrap that I’ve ever eaten. Seriously.

After another nice drive through a marvelous countryside we arrived to the starting point of Puck’s Glen, probably the most beautiful walking trail that I’ve seen. Puck’s Glen is amazing, the pictures cannot capture the atmosphere in the whole place. Looks like it’s named after the character of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream and it surely resembles a fantastic dream: huge trees, dense forests, breathtaking viewpoints, uncountable water streams, picturesque water falls, steep ravines,… The hike is not very long and it’s easy to follow so you should not miss it if you come near the area.

Puck's Glen, a real midsummer night's dream - CC BY-NC-SA

We finished our first stage near Oban, a beautiful resort town surrounding a nice bay. It has a curious monument on top of a hill, McCraig’s Tower, and lots of restaurants and hotels. Despite this, we chose a promising Bed and Breakfast in a town nearby.

A nice panoramic of Oban, with a blue McCraig's Tower on top - CC BY-NC-SA

Bonus recommendation: the Grove House Bed and Breakfast exceeded all our expectations. They were extremely nice with us (including waiting until late for the check-in), giving us two rooms for the same price so we could sleep more comfortably. In the morning I took one my favorite breakfasts in the UK: smoked herring grilled.

Day 2: Beinn Lora, Glen Coe, Loch Ness & Eilean Donan

After the energetic breakfast, the first thing we did was another small hike, the Eagle’s Eyrie walk in Beinn Lora. The path had been recently improved by the logging company that exploits the area and it was very beautiful and interesting. Not so many days before everything was covered by huge trees but when we were visited only some remaining lumber and stumps were there. In some stumps we counted more than 60 rings, the entire area produced mixed feelings of sadness and beauty. Very curious, after all.

Beinn Lora, nature alive and dead at the same time - CC BY-NC-SA

Some kilometers up north we arrived the main attraction of the day: the Glen Coe National Natural Reserve, one of the most popular Natural Reserves in the UK. We visited the Meeting of the Three Waters and the Three Sisters, totally different things but separated by less than 1 kilometer. Despite the light rain, we decided to start climbing the Bidean nam Bian mountain massif to reach the Coire Gabhail, also known as Lost Valley or Hidden Valley because in order to reach this glacier formed marvel you need to climb 230 meters through a steep path. The ascension was fantastic and beautiful, but also very long and quite adventurous because the rain became more intense and the path was steep and wet. We were always safe but we ended up very tired and soaked after almost 5 hours under the heavy rain. It was totally worth it, anyway.

Soaked but happy, entering the Lost Valley at Glen Coe - CC BY-NC-SA

After a well deserved lunch at the Boots Bar in the Clachaig Inn, we decided to spend the evening with more relaxed visits, the first of them to Fort Augustus, a small village in the south west end of Loch Ness. It is very popular for tourists but the main attraction is the lake itself. We took the car again to reach the ruins of Urquhart Castle, but it was closed already so we couldn’t even enter. I visited it in my previous trip to Scotland, but at least Agatha could see the ruins with the lake behind and Nessie diving somewhere..

The rain continued and the sunset was approaching, so for the rest of our evening we left a quick stop at the Eilean Donan Castle. The castle has an interesting history but it’s private and it was closed, so we just crossed the bridge and walked around it calmly to enjoy the place as we were completely alone.

The majestic Eilean Donan Castle - CC BY-NC-SA

Day 3: Isle of Skye

We visited some of the main landmarks and popular hikes in the Isle of Skye. The fields in some areas were more brown than green, but the place is marvelous anyway. I want to go back, nut with more time and a mobile home.

Our first stop was to climb to the Old Man of Storr, a picturesque 28 meters high pinnacle surrounded by similar rock structures. Compared to the previous days with the entire paths for us, in this route we met many more people. The parking site was packed full, even in the shoulders of the road, and the complete path was full of people going up and down. Nevertheless, the climb is beautiful and not very hard, so it’s a strong recommendation.

A small lagoon beside the Old Man of Storr, with the sea behind - CC BY-NC-SA

After lunch, we make a quick stop to see the Mealt Falls, the Loch Mealt overflowing to the sea almost directly on a cliff. Interesting.

Our next stop was poorly planned and fatally executed, everything because of me. There are several ways to visit The Quiraing and I choose the worst one starting with the most difficult part, a very steep ascension with lots of mud and puddles. The idea was that the rest of the way would be to descend from there, but the path was not easy even after having passed the worst slopes. A Storm suddenly appeared, we had only a few hours of light and we didn’t risk it. After going down to the parking lot, attempting the shortest and easiest path to The Quiraing was not appealing so we went to the next stop.

Fairy Glen is a special and curious place to visit. It’s a small area formed by small magical hills eroded in spiral-ish waves. To the natural attractive the locals have added more spirals in the ground made with stones and towers of stone in equilibrium.

The magical hills of Fairy Glen - CC BY-NC-SA

After a long drive we arrived before the sunset to the Neis Point, the most westerly point of the Isle. There is a beautiful walk from the car park to the lighthouse, including an interesting ascension to a small summit where you can (supposedly) see whales, dolphins and sharks. But you don’t need to climb anything to enjoy a spectacular sunset from almost anywhere in the point. You should go there definitely.

The walk to the lighthouse at Neis Point - CC BY-NC-SA

As we couldn’t book anything more or less affordable in the entire area, we changed our plans and decided to drive a couple of hours after dinner to sleep closer to our next destination outside of Skye instead of spending one additional day around there. We probably made a mistake because with the hotel booked far far away and just after starting the trip, it began to rain torrentially. Our GPS’s two hours estimation was transformed into almost 4 hours driving under the rain, at night, mostly through 1-lane roads and after a long day driving and hiking. But we arrived, luckily without running over any wild animal.

Bonus recommendation: Near the Rubha nam Brathairean on our way to The Quiraing we ate in the Skye Pie Cafe, a cute place with a vegetarian friendly menu that serves mainly pies of spectacular flavors based on local products, including some sweet pies for dessert.

Day 4: Corrieshalloch Gorge, Rogie Falls, Cromatry, Fortrose & Inverness

After a nice breakfast we started again very early our day. Lots of things to see!!

The first stop was a quick visit to the Corrieshalloch Gorge, a spectacular 1.5km long and 60 meters deep gorge with a huge waterfall and a bridge that only supports the weight of 6 people. We suffered a fun moment being there making pictures with other 5 adults when a family with a big dog appeared at the other end :-)

A curious 'dancing' bridge to cross the Corrieshalloch Gorge - CC BY-NC-SA

A few kilometers later we stopped for another short forest walk to visit the Rogie Falls, a series of waterfalls that we could enjoy almost for ourselves. We enjoyed it so much that we had time to make funny pictures while looking for a cache.

Taking a nap in Rogie Falls - CC BY-NC-SA

Three more stops: Cromatry, an interesting small village with a nice port; the Fortrose Cathedral, a half-ruined cathedral build primarily with red sandstone; and the Channonry Point, a spit of land near Fortrose that is very popular because from there you can spot bottlenose dolphins, porpoises and grey seals.

And finally we arrived to Inverness, the capital of the Scottish Highlands. We spent the rest of the day there, looking for caches, walking around and enjoying the pubs. According to Wikipedia Inverness is one of Europe’s fastest growing cities, and it’s ranked very high in quality of life and happiest place in the entire UK, but I didn’t feel any of this. Anyway, it can be a special place to live but IMHO it’s not so special for a tourist. The castle and the town hall are nice but I would not have minded having skipped this stop.

Sleeping in the worst hotel that I remember did not improve my general feeling about Inverness.

Day 5: Cawdor Castle, Glenfiddich distillery, Cairngorms National Park & Pilotchry

Our first day started with a nice visit to Cawdor Castle, a private castle that can be partially visited. It contains a nice collection of art and it’s richly decorated but what I loved most was the gardens. They even had a garden maze, but sadly the path to the interior of the maze was closed.

The gardens of Cawdor Castle, with the main building behind - CC BY-NC-SA

Neither Agatha nor I are big whiskey fans, but we did not want to leave Scotland without stopping in a distillery and we chose one of the most famous: Glenfiddich Distillery. I tried to convince her to go to Laphroaig distillery but it’s far away from everything else so I accepted the change.

Glenfiddich has a huge distillery in Dufftown, they offer all kind of tours and most of the tours include a whiskey tasting at the end. For the designated drivers they offered a small bottle of Glenfiddich 15 to make the tasting at home.

The visit was interesting, after having visited some distilleries and several beer breweries what I needed was to learn something new or different related to the process. This time I learned that the shape of the swan necked copper stills affects the flavor, character and strength of the resulting whiskey. Brilliant, right?

The beautiful copper stills of the Glenfiddich Distillery - CC BY-NC-SA

We considered visiting also the Strathisla Distillery in Keith as the oldest continuously operating distillery in Scotland, but we decided to start going south to spend the afternoon in the Cairngorms National Park.

After some research in the copilot seat Agatha chose the Loch an Eilein hike, a beautiful 7-8 kilometer walk around the said Loch. The entire route is astounding, including an idyllic view of a small island near the shore with an ruined castle. The best part was that we were almost alone in the entire area, more silence and quietness is impossible.

Calmly enjoying the Loch an Eilein - CC BY-NC-SA

We finished our day with another short walk to view the Falls of Bruar just before sunset and a nice dinner in Pilotchry, one of the most touristic towns in the area.

Bonus recommendation: Although they made a mistake in the order and they took almost an hour to serve us our dinner, you should consider visiting McKays, a lively pub, hotel and restaurant with live music and nice decoration. We were seated in a saloon with the ceiling full of golf clubs and golf-themed pictures on the walls. We had dinner in front of Ballesteros and Olazabal :-)

Day 6: Killin, Trossachs, Doune Castle, Stirling & Glasgow

Our first visit, near our hotel with views to Loch Earn, was to see the Falls of Dochart. These broad falls are formed at the junction of two rivers, just beside an old stone bridge at the entrance of Killin. Quite a spectacular view.

Panoramic of the Falls of Dochart, in Killin - CC BY-NC-SA

Also spectacular was to drive through the Great Trossachs Forest and the Duke’s Pass. For my next visit I must spend more time in this area.

After a quick shopping stop and ordinary lunch in Aberfoyle we arrived to another of the places I wanted to go since my last trip to Scotland: the Doune Castle, a medieval stronghold that is famous because several scenes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail were filmed there.

As a huge fan of Monty Python I was curious about the place, and specially (I recognize it) about the merchandising that they could sell in the castle shop. We finally didn’t visit the interior of the castle to have more time in Stirling, and the merchandising in the shop was a bit limited (a few t-shirts, mugs and books) but the visit was worth it because Doune is close to Stirling so we didn’t spend a lot of time.

Emulating King Arthur, at Doune Castle - CC BY-NC-SA

We arrived to the Stirling Castle with the full afternoon available to enjoy it calmly. It remind me (no surprises here) to the Edinburgh Castle and during our visit with the audio guide I tried to compare what I remembered from the other one. We could visit the place with less tourists that expected so it was more or less quick so we also spent some time walking through the Stirling town to grab a fantastic multi-cache with interesting stops: the Old Grammar School, Argyll’s Lodging, Mar’s Wark, the Church of the Holy Rude, the Old Town Jail or the Merkat Cross.

The day was cloudy, and from the castle the views of the National Wallace Monument were astonishing, even more than from behind the monument itself.

Views from Stirling Castle, with the Wallace Monument in the background - CC BY-NC-SA

After enjoying Stirling, we arrived with the last sun rays to Glasgow. We walked the downtown, surprised by the huge amount of bars and restaurants. We knew that Glasgow had a good atmosphere but it seemed disproportionate to us in a positive way.

But our flight was scheduled to take off very very early, so to avoid last minute issues and traffic jams we returned the car and booked a hotel beside the airport. Next time I’ll consider spending a full evening in Glasgow if I fly there.

I hope that you enjoyed the guide!

Greach 2018

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Greach 2018 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Some days ago I attended as usual to the fantastic Greach Conference, an international conference about the Apache Groovy language and ecosystem: Groovy, Grails, Gradle and a lot other things. Greach is held each year in Madrid but everything is in English, and nowadays it’s surely one of the Top worldwide events about this technologies.

Greach is a non-profitable event organized by Iván López (@ilopar) and Alberto Vilches (@albertovilches), with some help from colleagues and a lot of sponsors.

TLDR; The conference content and speakers were great, in addition to the logistics. I couldn’t attend the workshop day (my fault), and it was a pity specially because this year I had paid for it. Apart from learning (as usual), this year was specially exciting with the worldwide announcement of Micronaut.

Let me summarize some of the talks I attended:

Talks

Groovy Keynote: 2.5+ Roadmap, by Paul King (@paulk_asert)

Paul King, Groovy Technical Lead at OCI, gave a good overview on the status and roadmap of the Apache Groovy language. Paul summarized the features announced for Groovy 2.5 (GA expected Q2 2018) and Groovy 2.6 / 3.0 (RC end of 2018). Apart from more (and better) AST transformations, Groovy 2.6 / 3.0 version will come with the brand new Parrot parser that brings several improvements and better Java syntax support for a lot of use cases.

Building DSL using Groovy, by Puneet Behl (@puneetbhl)

Puneet, Software Engineer at OCI, started with a brief introduction to DSLs, for those who are not familiar with them. He focused on the advantages of the DSLs in some use cases, allowing the Domain experts to help, validate and even code DSL expressions. After that, he showed with some examples how to create a DSL language with Groovy. The talk was nice but probably he could’ve made the assumption that everyone in Greach knows Groovy basics or what a DSL is.

I’ve seen Grails code you wouldn’t believe…, by Iván López (@ilopmar)

Iván made, as usual, a well prepared an amusing talk about some mistakes that he has seen in the recent months in several Groovy projects. Names were changed and the code was partially blurred but it was clear enough to recognize the errors. Most of them were obvious and could have been detected with any static code analysis tool (like CodeNARC) but in other examples the static analysis is not enough and someone needs to read the code and think about what is written. That’s why the main recommendation that Iván gave for this kind of errors is the proper usage of Code Reviews with other peers.

Groovy GString magic, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen (@JacobAae)

I wasn’t sure if Jacob’s talk was going to be too basic, but knowing the speaker from other conferences I was confident that I could learn something. I was right in both assumptions, the talk was a complete review of the GString class in Groovy covering all the basic usages and the differences with the Java String class, the template engines, and the main caveats but the speaker also gave several interesting tips and tricks, and I didn’t knew all of them. It was specially nice the stripIndent method.

From Functions to Monadic Style, by Dierk König (@mittie)

Dierk’s talk was mainly a live coding session. He performed an interesting exercise, typical in functional programming workshops, but with the twist of adding specific rules to the exercise in an incremental way as in a coding kata. The talk was very interesting and sometimes amusing starting with an hilarious statement: “As soon as you have understood monads, you immediately lose the ability to explain it!”.

. @mittie admitted that he's a Groovy-holic#greach18 pic.twitter.com/XRD1axwZRa
— Greach (@greachconf) March 16, 2018

Mapping a tree with Grails, by Sergio del Amo (@sdelamo)

Sergio gave a complete talk reviewing the tree data structure, commenting some use cases in which to use it and also comparing several different implementations of a data structure in Groovy: Adjacency lists, path enumeration, nested sets and closure tables. He remarked that the right design and implementation depends on the use case, if you normally need to query the leafs or an entire subtree, if the tree is mostly static or its subject to lots of insertions, etc.

Sergio del Amo at Greach 2018 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Reactive All The Way Down with Ratpack, Groovy, RxJava, React, and RabbitMQ, by Steve Pember (@svpember)

This talk was also very complete, describing the advantages of a reactive environment, the anatomy of a reactive service and how to make the main technology choices to build a proper Reactive application. Among all the advantages described by Steve I’ll highlight the optimized usage of resources, the reduction of synchronous communications and the increase of error protection due to have more decoupled and independent systems.

Another hilarious moment for me came when Steve described as a reason to keep using RabbitMQ that “you don’t mind being looked down upon by Kafka fans”. Not related to this, but in my company we are precisely replacing RabbitMQ with Apache Kafka everywhere.

Launching the Micro Future: Groovy, Grails and MicroNaut, by Graeme Rocher (@graemerocher)

Iván López warned us about this talk and it was much more that what I expected. Graeme Rocher made the worldwide presentation of MicroNaut, an ultra-light cloud native reactive framework for the JVM. It’ll be compatible with Groovy and Java, but also with other languages of the JVM like Kotlin. The first milestones will be released by Q2 2018 and the GA version is expected by the end of the year.

Hello #greach18 conf attendees! It's here! It's here! It's finally here! https://t.co/lt3Bglsb90 pic.twitter.com/iGbUZMn0gO
— The Micronaut Framework (@micronautfw) March 16, 2018

Graeme and the rest of the OCI people have been working on this since at least 1.5 years ago. They released Grails ten years ago, so they have all our confidence and respect. The premise is that Grails, and Spring of course, were not designed for a microservices world. They come from an era without most of the things that are common nowadays: microservices, without containers,…

Some quick hints about MicroNaut:

It is designed from scratch with Microservices in mind
It’s ultra-light weight (Grame shared some amazing numbers) and reactive (it’s based on Netty)
- Can be run with as little as 10Mb Max Heap for Java (24MB for Groovy)
- Start-up time is below a second for Java (1 second for Groovy)
Compatible with any Reactive Streams implementation: RxJava 2.x, Reactor 3.x, Akka,…
Integrates AOP and compile time dependency injection (and this implies a lot, great topic to talk about), so no reflection and no runtime proxies
It’s both HTTP client and server
Service Discovery: Consul and Eureka are supported, Route 53 planned
Client Side Load Balancing: Integrated with Netflix Ribbon
Support for serverless computing via AWS Lambda
Developed via the annotations from Java and the powerful AST transformations from Groovy.

Graeme also commented the roadmap of Grails (4.0 version in Q4 2018). We were all just too excited with MicroNaut but he confirmed that OCI will still evolve Grails (with MicroNaut integration), and that’s good news for everyone.

Getting right to it, @graemerocher shows off some cool stuff that @micronautfw can do with a demo @greachconf! #micronautfw #grailsfw #groovylang #greach18 pic.twitter.com/laViV7iJ0s
— Object Computing (@ObjectComputing) March 16, 2018

Reactive Microservices with MicroNaut, by Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal (@alvaro_sanchez)

This was my first talk of the Saturday at Greach. After the hype with MicroNaut in the previous day, the room was packed full to hear more details about the new framework from Álvaro. Álvaro made a detailed technical explanation about MicroNaut, comparing some of the decisions to the ones with Spring/Grails.

He also made a live demo testing some of the capabilities: service discovery, load balancing, reactive and fault tolerant. He showed a demo project that will be released with the framework: a pet store composed with several microservices built in different technologies (Java and Groovy) and each of them connected to a different backend (PostgreSQL, Redis, Cassandra, Neo4J, etc.).

Álvaro Sánchez Mariscal at Greach 2018 - CC BY-NC-SA License

GORM Reloaded – Data Services for the Win, by Graeme Rocher (@graemerocher)

Graeme gave another very good talk, this time about GORM Data Services. He explained a lot of improvements, mainly related to joins and multi-tenancy. It was very interesting, now in my project we are analyzing the approach for a bunch of multi-tenant data bases and the talk gave me some ideas. He offered two distinct modes to tackle the multi-tenancy problems: data partitioning and isolating connections/sessions. GORM supports both approaches perfectly.

I saw a lot of powerful features behind GORM Data Services, improving the performance and code maintenance, and simplifying amazingly the multi-tenant application development.

101 scripts that can save you the day, by Jorge Aguilera (@jagedn) and Miguel Ángel Rueda (@MiguelRuGa)

Jorge and Miguel Ángel offered a funny theatrical performance to show the advantages of their project (101 Scripts) offering dozens of very useful scripts made in Groovy for a lot of common tasks. I had already reviewed the project page (baked with JBake, my previous static site generator) and some of the scripts and I loved it. I hope I’d be able to contribute in the future, at least with some translations.

Surviving in a Microservices Environment, by Steve Pember (@svpember)

My last choice in Greach 2018 was to listen again to Steve Pember. This talk was focused on the technical and not technical choices and challenges in a microservices environment. Steve put the emphasis on three main topics (and I agree with him): infrastructure, architecture and team communication. He provided a valuable vision on this, with some useful insights. I’ll highlight one of them, related to team communication.

He reminded the audience Conway’s Law, with the assumption from his side (and I totally agree) that it’s completely real. If a company is not able to integrate all the required capabilities in its squads, it’ll be doomed to have knowledge silos and complex dependencies everywhere.

organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — M. Conway

Steve Pember at Greach 2018 - CC BY-NC-SA License

And that’s all. See you in Greach 2019!!

Travels With Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Travels with Charley: In Search of America is mainly what they call a travelogue o travel literature. It’s not the first time that I read one and I’m starting to enjoy the genre. I added this one to my want to read in Goodreads a long time ago after reading some hilarious paragraphs during a couple of English lessons, and the rest of the book had not disappointed me at all.

John Steinbeck and Charley

In 1960, a 58 years old John Steinbeck bought a small camper to drive around the United States with his dog (Charley). He called the camper Rocinante (here you have a picture of it), the perfect name for a saddle in which to go on adventures. He said before the book was published:

I was advised that the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script would cause curiosity and inquiry in some places. I do not know how many people recognized the name, but surely no one ever asked about it.

The book was published in 1962 and Steinbeck died just six years later. Reading this book you can somehow perceive his age, obviously regarding his health condition but also because he didn’t care about others reading what he wrote or did. When he started the arrangements for the trip, everyone tried to persuade him to abandon the idea because it’s age and chronic disease, but he felt he needed the trip and that it was now or never.

During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

The purpose of the trip was to get to know again his country and, in my opinion, as a way to say goodbye to several places, essential locations for him in the past. This quote summarizes his motivations:

For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago, or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.

Steinbeck beautifully describes his feelings about the places or about the people he encountered, and that is what makes this book remarkable. He takes advantage of the trip circumstances to give his opinion on the social and political issues of 1960: decisive election year between Nixon and Kennedy, the embarrassing (even on those days for him) racial issues in the southern states and the cold war against the Soviet Union, just to give some examples.

As one can imagine reading the book, and it was confirmed some years after the publication, some of the dialogues during his encounters are purely fictional as a mean for the author to describe a situation or a way of thinking of the folks he encountered. Part of the magic resides in guessing which ones are more or less distant from his real experiences. He even describes the approach as a disclaimer:

I've always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

The book contains dozens of brilliant quotes, some of them with a beautiful and intense description that mentally transfers the reader to a certain American landscape:

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.

You cannot use this book to prepare a similar trip, or to discover any of the places that he visited. He also wrote about it in the last part of the book, as a retrospective of what he finally ended writing, in one of my favorite quotes of the book:

If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their stored pictures would be not only different from mine but equally different from one another. If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness. From start to finish I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this my country. If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

I really liked this book, and for sure I’ll try to read more from Steinbeck.

FOSDEM 2018: Sunday

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After an interesting Saturday, finished with a great dinner with some friends in one of our favorite restaurants in Brussels, my Sunday at FOSDEM started again very early.

FOSDEM 2018

My choices for the Sunday were again diverse and (in most cases) successful. Apart from the closing keynotes, I spent some time in the Legal and Policy Issues devroom, a couple of talks in the HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom and half the afternoon in the Geospatial devroom.

Before continuing, if you want to read my summary of the previous day you can follow this link: FOSDEM 2018: Saturday. You will also find there general info and details about the event itself.

Let me summarize:

Talks

Capture the GDPR with Identity management, by Juraj Benculak

This first talk was a bit disappointing. The intro about GDPR took most of the talk, and I bet that almost all of us who where there at 9am in a Sunday knew what GDPR is.

The recommendations for GDPR arrived very late. The speaker made a brief overview of how you can benefit from a nice data mapping and data governance, and how good it is to observe privacy by default and by design. Then, he introduced Identity Management as the ideal tool for the job demonstrating the lawfulness of all the data processing. The fact that he develops Identity Management software has something to do with it, of course.

Artificial intelligence dealing with the right to be forgotten, by Cristina Rosu

The next talk in the Legal and Policy devroom was luckily more interesting, but again the title was misleading. Most of the talk was an intro to the right to be forgotten, including an overview of all the relevant legal cases starting with the Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González. Cristina Rosu complemented the legal intro with some metrics about GDPR compliance in some countries.

Some statistics on deletion for GDPR compliance

In the last slides, the only part related to Artificial Intelligence, the speaker commented some possible approaches to enhance the right to be forgotten in the AI environment: Obfuscation strategies, data minimization, personal data stores, algorithmic transparency or ethical boards inside companies.

Behind the scenes of a FOSS-powered HPC cluster, Ansible or Salt? Ansible AND Salt!, by Damien François

The speaker, as a systems engineer, is responsible of the automation of a medium-sized HPC infrastructure at the Louvain University. The purpose of his talk, quite interesting, was to advocate for the use of similar tools at the same time, instead of using the same tool for everything. Some features overlap, but he claimed that each tool can be more powerful in certain tasks, and separating tools also helps in defining responsibilities.

They use Cobbler to install and deploy Operating Systems and set-up hardware specific configuration, Ansible for one-off operations (setup RSA keys, register node to services or prepare config files) and Salt for daily management (configure system, install admin software or mount the user filesystem).

He ended comparing Ansible and Salt, reviewing the best characteristics of each of them as you can see in the picture that I took:

What the speaker loves about Ansible and Salt

How DeepLearning can help to improve geospatial DataQuality, an OSM use case, by Olivier Courtin

The speaker started his talk reviewing some of the Quality Assurance tools available in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, being the main ones: Keep Right, Osmose, OSM Inspector and Maproulette. The problem of them, and I know it very well because I’ve used them a lot, is that the detection can be automatic but only sometimes the tool is able to provide fix suggestions or a standard correction guide, and eventually all the corrections need to be done manually by a mapper (like me).

The premise of the talk was about using other datasets to highlight inconsistencies and, potentially, to predict some characteristics not present in the map using DeepLearning and satellite imagery. The results that he showed were impressive, but he also showed that a lot of work needs to be done in order to have enough quality to consider a more automated approach for Quality Assurance in OSM.

Completeness in OpenStreetMap starts by detecting inconsistencies as soon and as detailed as possible.

Applying DeepLearning techniques to improve OpenStreetMap

Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms, by Michael Meeks

After some interesting networking in the stands, I entered this talk with low expectations. I did not regret it because it was very interesting.

The talk was about the huge refactor that was needed in the codebase of LibreOffice to make it work in the Cloud. The speaker explained clearly why they needed to re-structure at all, the main problems that they faced (Windows and Linux rendering APIs) and how they solved critical issues like extreme coupling and threads management.

The summary of the talk in a quote is: “Fix each bug only once”. What a great statement.

Re-structuring LibreOffice

Building Rock Climbing Maps with OpenStreetMap, by Viet Nguyen

This was my first talk in the Geospatial devroom, it was somehow inspiring despite I can’t say that I learned a lot. The speaker explained that, as a rock climbing lover, he couldn’t find good data regarding climbing routes, walls and sectors so he started introducing that information himself in OpenStreetMap. He summarized his experience, the decisions that he had to take, and how he is trying to get more contributors for his project: OpenBeta.

Building OSM based web app from scratch, by Nils Vierus

I could imagine that this talk was going to be very basic and I guessed right, but I wanted to stay in the devroom for the next talks so I stayed in the room retaining my seat.

The speaker made a general overview about Programming languages to build an OSM based web app, IDEs, mapping libraries, OSM data retrieval tools, routing tools and even version control systems. Good introduction to the topic from a good speaker but I’m not sure if this kind of talks should have a place in FOSDEM.

Privacy aware city navigation with CityZen app, by Redon Skikuli

The speaker was nice and funny, but again the talk was not very advanced. It was more interesting when he talked about the Open Hackerspace that he collaborates with in Tirana (Albania) than the part related to the CitiZen App. The claim that the app is privacy aware is very limited. They just don’t keep your navigation data but in the end whenever they ask for the location of the user, an Android device stores the location anyway (directly or when requesting the nearest POIs).

As a nice addition, CitiZen allows the users to modify or insert the POIs retrieved from OSM by editing them inside the app.

Every subway network in the world, by Ilya Zverev

This talk was refreshing and reconciled me with the geospatial devroom. Ilya (software engineer at Maps.me) explained how he ended building the offline subway navigation feature for Maps.me. As he explained, when they started reviewing the available data in OpenStreetMap related to subways they realized that the information was very poor and incomplete. For example there was no way to map properly the connections between lines.

He started building a validator and then station by station, city by city, he improved the subway information in OSM. He even presented a proposal for the subway geospatial information, including new relations for the transfers.

Subway stations schema in OpenStreetMap, according to Ilya Zverev

The story of UPSat, Building the first open source software and hardware satellite, by Pierros Papadeas

One of the most inspiring talks of the entire FOSDEM with a packed full Janson Room (with capacity for 1415 people).

The speaker explained how during 2016, the Libre Space Foundation a non-profit organization developing open source technologies for space, designed, built and delivered UPSat, the first open source software and hardware satellite.

Pierros Papadeas explaining the UPSat design and building process

He explained with some detail how he got involved, the current status of the project, the design, construction, verification, testing and delivery processes, etc. You should consider watching the video :-)

Exploiting modern microarchitectures, Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks, by Jon Masters

The closing keynote was given by Jon Masters (Computer Architect at Red Hat) about Meltdown and Spectre, as he was tech lead for mitigation efforts against them in Red Hat. Jon was surprisingly capable of explaining in less than 50 minutes what are those vulnerabilities about, how they were possible in the first place and what are the consequences of avoiding them. I already knew most of it but Jon made it even clearer for me, and surely for the rest of the audience given the applause he received.

It was specially amusing for me, as I’ve been refreshing my knowledge about the Tomasulo Algorithm these past months.

Microcode, Millicode and Chicken bits

And that’s all. See you in Brussels for FOSDEM 2019!!

FOSDEM 2018: Saturday

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After an uncertain landing a few hours ago (the airport in Madrid was barely working due to a snowy morning), I’ve just arrived home but instead of having some rest after an intense and though-provoking FOSDEM I felt the urge to start writing about my weekend in Brussels.

I’ve been there not only to enjoy this wonderful city with its trappist beers and great food, but specially to attend FOSDEM as I intend to do every year.

FOSDEM 2018

For those of you who don’t know FOSDEM, it’s the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to Open Source development. It’s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem. It’s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with faces (or with voices, like @lekum!) you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.

I already wrote about it a couple of years ago, when I even gave a lightning talk in one FOSDEM Fringe event the Floss Community Metrics Meeting (FCM2).

The numbers of this year speak for themselves:

more than 8,000 attendees in only two days
652 speakers in 690 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
57 tracks in 33 different rooms
more than 350 hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
56 stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, Python Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, OSI, the Eclipse Foundation, O’Reilly, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, VLC, Jenkins, Perl, …

FOSDEM 2018

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended:

Talks

Consensus as a Service, Twenty Years of OSI Stewardship, by Simon Phipps and Italo Vignoli

The Open Source label was born in February 3rd 1998, so we celebrated its 20th Anniversary during the opening day of FOSDEM 2018. Simon (President of the OSI) summarized the evolution of the Open Source environment in the last two decades, also guessing what are going to be the main challenges for the Free Open Source Software for it’s third decade.

He remarked that Open Source (OS) projects should not have a business model, the companies that uses those OS projects are the ones that need a realistic business model. I totally agree with this, OS projects can be relevant and positive for the society in a lot more ways than profitability of the founders. Open Source allows software users and developers to advance in their software freedom at work as well as in private.

He labeled the first decade (1998-2008) the decade of Advocacy & Controversy. We all still remember when in 2001 Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft said “Linux is a cancer” (although now apparently he loves it), or in 2005 when UNIX was made Open Source, or 2007 when Java was also made Open Source. In the beginning most OS was a proprietary replacement, but at the end of the decade everyone understood OS as a benefit.

Simon labeled the second decade (2008-2018) the decade of Adoption and Ascendancy, with three main aspects: broad enterprise adoption, problems with software patents and GPL enforcement. Since 2008 most hidden infrastructure is based in OS, since 2011 OS enabled the web service business era, since 2013 the OS is powering the cloud/containers revolution, … to the point that nowadays we can realize that Open Source is at the heart of most new software.

Simon quoted Eben Moglen and his “Licenses are Constitutions for Communities”, and explained that “Open Source licenses are the multilateral consensus of the permissions and norms for a Community”. That’s why it’s important to respect the licenses, and that explains why for the community any violation of the license it’s felt like an awful aggression.

Derived from the four essential freedoms of Free Software, Simon emphasized the real value of Open Source:

Innovate without needing to ask first
Start where others reached
Stay in control of your own resources
Share upkeep of your innovation
Influence global ecosystems
Be protected from others doing the same

Maybe my favorite talk this year. Don’t expect summaries as long as this one for other talks :-P

Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS), by Martin Junghanns and Max Kießling

As part of Neo4J, the speakers explained why and how they created Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS), to provide graph-powered data integration and graph analytical query workloads within the Apache Spark ecosystem. They presented the internal architecture, made a live demo with Spark and Apache Zeppelin and explained that CAPS is released as Open Source inside OpenCypher.

The Computer Science behind a modern distributed data store, by Michael Hackstein (@mchacki)

The first thing that Michael Hackstein (ArangoDB) explained was that he was replacing the original speaker (Max Neunhoeffer, that couldn’t attend for personal reasons), but in the end he gave a great talk about a complex topic, being clear and precise. Anyone could notice that the substitute speaker knew the subject perfectly.

Michael explained the main challenges when building or using a modern distributed data store. He started with an important advice: “The first law of distributed data is… don’t distribute data” :-) Having said that, he clarified that sometimes you cannot avoid it because you need to scale and/or you need to be resilient.

In a distributed system different parts need to agree on things (consensus) but it’s not always easy because the network has outages, drops, delays or duplicates packages, any disk fails or even an entire rack fails. He explained the basics of Consensus, as explained originally in the Paxos Consensus Protocol (1998) and later in Raft.

Another important thought was related to sorting. Most published algorithms are nowadays poorly efficient because the problem is no longer the comparison computations but the data movement between data stores. He explained Log Structure Merge Trees (LSM-trees) as a possible solution.

He also summarized other problems like the synchronization of machines (mitigated with Hybrid Logical Clocks) and Distributed ACID transactions, only supported as off today by Google Spanner (because they have the money to use atomic clocks) and Cockroach DB an Open Source clone of Spanner that achieved it without atomic clocks.

Log structured merge trees (LSM-trees)

Digital Archaeology, Maintaining our digital heritage, by Steven Goodwin (@MarquisdeGeek)

Steven Goodwin is the founder of the Digital Heritage, a (let me quote) “plan to collate the learnings and knowledge of computer systems from 1975 onwards so that students of technology and scholars of the future can understand how they work, how to use them, and how they affected the culture of the 20th century”.

He explained how in a few years time it will be difficult or even impossible to study retro-computers given the fact that its software is either proprietary, closed-source, written in an obsolete programming language or protected to prevent copying. Not only this, the hardware is also failing, the magnetic devices are no longer storing the information and so on.

After raising awareness of the problem, he also gave several recommendations and methods necessary to preserve our legacy using emulations, mainly based in Open Source projects.

JVM startup: why it matters to the new world order, by Daniel Heidinga

In the old world order the deployments were infrequent so the startup time was a very small fraction of the total up time. Now in the new world with CI/CD systems, microservice or serverless architectures controlling the startup time is essential. This topic is very hot right now.

Daniel (OpenJ9 Project Lead) explained the problem and provided possible solutions inside the JVM, focusing mainly in the use of OpenJ9’s SharedClasses.

OpenJ9 startup sequence

Class Metadata: A User Guide, by Andrew Dinn

Andrew Dinn (Red Hat Open JDK) explained clearly what is the Class Metadata and why it matters inside the JVM. He also gave some real-life use cases to explain how design decisions can incur or avoid Class Metadata costs.

Java's Metaspace Constant Pool Objects

Java in a World of Containers, by Mikael Vidstedt and Matthew Gilliard

Mikael (Director of the JVM group at Oracle) and Matthew (also from Oracle) explained that Oracle is focused on maintaining Java as the main language in the containers ecosystem thanks to, according to them, some of its characteristics:

Managed language/runtime
Hardware and operating system agnostic
Safety and Security enforced by the JVM
Reliable as compatibility is a key design goal
Runtime adaptive
Rich ecosystem

Also related to reducing the startup time and footprint needed, they also explained how (using the modular system of Java 9) creating custom JREs allows you to reduce the size of the JDK needed inside the Docker container. A full JDK weights around 568 MB, the java.base module just 46 MB and a reasonable set of modules with complete capabilities could be around 60 MB. It can be further optimized using jlink –compress but it’s a trade-off between size and compressing/uncompressing effort.

After reducing the JDK layer of a container, the next battle is in the operating system layer. They announced and presented OpenJDK Portola Project, a port of the JDK to use Alpine Linux (the base image weights just 4 MB) and the musl C library. Very impressive.

OpenJDK Portola Project

Class Data Sharing, Sharing Economy in the HotSpot VM, by Volker Simonis

Volker (SAP) introduced Class Data Sharing (CDS), explained clearly the implementation details and finally he demonstrated it’s advantages in some use cases.

Class Representation in the HotSpot VM

Hairy Security, the many threats to a Java web app, by Romain Pelisse and Damien Plard

Romain (Red Hat) and Damien (Solaris Bank) gave a fun and instructive talk about security, challenging some myths.

They reminded us that it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ you’ll be hacked.

If you want to read my summary of the next day you can follow this link: FOSDEM 2018: Sunday.

Some things that Java developers really need to know in 2018

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago DZone published an article called 9 Things Java Programmers Should Learn in 2018. I liked the idea and I even recommended the article to a couple of colleagues who are trying to reorient their professional career. After the advice I added some personal disclaimers about the content, to the point that one of my friends wisely told me:

if you don't agree with these recommendations, why don't you write your own article?

…and that brought us here :-)

The article in DZone is fine and very detailed with good recommendations but it’s not realistic. Some of the things that the author considers essential (Android development or Spring Security, for example) for me are not that important, at least from a general perspective. You can (and should) learn them if you need them, but 99% of you will survive without them.

Instead of sharing my view only with a couple of colleagues, I’ll try to give a realistic and opinionated (yes, I like the word) list of things in no particular order that you need to know or learn in 2018 if you are a Java developer. Some of them are not new, but you need to be sure that you know (or master, if you want) them by the end of the year.

I’m addressing only Java developers, but hopefully you’ll find something of value even if you’re not.

Learn Java 8, and then Java 9

January 2018 and I still find a lot of Java developers who do not know much about Java 8. Regarding this, my recommendation clearly is to learn separately Java 8 with the huge amount of improvements it brought to the language and then, and only then, start playing with Java 9.

You will be a better developer after you learn Java 8, even if in your current project they force you to code in Java 6. You’ll understand why some improvements were needed in the language and you’ll be the first in the line when a migration to Java 8 or 9 approaches in your surroundings (and it will, eventually).

But let me remark this, it does not matter if you have dozens of badges in Codecademy or Code School if by the end of 2018 you are not familiar with Java 8 and Java 9.

Unit Testing as the logical choice

If at this point of your career you don’t write unit tests you can stop reading the article right now, this is not going with you. If on the contrary you are already used to write unit tests for your code, your next goal is to write better tests.

Are you stuck with JUnit? JUnit 5 was released recently and I haven’t checked it yet, but let me recommend a more logical choice: Spock. Less verbose, more idiomatic, integrated stubbing and mocking, easy parametrized testing, test data tables, … If you are using JUnit, there is nothing that prevents you from going to Spock (totally or at least partially to test the new features).

Beside the framework, now that you are familiar with the classic code coverage metrics, take a look to Pitest and mutation testing principles in general.

JVM internals

Yes, performance tuning is important and learning about it will help you in your daily work, in yearly rise negotiations and job interviews in general. But let’s take a step back, do you really know the JVM internals enough before looking at it with a magnifying glass? I’ve met a huge amount of developers and Java Architects that don’t even know what GC is, what does Stop The World mean or how does a dynamic class loader work.

Yes, it’s great to know how to analyze and profile an application to figure out why it’s so slow or why it crashes. But unfortunately for you, you can not always blame others. Make your best effort to understand that not everything is magic.

Learn Apache Groovy

Once you know your weapons, it’s good that you know what you’re up against. Forget for the moment about Kotlin and Scala, focus first on consolidating your Java skills. As with Spock, there are few excuses to prevent you from coding in Apache Groovy, and the learning curve is totally flat.

Groovy is not only Java without semicolons. The description in the project website is clear enough so let me quote it:

Apache Groovy is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. It integrates smoothly with any Java program, and immediately delivers to your application powerful features, including scripting capabilities, Domain-Specific Language authoring, runtime and compile-time meta-programming and functional programming.

OK, I said that you will likely survive without Android knowledge and for sure you’ll probably survive without learning Groovy. But even if you find it difficult to use it in your projects I firmly believe that learning Groovy will have a substantial impact on your career and will even make you a better Java developer.

Join me in the next Greach Conference and you won’t regret.

Code regularly

As the DZone article remarks, sadly it’s usual practice to spend less time coding as your experience grows. This would deserve a totally different article, but for the moment let me stress that whatever your work experience is, you should not disconnect from programming and source code in general.

There are a lot of online resources about problems to be solved or challenges in general, but you don’t even need to complicate yourself or challenge others. You can simply think about something you need at home (or at squad level) and try to create a software tool to mitigate or solve those problems. I personally would recommend both approaches: try to enjoy the technical and social part of the hackatons or coding challenges but also try to solve your needs in solitude at home.

Try new data structures, learn new algorithms and understand the pros and cons of them. Force yourself to struggle solving a specific problem without using the most appropriate data structure or without loops, for example.

Learn from others and let others learn from you

As others say there are only two ways to improve yourself, learning from your own experience (which is very limited) or learning from others experience (which is unlimited).

Ask for recommendations and read technical books, related to the Java ecosystem or not. Learn first about the principles: clean code, design patterns, testing, functional programming, …

Read more code. It can be code from an open source project or code from your squad’s fellows. Try to find both the good patterns and the bad smells. Discuss with your peers about it (always politely) and let them also learn from you.

Write about your experiences, in a blog preferably. The writing exercise itself will help you consolidate what you are learning. Use an open source static site generator and you’ll also learn designing your site and deploying your blog posts.

Get involved with your community. Try to attend local Meetups and technical conferences, eventually you’ll find the courage to even send proposals for those meetups and conferences.

Luis, I already know everything!

OK, it’s not my case but if you already know everything that I mentioned (or so you think) let me give some bonus recommendations:

If you are a proficient Java developer, you should consider staying in the back-end. It may seem that it is unavoidable to code front-end, but there is plenty of fun and complexity in the back. Nowadays you can evolve and grow your career without changing the platform.
Learn about performance and fine tuning, at least the basics.
Learn about Apache Kafka, it’ll open you some doors now and probably lots more in the near future.
Improve your knowledge and skills about DevOps culture and Cloud Computing.
Do not settle for anything. If your job/company does not give you what you’re looking for, you must run out of there.

Feedback

Remember, this opinionated recommendations are focused on Java developers about what they could do in 2018. It does not necessarily apply to other professionals.

What do you think? Am I missing something?

Let me know in the comments!

Brittany: a brief opinionated guide

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As explained in the previous post, I’ve recently been in Normandy and Brittany with my friend Agatha. After publishing the first part of the trip (Normandy: a brief opinionated guide) now I proceed to do the same with Brittany.

It has been quite complicated because we saw a lot of awesome things and for me it still takes a lot of time (several hours) to write this kind of articles.

What to expect from this guide

I don’t like to repeat myself, so I invite you to read the disclaimers in the Normandy article. I’ll simply put here the map of Brittany prepared by Agatha.

Map with the main places to visit in Brittany, prepared by Agatha - CC BY-NC-SA License

Let’s start!

Dol-de-Bretagne

Our first stop in Brittany from Normandy was precisely in a town that was besieged several times by the Normands. In 1924 the town changed its name from Dol to Dol-de-Bretagne, maybe to discourage a new attempt by their neighbours.

Dol-de-Bretagne deserves a quick visit, not only to see its Cathedral and the quaint Grand Rue des Stuarts (Dol is considered the origin of the famous royal House of Stewart) but specially to see a huge menhir (the estimated weight is 125-150 tons).

Dol-de-Bretagne menhir - CC BY-NC-SA License

Cancale

We arrived Cancale at the right time, just before lunch. This fishing village is famous for its oyster beds, its oyster farmers everywhere, its popular oyster market, and its countless restaurants where you can order oysters. According to Wikipedia, the oyster beds of Cancale cover more than 7 square kilometers, and they harvest about 25,000 tons of oysters each year. Impressive, even for someone like me who finds eating raw oysters quite disgusting.

Panoramic with lots of oysters beds and the popular Oyster Market - CC BY-NC-SA License

Cancale’s Oyster Market is famous because in the stalls they sell freshly caught oysters on a plate or tray with a slice of lemon, and people eat them right there by the sea. The initial plan was to visit the market before lunch so that Agatha could satisfy her appetite. After seeing one after another the handful of stalls that were there open, the rumors say that Agatha did not find the idea very pleasant and had to settle for trying the oysters in the restaurant.

There were countless restaurants, I suspect that in high season it will be difficult to come and eat in a decent place without reservation.

Bonus recommendation: Restaurant Le Cancalais, one of the finest restaurants in Cancale, although perhaps also one of the most expensive. Great menu with several seafood and fish dishes.

Saint-Malo

Saint-Malo was one of the main positive surprises of the trip. With an historic center that is itself a walled citadel, Saint-Malo was in the past notorious for its privateering and pirate activities. Today, it is considered the most visited place in Brittany.

Although the day was windy it was not very cold, and with a vin chaud in the hand we took a very cool walk over the city walls. I thought initially that it was the standard insipid posh town with glamorous sites everywhere but I found a charming town with (yes) lots of glamorous places everywhere. Maybe I put a lot of my part, but I perfectly imagined the streets and beaches full of corsairs.

Panoramic on top of the Jardin des Petit Murs, Saint-Malo - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bonus recommendation: Café La Java, by pure chance we stopped for a coffee in this spectacular place. The decoration was based on dolls, puppets and lots of circus material. The chairs on the bar were swing chairs hanging from the ceiling… everything was incredible, even the blow they gave us when we asked for the bill.

Dinard

After the positive surprise of Saint-Malo we decided to visit Dinard, another famous tourist destination for wealthy people in this case mainly from the United Kingdom. We took a short walk after the sunset that did not allow us to see much but we ended with the feeling that the place looks nice for the spring and summer but it’s basically dead in the low season.

The most remarkable moment, and it was not prepared in advance, was the photo that I took next to an statue of Alfred Hitchcock with an Alfred Hitchcock’s t-shirt. Hitchcock visited several times the town for holidays, to the point that the locals even claim that the house used in Psycho is based on a still standing villa of Dinard. The statue is full size a replica (or vice versa) of the trophies for the winners of the Dinard British Film Festival, held here every year since 1989.

In Dinard, with Sir Alfred Hitchcock - CC BY-NC-SA License

Dinan

Dinan was also one of those villages that could deserve a relaxed weekend getaway. We quietly walked through its center despite the rain, crossing countless streets and squares with picturesque facades and shops. We couldn’t climb La Tour de l’Horloge to see the views from up there, but maybe you should.

I think that Dinan was the first town where we enjoyed a town center more or less protected from the cars and the traffic. This helped a lot to improve our sense of comfort there. As happened in Saint-Malo, the town center was full of nice shops and restaurants, giving the pedestrian the feeling of being inside a spectacular outdoor mall.

Panoramic in Dinan - CC BY-NC-SA License

Côte de Granit Rose

The Côte de Granit Rose (Pink Granite Coast) is a >30km stretch of coastline famous due to its unusual pink sands and rock formations. This is an unique place, and several curious and picturesque areas can be seen from different places. Beside the coast and the cliffs, most of the house and chalets in the area were also built with this pink granite.

We went first to some viewpoints inside Perros-Guirec and then to Ploumanac’h, close to the main area for visitors to the Pink Granite Coast in the Pors Karmor bay. It is supposed to be more startling during the summer because there is more sunlight, but it’s a recommended visit at any time of the year.

Panoramic in the Côte de Granit Rose - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bonus recommendation: Restaurant Le Ker Louis, again we ended there a little bit by chance, because we tried before in several places that turned out to be closed, and it was a tremendous luck. Our lunch was spectacular, very well prepared and quite inexpensive.

Rumengol and Le Faou

We planned Le Faou and Rumengol (a small village that belongs to Le Faou as well) as two quick visits in our way from the northern coast of Brittany to the Pointe du Raz, and we were not mistaken.

Rumengol has a curious church (Notre-Dame-du-Tout-Remède) that hosts a significant pilgrimage ceremony, one of the main ones in Brittany. We only saw the church from the outside and after the sunset, but it looked very special and quite different from others. Le Faou has a couple of cute streets, nice but nothing remarkable where almost all the villages have the same.

Pointe du Raz

Pointe du Raz is one of the sites that most impressed me on the trip and one of the places that I will remember the most. It is a rocky promontory that is just embedded into the sea, but the sensation there with strong waves crushing the cliffs and hurricane winds was really special. Totally overwhelming, to the point that it seemed dangerous to go near the edge of the cliffs in case the wind blew you away. I’m not surprised that the French considered it the end of the world.

From the headland, you can see several lighthouses of different sizes located on rocks or small islands. It’s the place that I know where more lighthouses can be seen.

Notre Dame des Naufrages looking into the sea - CC BY-NC-SA License

Locronan

We really wanted to see Locronan and we were not disappointed. Narrow streets, cute shops, houses made of stone and slate,… Our only problem was that we arrived exactly when dozens of workers and gardeners were conditioning and decorating the entire town in a big way for XMas. It was full of vans, tractors, boxes, sacks,… but despite all this, the town looked beautiful.

Locronan is a deserved member of the Les Plus Beaux Villages de France (The most beautiful villages of France) association. Le Faou is also a member but there are huge differences in terms of beauty and care.

Panoramic of the Place de l'Église in Locronan - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bonus recommendation: Ty Kouign Amann, one of the finest chocolate shops we’ve seen in the trip. It was so tempting that we left there with a bag full of chocolates.

Quimper

Among all the large towns (or small cities) that we visited, Quimper was one of the ones I liked the most. Several gardens, beautiful houses and the usual town center full of nice shops, boutiques and restaurants. Also, the Cathedral has a feature that makes it special. The main nave is bended in the middle, so much that it is clearly perceived both inside and outside the temple.

Bonus recommendation: Le Sistrot, this marvelous place is both cider house and refined restaurant, they served us one of the best meals of the entire trip. They had in the menu dozens of different ciders from all over the world and of many different types, for example I ordered one made of 5 different kinds of apples. I was left wanting to order the add-on for the menu that included a different cider to match with each plate, dessert included.

Ville Close

The Ville Close (Walled Village) is a fortified island forming a medieval small village inside the town of Concarneau. It was nice but somehow disappointing because it’s very very small and 90% of the shops and restaurants inside the fortress were closed. It is sized for many people, and they even had an outdoor theater, so surely in other seasons it will be much more attractive.

Panoramic of the Ville Close and the Marina of Concarneau - CC BY-NC-SA License

Pont-Aven

Pont-Aven is mainly known for the Pont-Aven School of Arts, a group of artists in the 19th century led by Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin that painted every corner of this town. Now Pont-Aven is full of tourists, restaurants and art galleries.

To reinforce the impressionist atmosphere that inspired (and inspires) the painters and charms the visitors, the entire village specially around the river was illuminated in a very special way. I’m not sure if this is always like this or only on these pre-XMas dates.

Panoramic of the River Aven passing through Pont-Aven, with nice colours and lights - CC BY-NC-SA License

Auray

We made a quick visit to Auray, just to walk a while through the center and to have dinner. It’s nice, not as interesting as other places in Brittany but I’d recommend a visit if you pass near there.

Carnac

Carnac is renowned for the Carnac stones, one of the most extensive Neolithic menhir collections in the world. Within the limits of the town you can visit several areas with kilometers of alignments of stones of different sizes, some of them over two meters high. I’m not sure what is more impressive, the fact that they could do that around 4500 BC or that most of them in this area are still standing in the 21st century.

Near a couple of alignments you can also find a huge menhir, brilliantly called Le Géant du Manio, with more than 6m of height. Le Géant is hidden inside a forest, so you need to walk for 10-15’ to reach there but the short walk is worth it because the forest is impressive. I would love to have forests like that near my house.

Inside one of the stone alignments in Carnac - CC BY-NC-SA License

Vannes

Vannes was also a positive surprise. It’s quite big (more than 50K inhabitants), but the town center is again very well preserved and luckily for them restricted to vehicles. Narrow streets with nice shops and restaurants everywhere.

One of the differential elements of Vannes is his port, built in an elongated way to take the sea into the center of the city.

Panoramic of the Port-de-Vannes, with the famous Place Gambetta in the left - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bonus recommendation: Restaurant Rive Gauche, possibly the restaurant that we liked the most. The plates were spectacular, refined and inexpensive. It’s very small, so you should book in advance.

Malestroit

We only had time for a quick walk through the center of Malestroit and it was raining a lot, so we couldn’t see this small village as calmly as we normally do but what we saw was very beautiful. They were celebrating a charity market, and we were able to buy them vin chaud so our memory of them will always be positively biased.

La Gacilly

La Gacilly is famous for two things: it’s local craftsmen stores (not as valuable as they were described) and Yves Rocher. This cosmetic company was founded here, and everywhere you look you’ll see something related to it: shops, restaurants, cafés, spas, hotels,… the company even maintains a botanical garden in La Gacilly, open to the public without charge.

Rochefort-en-Terre

Rochefort-en-Terre was perhaps the most anticipated destination by Agatha. During the entire year is just another nice village with stone houses, attractive restaurants, galleries, cute shops… but during the last days of the year it changes entirely to transform the entire village into a magnificent XMas market. It’s true that after the sunset the environment is magical with all those lights and even some artificial snow flakes in some streets. The magic disappears partially because it was infested with visitors, even more than Mont Saint-Michel.

That night we slept in another small town close to Rochefort-en-Terre so in addition to seeing it at night, the next day we walked by there with sunlight and it was also interesting, specially because we were almost alone. The bad thing is that everything was closed that early in the morning.

Rochefort-en-Terre at night - CC BY-NC-SA License

Josselin

Josselin is considered one of the most beautiful medieval villages in Brittany. In addition to having the typical facades with wooden beams, here I had the impression that they were painted with more care and style. We took a good walk but we could not enter the castle, things that happen when the monuments are privately owned.

Josselin's colourful facades - CC BY-NC-SA License

Brocéliande Forest

We really wanted to spend a few hours hiking through the forest of Brocéliande (a legendary forest commonly considered to be the Paimpont forest in Brittany) but two things crossed our path once we started the route: a copious rain and a sign forbidding us to continue. The forest, at least the part that tourists cross, is privately owned and that makes it possible that the main forest area only opens from April 1st to September 30th.

Anyway, our limited walk was great specially under the rain.

Inside Brocéliande forest - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bonus recommendation: Crêperie La Fée Gourmande, we had a lot of trouble finding a place to eat in Paimpont because everything was closed, but in the end someone told us how to get to a creperie in the outskirts that would surely be open. La Fée Gourmande is not in the center of the town but it’s amazingly located in the shore of the Étang de l’Abbaye de Paimpont and the galettes were amazing. a total success because they were also very nice with us.

Fougères

We were on the verge of not being able to go to Fougères due to the lack of time and I’m very glad that we could finally make it, even if it was at the cost of having cut the walk through Brocéliande.

The Château, a huge stronghold built atop a granite ledge, is one of the most famous attractions in the area. It’s very well preserved and the visit with the audioguide explains clearly the history of the castle and the city in the Middle Ages.

As in many other places, we were almost alone so we could make funny things like climbing two different towers so we could take each other a picture on top of the other tower. I have several epic pictures in this castle, it’s a pity that I didn’t have my bow and some arrows to pose properly.

Panoramic inside Fougères Castle - CC BY-NC-SA License

The town itself is nice, specially because it’s located on top of a hill and the views are magnificient both from the village to the castle and from the castle to the village. The garden surrounding the Cathedral was full of lights and XMas figures (and people).

Rennes

Our visit to Rennes was slightly disappointing, we planned one evening and a morning there but we could only see the Cathedral. We tried hard to visit the Parlament de Bretagne but they exhausted us by making us cross the center of the city to go to a tourist office that later turned out to be closed… Rennes is very big (10th largest city in France) and it seemed to be a very lively city but they did not prove to be very well prepared for tourists out of season.

I would not mind coming back and spending a quiet weekend here.

Typical pedestrian street in Rennes, the house on the left is unique because the wood is painted in 3 different colors - CC BY-NC-SA License

Vitré

Vitré was our last stop in the trip through Normandy and it was not a bad culmination. We were able to take a pleasant walk under a light rain, and after lunch we visited the castle. The part of the castle that you can visit is small but interesting, the other part holds the Town Hall and other official dependencies.

The entrance to Vitre Castle - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bonus recommendation: Restaurant Le Petit Bouchon, it’s outside the historic center, so it’s almost impossible for you to end up eating here if it’s not after a recommendation. We ate very well and were treated perfectly. Their Café Gourmand is delicious.

Le Mans

Le Mans is not in Brittany, but it was on our way to Charles de Gaulle to return the car and flight back home. They claim to be the second most known French city around the world, and this is because since 1923 the city hosts the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance car race.

We couldn’t enter the Cathedral but we liked a lot the rest of the town center. It’s nice and very lively. They have a cute area around the monument to the 24H of Le Mans race, which is indistinguishable from a shopping mall due to the amount of shops of all kinds.

The Museum of the 24 Hours of Le Mans is full of real sport cars and bikes with a few replicas, very interesting to any aficionado of the races. The vehicles were grouped by category and year, so it was easy and educational to follow the evolution of the technological improvements. One of the most curious things were some showcases with miniatures of all the cars that participated every year.

The last items in the collection of the Museum of the 24 Hours of Le Mans - CC BY-NC-SA License

In addition to the museum, it’s possible to do a walking tour through the Circuit de la Sarthe. The visit includes access to the stands, bleachers and the pelouse area. I enjoyed it but it would have been nice to be able to visit other interesting areas like the boxes, the workshops, the VIP areas… or even lending us a car to make a whole lap to the circuit :-)

Circuit de la Sarthe, the main part of the 24 Hours of Le Mans Circuit - CC BY-NC-SA License

I hope that you enjoyed the guide!

Normandy: a brief opinionated guide

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Some months ago I wrote in the blog about my road trip through the Romantikstraße in Austria. I shared the trip with Agatha and it went great, so we took advantage of the fact that we both had several pending holidays for this year and repeated the experience in two of the most beautiful regions in France: Normandy and Brittany. This post will be a summary of our experience in Normandy and hopefully I’ll be able to write a similar one for Brittany.

What to expect from this guide

The trip was decided and confirmed like four or five days before leaving so we couldn’t prepare a lot but at least Agatha was able to prepare a list of places to visit in both regions. Specially for Brittany she even made the effort to collect several articles with comments and recommendations of places. Being honest, we could not follow most of them (they were written for other times of the year and other kind of travelers) but it was very helpful anyway.

So, our trip started with many places to visit, a few notes and very few hours of daylight to see things. We had to be very practical and extremely flexible, but in the end almost all the decisions went well so I decided to relate the trip from an opinionated point of view, as I have been asked by several colleagues and friends.

Map with the main places to visit in Normandy, prepared by Agatha - CC BY-NC-SA License

For each place, I’ll summarize our experience there with the list of places we visited and some comments on them. There is much more to visit, It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the essentials of each city or town.

I will not include purely practical info like ticket prices and opening times, it changes a lot and sooner than later it becomes obsolete info. Alas, we were forced to visit some places only during the evening/night with all the museums and attractions closed.

The entire trip was made by car and we booked all our stays in the same day. Normally around 5-6pm and some days even later, the advantages of traveling in the low season.

I’m afraid I’ll forget a lot of things, maybe in the next trip I’ll choose to be copilot so I can take notes during the trip.

Let’s start!

Rouen

After landing in Charles de Gaulle around 3pm, we picked the rental car and our first destination was Rouen, capital city of Normandy. The city is known for its gorgeous downtown, its famous gothic Cathedral and for being the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

We arrived later than expected so everything was closed. The Cathedral was supposed to be open (according to the web) but it wasn’t. Luckily in front of the cathedral there was a Christmas Market so we had our first vin chaud to warm ourselves for a walk the town center.

Places we visited:

Notre Dame Cathedral, it’s huge and awesome, specially from the outside. One of the finest gothic cathedrals around Europe.

Notre Dame Cathedral, Rouen - CC BY-NC-SA License

Gros Horloge, a fourteenth-century two-sides astronomical clock, not as spectacular as the one in Prague, for example, but you should not miss it as it’s close to the Cathedral.
Place du Vieux Marché and the Church of St Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc was burned alive for heresy in this square in 1431, there is a small memorial with a huge cross marking the spot. The church was completed in 1979, quite modern but the place it’s very interesting. The stained glass windows are from the 16th century, retrieved from other church, and the building itself is worth the visit. It’s very long, crossing almost entirely the square, and evokes both flames and an overturned ship. There is also an interesting gourmet market beside the church, following the same design.

Place du Vieux Marché, Rouen - CC BY-NC-SA License

Church of Saint Ouen, the largest gothic temple of Rouen that started as an abbey church but was vacated and it serves now other purposes as part of the Town Hall. When we entered, there was an organ concert and a moder art exposition.
Church of St Maclou, this 15th century gothic temple is much smaller than the other touristic temples but in my opinion it’s the most quaint one. Also, the best streets to find a good place to eat or drink (as a resident told us) are the ones surrounding St Maclou.
Aître Saint-Maclou, It is one of the rarest ossuaries remaining in Europe. It’s origin as a normal cemetery dates back to the Black Death. After a new epidemic in the 16th century it became necessary to increase its capacity so they build galleries with several rooms to contain the bones.
Other interesting places we couldn’t visit properly: the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles and the Tower of Jean of Arc.

Bonus recommendation: Restaurant L’Anticonformiste, the food was great and they have an interesting atmosphere and decoration. It was full of locals, but the place is tourist friendly.

The Normandy Abbeys Trail

This interesting trail starts with the Church of Saint-Ouen in Rouen, and continues near the city following down the course of the Seine River.

Saint-Georges Abbey in Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville, sadly it was closed so we couldn’t enter (not even the gardens) but there is a remarkable bakery that compensated us.
Jumièges Abbey, it was a Benedictine monastery, now turned into a nice ruins. The remains are perfectly preserved and the audioguide tells a lot, but maybe I missed more context information about the place. We had the entire place almost empty for ourselves, I feel that the visit will lose a lot if crowded with people.

Jumièges Abbey - CC BY-NC-SA License

Saint-Wandrille Abbey, we arrived late for the guided visit (in French) so we had to settle for being able to take a walk around. The place is still hosting a community of monks, so you cannot see a lot without a proper tour. Nice but you can skip it if you are not going to enter and visit the place properly.

Étretat

Étretat is known for its cliffs, including three natural arches and a pointed formation called L’Aiguille (the Needle) which rises 70 metres above the sea. We lunched there the typical mussels before walking through the beach to get to a cave by which you can cross to another rock beach to see the largest arch and the Needle, not visible from the town. As many other things around here, with high tide you cannot reach the tunnel so we were more or less lucky. There is also an interesting trail through the cliffs, so we hiked for a while and enjoyed a couple of viewpoints.

Bonus recommendation: La Salamandre, the typical restaurant to eat Mules e Frites (mussels with french fries), the waiters were friendly and both the building and the decoration are unique.

Étretat beach and cliffs panoramic - CC BY-NC-SA License

Honfleur

Sadly we had to choose between Le Havre and Honfleur (the northern and southern banks of the estuary of the Seine River, respectively) and we opted for the latter to continue exploring the good rural taste of Normandy. Probably we made a good choice because we loved Honfleur, a lot, and we only regret not having been able to walk it during day.

Honfleur is full of restaurants, boutiques, chocolate shops, art workshops and galleries. Almost everything was open until late so I can imagine that they are used to receive a big bunch of tourists. Lucky us, we visited everything almost empty and we could had dinner in a great restaurant without a previous booking.

Saint-Catherine’s Church, this temple was built almost entirely with wood and incredibly it is still standing. It is the largest church made out of wood in France. To add more value to the place, it’s said that it was built without using any saw, only cutting the wood with axes. It’s very beautiful both inside and outside.
Vieux Basin and Le Lieutance, close to the church you can find the picturesque old port, one of the finest that we’ve seen in the entire trip, and the old house of the Lieutenant.

Le Vieux Basin, Honfleur - CC BY-NC-SA License

Le Jardin du Tripot, one of those marvelous places that only locals, very well informed tourists and geocachers get to visit. Don’t miss it, I won’t tell more to avoid spoiling the surprise.

Bonus recommendation: L’Homme de Bois, Honfleur is full of restaurants for all pockets but this one convinced us just by crossing ahead. We could not have dinner better, I tried their grilled stingray fin and it was delicious.

Normandie Battle coast, museums and memorials

We visited several landmarks related with Second World War, the Battle of Normandy and the Normandy landings. We didn’t enter all the museums as they are apparently very similar, but we probably visited the most relevant ones.

Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie, one of the biggest collection of vehicles and weapons (mainly originals with some replicas). The way they present the collection may have aged too much, they would improve a lot if they changed the appearance of some posters and displays, and the approach of the signage in some areas.

Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie - CC BY-NC-SA License

German Cemetery, our first truly sad place of the trip. Many years have passed but it continues to impress me the amount of people involved in WWII. The cemetery was totally empty for us, and it was specially impressive thanks to a chilly atmosphere with some fog and the early sun.

German Cemetery - CC BY-NC-SA License

Le Pointe du Hoc, one of the most representative places of the Normandy landings, as it still concentrates most of the remaining bunkers, and dozens of huge craters caused by the bombings. Again, visiting the place almost alone was specially valuable as you could enjoy the silence and try to imagine the place during those terrible days. The storming of the place by a couple hundred American rangers is one of the most epic episodes of the entire Battle of Normandy.

Le Pointe du Hoc - CC BY-NC-SA License

Omaha Beach, maybe the most famous landmark and the one with less present day remains. The beach is huge, no wonder it was a key point in the landings being also the most heavily defended beach.

Omaha Beach - CC BY-NC-SA License

American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer. Another iconic visit, with its countless tombs overlooking the sea. The contrast with the German cemetery was huge, in many aspects. Curiously, a couple of big murals in the memorial helped me understand much better some concepts and tactical explanations that I’ve read the day before in the Normandy Battle Memorial Museum.

American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer - CC BY-NC-SA License

The German Batteries at Longues-sur-Mer, another typical visit with several German batteries preserved almost perfectly with only the damages caused by the war conflict itself. Walking by the closest ones to the coast, it’s enough to turn yourself to feel still threatened by the batteries that are still standing.

German Batteries at Longues-sur-Mer - CC BY-NC-SA License

Port Winston or Mulberry harbours. Most of the temporary portable harbour in front of Arromanches is still there, exactly where they were voluntarily sunk. They were developed by the British and meant to be used until the allies captured a normal French port. Another example of the logistical effort that both sides reached during the conflict. What a pity of wasted resources and talent.

Port Winston or Mulberry harbours - CC BY-NC-SA License

Mémorial de Caen, the biggest museum related to WWII in Normandy. The visit is supposed to be essential, but for us it was more and more of the same content. I’d recommend to visit it before going to the rest of the Normandy landing areas. Again, we could enjoy it a lot being almost alone in the entire museum, including a 25-30’ projection of a film in a 200-250 seat cinema for us alone.

Mémorial de Caen - CC BY-NC-SA License

Bayeux

Bayeux itself is nice and deserves a visit, but it’s specially advisable because it is the home of the Bayeux Embroidery. It has always been called the Bayeux Tapestry although it is not technically a tapestry, but this is a different story. It’s a 70 meters long embroidered cloth which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England. It was supposedly made in the 11th century, a few years after the Battle of Hastings.

The tapestry consists of about 60 scenes, like in a comic book, and was meant to be displayed annually in the Bayeux Cathedral so all the citizens could learn about the epic victories of William, Duke of Normandy. Now it’s exhibited in a specific museum with some interesting information about its construction and design. This museum is also sized for hundreds of tourists, and it was great to be able to enjoy it almost alone. The audioguide of the museum is mandatory, not only because of the detailed information that it provides but also because the locution of the guide forces you to go along the cloth following the story. A clever way to shepherd tourists.

Bayeux Embroidery or Bayeux Tapestry - CC BY-NC-SA License

Caen

In order to reach Mont Saint-Michel before the high tide, we dedicated Caen less time than it would normally deserve. We crossed the town center, viewing from the outside the main attractions: the Church of St. Etienne (a.k.a. the Men’s Abbey), the Church of Ste. Trinité (a.k.a. the Women’s Abbey) and the Château de Caen, that hosts a couple of museums that we would have visited if only we had 2-3 more hours to spare.

Caen - CC BY-NC-SA License

Mont Saint-Michel

A lot of people recommended us to spend the night inside the island of Mont Saint-Michel, even someone said that ideally you should spend two nights: one outside to view the island from the land and another one inside. This is a very poor recommendation, in my opinion.

It’s not that I was disappointed with the Mont Saint-Michel, on the contrary I loved it, but it’s extremely expensive and I don’t see the value of spending even one night inside. We slept in one of the handful of small hotels inside the rock, and for us it was not very abusive but the price of the same room during the high season was more than 400 euros, with an additional 19€ per person for the breakfast.

The restaurants were, as the hotels, very scarce and therefore very expensive. Normal menus for 40, 60 or even 80€. The specialty is a giant French omelette, normally with nothing at all (for about 25-30€) but sometimes with other ingredients as cheese, mushroom or even lobster, asking for up to 75€ per omelette. Ridiculous.

For the first time in the trip, we saw there several tourist groups but it was clearly below the normal occupation. Maybe in Spring or Summer it has more value to spend one night, as it can be the only way to walk by the streets, the walls or the abbey without crowds everywhere.

For me, the most impressive part is not the tides and the water going up and down covering the entrance to the island. The most impressive part is the abbey internals. In order to place the transept crossing of the church on top of the mount they had to build a lot of chambers, crypts and corridors to sustain the upper floors of the Abbey (and the church on top of everything). Again, it’s impressive the amount of logistical and technological talent wasted in superstitions.

Bonus recommendation: Spend some hours during the day, being aware of the tides schedule to see at least one high tide, but don’t spend the night. The visit to the abbey takes about 2h, and the rest of the mount can be seen calmly in another 60-90 minutes, so you don’t need more than 4-5 hours to see everything properly and leave with your wallet as harmless as possible.

Mont Saint-Michel at night - CC BY-NC-SA License

Follow the link to read about the rest of the trip through Brittany.

Big Data Spain 2017

Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I attended Big Data Spain (BDS), a renowned event focused particularly on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It’s a reference event about Big Data, not only in Spain but across Europe. The event is almost entirely held in English and attracts top level speakers and public.

I couldn’t take a lot of notes, but I’ll summarize the talks that deserve your attention (among those that I heard):

Talks

Artificial Intelligence and Data-centric businesses, by Óscar Mendez (Stratio)

The first keynote was the typical inspirational talk to open an event. Óscar focused on the growing relevance of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. It’d be curious to compare it with the opening keynote from previous years, the revolution is always just around the corner.

Anyway, Óscar gave some interesting concepts. I specially liked the way he explained the next relevant disruptions:

First disruption, use big data also for Operational purposes (and this is the key, IMHO)
Second disruption, use distributed applications via microservices
Third disruption, smart data centers moving first to IaaS and then to PaaS

Big Data, Analytics, and Tax Fraud - José Borja Tomé (Agencia Tributaria)

José Borja started with the disclaimer “As you can imagine, I’m not here to show you how to pay less taxes”, and just with that he got all my attention and friendship. He also explained, for the greater tranquility of the Spanish audience, that Agencia Tributaria (the Spanish Tax Agency) is trying to modernize itself in terms of combating fraud and help the tax payers fill in the required forms. He delivered this messages with some slides that looked like they were made with Office 95 but the important thing is the content, not the appearance.

He ended his talk with several surprising and exciting figures. For example, and according to his own figures, Spain performs better (despite our usual perception) than the EU-27 median regarding the difference between the VAT that should be payed and the one that is really payed.

Jose Borja - The difference between the VAT that should be payed and the one that is really payed in the EU-27 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Big Data security: Facing the challenge, by Carlos Gomez (Stratio)

Carlos gave a technical overview of how to protecting the data and services of a company in a Big Data environment when everything is data-centric. He summarized that it is distributed in two areas: protect the data and protect the service. You should review this talk if you are in the security business.

Listening to Carlos Gómez's master class about how to securize a BigData platform #BDS17 pic.twitter.com/RoSebEwqVc
— Daniel Carroza (@danielcsant) November 16, 2017

Playing Well Together: Big Data beyond the JVM w/Spark etc, by Holden Karau (Google)

Holden gave several good tips and tricks about Apache Spark in general, and specifically about using it from outside the Java ecosystem in Python. As a Python connoisseur, but not a Spark user (yet), I just learned a couple of usable tips but the talk was great anyway and it was a pleasure to meet Holden.

Why big data didn’t end causal inference, by Totte Harinen (Uber)

This talk was one of the most promising for me after reviewing the schedule a couple of days before the event. Several years ago there were rumours of the death of causal inference at the hands of Big Data. The main reasons why Big Data might have done it are:

Humans are bad at coming up with causal hypotheses
Correlational models form a more accurate picture of reality
Data analysis just seems to be headed towards the correlational approach

According to the speaker, causal inference is today more relevant than it’s ever been. In fact, bigger data normally implies a better causal inference and not the opposite. Also, Big Data findings can inspire causal hypotheses and Machine Learning methods can help us to estimate causal quantities.

I probably will watch again this talk if the video is published.

Totte Harinen - Some general ways in which Big Data and causal inference complement each other - CC BY-NC-SA License

Towards biologically plausible deep learning, by Nikolay Manchev (IBM)

Another of my favorite talks of this BDS, and very difficult to summarize. Nikolay reviewed where deep learning currently stands, what are the current limitations and challenges, and how neuroscience and psychology can bring us closer to human-level intelligence (or even beyond).

Nikolay Manchev - Deep Learning performance vs human-level performance in object recognition tasks - CC BY-NC-SA License

Foundations of streaming SQL – learn to love stream & table theory, by Tyler Akidau (Google)

Tyler based his session on a very simple but interesting concept: “Tables are data at rest, Streams are data in motion”. He explained why it’s important to know perfectly the status of the data at each stage, and how to make the most of both data structures mastering the operations and transformations between streams and tables.

Tyler Akidau - Tables are data at rest, Streams are data in motion - CC BY-NC-SA License

The Data Errors we Make, by Sean J. Taylor (Facebook)

This was a surprisingly interesting talk, despite I entered the room with very low expectations. In summary, Sean emphasized the necessity to think about errors, to prevent them and to estimate the uncertainty based on the fact that there will always be errors. He gave several examples and some useful tips and tricks.

AI in VR, by Michael Ludden (IBM Watson)

this session was very funny and interesting. Michael summarized the current ecosystem regarding AI in VR, explained the current approaches to AI (and the pros and cons of each) and even made some predictions about what will happen in the future. As Director of Product of IBM Watson, he presented as an example Star Trek: Bridge Crew, an amazing VR game that reacts not only to the player movements but also to voice commands. I’ll just leave you with the trailer:

Streaming analytics @ ING, by David Vaquero (ING Bank)

My last choice could not be other than my colleague David. He explained what we are building in ING to be used by any business unit around the world. It was only a short talk, but David could have spent hours talking about the project transmitting the passion he has for this.

In summary, what ING is building is an event-driven architecture delivered as one platform, with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink and SAS RTDM in the core. I hope that you’ll listen more about this in the future.

Time to see how @INGTechIT is using streaming thanks to @davidvaquero pic.twitter.com/Mag9BB9kEg
— David Gómez G. | @dgomezg@jvm.social (@dgomezg) November 17, 2017

Conclusion

It was my second or third presence in Big Data Spain. I attended a couple of years between 2012 and 2014, but I ceased attending because the content seemed too focused on marketing and business. This year I have finished (again) with a similar feeling, but at least some of the sessions were worth the visit. Anyway, the event itself is much more professional than in the past and everything looked controlled and very well organized. I’ll consider attending again next year.

On being a Senior Software Engineer

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For many different reasons I have had to discuss quite a lot recently about the professionalism of some people, technical and non-technical. Sometimes, because a person feels that she (I will use the feminine as neutral gender) is not being treated fairly with respect of her category, or because her performance is disappointing for others, sometimes after unfair comparisons between colleagues, … As a common element, a diabolical concept was almost always being misused in these situations: Seniority.

Having several years of experience does not make you a better engineer per se. A very common case is that someone has experience with something but knows nothing (or knows little) about everything else. Worse than that, in some organizations the senior label is even used almost automatically to justify a promotion or a salary raise after a certain amount of years in the same job.

About 5 years ago John Allspaw (former CTO at Etsy) wrote an article called On Being a Senior Engineer that has aged very well. I would sign that article today, as it details perfectly what could be the differences between a senior engineer and a mature engineer. As the author says, you can expect a senior engineer to be a mature engineer, but sadly it’s not always like this.

In his article (I recommend its complete reading) Allspaw describes a list of traits or characteristics of mature engineers:

Mature engineers seek out constructive criticism of their designs
Mature engineers understand the non-technical areas of how they are perceived
Mature engineers do not shy away from making estimates, and are always trying to get better at it
Mature engineers have an innate sense of anticipation, even if they don’t know they do
Mature engineers understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work
Mature engineers lift the skills and expertise of those around them
Mature engineers make their trade-offs explicit when making judgments and decisions
Mature engineers don’t practice CYAE (“Cover Your Ass Engineering”)
Mature engineers are empathetic
Mature engineers are aware of cognitive biases

The first thing that you need to realize is that almost all the characteristics described are non-technical. Allspaw article can be can be summarized in this quote:

Being able to write a Bloom Filter in Erlang, or write multi-threaded C in your sleep is insufficient. None of that matters if no one wants to work with you. Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes

If I had to choose, I’ll always pick a mature engineer over any so-called senior (or even ninja!) in a particular technology or programming language. In fact, I would not change a good junior for a ninja, but that is another story that will have to be told in another moment.

Susan Gerbic in Skeptics in the Pub Madrid

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This entry is also published in Spanish in the website of ARP-SAPC

As you probably know, we are celebrating the XXX Anniversary of ARP-SAPC with a special event this next Saturday (Sep 30th) with Alfonso López Borgoñoz (@lopezborgonoz). As an addition to this celebration, a week later we’ll be honoured to host a Skeptics in the Pub Madrid special event with Susan Gerbic.

Affectionately called the Wikipediatrician, Susan Gerbic is the cofounder of Monterey County Skeptics and a self-proclaimed skeptical junkie. Susan is also founder of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project. She is a frequent contributor to Skeptical Inquirer and Skepticality Podcast. She is the winner of the CSI In the Trenches Award from 2012, James Randi Award for Skepticism in the Public Interest from 2013 and a Scientific and Technical Consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).

Our SitP event will be the last stage for Susan in a huge tour all through Europe. She’s been (or plans to be, as the tour is currently ongoing) in Oslo (Norway), Stockholm (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark), Malmö (Sweden), Prague (Czech Republic), Wrocław (Poland, for the 17th European Skeptics Congress), Göttingen (Germany), Frankfurt (Germany), Zurich (Switzerland), Cesena (Italy, for the CICAPFest 2017), Budapest (Hungary), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Sofia (Bulgaria) and finally Madrid. For more details about her tour, you can start with this video of Susan explaining the details.

One important thing. The talk that Susan has prepared for us will be in English, although in the Q&A it will be possible to make questions in Spanish and we will translate whatever is necessary. The content of the talk, as described by herself:

You supported the March for Science. Now what? Susan Gerbic will be explaining why the answer is to join her project, Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW). She will explain why improving the pages for Science and Scientific Skepticism on the 10th most popular website improves education world-wide. GSoW works to support the people and organizations that do the research, write the books, organize the conferences and take the heat from the anti-science and paranormal world. GSoW gives them the best possible Wikipedia pages possible, while following all the rules of Wikipedia. The GSoW has had a large impact on education around the world since 2010. The GSoW has written and rewritten over 400 Wikipedia pages in many languages. All training is done online, self-paced and with a personal trainer. All GSoW members join the Secret Cabal hidden away on Facebook where new recruits learn the secret handshake. Previous pages include; Spontaneous Human Combustion, Facilitated Communication, Catherine de Jong, Cornelis de Jager, Massimo Polidoro, Massimo Pigliucci, Leo Igwe, Gábor Hraskó, VoF, ARP-SAPC, Klub Sceptyków Polskich, Chupacabras, CICAP, CSICOP, Association française pour l'information scientifique, GWUP, and many many more.

The poster, masterfully designed by Emilio Molina (@ej_molina_c):

Susan Gerbic in Skeptics in the Pub Madrid - CC BY-NC-SA License

As usual, the entrance is free. During the realization of this cultural activity is allowed the presence of minors under 18, provided they do not consume alcoholic beverages, and children under 16 if accompanied by a parent or guardian.

We’ll be waiting for you at the Moe Club, at Alberto Alcocer 32 on Sunday, October 8th at 19:00.

Romantikstraße, the Romantic Road (5 of 5)

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fifth and last part of my chronicle about our trip through the Romantikstraße, you can read the rest here:

Day 5

Our last stage started in Obertraun and ended in Madrid. After a fabulous trip around Austria, we decided to spent our last morning in a quite different environment, visiting the Mauthausen memorial.

Mauthausen

The Mauthausen concentration camp (1938-1945) was one of the first massive concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the last to be liberated by the Allies. The construction started just two weeks after the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed into the Third Reich. Since the beginning it was labeled as Stufe III (Grade III), which meant that it was intended to be one of the toughest camps, and never lost this horrible classification. Mauthausen was mainly used for incarceration and extermination through labour of political prisoners, forced to work both in the expansion of the camp itself and in granite quarries nearby. Their daily lives were shaped by hunger, arbitrary violence and death.

The main complex in Mauthausen was declared national memorial site in 1949 and it’s also a museum since 1975, 30 years after the camp’s liberation. As they state in the web:

The Mauthausen Memorial is a former crime scene, a place of memory, a cemetery for the mortal remains of thousands of those murdered here and, increasingly, a site of political and historical education. Its task is to ensure public awareness of the history of the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps, the memory of its victims, and the responsibility borne by the perpetrators and onlookers. At the same time it seeks to promote public critical engagement with this history in the context of its significance for the present and future.

The visit is completely free and you only need to pay for the guided tours and workshops, although there is a free audioguide app for the complete memorial and museum. We chose the latter option and it was very useful and interesting.

Several weeks have passed since our visit and I still remember perfectly the sensations that I experienced there. In addition, we had the bad luck that it started raining when we arrived and halfway through the visit it started to rain very very hard. I have seldom seen so much rain. Maybe it was good luck, because it forced us to stay inside the barracks and prevented us to hear anything else but rain and thunders despite being surrounded by groups of visitors in other buildings. The climate was aligned with the sad and withered spirit of the place.

Mauthausen wreaths - CC BY-NC-SA License

Before entering the remains of the concentration camp, the visitor has to cross a couple of dozen memorials, erected by various countries and collectives that lost their citizens in Mauthausen. Curiously, some of these countries no longer exist (like Yugoslavia), others did not exist at that time (like Ukraine) and most striking of all, one of the memorials is dedicated directly to the Spanish Republicans (as you can see in the featured image), since several thousand political prisoners from the Republican side were taken there. Some memorials were large and epic, others small and humble, but all were breathtaking.

Even now in 2017, there was not a single flag of Spain in the whole camp other than the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) one, even inside the secular chapel where the flags from all the victims waved. I think it is a lovely and wise gesture.

Spanish Second Republic flag in Mauthausen - CC BY-NC-SA License

Thanks to the deluge, during the last part of the visit we had the camp practically empty for us.

Mauthausen panoramic - CC BY-NC-SA License

After having visited Auschwitz last year, the visit to the rest of the concentration camp inflicted less impression on me. Some anecdotes and brutal events of Mauthausen are unique, but both the figures and how to show what happened at Auschwitz are much more overwhelming.

I won’t go into more details about the camp itself to avoid any spoiler. Mauthausen is an essential visit whether you have visited other concentration camps or not. Please go.

ING Security Summer Camp 2017

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I had the huge pleasure to participate in a week-long Security Summer Camp organized by the Information Security department of ING Spain. The agenda was very promising and implied some theory and lots of practice, ending with an Escape the Room game and a 2,5 days long Capture The Flag hacking competition. Several speakers from the Infosec Squad prepared talks and workshops about different topics, focusing on Ethical Hacking, secure development, server hardening or OSINT.

Everything was perfectly prepared and organized. I’ll remark (as her colleagues also did) the invaluable effort of Martina Matarí (@da3n3rys) coordinating everything. She also prepared a talk, the Escape the Room and the CTF competition by herself. Thanks Martina and company, it was impressive!!

Let me also say that it’s worthy of praise for a company like ING to allow and promote this kind of events, held mostly in working hours for more than 70-80 participants.

Talks and Workshops

Sleeping with the Enemy: Ethical Hacking workshop

Beatriz Portela (@usr0000) gave a series of workshops focusing on the most common and basic vectors of attack, learning what a vulnerability is and how to take advantage of it.

Server hardening

Sergi Llorente explained how to protect a server from malicious attackers: DDoS prevention, firewall policies, optimal configurations, password and banning policies and even physical attacks prevention policies. Very complete, and ended with a contest asking all the audience to infiltrate a prepared virtual machine with a weak spot, retrieving the admin password and getting access to a console with admin rights on it.

Secure development

Daniel Medianero (@dmedianero) prepared a good combination of theory and practice regarding bad smells and vulnerabilities in code, both in backend and frontend. He even prepared an online survey for the audience to vote if a given code snippet presented a vulnerability and of what kind. It was very educational and entertaining.

Vicente Carreras (@vicentecarreras) checked if the attendees listened carefuly enough in Daniel’s talks with a contest by teams.

OSINT, don’t be part of it

Martina Matarí (@da3n3rys) talked about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), the danger it entails and what proactive methods exist to monitor it and specially to stop being a part of it.

Escape the Room

Sadly I couldn’t participate, but everyone said it was awesome.

Capture The Flag

I was enrolled in the CTF since I signed up for the Summer Camp, but after a hard week with a lot of issues (work related and not) I wasn’t sure if I was going to contribute properly to my team. All it took was for Martina to subtly insist and I forgot about the weariness and recovered my eagerness to participate. Anyway, I had plans to stay at home during the weekend.

For those who don’t know what a Capture The Flag is (in this context), I’ll copy the description from the cfttime.org site:

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a special kind of information security competitions. There are three common types of CTFs: Jeopardy, Attack-Defence and mixed.
Jeopardy-style CTFs has a couple of questions (tasks) in range of categories. For example, Web, Forensic, Crypto, Binary or something else. Team can gain some points for every solved task. More points for more complicated tasks usually. The next task in chain can be opened only after some team solve previous task. Then the game time is over sum of points shows you a CTF winer. Famous example of such CTF is DEF CON CTF quals.

Well, attack-defence is another interesting kind of competitions. Here every team has own network (or only one host) with vulnarable services. Your team has time for patching your services and developing exploits usually. So, then organizers connects participants of competition and the wargame starts! You should protect own services for defence points and hack opponents for attack points. Historically this is a first type of CTFs, everybody knows about DEF CON CTF - something like a World Cup of all other competitions.

Mixed competitions may vary possible formats. It may be something like wargame with special time for task-based elements (like UCSB iCTF).

CTF games often touch on many other aspects of information security: cryptography, stego, binary analysis, reverse engeneering, mobile security and others. Good teams generally have strong skills and experience in all these issues.

The participation on this competition was lower than for the rest of the Summer Camp, as expected taking place in the weekend. From my team (randomly selected from all participants) we were only two of us left. I didn’t know my partner, but that didn’t stop us from organizing ourselves quickly to start solving problems from the same Friday evening. From the beginning I discovered that my partner was a bright and hard working guy, and soon we understood each other very well (Jaume eres un crack).

The challenge was a Jeopardy-style CTF and consisted on solving tasks with difficulties from 1 to 5 distributed in several categories. Each solved task represented a conquered country (as you can see in the map). Optionally, the first team to conquer a country gets more points than the rest. The categories where:

Criptography - cryptography tests, from basic to advanced ones
Forensics - Forensic analysis from network logs, mobile images and other operating systems
Quiz - Questions about hacker culture
Reconnaissance - Searching for people, machines, websites or data starting only with small hints
Reverse engineering - Cracking several kinds of files
Steganography - Finding hidden messages in known file formats
Web Hacking - Putting into practice what was learned during the ethical hacking talks

I won’t spoil here any of the tasks, I’ll only say that for a level 2 cryptography task I spent around 3-4 hours on Sunday. It took me several steps with different types of encryption (which you had to guess) to get the final result (with great relief and joy). There are a lot of examples in the Internet and for some of them you can even find the solution published by a participant.

It was thrilling, very very funny and I learned a lot. The other participants had very good level and competition was fierce. We struggled to lead the scoreboard almost all the tournament, we managed to solve almost all the tasks to avoid a comeback from our pursuers and finally WE WON! Go StarHack Team!!!

Here you have the Final Scoreboard. It can be observed that there was scoring activity during almost all the weekend, nights included. Kudos for all the participants :-)

ING CTF 2017 - Final Scoreboard - CC BY-NC-SA License

The prize for the winners (I discovered it on Monday, I did not care during the contest) was a fabulous Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Pack. Now I have three different Raspi devices so I need ideas, I’m taking advantage of one of them only :-)

Romantikstraße, the Romantic Road (4 of 5)

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth part of my chronicle about our trip through the Romantikstraße, you can read the rest here:

Day 4

Our fourth stage started in Gästehaus Lauterbacher, a splendid guest house in Neumarkt am Wallersee. Quite off our route because we couldn’t find anything affordable in Mondsee. We wanted a good place to rest after a hard day 3, and Lauterbacher was more than good. The place itself was nice and the owners were marvelous with us. I’ll seriously consider returning to this place if I ever come back to the region.

And thus it began the most awaited stage of the trip.

Postalm

On our way to Hallstatt we droved through Postalm, a mountain pass which is part of a very well preserved and protected Natural Park. Just to cross the area you need to pay a tax (5€ per adult, 2 per children and so on). Normally you’ll pay to spend the morning, the day or the weekend inside: it’s full of hiking routes, mountain bike tracks and even several ski slopes for the winter.

As it was early in the morning, it was almost empty. We only came across a couple of cars and several herds of cows. The scenery was beautiful: everything was green, mist here and there, and almost no sign of mankind except a few piles of stacked wood and the road itself.

Postalm, paradise of Solitude and Nature - CC BY-NC-SA License

I loved the place, although we only stopped a couple of times to make pictures. Another place that I hope to return in the future with my hiking equipment.

Gosau

Our next stop was Gosau. We also spent less time than expected here, we were eager to arrive Hallstatt as soon as possible. We crossed the town a couple of times, made some pictures, visited a lake,… great if it was not what we had been doing the past three days.

The catholic and evangelist churches, disputing the valley in Gosau - CC BY-NC-SA License

Hallstatt

And finally, we arrived Hallstatt, the main destination of the entire trip. I generally liked it and of course it’s very beautiful, but I must say that it might be overrated (IMHO).

The first thing that we did was to go up to the Salz Welten (Salt World) complex using a funicular. The views were as amazing as this during the climb:

Southern part of Hallstatt, with the Salzbergbahn station - CC BY-NC-SA License

Right after ascending you’ll find what they call the World Heritage View (with the corresponding restaurant and souvenir shop): an impressive viewpoint from which you can see much of the Hallstätter See lake and just below, small (because it is small) the old town of Hallstatt on the lake shore.

Hallstatt World Heritage View, with a group selfie using a drone - CC BY-NC-SA License

'Miners' sheltering from the rain in the Hallstatt Salt Mine - CC BY-NC-SA License

They claim that the Hallstatt Salt Mine is the oldest salt mine in Europe, but what they have there is more a tourist trap (as we guessed beforehand) than an historical or practical recreation. Yes, during the visit you go underground and they even give you a miner outfit, but the visit consists almost exclusively of videos and light effects.

What makes the visit unique are wooden slides by which you descend from some galleries to others. It’s curious, but after the second one it’s not that thrilling and with a big group visiting the mines it’s bottleneck after bottleneck. These slides are the reason behind the miner outfit, because apart of them the risk of staining or tearing your clothes is null. A curious thing, being a mine.

But maybe I’m biased, after visiting in 2016 the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland, near Krakow. Wieliczka is a really huge mine, the areas that are visitable are much more impressive and the information is infinite times more interesting.

Luckily for you as future visitors, the funicular ticket to visit at least the World Heritage View can be purchased separately from the entrance to the mines.

With that bittersweet flavor, we went down again to visit the old town, full of restaurants, hotels and souvenir shops. The best approach to visit Hallstatt is to lose yourself in its streets, alleys and stairs. I liked some hidden corners more than the typical streets or squares. In fact, what could be a very cool area for visitors (next to the church) is used as parking and therefore is full of cars. Cars and vans can be seen on any postcard picture, as this one:

Hallstatt from the 'postcard picture' spot - CC BY-NC-SA License

And I say postcard picture because since you enter the town there are signs for you to go to the spot from which the postcard picture can be made. Looks like the spot it’s important for them, so I added the viewpoint to OpenStreetMap :-)

We took dozens of postcard pictures and postcard selfies, struggling to avoid that other tourists could appear. It was packed full of people.

A very cool thing about Hallstatt is that the cemetery is located between the houses that surround the catholic church. There is so little place to bury people there that every ten years bones used to be exhumed and removed into an ossuary, to make room for new burials. A collection of elaborately decorated skulls with the deceased’s name, profession and date of death inscribed on them is on display in a small chapel.

Hallstatt Beinhaus, where you can show off your skull forever - CC BY-NC-SA License

Apparently it’s possible to leave written in your will that you want your skull to end there. Think about it.

Obertraun

We ended the day (and we could also say our Romantikstraße trip) in Obertraun, another touristic place just in front of Hallstatt in the lakeshore. Obertraun also has it’s own funicular with caves, mines and breath-taking views, the Dachstein Salzkammergut, but as it was raining and very foggy we prefered to stay in the lakeshore.

Despite the heavy rain and the mist, we took a couple of glasses of the wine we had bought in Kremsmünster and went for a walk. In the lakeshore there were several floating platforms, ready to receive bathers in the summer. We toured the entire village and we even entered a small forest in the mouth of the Koppentraun river to search for a cache (and it was worth it!).

After starting to worry about not find any open restaurant, we discovered the perfect place (and it was beside our hotel): Kegelbahn, a restaurant with typical local food, and a small bowling alley! After a delicious onion soup, a superb goulash and an exquisite cheesecake, we occupied the bowling alley until they closed the place. It was such a fun and unexpected moment.

In Obertraun, throwing bowls like there's no tomorrow - CC BY-NC-SA License

Our visit on the fifth and last day is not strictly part of the Romantikstraße route, but it’ll be part of my review anyway.

Stay tuned for the last episode!

Romantikstraße, the Romantic Road (3 of 5)

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third part of my chronicle about our trip through the Romantikstraße, you can read the rest here:

Day 3

After two days visiting splendid places with invaluable surprises, we finally decided to discard a short visit to Salzburg in order to spend more time on each stage of our trip. We wanted to take advantage of our rental car and Salzbug deserves to be visited more calmly (and you don’t need a car to go there). For similar reasons, we also ruled out going to the Hohenwerfen Castle.

I think it was the right decision, because it allowed us to make the most of the remaining of our road trip.

Sankt Wolfgang im Salzkammergut

Sankt Wolfgang im Salzkammergut is one of the most touristic places of Austria. I suspect that I’d have preferred to visit this town 15-20 years ago, now it’s excessively exploited touristically. In the narrow streets of the center I had the feeling of being inside a theme park, and unfortunately one with many more shops than attractions. It is possible that the shops and restaurants themselves are nowadays the attractions. Not for me.

Schafbergbahn trains crossing - CC BY-NC-SA License

But still we had a great time there.

We started the day by climbing on the Schafbergbahn, a rack railway leading in the warmer half of the year from almost the lakeshore of the Wolfgangsee lake to the summit of the Schafberg mountain (1,783 m). From the viewpoints of Schafberg it is possible to see 9 of the main lakes of Austria, countless mountains and an infinite 360º landscape.

Initially it reminded me to a small version of the Jungfraubahn, which I visited in 2013. Saving the differences because the Jungfraujoch station is the highest station in Europe (3,454 m), the line is more than twice as long and the amount of visitors is probably exponentially greater in the Jungfrau.

Unfortunately, due to some construction works in the railway, the train only reached the Schafbergalpe (1,363 m), an intermediate railway halt with a big guest house, a couple of private houses and traces of many hiking trails.

Despite not being on the mountaintop, the views were overwhelming. We wandered around the area, taking lots of pictures but as you can imagine they don’t capture the feeling of being up there surrounded by such a wonderful environment. For my next visit I promise to bring adequate equipment to do some hiking route.

Staring into the endless mountains at Schafbergalpe - CC BY-NC-SA License

After the descent came one of the funniest moments of the trip. As we saw in many other places, on the lakeshore of Sankt Wolfgang there were some boat-rental locations. Instead of renting a paddle boat, we chose an small boat with electric engine to try to make a longer trip through the Wolfgangsee lake. In the end, our boat wasn’t much faster than a paddle boat but at least could entertain ourselves doing the clown on board instead of pedaling.

Note to my wise readers: What translation to English do you suggest for “hacer el pertur”?

Sailing on the Wolfgangsee - CC BY-NC-SA License

Apart from amusing ourselves stupidly, from the boat we could contemplate the town from its best perspective. In the next picture you can perfectly see what I mean, a postcard view with the main landmarks: the catholic Church of Sainkt Wolfgang and the Im Weißen Rößl (The White Horse Inn). The inn (now an expensive hotel with a couple of fine restaurants) is very popular for a successful operetta of the same name in which the protagonist is a bartender of the inn desperately in love with the owner of The White Horse. The show has been performed several times mainly across Germany and Austria, but in the 1930s it was even featured on Broadway and the West End of London. There are also several movie and TV series adaptations.

Postcard picture of Sainkt Wolfgang im Salzkammergut, with the Church of Sainkt Wolfgang and the Im Weißen Rößl (the yellow building) - CC BY-NC-SA License

We tried to escape from the tourist traps as much as we could, but in Sainkt Wolfgang it was a really difficult task to achieve. Finally we had lunch in Hubertuskeller. It was very good and not absurdly expensive.

Bad Ischl

For the afternoon we improvised a visit to Bad Ischl and it was our main mistake of the trip, but it was our fault and not because the city is not interesting.

The center of Bad Ischl is very beautiful and it’s very well maintained, but the main attraction is the Kaiservilla, summer residence of the Austrian Imperial family, and we couldn’t see it because it was closed. The town is also famous for it’s salt mines and offers several health spas, but we didn’t have time to enjoy them. We walked through the center, we searched for a couple of caches and we left to reach Mondsee before sunset.

Post Office and the Trinkhalle in Bad Ischl - CC BY-NC-SA License

Mondsee

Mondsee is famous for the Mondsee Abbey and the Basilica of Saint Michael, inside which it was filmed the wedding scene of the film The Sound of Music. We did not arrive in time to visit the church but at least we managed to quietly stroll around the village.

Following a recommendation we tasted a local variety of wine and an assortment of local cheeses, and they were good but nothing special. We enjoyed particularly the Strandpromenade, from which we could see the sunset falling on the Mondsee lake. I’ve just discovered in Wikipedia that Mondsee is one of Austria’s last privately owned lakes. In August 2008, the owner announced it was up for sale. WTF! Fucking Private Property!!

Except for some detail, Mondsee is similar to other towns we had already visited in our trip, but surely it is worth spending more time here.

Waiting for the sunset at the Mondsee lakeshore - CC BY-NC-SA License

We were not able to find a reasonably priced accommodation here so we booked something about 20 km away and off our route, and surprisingly there we met the most incredible host in the world. But this story belongs to our next day…

Stay tuned for next episodes!

Romantikstraße, the Romantic Road (2 of 5)

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second part of my chronicle about our trip through the Romantikstraße, you can read the rest here:

Day 2

Kremsmünster

For me, Kremsmünster Abbey was the most positive surprise of the entire trip. A priori it looked like yet another abbey, and our first hour there not only was confirming that suspicion but also made us feel somewhat deceived. We paid a considerable amount of money to find out that the ticket didn’t include the visit of what we particularly wanted to see in there: The Tassilo Chalice, the Library and the Mathematical Tower. We could only access the public areas and the inner gardens where they temporally hosted a floral exhibition. The information was confusing, mostly in German only, and the variety of ticket options was the most complex that I’ve ever seen in a place like this.

Kremsmünster Mathematical Tower - CC BY-NC-SA License

After visiting the gardens and the Abbey Church we followed some unclear signs to the Tassilo, and when we were almost there a couple of exhibition guides insisted us that our tickets didn’t include this area, so they charged us again (without any kind of ticket) to enter the Treasure Chamber and a couple more rooms with minor interest. The Tassilo is an interesting piece of art and history, but the extra price to see it seemed disproportionate.

We were about to leave, almost angry, but in the end we bought another additional ticket to visit the panorama terrace on top of the Mathematical Tower even though it only included climbing up the stairs and going out on the terrace to see the views from there. The rest of the building was not included in our handful of tickets but at least we’d see some of what we initially wanted.

And there, waiting at the entrance of the tower, our luck changed with the stellar appearance of Anna. I’ll call her Anna as the most popular female name in Austria to preserve her identity, not because I don’t remember her real name.

The incredible kindness of Anna, her desire to practice spoken English and the fact that there were no more tourists in the visit, made our day radically better. Waiting to see if anyone else was joining the visit we told her about our bad luck and poor understanding of the information for tourists, and she empathized and wanted to compensate us in some way. She couldn’t realize that we’d bought like three different tickets to leave without seeing what we expected to see (the main attractions, by the way).

Xylotheque - Sternwarte Kremsmünster
Source: Reinhard Stiksel in Wikimedia - CC by-sa License

We climbed the Tower, but instead of going directly to the top we stopped at each floor and briefly visited the exhibition rooms. One room was a small Natural History collection with several stuffed animals, minerals, all kind of insects, other contained an interesting collection of vintage astronomical devices and globes, another presented diverse regional folklore, ethnology and popular costumes,… We didn’t make any picture acknowledging that the visit was unofficial, but I can still remember an amazing cabinet with a curious Xylotheque, pieces of different types of wood carved as books that contained their characteristic leaf, fruit or flower. I’d found a picture in Wikimedia, take a look right here.

Anna’s infinite friendliness did not end there. On our way down she offered to negotiate for us a private visit to the Library, guided by herself. She managed to convince her boss, and paying an additional ticket at a reduced price we got to see the rest of the art collections and the impressive Library. We visited the Imperial Hall, several rooms with a nice art collection (mainly paintings) and finally the Library. We could’ve spent hours there…

Kremsmünster Library - CC BY-NC-SA License

We’d planned to be in Kremsmünster just a couple of hours , but finally we were there all morning so we had to lunch just there, in a traditional restaurant inside the Abbey grounds: Stiftsschank. It was great so we recommend it as well.

Scharnstein

Scharnstein stands out for its variety of hiking trails, since it’s surrounded by forests and mountains. It’s also near Totes Gebirge, a picturesque mountain range part of the Limestone Alps.

Our extended visit to the Kremsmünster Abbey forced us to expend less time here, but at least we could do some light hiking. We made one of the typical routes: climbing from the town to the ruins of the Scharnstein Castle. Both the ascent and the exploration of the ruins were fantastic. We were lucky enough to be completely alone, so it was a relaxing experience and a total immersion in the Nature that surrounded us. The views were excellent, with the remains of the castle with the huge Almtal valley behind.

Relaxing at Scharnstein Castle - CC BY-NC-SA License

In Scharnstein you can also find an interesting Criminological Museum. We went there but it was closed, so we settled for a beer in a tavern located in the same Scharnstein Castle that hosts the Museum about Crime and another about the Austrian Federal Gendarmerie. The tavern was promising but they’ll have to admit that it has seen better days.

Traunkirchen

Our next stop was Traunkirchen, a small village known for its idyllic location on a small peninsula overlooking the Traunsee Lake. It’s probably the place where we took more pictures per minute, and that’s considering that the best pictures of the village are made from the lake itself. It was a short walk, but it was totally worth it.

On our way there we booked with our mobile a guest house in other village. If we had seen the Das Traunsee Seehotel before… we’d have spent the night there regardless of how much we were charged, and it didn’t seem cheap. The views and the back terrace of the hotel were incredible.

A pier in Traunkirchen with the Traunstein mountain behind - CC BY-NC-SA License

Gmunden

We planned to end our second stage in Gmunden, the most important town of the region and where the Traun River empties into the Traunsee Lake, at the foot of the Traunstein mountain and near the beautiful village of Traunkirchen. Yes, I agree with you, this village should’ve been called Traun Town.

Gmunden is a very lively town with a lot of summer resorts, shops, art galleries and restaurants. Curiously, most of the fashion boutiques exclusively had Austrian regional costumes on display on the storefronts. I left there with a real desire to buy one, they were splendid. During our visit it was very peaceful, but it was clear that it’s a popular tourist destination. The old town is surrounded by countless houses of all sizes from modest chalets to small palaces.

In the western lakeside, in front of the mouth of the Traun River and connected with the downtown through the Esplananade (a nice long promenade) is located the biggest attraction of the town: the Schloss Ort Castle. This singular Austrian Castle is set on a small island offshore, so it can only be reached by a long timber bridge. This 120m bridge starts from a beautiful green peninsula called the Toscana Park. We took a delightful walk through the park by the water’s edge where each stop seemed a special viewpoint and provided a unique perspective.

Gmunden's Schloss Ort Castle - CC BY-NC-SA License

We had dinner at the Weinhaus Spiesberger, conceivably the best tavern in town where Agatha dined, guess what, Traun Fische! We did not quite understand what kind of fish it was, as in the UK when you order Fish & chips and almost nobody is capable of telling you the specific type of fish. Anyway, it was a seasonal fish from the Lake (or so the said) and it was good so I also recommend this place at least for a beer.

Stay tuned for next episodes!

Romantikstraße, the Romantic Road (1 of 5)

Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I had the immense pleasure of making a road trip through Austria following what they call the Romantikstraße, Romantic Road or Romantic Trail in English. Interestingly, ours was a singles trip initially planned for three friends but sadly in the end we were only two because at the last minute Roberto had to cancel. I shared this great adventure only with Agatha and it was great (as expected). I suppose that in the eyes of any innkeeper or bartender we were a happy couple celebrating something.

Having said that, I didn’t notice any special romantic atmosphere beyond the surrounding beautiful landscapes, fantastic lakes and awesome mountains. Some might say that my sense of romanticism is broken, and it may be possible, but for me Nature is not romantic by itself. Luckily the shops, restaurants and villages in general didn’t focus on selling this concept to the visitors. In fact it was very unlikely to find a sign about the Romantikstraße off the main roads of the route. But enough talking about the commercial name of the route.

Let me summarize our experience, mainly anecdotes and tips. Prices, timetables and other General tourist information are easy to find and that info sometimes expires soon. I’ll love to read it in the future and it could be useful for anyone planning a similar trip. You can also read Agatha’s review in her blog (in Spanish). She prepared the route perfectly in advance and we mainly followed her plan, we only needed a couple of improvised detours.

TL;DR

The area covered by the Romantikstraße is totally amazing. Everything is beautiful, looks shiny, deserves a zillion pictures or to sit for a while to admire the landscape. Especially the latter
It’s not a cheap trip, but it’s not as expensive as Switzerland
We spent 4,5 days there and it was enough but the trip deserves at least a couple days more
Hallstatt is very beautiful, but it’s not (as they claim) the most beautiful village in the world. Covarrubias is (of course)

Preparing the Romantikstraße

If you are not as lucky as I was and you need to prepare the trip in advance, my first recommendation is to visit the official website of the Romantikstraße. There you’ll find a lot of info about the route and the main attractions. You can also request a brochure of the route in several languages for free, we did it and it was useful during the trip.

About the accommodation, depending on the dates of the trip it may be essential to book everything in advance. Some villages are very small and have few options to choose from. We booked in advance only the first night and a couple of nights we needed a considerable detour from the route, and it was low season.

Day 1

Schallaburg

After wasting more than 1 hour in the airport waiting the queue of the car rental company our first destination was the Schallaburg Castle, a >900 years old castle very well preserved located on top of a hill surrounded by forest. In addition to the privileged situation, the castle offers a very well arranged garden. This first stop reminded me of my bicycle trip through La Loire à Vélo.

The castle also hosts temporal exhibitions and a very nice restaurant in the courtyard called Schloss. Apart from the regional specialties, the restaurant changes it’s menu and decoration to match the running exhibitions. During our visit the main exhibition was about Islam and we could acclimatize to the country with a regional craft beer and some falafel.

The first funny anecdote of the trip arrived soon. From the parking to the castle we saw two different roads, both very steep. Ignoring a medium-sized sign in German we followed the nearest of them, because in OSMAnd I could see that it was more direct to the gardens and the castle. After visiting the garden, the courtyard of the castle, the restaurant and most of the open rooms (and some closed ones), we noticed that we had paid nothing to be there. We went back to the parking lot using the other way and confirmed that we’d skipped the ticket office. I leave to your imagination if we warned them of our mistake and paid the entrance.

Schallaburg castle's courtyard - CC by-nc-sa License

Before leaving, we found our first cache of the trip, less than 5 meters from our car :-)

Melk

Our next visit was to Melk and his famous Melk Abbey. Umberto Eco named Adso de Melk as a tribute to this abbey, and we were curious about it and the fact that the Austrians talk about this place as one of the most important monasteries in Europe. The place did not disappoint us at all.

We did a quick tour through the main elements of this baroque Abbey. The exhibition, the Marble Hall and the church are quite beautiful but what really impressed us was the Library, with about 100.000 volumes (1.888 manuscripts, 750 incunabula, a unique 13th century copy of The Song of the Nibelungs, …). In one room of the Library the fresco portrays an allegory of Scientia (Science), just like churches in Spain, right?

Melk Abbey Library
Source: Jorge Royan @ Wikimedia - CC by-sa License

The Abbey was also wisely located, on top of a hill and clearly standing out from the town of Melk. The visit is worth it just for the views from the balcony connecting the Marble Hall and the Library with Melk, the Danube river and forests everywhere.

The visit to the Abbey includes a nice English landscape garden with an interesting baroque pavilion and a small park full of works of art and fabulous hidden corners.

Don’t forget to find this awesome cache in the surrounding area. One of my all time favorites.

Steyr

Our last stop for the first day was Steyr, where (as they say) Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo meet each other in harmony. Steyr is in the confluence of the rivers Enns and Steyr, and therefore features more than 100 bridges. I confess that I expected to hear the comment The Venice of Austria but it didn’t happen. The old town is nice, all around the huge Stadtplatz (market square) that was, sadly, partially occupied with parked cars and even some tents for private events. Disgusting for the visitors and I’d bet that also for the locals.

Steyr's Nachtwachtern - CC by-nc-sa License

Our main goal in this city was to follow the Nachtwächtern Tour, a walking tour through the old town guided by a historian disguised as medieval watchman. Unluckily the tour was only in German, and we struggled to get the guide to understand that we wanted to follow him without understanding anything at all. The guide took pity on us, letting us follow him paying only half the price. As expected we didn’t understand anything, but we crossed the same streets and alleys, we looked where they looked, we analyzed in detail whatever they commented in detail, and we laughed when they laughed (maybe even some joke about Spanish tourists, who knows).

The Night Watchman Tour is also the only way for a tourist to climb the 228 steps of the Stadtpfarrkirche Steyr tower, a roman catholic Church dedicated to Saint Aegidius (I toast him!) and Saint Koloman. Even at night, the views are wonderful.

We had a delicious dinner with local specialities at Mader and returned to our guest house (Gasthof Bauer). I recommend both places but especially the second one, the guest house occupied several low buildings and houses in a small island near the old town, the rooms were almost small apartments and the attention we received was exquisite.

This is the first part of my chronicle about our trip through the Romantikstraße, you can read the rest here:

Stay tuned for next episodes!

Baking my Blog with JBake and GitHub

Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Almost since I created my personal blog in 2003 I thought about moving it from blogger to my own domain, private hosting and so on. My laziness prevented me from doing so. Not because the migration itself, but for the maintenance it entailed.

Anyhow, I was determined to migrate my blog outside of any blogging platform. I wanted to have complete control over my content, but without wasting lots of time in maintenance. All I needed was a way to do it seamlessly, quickly, and as automated as possible.

The static site/blog generators appeared a long time ago but now they are multiplying and flourishing. I watched them and the surrounding tools for a long time… and recently my atheist prayers were heard!

I will describe briefly what I did to move my blog from blogger to Github Pages in a few hours. The most time consuming task was to decide among a large number of excellent static site generators.

Step 1 - Choose your weapon

The reference here is StaticGen, a ranking with all the open source static site generators. The site itself is open source, and static generated (of course) using Middleman.

In StaticGen you will need some time, filtering by programming language, sorting the options by stars, forks, … Eventually you’ll chose one that covers your needs mainly in terms of language, templating technology or license.

I was tempted to use Hugo but I selected JBake (created in 2013 by Jonathan Bullock) instead of other much more popular options. The main reasons for me were:

It’s Open Source (MIT License). This is always the first element in my checklist
It’s cross platform, one of the main benefits to choose a product running in the JVM, right?
Supports a good amount of content formats: plain HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, … this is great now that I write even my personal notes in markdown format
Interesting template support: Freemarker, Thymeleaf, Jade or Groovy template framework
Blog-ready out of the box: RSS feed, tag support, archive, index pagination, …
Easy to integrate with CSS frameworks as Bootstrap
Custom metadata in the contents, even exposed to the templates. This is winner by itself

The documentation of JBake could be improved, but it’s good enough.

To install JBake, you can execute the last binary distribution but I recommend that you simply use SDKMAN. If you don’t know what SDKMAN is, you are missing something special. After you have SDKMAN installed, enter the following command:

>> sdk install jbake

Thanks Jonathan !!

Step 2 - Choose your theme/style

Some static generators support themes better than others, that’s for sure. This was important to me, and I checked that in JBake the code responsible of the presentation is isolated enough from the content, so it’s more or less simple to change entirely the theme or style of your site.

In fact, I didn’t start the personalization of my blog from the default theme and style. I cloned the JBake Future Imperfect Template by Manik Magar and for the moment I’ve only needed minor touches to make it better suited for me.

As simple as this:

>> mkdir awesome-jbake

>> git clone https://github.com/manikmagar/jbake-future-imperfect-template.git awesome-jbake

>> cd awesome-jbake && ls -ltr

Most of the changes were related to custom css styles that I was already using in Blogger, the JBake Future Imperfect Template is fantastic.

Thanks Manik !!

Step 3 - Migrate your content from your old blog/site (if needed)

You’ll only need this if you are migrating something, skip this point if you are creating something from scratch.

For this magic trick, my first intent was to implement it myself, only to code for a while. Finally I discovered a repo in github with a promising name: blogger-to-jbake. I checked the code and the author (Cloud Tu) had developed more or less what I meant to do.

With a little help from an difficult-even-for-google-translate README file in Chinese, I could run the program and export all my blog only with minor problems regarding the download of certain images that were not hosted in blogger.

The steps are very simple:

Modify the src/main/resources/application.properties to set the Blogger atom file path, the output path and your current URL in Blogger
Execute gradlew run in the console
Profit!

I made some improvements (from my humble point of view) in the code, and I’ll send the corresponding pull request. They could be valuable for anyone else.

Thanks Cloud Tu !!

Step 4 - Deploy your blog

Well, thanks to Github and specifically to Github Pages, the only thing that I needed was to change the configuration of JBake so the output directory for the baked content is called docs instead of the name by default (output).

After enabling it for the first time, Github automatically deploys in Github Pages whatever you put in the docs directory of your repo.

I’m suffering the misbehavior of Github Pages with relative paths, but for the moment I’m solving it with a sed command before pushing the baked content.

Thanks Github Pages !!

Conclusion

I’m happier than ever with my blog, and I’ll try to write more often now that I can make it with my editor in Markdown or AsciiDoc.

It’s also possible that I’ll write a more technical post about how JBake works, but in the meantime ask me in the comments anything that you want to know.

Greach 2017, the Groovy Spanish Conference

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I'll keep my intent to summarize all the important events that I'm attending, and I'll do it again in English as the audience is international. Please, point me any mistake you may find

Greach Conference 2017 - CC BY-NC-SA License

This week I attended, as usual since I don't remember when, to Greach 2017, an international conference about the Apache Groovy language and ecosystem. Greach is held each year in Madrid but everything is in English, and nowadays it's probably one of the Top3 worldwide events about this technology.

The event is organized mainly by Iván López (@ilopar) and Alberto Vilches (@albertovilches), with some help from other colleagues and a lot of Sponsors. Everything was perfect: the location is great, the spaces were confortable, the wifi more or less worked fine, cafeteria in-place, free wardrobe,... the lunch boxes were far from perfect, but that's another story more related to the venue.

TLDR; The conference content and speakers were great, in addition to the logistics. I missed the workshop day, but everyone told me it was also fantastic (both venue and contents). I learned a lot, not only about Groovy or Grails, but also about GraphQL, Ratpack and concurrence in general.

Let me summarize some of the talks I attended:

Make concurrency groovy again, by Alonso Torres (@alotor). Alonso gave an excellent overview of the main available resources regarding concurrence in the Groovy ecosystem, comparing some of them in terms of design, code readability and even performance. Threads, functional style resources, parallel collections, Atomic variables, fork/join, GPars, actors... and even how to steal a bit from others (Clojure, Akka or Spark) thanks to the Java bindings. Take a look at the slides

Javaslang & Groovy: The best of both worlds, by Iván López (@ilopmar). Another hands-on master class by Iván, combining and comparing some of the benefits of Javaslang with what's available out-of-the-box in Groovy. The demo part (90% of the talk) covered a lot of interesting examples: Optional vs Option, Try, Functional Interfaces, Tuples, Javaslang collections, Pattern matching, validations, ...

Ivan talking about javaslang and groovy! #greach pic.twitter.com/zkxySl6SQu
— Ryan Vanderwerf (@RyanVanderwerf) March 31, 2017

Back From The Dead: HTTP Builder NG, by Noam Tenne (@NoamTenne). Noam gave a complete review of the features included in HTTP Builder NG, the current available implementations and some advanced features and use cases like header parsers, content parsers, request interceptors or request encoders

hasMany Considered Harmful, by Burt Beckwith (@BurtBeckwith). Burt gave this talk for the first time in 2010 at the Spring One, pointing out some performance problems when mapping collections with any ORM tool (like GORM or Hibernate). After seven years, he revisited the topic repeating (sadly) the same warnings about more or less the same problems, some of them critical with huge data collections

GraphQL development with Groovy, by Mario García (@marioggar). Thanks to Mario now I have a clear view of what GraphQL provides, and specially what it does not provide. He reviewed the main features, the logic behind schemas, types querying, hierarchy, operations, the introspective nature of GraphQL... Mario also demoed some useful combination of GraphQL with tools like GraphiQL or Relay. He even teased GQL, his own DSL library to use GraphQL directly from Groovy. Awesome :-)

Groovy Puzzlers 4: The Bytecode Bites Back, by El Groovyssimo (@el_groovyssimo) and Noam Tenne (@NoamTenne). Again, this was fantastic. Entertaining and somehow even educational. It's based on the Java Puzzlers created by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter, but focused on Groovy. Big fan of the format

Alexa, Tell Me I’m Groovy, by Ryan Vanderwerf (@RyanVanderwerf). Ryan explained how the Alexa platform works and some basic info about the main SDKs: Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service. Ryan also showed how he uses Grails apps to create Alexa services and cards, and how to test them online with Echosim.io. Very interesting, and one of those talks in which the audience leaves with some good ideas for the future

Alexa can do GREAT stuff! @RyanVanderwerf has her tell @Greachconf we're all #Groovy 😎 @amazon #grailsfw @groovypodcast pic.twitter.com/c2KfK0A7u2
— Ted Vinke (@tvinke) April 1, 2017

Grails keynote, by Graeme Rocher (@GraemeRocher). The anual Grails keynote in Greach, in which Graeme showed what came with Grails 3.2 (improvements in the awesome JSON views, in profiles, GORM 6, ...) and what will come with Grails 3.3: GORM 6.1 (already available independently), Spring Boot 1.5.x and Hibernate 5.2. Regarding GORM, the main things for the 6.1 version are: Improvements in common AST transforms, common services, and Data Services, package scanning and a better mapping DSL. Graeme showed some of the new features and they looked amazing, very good work :-)

What's new with #grailsfw?@graemerocher delivers keynote @greachconf and fills us in! pic.twitter.com/RJ029GnXGN
— Object Computing (@ObjectComputing) April 1, 2017

Geb best practices, by Marcin Erdmann (@MarcinErdmann). Marcin gave us some tips to make a better use of Geb, starting with the reminder that a Module is a Navigator, that Navigators are iterable, and the advantages of overloading some methods, having dynamic base urls or page parametrizations. He also explained how to inject Javascript into pages (if needed). Other best practices: using strongly typed Geb code, tracking the current page type, always keep the at checks simple and quick and that modules are not meant only for reuse but also to isolate complex blocks.

Mastering Async In Ratpack, by Danny Hyun (@Lspacewalker). Danny went beyond the basic concepts of concurrency in a fantastic code-driven talk, showing a lot of good examples about the complexity of this kind of problems. He explained how Ratpack comes to the rescue, how the Ratpack concept of Promise works, how to manage them and how to test complex concurrent execution flows. Very complete for 45 minutes and very well presented. Homework: read about the C10K problem and the Disruptor pattern

Notes for Rapid Ratpack Web app development https://t.co/XPKWNA3dg1 @greachconf #greach #groovylang
— not the mama (@Lspacewalker) March 31, 2017

See you in Greach 2018!!

Greach 2016, the Groovy Spanish conference

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I'll keep my intent to summarize all the important events that I'm attending, and I'll do it again in English as the audience is international. Please, point me any mistake you may find

This last weekend I had the opportunity to attend Greach 2016. Greach is an international conference about the Groovy language and ecosystem, it's hosted here in Madrid but the conference is 100% in English to successfully attract top speakers and attendees. This was the 5th edition of the conference, consolidated as one of the biggest events worldwide about Groovy.

TLDR; You shouldn't miss this gathering if you have a minimum interest in this technology. Top speakers and high quality content are guaranteed in a confortable and thought provoking environment. Totally worth it.

Everything was (as expected) brilliantly organized thanks to Iván López (@ilopar), Alberto Vilches (@albertovilches) and a lot of Sponsors. The venue changed from previous years, and Teatros Luchana was also a success. Both auditoriums and networking space had the proper dimensions, very good location, a very handy cafeteria, free wardrobe, more than decent food,... Maybe the sponsors area could have been larger, but everything else was more than correct.

Let me summarize:

A Groovy journey in Open Source, by Guillaume Laforge (@glaforge, Apache Groovy Project VP). Guillaume made an interesting overview of Groovy's history, from its birth in 2003 to its current status as a top Open Source programming language inside the Apache Software Foundation, remarking some of the main milestones. The audience particularly appreciated when he explained extensively about the current situation, when no one has the maintenance and evoultion of Groovy as its full-time paid job.

The advantages of Grails, by Søren Berg Glasius (@sbglasius, Grails team member and @GR8Conf organizer). Søren made a nice introduction to Grails, explaining what comes out-of-the-box: GORM, a rich controller layer, GSPs technology, an embedded Tomcat, on-the-fly reloading, Spring DI, i18n, transactional services control, easy taglib generation, Gradle and a useful command line tool.

Geb for Browser Automation, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen (@jacobaae, Software Engineer at Lego and the hands behind the weekly Grails Diary). I received more than I expected, it was a great talk about advanced tips and tricks using Geb for testing automation. Pro tip: extending GebReportingSpec to make captures before and after each test.

Slides for my Geb talk: https://t.co/qU8YiSpZp2 code (presentation and application): https://t.co/PNOmj7UQ7b #greach
— Jacob Aae Mikkelsen (@JacobAae) April 8, 2016

Groovy Powered Clean Code, by Noam Tenne (@NoamTenne, Backend Engineer at Codefresh). Noam emphasized (as expected) the importance of clean code, focusing on how Groovy itself can improve our codebase: JSON native support, checked exceptions, default imports, AST transformations, extension modules, scripts,...

Dynamic GORM, by Burt Beckwith (@BurtBeckwith, Grails core committer and plugin developer). Burt showed a lot of internal features of GORM, and how he is arranging some useful improvements in a promising open source library (which will be published shortly).

Creating and testing REST contracts with Accurest Gradle Plugin, by Olga Maciaszek-Sharma (@olga_maciaszek, Java and Groovy Developer at Codearte). Olga started with an interesting reflection about the absence of contract compliance in REST, and its importance in microservice-based systems. Do we need to test all after the release of any microservice? Do we test them independently mocking everything else? How will we notice if a contract changes? The last part of her talk was an introduction to Accurest, a Gradle plugin to create REST contracts and to verify its compliance with automatically generated Spock tests. Very promising.

Continuous Delivery as Code with Jenkins and Gradle, by Alex Soto (@alexsotob, Software Engineer at CloudBees). Alex started with the principles behind CD: deliver faster, sooner and better. Then he remarked the main idea of agile: Deliver business value more frequently. After that, he metioned some interesting tools like Serenity to make BDD or Gatling for stress testing, and several tips to improve your CD using Gradle and Jenkins.

Down the RabbitMQ hole, by Alonso Torres (@alotor, Software engineer at Kaleidos). Alonso amazed the audience with a curious proof of concept making a working WebSocket infrastructure using RabbitMQ (thanks to the STOMP protocol), Spring Integration and Groovy. Awesome.

#greach you can check the slides of my talk "Down The RabbitMQ Hole" here https://t.co/7UVnOP5tjY I hope you enjoyed it :)
— Alonso Torres (@alotor) April 8, 2016

Operating Microservices with Groovy, by Andrés Viedma (@andres_viedma, Software Engineer at Tuenti). Andrés uses Groovy mainly for testing and scripting, and explained some examples of how Groovy makes his day thanks to its dynamic nature. As an example he showed, demo included, how he makes dynamic curl petitions using Groovy's JsonRpcClient.

Our friendly troll @andres_viedma talks about testing microservices Using @ApacheGroovy #greach pic.twitter.com/TGGlx7O3Cd
— Greach (@greachconf) April 8, 2016

Grails Keynote, by Graeme Rocher (@GraemeRocher, Grails Project Lead). In this interesting keynote Graeme talked about the upcoming Grails 3 and its importance in the future. How Grails has adapted to the current and future needs through diverse and powerful profiles (rest-api, angular, plugin, web-plugin,...). He made an overview of the REST API profile and it looked awesome: No GSP, specific plugins, specific ui plugins, extensible and customizable Json/Markup views,... Brilliant and very useful.

Mastering Grails 3 plugins, by Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal (@alvaro_sanchez, Grails committer at ObjectComputing). Álvaro explained in detail how Grails 3 plugins work, focusing on best practises. He also gave some tips to improve your plugins, with bug emphasis on modularization and tidiness.

Gradle Glam: Plugins Galore, by Andrés Almiray (@aalmiray, Griffon project lead, Basilisk project lead, Java Champion). Andrés gave a complete review, live demo included, of several plugins for Gradle. I will highlight some of them: versions (to manage dependencies), license (to update license headers and even download the license docs), versioning (to add the git hash to the project manifest), coveralls (produces an awesome report on coverage) and another to publish generated docs (with ascii doctor, for example) automatically to gh-pages in Github.

Creating ASTT’s the painful truth?, by Mario García (@marioggar, Software Engineer at Kaleidos). Mario dared to talk about AST Transformations, giving an extraordinary explanation of the theory behind them, showing a lot of code and sharing several good & bad experiences with them. He explained when and why its a good idea to apply ASTTs, some improvement tips and even tricks to reduce your AST code using ASTTs or combining them. Impressive as usual.

Logró conseguido por @marioggar : dar una charla sobre un tema con el Dios de ese tema entre los asistentes :) pic.twitter.com/DjtorAdDqS
— Jerónimo López (@jerolba) April 9, 2016

Make your Asciidoctor Groovy, by Stephan Classen (Software Engineer at Canoo). Stephan explained Asciidoctor's screenshot extension, and how easy it may be used with Geb to improve your documentation updating automatically every capture in your manuals after each build. Stephan also explained how the conversion process of AsciiDoctor works, in order to hack any step to adapt the resulting document. Very useful info :-)

Groovy Puzzlers S03 – The Unstoppable Puzzlers Hit Again!, by Noam Tenne (@NoamTenne) and ~~Andrés Almiray~~ El Groovyssimo (@el_groovyssimo). I loved this contest, entertainment at its finest and very very educational. It's based on the mythic Java Puzzlers tradition created by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter, but migrated to Groovy mainly by JBaruch. Some intriguing blocks of Groovy code are shown and the audience needs to choose between 4 possible outputs. Obviously it's easy to miss, but hard not to laugh and learn afterwards. Hilarious.

Having so much fun trying to solve the #groovypuzzlers at the @greachconf pic.twitter.com/oujCaepcHA
— Andrés Viedma (@andres_viedma) April 9, 2016

See you in Greach 2017!!

FOSDEM 2016: Sunday

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I attended FOSDEM in Brussels last January. I should have written this weeks ago but better late than ever, right?

FOSDEM 2016 - CC BY-NC-SA License

You can read about the rest of my FOSDEM here:

As a retrospective, I attended a lot of talks and almost all of them were very interesting, but looking back now I realize that I should've spent more time in the stands and aisles. I expected to do networking when forced by room capacity issues, but luckily we never suffered this problem despite attending some overcrowded talks (with a lot of people having to stay outside). Perhaps it wasn't so bad, because even so I spent a lot of money on textile products :-D

Our FOSDEM Sunday ended being much like the day before. A large majority of the talks I attended were in the Legal and Policy Issues track.

Let me summarize:

Building a geo-aware Operating System, by Zeeshan Ali (@zeenix, Gnome developer, Red Hat). I was very thrilled with this talk, but it didn't meet my expectations. Zeeshan (and others) have developed great tools for the Gnome desktop: geoclue, geocode-glib and the integration with GNOME Maps seemed great, but I expected some less obvious features (from the functional point of view, of course) than locating yourself on a map. Having said that, geo-awareness in mobile devices was a total revolution, and I'm sure sooner or later it'll also be strongly reflected in our desktops
Results of Google Summer of Code 2015 at OSGeo, by Anne Ghisla and Margherita Di Leo (Google Summer of Code tutors). Being a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation and an addicted mapper, I felt the need to attend this talk. It ended up being an enumeration of projects, without the necessary detail to make the explanation amusing or interesting. At least I recognize that they talked about GSoC with great enthusiasm, made me want to participate at some point
Open source foundations: threat or menace?, by Richard Fontana (@richardfontana, IP, Open Source and Patent lawyer at Red Hat). Mr Fontana gave us a very interesting and thought provoking talk. After a brief explanation about legal differences between 501(c)(3) vs. 501(c)(6) foundation types in the US (and why some Open Source foundations have chosen one or the other), he detailed his concerns about the work carried out by some foundations:
- Sometimes foundations drive to an illusion of property
- We have seen examples of foundations "artificially" prolonging the life of a project, which is not always positive
- Some Open Source projects receive legal support by foundations and liability protection, but he explained that it should only apply if the foundation is in charge of what the project (or volunteer) does. Sometimes foundations (like Apache Software Foundation or Eclipse Foundation) presume of the independence of their projects, and this is a contradiction
- Foundations serving only as right holders in trademark issues
- In some foundations there is not a clear barrier between business management and technical management, as it should be
- Sometimes, the amount of power inside a foundation is derived by the amount of money donated (in cash or man hours), this gives the message that the project from those foundations are for sale
JEP 243: Java-Level JVM Compiler Interface and what it can be used for, by Christian Thalinger (@christhalinger, Member of the HotSpot compiler team, Oracle). This was a very technical talk about how this JEP have changed the Compiler Interface, included into de JDK 9 repositories. Christian explained some of their goals: mainly examine and intercept JIT activity and record events related to the compilation
Status of safety-critical FOSS, by Jeremiah C. Foster (@miahfost). Back in the Legal DevRoom, Jeremiah gave us a very interesting talk starting with a lot of information about safety-critical software and why it is important that software freedom becomes more present in this context. He also discussed it may be even possible to certify GNU/Linux at a safety-critical level, and how copyleft should be mandatory given that it provides more transparency not only in the code itself but also in the entire development process. In GPLv3 licensed projects he explained some concerns about how the install info may require disclosure of the encryption keys used to sign a boot image. Another concern in the industry is that end users should not be able to modify embedded software in safety-critical systems.
Comparing codes of conduct to copyleft licenses, by Sumana Harihareswara (@brainwane, founder of Changeset Consulting). Sumana gave a very well argued speech without media support, leaving clues of a probable theatrical past (or present). The basic comparison was that, just like the GPL restricts some developer's freedom (about redistributing under an incompatible license) to protect all users' freedom to use, inspect or modify the code, in the same way Codes of Conduct restrict some people's behaviour to increase everyone's freedom. I share Sumana's point of view, also when she said that (I quote): we will make better software and have a greater impact if more people, and more different kinds of people, find our communities more appealing to work with
Who's afraid of the DCO and why you should help adopt the DCO for your project, by James Bottomley (@jejb_, Linux kernel SCSI subsystem Maintainer, Odin CTO). Another brilliant talk, with the added bonus that James used Impress.js :-D James presented DCO as an alternative to the popular CLAs. He explained why your project needs a contributor agreement in the first place, why Linux adopted the DCO ten years ago, and a lot of info about best practices and possible problems
Pick a peck of license pickers, An in-depth look at efforts to make choosing a license easy, by John Sullivan (@johns_fsf, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation). John did an interesting analysis of the current options to choose a software license, beginning with the claim that something has to be done because there are still a lot of projects without license but in a clever way to reduce the license proliferation. There are some guides (like the one the FSF itself has) which represent a significant barrier for most users. A lot of text with sometimes hard to understand differences between options. Apart from this approach, there are some popular tools like choosealicense.com from Github or the Creative Commons' license chooser, but they also present several problems. The options order is important, the descriptions may be misleading, summaries are not fair... The QA turn was also brilliant, given that Brandon Keepers (Open Source Lead in Github) was there to argue their position.
Putting 8 Million People on the Map: Revolutionizing crisis response through open mapping tools, by Blake Girardot (@BlakeGirardot, Vice President of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team). The Janson auditorium (with a capacity of 1415 people) was packed full for this closing keynote. Mr Girardot explained perfectly how open source tools have allowed a lot of contributors (including me!) to improve in a radical way our disaster preparedness as a global society. One of the recent examples: After the Nepal Earthquake in 2015, about 700 contributors using open source tools such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's Tasking Manager made more than 13 million edits to OpenStreetMap in the first two weeks after the earthquake. Impressive, isn't it? He also described other tools and projects like the OpenStreetMap Export Tool or the OpenAerialMap project, but as an active member of the OpenStreetMap group, I'll expand the information about this in future posts

See you in Brussels for FOSDEM 2017!!

FOSDEM 2016: Saturday

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I attended FOSDEM in Brussels last January. I should have written this weeks ago but better late than ever, right?

FOSDEM 2016 - CC BY-NC-SA License

After an interesting Friday (as I told you yesterday) our FOSDEM Saturday started early. I attended a couple of talks in the Free Java DevRoom, another couple about Open Source Design but surprisingly most of them were in the Legal and Policy Issues track.

This doesn't mean that this is what matters most to me now (and it matters, a lot), but surely there are other events to listen about containers, virtualisation, Java or Python. IMO, there's no better place than FOSDEM's Legal DevRoom to feel the pulse of the FOSS community.

Let me summarize:

The State of OpenJDK, by Mark Reinhold (@mreinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform, Oracle). The annual review by Mr. Reinholm here in FOSDEM. Main ideas:
- OpenJDK is growing with a lot of new projects (and not only commanded by Oracle)
- 9 main projects and more than 72 JEPs (in that moment) targeting JDK9, including JavaDoc.Next, search capability in Javadocs (powered by Javascript)
- Mark gave interesting tips about Valhalla Project, that may enable Java to have Classes without instances
- He also highlighted Panama Project, an improvement in the JNI to enrich connections between the Java VM and non-java APIs (mostly for C/C++)
This Is Not A Drill - Preparing for JDK 9, by Dalibor Topić (@robilad, OpenJDK Product Manager, Oracle) and Rory O’Donnell (OpenJDK Quality Manager, Oracle). A compilation of accumulated wisdom obtained by projects testing JDK9 early access builds. We already knew that, for the first time, JDK9 will not be fully backwards compatible so some tips about how to prepare your projects for JDK 9 were necessary. If you lead a Java project, you need to pay special attention to JEP 260 (internal APIs will be inaccesible), JEP 162 (removal of some deprecated methods), JEP 220 (changes in the binary structure of JRE and JDK), JEP 261 (the new module system) and JEP 223 (new version-string scheme)

Now listening to "This is not a drill - Preparing for JDK 9" #FOSDEM pic.twitter.com/RU9km0p6t5
— Esther Lozano (@esloho) January 30, 2016

Designing accessible applications, by Samuel Thibault (computer science assistant professor). Yet another talk about accessibility, I've attended a lot of them and sadly they tend to be the same talk again and again. An interesting thought was that the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states that if you (as a developer/company) don't make reasonable accommodations for disabled people, you are discriminating them
Blender as virtual studio lighting playground, by Tuomas Kuosmanen (@tigert, GIMP developer and artist). I attended this talk mostly to meet @tigert but also to see the actual status of Blender (I played with it for a while centuries ago). The talk was amusing but not very advanced, Tuomas told us about a POC he made to recreate a photography studio lightning set-up with blender
Copyleft For the Next Decade, by Bradley M. Kuhn (President at Software Freedom Conservancy and on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation). Perhaps my favourite talk of the day, Bradley is a great expert about Open Source and maybe the main Copyleft enforcer nowadays. He gave some tips to pursue software freedom, and how all of this is in danger if license violations are note enforced. Sadly, he said, given any open source project there's almost always a proprietary version forked from it. A famous example is Apple when they forked BSD. I leave you with an important thought: If Copyleft is not enforced, is there any difference?
Who controls your project? Governance in the real world, by Jesús M. Gonzalez-Barahona (@jgbarah, URJC professor and Bitergia co-founder). Jesús gave a very complete talk about metrics related to governance, and using Bitergia's tools he showed how it's possible to know interesting things about a project like:
- Who contributes? Not only individually, sometimes you want to know how they are affiliated
- How are the changes been reviewed? How are they fixing the tickets? Are we neutral?
- A project's Pony Factor: the lowest number of committers whose total contribution constitutes the majority of the codebase
- A project's Elephant Factor: just as the Pony Factor, but with companies
- Geographical diversity, gender diversity, ...

Full room at "Who controls your project?" @jgbarah talk!! Open Development Metrics for governance analysis #fosdem pic.twitter.com/Fd70nrqZey
— Bitergia (@Bitergia) January 30, 2016

TL;DR on legal strategy for commercial ventures, by James Shubin (@purpleidea, Engineer at Red Hat). James gave the audience a lot of recommendations on choosing a software license. He also explained how a lot of people mix up the concepts of proprietary license and commercial license. He remarked that Copyleft is also the best solution for any employer, because it protects them from a developer/s leaving the company and forking the project. He gave some other examples about how Copyleft has a lot of synergies with profit.

Loved first prediction by @purpleidea :) We are taking AGPLv3 seriously here! #FOSDEM2016 pic.twitter.com/tYkHJ7eAWm
— Taiga.io (@taigaio) January 30, 2016

Open Source is being ruined and it’s all our fault, by Brian Harrington (@brianredbeard). In the same line of the previous talk, RedBeard explained the good vs the bad ways to profit in Open Source. The good ones are mainly (no surprise here): Selling a "boxed" product, selling support or selling subscriptions

You can read about the rest of my FOSDEM here:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I attended FOSDEM in Brussels last January. I should have written this weeks ago but better late than ever, right?

FOSDEM 2016 - CC BY-NC-SA License

As you may know if you are reading this, FOSDEM is a not to be missed event about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). By far, it is the most important gathering about FOSS in the planet. It's an unbeatable opportunity to attend great talks and workshops, but also to hang around with amazing people and top professionals.

The most impressive fact is that FOSDEM is organized by volunteers and everything is community driven, from each year tracks to their schedule. It's free to attend and there is no registration. You just need to show up :-)

This year, the usual huge numbers even increased (source: fosdem.org):

2 days
more than 8,000 attendees
52 tracks in 28 different rooms
569 speakers
618 events (talks, workshops, panels, ...)

Apart from the main event during the weekend and the official Friday Beer Event (the mythic Delirium Café overcrowded with hackers from around the world), each year there are dozens Fringe events around FOSDEM during the previous days, totally independent but also related to FOSS and communities.

I had the opportunity to give a lightning talk in one of those fringe events: the Floss Community Metrics Meeting (FCM2). Let me bring here their own description:

This meeting is intended to be an open venue for community managers, DevRel managers, and FLOSS community experts to present ideas, tools, and analysis that the FLOSS community is already doing with FLOSS platforms. It is open to discuss about collaboration, synergies, etc. It will be organized to foster discussion, but will also focus on development of new tools, improvement of existing ones, and how to spread the knowledge about what is being done and can be done in this area

My talk was about measuring health and ethics in programming languages, a brief version focusing on the metrics aspects of my talk in the last Codemotion event about Governance in programming languages.

Time for @luiyo 's lightning talk at @flossmetrics about measuring health and ethics of programming languages :D pic.twitter.com/tEBhbLZed7
— Esther Lozano (@esloho) January 29, 2016

Let me summarize some of the other talks:

Duane O'Brien (PayPal) talked about measuring velocity from the InnerSource point of view
Sumana Harihareswara (Changeset Consulting) explained some of the usual mistakes measuring FOSS projects. I loved (and will use!) her explanation of the lamppost fallacy
John Sullivan (Executive Director @ FSF) started explaining the FSF's mission ("all computer users must be able to do everything they need to do on any computer using only free software") and then how they use free software project metrics (even in non-software initiatives) to see if they progress towards their goal
Ioana Chiorean (Mozilla Rep Mentor) told us about Mozilla's representatives program, how they work and how they measure their progress
J. M. González-Barahona (Bitergia) showed us GrimoireLab, an impressive open source tool by Bitergia using (among other things) Perceval, Elastic Search, Python and Kibana
Donnie Berkholz (451 Research) about another common mistake, comparing communities and projects that shouldn't be compared between them (OS vs editors vs frameworks vs ...)
Dawn Foster (Univ. of Greenwich) showed us Gource, an impressive tool to visualize repos. I knew about it some years ago and it still has no rival in awesomeness, just look at this demo
Jos Poortvliet (ownCloud) explained how they analyse their metrics: code commiters, ticket participants, discussion participants and so on
Lauri Apple (Zalando) surprised me with Zalando's numbers: 17 million customers, +10,000 employees (+1,000 technologist) and more than 300 open source projects. Not so bad for an online fashion platform... She showed us Catwatch, their own open-source projects dashboard
Jose Manrique Lopez (Bitergia) showed us the evolution of Cauldron, another fantastic tool from Bitergia to display the metrics behind Github repositories
JJ Merelo (Univ. of Granada) described his problems with his own tool to rank Spanish users and repositories from Github
Christoph Wickert (Fedora Project) showed us HyperKitty, a django-based tool to replace Pipermail as the default archiver for Mailman. Looked like a gigantic step ahead of its predecessor
Kristof Van Tomme (Provonix) explained how they started with a tool to generate upgrade reports from Drupal sites in order to review the upgrade status of the site's modules, and ended with a daemon analyzing thousands of Drupal sites to get not only update reports, but lists of sites using a certain module, comparing modules and the demographic of their adoption and son on

TL;DR: it was worth it attending the event, totally, and not only because I was in the speaker roster (with excellent companions).

You can read about the rest of my FOSDEM here:

A Feast for Crows de George R.R. Martin

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: Apenas dispongo de tiempo para preparar (en condiciones) reseñas, pero no quiero dejar la costumbre de poner pequeños pasajes con la esperanza de conseguir atrapar nuevos lectores.

Espero que disfruten tanto como yo del siguiente fragmento de A Feast for Crows de George R.R. Martin. No contiene spoilers, pero sí da una buena idea del ambiente que se respira en la novela, el tono de este tomo me ha parecido especialmente pesimista y desolador (que ya es decir para Canción de Hielo y Fuego).

Crow-Black (and white) by Hamish Irvine,
from Flickr — CC BY-NC

Back on the road, the septon said, “We would do well to keep a watch tonight, my friends. The villagers say they’ve seen three broken men skulking round the dunes, west of the old watchtower.”

“Only three?” Ser Hyle smiled. “Three is honey to our swordswench. They’re not like to trouble armed men.”

“Unless they’re starving,” the septon said. “There is food in these marshes, but only for those with the eyes to find it, and these men are strangers here, survivors from some battle. If they should accost us, ser, I beg you, leave them to me.”

“What will you do with them?”

“Feed them. Ask them to confess their sins, so that I might forgive them. Invite them to come with us to the Quiet Isle.”

“That’s as good as inviting them to slit our throats as we sleep,” Hyle Hunt replied. “Lord Randyll has better ways to deal with broken men—steel and hempen rope.”

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”

“More or less,” Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world...

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them. but he should pity them as well.”

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I've discovered through my dear friend Mónica a wonderful poem called The Chaos. I'm talking about between 146 and 274 funny and well thought verses (depending on the version) about English spelling and pronunciation singularities written by Gerard Nolst Trenité which appeared for the first time in 1920.

I recommend as a splendid exercise that you attempt to read the entire poem aloud (aloud or do not try!). Everyone will get it wrong at some point for sure, but I hope you'll find it fun, challenging and educational. Hint! There is a partial phonetic version of The Chaos poem (both in English and American pronuntiation).

I'm delighted to share with you a 1993-94 version from The English Spelling Society, the most complete version. As a standard practice, words whose spelling can lead to mispronunciation are shown in bold.

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,

Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! 10
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,

Say - said, pay - paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,

But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak, 20
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,

Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining, 30
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.

From "desire": desirable - admirable from "admire",
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind, 40

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Have you ever yet endeavoured

To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. 50
Blood and flood are not like food,

Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,

Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live. 60

Is your R correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes with Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,

Buoyant, minute, but minute.
Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;

Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?
Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy? 70

Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.
Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,

You'll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.
Would you like some more? You'll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik

Does not sound like Czech but ache. 80
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.

We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.

Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label. 90

Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,
Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it",

But it is not hard to tell
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,

Senator, spectator, mayor, 100
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the A of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,

Desert, but desert, address.
Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,

Cow, but Cowper, some and home.
" Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker",
Quoth he, "than liqueur or liquor", 110

Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.

Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.
Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,

Paradise, rise, rose, and dose. 120
Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,

Valentine and magazine.
And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,

Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.
Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring? 130

Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,
Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled.

Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.
Don't be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;

Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn. 140
Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.

Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)
Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don't mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,

Rhyming with the pronoun yours;
Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did, 150
Funny rhymes to unicorn,

Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.
No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud

Is no better than McLeod.
But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,

Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme. 160
Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you're not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!

Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty, 170
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.
Please don't monkey with the geyser,

Don't peel 'taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.
Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,

Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan. 180
The TH will surely trouble you

More than R, CH or W.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.
Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget 'em -

Wait! I've got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.
The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight - you see it; 190

With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.
Shoes, goes, does [1]. Now first say: finger;

Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,
Hero, heron, query, very,

Parry, tarry, fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath. 200
Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,

Bowing, bowing, banjo- tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?

Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite

Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer. 210
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry. 220

Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,

Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver. 230
Never guess - it is not safe,

We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.
Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,

Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;

Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir. 240

Mind the O of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;

Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.
Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.

Liable, but Parliament.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen, 250
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,

Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.
A of valour, vapid, vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,

I of antichrist and grist,
Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.

Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll. 260
Pronunciation - think of Psyche! -

Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won't it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying 'grits'?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel

Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father? 270
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of sup...
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

[1] No, you're wrong. This is the plural of doe.

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is going to be my first review in English. Don't Panic! As I recently only read and watch both TV series and films in English (usually without subs) seems to me the perfect way to express ideas and concepts from the books, as well as a way to improve my skills. Please help me notice any inconvenience or mistake.

I've been constantly thinking about this post since I finished the book almost two months ago. In this time lapse Mr. Hitchens died, with the subsequent hard time for us his followers. Embarrassingly I didn't have the time and/or strength to write about it, I found it difficult to write something different than what many others wrote. Although it was not a surprise for anyone, his death truly made me very sad and angry.

Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great

God is not Great is a 2007 book from Christopher Hitchens. In this book he made a fierce and sincere apology against religion, or at least against organized religion. Focusing on the Abrahamic religions, the book contains a perfectly documented collection of facts, personal anecdotes and well chosen arguments. In each of the nineteen chapters the author explains (for example) how religion kills, how do we know some metaphysical claims of religion are false, the lies behind intelligent design, and how some religions have ended in the past.

In Chapter Two, Religion Kills, he described common irrationally violent situations in many cities (Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem or Baghdad) easily attributed to religion. He also wrote about the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie and the crazy actions driven by the US after the September 11 attacks, as examples where religious leaders pursued, allowed and justified big massacres.

In Chapter Four, A Note On Health, he reminds us of some big confrontations between medicine and religion: some vaccines, condoms, the Jewish circumcision and the female genital mutilation rituals, and the pursuing and punishment of homosexuality.

Chapter Five, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False, where Mr. Hitchens explains the difference between the knowledge of the world today and when some religions where founded. He claims that the necessary leap of faith needs to be repeated, and it turns harder to take the more it is taken.

In Chapter Nine, The Koran Is Borrowed From Both Jewish and Christian Myths he examines the religion of Islam and its holy book, the Koran, asserting that it was not supernatural and simply was a compendium of other religious texts and sayings.

Chapter Thirteen, Does Religion Make People Behave Better?, explains how non-religious people stand and pursue moral causes with at least as much strength and clearness as religious people. He also notes many issues of misbehavior in religious leaders.

In Chapter Fourteen, There Is No 'Eastern' Solution, he blames Asiatic religions as Buddhism and Hinduism with similar sins and problems: the violence, the unverifiable assumptions, the unhealthy manners and rituals, etc.

Chapter Fifteen, Religion As An Original Sin, where he declares that there are several ways in which religion is not just amoral but positively immoral, being the faults found not in its adherents but in its original precepts. These include:

Presenting a false picture of the world to the credulous
The doctrine of blood sacrifice
The doctrine of atonement
The doctrine of eternal reward or eternal punishment
The imposition of impossible tasks or rules

And Finally Chapter Nineteen, In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment, where he argues that the human race no longer needs religion, to the point that underestimating religion will improve mankind, and will boost the progress of civilization. He ends asking atheists to fight for a religion-free society.

Some of the commonly selected quotes are:

Organized religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.
I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed. History gives us many other such examples, which I am going to discuss later on. But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion.
At least two major and established religions, with millions of adherents in Africa, believe that the cure is much worse than the disease. They also harbor the belief that the AIDS plague is in some sense a verdict from heaven upon sexual deviance--in particular upon homosexuality.
In Ireland alone--once an unquestioning disciple of Holy Mother Church--it is not estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority.
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion and one would like to think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Conceivably, some readers of these pages will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu and Buddhist murderers and sadists. Perhaps they dimly imagine that contemplative easterners, devoted to vegetarian diets and meditative routines, are immune to such temptations?
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers and explanation of anything important.

Mr. Hitchens was an English (also American since 2007) journalist, author and polemicist, in the wider meaning of the expression. He was considered one of the main intellectuals of the world, and was clearly identified as a Pope (in the techie way) in the atheist movement. After a brilliant career with a lot of polemic confrontations with people as Mother Teresa (Hell's Angel documentary) or Bill Clinton (No One Left to Lie To), and demolishing debates against figures like Tony Blair, he faced some serious health issues due to an oesophageal cancer. On 15 December 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, as a complication of this cancer.

I'm not used to write bios in this blog, but if that moment comes surely he is going to be among the firsts to appear.

Skeptics by Ted Burnham

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A short documentary about that most curious of creatures, the skeptic. Featuring Phil Plait and members of SSaSS, the Secular Students and Skeptics Society. Produced for a graduate class at the University of Colorado School of Journalism.