Thousandapologies

Today I finally got good news after all: the journal paper I wrote a while ago has finally been accepted for publication. The journal it’s accepted for is the “International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education And Life Long Learning(IJCEELLL)”. All I have to do is apply some minor changes and after that I will have my first journal paper published. This is really a relief and now I can focus on the upcoming papers. The paper I published is titled A reference model for mobile social software for learning and provides amongst others a state-of-the-art of mobile social software. Also we classified this mobile social software and identified limitations and possible improvements for learning applainces. Futhermore, we shortly spoke of one of our software solutions called “ContextBlogger”.

Anyway, suffice it to say I’m really happy about it and will have a beer or two this evening to celebrate!

Just awesome! Some time ago, Chrissass, the Drachslaaaaaa and I subscribed for a dataming course at the University of Maastricht, that I knew already, would bring me back to my old faculty and some old teachers. This morning the first day started and it really felt so familiar: the train ride to Maastricht, the same I rode during about five years, and the classes of the teachers I already knew. Some of the teachers improved, some of them did not… It was nice to meet my old supervisor again and have a talk to Evgueni Schmirnov also one of my old lecturers. It really struck me that Open University is quite famous also at other Universities and also the tone of voice Evgueni talked to me about OUNL. Apparently, he was quite impressed I ended up there. And although I first planned to do a PhD in Maastricht University, which I unfortunately did not get, I’m happy I ended up in OUNL. I think till now I enjoy working at the OU a lot and today I realised, that while I was happy to be back at Maastricht University, this is a time that has passed and probably I ended up in the right place. Now I have amazing colleagues at OUNL, the apecage people I would not like to miss, and working in a European project like MACE gives you a lot of new experiences and opportunities. Also the sheer amount of nice people I met since I started working at OUNL, through winterschools, summerschools and projectmeetings is amazing and it happened a lot faster than I would have met people in all day life. Then again, I might have got this opportunities at Maastricht University but I’m not too sure about it. Well life is truly like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get, you never know what comes along the way, but you have to make the best of it, and right now I feel satisfied about where the road has taken me upto this moment…

Sometimes I really feel like old Bilbo Baggins, going on a quest to some far away land to slay the dragon Smaug (in my case the beast called MACE), really enjoying it, but still happy to arrive home again in your warm cosy hobbit hole eating the familiar kinds of pastry and drinking tea. Even more so this was the case for my travel to Italy. I really loved the time we had in Ancona, meeting all those beautiful people and enjoying the beautiful country. However, to every travel there’s an end and when the end is approaching I usually cannot wait to arrive back home to my beautiful province and the lovely hills of Limburg, where my hobbit house is located and where most of my friends and family are located. Although I must say that I really feel I made or are making some new friendships with the people of MACE. Especially the last day was a blast!

The third day in Ancona started with us technical people being forced to go to the coding dungeon deep down in the Universitá building. The architects somehow figured out, maybe through clever espionage, that if you keep us programmers from all the delicious Italian coffeebreaks, we might even start to work. Best avantage of it, when being an architect, you get more food and coffee for yourself and can enjoy the beautiful surroundings of Ancona, seen from the 8th floor, better, without being bothered by some technical bladiebla. Not being able to resist so much résistance (oui?), with even some of our own side switching to the dark side of architecturism, we fled, tail between our legs, to that safe haven of the dungeon. More importantly, the cunningness of the architects led actually to some good work to be done on our side. Developers from different locations, Potsdam, Bonn, Leuven and Heerlen, started talking to each other and coding together; we immediately found out some problems that were caused by lack of communication. However, nothing beats sitting down in a room and running into problems together; no videoconference can lead to problems being solved so fast. At the end of the day I spent so many hours coding intensively away that I was a wee bit dizzy. Being allowed back into the architect’s room, getting a coffee break as a payment for our hard work, I tried out some white wine which immediately rose to my head. I had to drink a number of strong espressos to get me on my feet again. I spend that break having a nice chat with Alba about our travels; I though I was travelling a lot, turns out that she even does more. Her boss Miguel said he was even surprised whenever he saw her in the office

After the second meeting day came to its end, Rosanna suggested to go back to Porto Novo again, most of the people thought that to be a grand idea. So Tally and I needed a ride to go there… Luckily, Massimo of Nautes was so kind to bring us there. Unfortunately, he could not join us himself because he had to take care of his little daughter. Also he arranged for a ride back with Miguel and Alba. A small ride further, in which Massimo told us of his time in Rome and lots of other stuff, we arrived in Porto Novo. Thanking Massimo for his great hospitality we parted and headed for the beach and the small pub where we had spent some time the day before. Tally and I had a beer there, enjoyed the beach and about an hour later we decided to head back for the pizzeria the next social event was held.

Again the food was great and we started the evening already nice exchanging some language mixups with the Germans. Tally’s “schmecklich” always sparks that same discussion again . Suddenly Till was drawing my attention by pointing somewhere into the back of the terrace. To my great delight, the restaurant had a foosball table and Till and I having talked about that the eve before, immediately decided to play some good old table football. Soon we were joined by Marius, Massimiliano, Elisa, Mo and Rosanna’s son. Depending on the team we got our ass kicked or were kicking some ass; some combinations better than others. Netherland plus Germany for example, no good, Italy and Netherlands lot better, but the best combination was Limburg(me) and Bavaria(Mo). Thinking out some cunning tactics and some interesting strategies we really kicked some ass One thing I noticed during our games though is that Italian women, that start to lose, try to seduce you and in that way win from you, saying something like “Tim you a beautiful man, what are you doing this evening?”. Unfortunately for the woman to whom it concerns, it did not work. Here’s an action picture of us playing some “kicker”, taken by Elisa.

At some time we decided to go back to the table and some 20 minutes later we left the restaurant. Tally and I saying goodbye to some people because we would not be in the meeting the day after because we would leave then. Together with Miguel, Alba and Elena we drove back to Ancona where they safely dropped us off at our hotel. I really would have liked to stay a little bit longer enjoying their company and of the other MACE people a bit more.

Yesterday started of with some meetings at 9:00 and carried on from coffee break to coffee break. Luckily coffee breaks in Italy last a lot longer than back in the Netherlands and although there’s no “vlaai” also come with very nice food and snacks of various kinds. Halfway through the day, the groups was split up into a technical and a conceptual group; for us not bother the architectural people with geek speech and for the architectural people not to bore us with conceptual stuff. I expected do some coding during the technical meeting but it turned out to be deciding to use several standards we already decided on before.

After the first day of the meeting we went to a neighbouring village of Ancona called Porto Novo; according to our Italian friends literally meaning “take an egg”. In Porto Novo the MACE meeting’s social event was held. Porto Novo itself is very small, for Limburg people, about the size of “Rimburg”. One very long street laying below a big mountain, with some very nice houses for the local rich and famous. Beautiful beaches, full of bathing people and surfers inspired some of us to take a dive. We were taken by Massimo to see a very old church from around 1000A.D. Somewhat after we went to the beach and sat down at the terrace there, drinking some Italian alholic speciality called ” Negroni”, very strong indeed. We very much enjoyed the view and gazed across the adriatic sea and were later joined by more and more people from the MACE project.

Later in the evening we went about 300 metres down the beach and sat down outside a nice restaurant called “Da Giacchetti” for a candelight dinner under a starry starry night, enjoying the calming sound of the sea and the excellent Italian food. Especially, I, as a major fan of Italian food enjoyed the meal and company of the awesome MACE people a lot: it made me even question why I was not born in Italy. Unfortunately, there came a time when we had to drive back to the hotel; Lorenzo offered to drop us off there and after half an hour, with a wee tour of Ancona included, we came back to our hotel for a very needed good nights rest.

Pfew…yesterday was a bit of an ordeal… Tally and I left at around 8.00 in the morning, already regretting the choice for Schiphol airport a bit. Although we weren’t really looking forward to it, the three hour trainride was without any events and actually quite fun. At Schiphol we found ourselves a bit puzzled about the way check-ins work there, but with a little help of some pretty stewardesses we soon found our way into the taxfree zone. However, not before my bagpack was checked first by some security dude for plastic explosives of any kind. Stupid me had forgotten to take out one bottle of water and paranoid as they are nowadays they had me take it out and throw it into the garbage container. After that, we decided to go and look for a cup of coffee, and found a grand café in Schiphol.

Following my advice we first went for a latté macchiato, ever since the Namesake introduced me to it in lovely coffee shops in Aachen (of the none Dutch kind, you actually get coffee there) I’m hooked to that. How big was our surprise when the macchiato finally arrived; Tally even shouted “what a small cup of coffee” much to the waitresses dislike and embarressment. Being used to Limburg measures one often gets disappointed in the North of the Netherlands, that’s why we went for another cup with some homebaked applepie; very nice! You can see how small the coffee was in the next pic.

Then it was time for us to leave on our first flight to Rome, with the Royal Dutch Airlines(KLM). Normally used to price fighters, I was surprised by the good service in the KLM airplane, we got food and drinks and drinks again, all for free! Almost two hours later, after an uneventful flight we arrived in Rome, where we had to wait for about an hour for our connection.

A good chance for a first pizza we thought and headed to the first “Inbiss” available. Ordering in Itally turned out to be quite an adventure; first we wanted to order at one counter but the people there pointed us to another counter, there had to order, then take the receit, we were pointed back to another one to tell someone what we ordered and then finally we got our long awaited pizza. What a disappointment that was! Only half warm and not really tasty, I was worried about keeping it inside my stomache in the next plain trip. We spend the next half an hour looking at Italian beauties and were so occupied by it that we almost forgot to go down to check in to the airplane. Then the less fun part of the journey started…

First they drove us accross the entire airstrip and left us wondering whether they decided to bring us to Ancona by bus. Then, discovering that the next flight would be by a propjet, Tally and I were split up to different rows of the airplane. After three quarters of an hour in an airplane in the burning sun, we still did not leave the airport, some person was lost and they had to go through all bagage to find his and could not leave before it was found. Finally the engines started and I thought we might finally soon take off, however, the spend the next 20 minutes taxiing around the rest of the airstrip we had not seen before. Luckily the flight after went pretty fine and I must say I really enjoyed my first flight in a propjet; you can see a lot more than from an ordinary plane.

Also I spend this flight sitting next to a beautiful Danish girl which I talked to a bit. She was wondering whether I was a participant on some social sciences conference, but I had to unfortunately tell her I had to go to a meeting for the European project MACE. We spend the flight half talking, half reading our magizines. I was reading my favourite magazine about photography, she some weird Danish magazine about psychology. This magazine, I saw, was showing a photographs of some guy putting a rope around a woman and pulling her up to the ceiling by her feet. Maybe it was the warmth in the plane driving me crazy, or the length of the journey, however, it could be just normal in Denmark; they were vikings some time after all!

One hour later, after another splendid landing, we arrived at Ancona airport. I said goodbye to my fair Danish female neighbour and the last part of the journey started. A fifteen minute taxi drive to our hotel. Twelve hours later than we started we arrived in our hotel. We took a wee shower and headed off into the city.

Our hotel turned out to be in “little Delhi”, we could not find a single Italian, only Namesake’s fellow countrymen. I was imagining the Namesake shaking his head and saying “thank you, come again” at every Indian passing by and almost could not resist the urge to shout “Namaste, keise ho!”. Little Delhi was quite far away from the city centre and we had to walk for almost half an hour to get there, involving a dangerous trip through a tunnel looking into the headlights of upcoming cars, that reminded us both of some classic 60s movies. Our first impression of Ancona was not that good, it seemed a rather modern and industrial city. When we came to one of the squares this however changed a bit. Lots of music and especially the “outside” life of the Italians was very beautiful to see. I cannot imagine this in the Netherlands on such a big scale. Also some big event was organised on one of the squares with lots of dancing and rollerskating (figure skating on rollerblades). I was a bit ashamed of seeing little kids dancing better than I probably will ever be able to. Also we enjoyed the Italian beauties carrying out the rest of the skating and dancing. By sheer coincidence, I saw Elisa with some guy that turned out to be Moritz and suddently discovered the rest of the Potsdam and Venice gang. After a wee talk with them, we both went our ways, they off to sleep, we to find some Italian Guinness. And hallelujah, it took us only five minutes to find and Irish pub with, yes, Guinness. We sat down for some hour and then decided to get back to the hotel, almost getting lost but finally guided back by the smell and the increasing number of Indians (not related I hope).

The general not-so-nice time at work now; the constant struggle with software for geeks only, random paper deadlines, boring videoconferences which everyone else seems to enjoy, and just general stress, makes me long to those old days of secondary school. As the week progresses I start feeling more nostalgic than ever, thinking of the times when we only used to complain about homework. Working people seemed to have it so easy back then, never to make any homework, just coming home, eating dinner and watching telly. How different is reality….

However, nostalgia mostly also brings back some nice memories. Coming home, needing a desperate burst of energy, I browsed through my cds and found one of SetaSurf; a band of some friends of mine which was quite popular in our school days. We almost never missed a gig and just plainly enjoyed every note. Playing their cd right now brings back so many memories; listening to their lyrics and their surf-punky music even more. I know for sure I’ll bring some of their music with me on my next work-related trip, this weekend, that will bring me to Ancona, Italy. Damn it would be nice to see these guys united, even if it was only once, to play some decent music in the “Nieuwe Nor”. I think lots of people agree with me and would come to their gig, reliving old times and enjoying new ones. Ah well, I know I start sounding like an old hippy…

Thank god or gods(never know if you might insult one of them), Tally was there today to help me with some of my longstanding coding troubles. I’ve never done too much server side coding, so most of it is quite new to me; as are some of the tricks that are quite obvious when you know them, but have to be thought of in the first place.

Last week, when I was coding some of the query stuff, I ran into some weird and unexpected problems that could not be debugged on the server. Today, Tally and I decided to set up most of the stuff also locally, clean up the database structure Bashar originally made, adhere to some standard naming standards and furthermore start debugging. Immediately, we ran into some weird problems; to debug we added a main method to the serverclass. It turned out not to be found in anyway by that piece of garbage named “Eclipse”. Even when it was found the stupid program did not run. I was already ready to take my laptop, open the window, throw out the laptop and celebrate a day of non-eclipseness. Bravehearted Tally, however, remained calm under many such problems and told me just to restart Eclipse. Amazingly, that worked *sigh*! Now that we had the server running locally, we could finally run through all the code and found all the glitches and bugs, I, merest of all codemen and lesser geeks, had introduced. Soon we had all of the code running.

Off to another quest through the darkest swamps of php, css and javascript we went. I had found a javascript version of a semacode generator the other day and that finally allowed me to easily generate and afterwards print them. However, to get it integrate with the rest of the server software, a php module was needed that called a webservice, generated an id for the semacode and then use the javascript to generate the semacode itself. That was too much too ask and out of reach for this poor fellow. Also, this task turned out to be a wee bit more difficult for Tally than he first thought. Finally, we got the stupid thing running but still there are some issues. For example, the object the semacode is attached to is described by a name in the database, for instance the not so original “coffee machine” or the most common OTEC form “exploded microwave”. Any way I tried I could not get the stupid name set correctly in the database. Moreover, the code we hacked together suddenly resulted in the semacode to magically dissappear from the print-outs, argg! That’s something for tomorrow.

Tonight, I aimed my arrows at some other part of the code, that now is already finished, but not tested: the metadata service. All kinds of content retrieval and storage should now be easily possible via a common webservice interface. Additionally, I think the code also can be easily adapted for other usages, for example the competence metadata or other parts of the MACE project. But first, let’s see if its working alltogether. Fingers crossed!

Just got back from an interesting visit to RWTH Aachen. It felt awesome to be back in what I now start considering as my second hometown, alas it was only for a work meeting, which lasted for two hours. But what a meeting it was! Marcus, my supervisor, asked me last week, during the summerschool, if I would be wanting to visit the MediaLab in Aachen together with him; always curious and happy to find out new things and make new contacts I happily replied yes to his question. After a small trip from our beloved OUNL to RWTH (actually it took the GPS receiver longer to get a signal than the trip lasted), Marcus, Wim and I were received by prof. Jan Borchers in what they called Media Space an interactive room containing three smartboards and loads of Apple hardware: I think the namesake would have drooled seeing how much!

First followed an interesting presentation of Tico Ballagas about two of his projects. One, called Rexplorer, was an interactive GPS based city tour that guided the user through the city of Regensburg, Germany and let him or her explore its past. The tour was presented as a game in which the tourist has to wander through Regensburg in search of paranormal activity. On detection of this activity, the tourist had to make a special incantation, swinging his want in a special way, to come in contact with the ghosts of a past long forgotten. The ghosts would tell the tourist something about the past of Regensburg, but also would give him some task to fulfill. Pretty interesting I say.

After that, Tico presented iStuff, a very interesting, though slightly more technical presentation. iStuff is a technical framework for ubiquitous computing that makes it possible to abstract most of the difficulties of using sensor and actuators and thus makes fast prototyping of mobile applications possible, and all that in Java! This part of the presentation was really really interesting for me, because iStuff will probably solve some of my problems. Especially, since I have been struggling to get the ContextBlogger to work and more importantly I start to realise that I cannot do all the programming work on my own, how much I would want to… I just do not get enough time to start everything from scratch. Needless to say that after arriving home, I immediately started checking out the toolkit. Seems promising so far.

Tico’s presentation finished and I would have thought we would go home afterwards, but nothing of the sort. Prof. Borchers took us to a little room besides the Media Space and introduced us to one of his students working on a new way of HCI: a table that displayed a computer-generated image that could be manipulated with your hands. Marcus, Wim and I gazed at the table in delight and tried our best to play the game presented on it. Finally, not succeeding in bringing all lemmings safe to their home, we went back to the Media Space. Another presentation about the capabilities of the Media Space, which might be pretty interesting for OUNL. Actually it turned out to be a fruitful visit, that gave us all enough food for thought. Also, the bonds between RWTH and OUNL might be tightened, because Marcus invited Borchers both for a return visit to OUNL and to give a guest lecture at the next Winterschool in Innsbruck, hope he accepts!