Journal
Ph.D. finished, new job
I have defended my thesis with success on 27 October, 2011. For archival reasons, I have moved my Ph.D. website from the university site, as my account will be removed this year at some point.
What are you doing next? A question often asked to a Ph.D. student. My answer is Mozcode, my sole proprietor company that develops custom made software and/or uses free & open source software components to design, build and deploy software solutions according to your wishes.
Category: life/work | Tags: life · work · phd · mozcode | PermalinkAlso Giving up on Ruby Packaging
I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven’t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them.
So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads.
Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration…
10 Years of Spacelabs
A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs 1 was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post.
The past
Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP.
Spacelabs doesn’t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas.
I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things—from networks to program languages to software design—but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems.
The future
Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master’s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the “Potentiaal/E-hoog” building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave…
1 Yes, the website is very much from the past.
Category: life | Tags: life · hacking · study · debian-planet | PermalinkContinue Posting?
What is this? A real journal post after all this time? Yes, apparently! Some of you have noticed (and mentioned) that I stopped posting halfway my trip to Iceland. I got so backlogged on the pictures already that I had no time and motivation to continue posting. I might write some summary post about the trip later. This journal did not really die during my time in Iceland, it has been quite dead since April 2008. I think there are three reasons for this:
- A lack of motivation to really sit and write something (but how long does it take, really?)
- Me joining the microblog “hype”. This was apparently already over two years ago.
- Moving to another house and discarding my old laptop in the process. This made my journal/blog software unaccessible.
I have restored the software on my current laptop now. We’ll see how it goes. ;)
Category: life | Tags: life | PermalinkExploring Reykjavík
I’ve been here for over 2 weeks now and I feel like I’ve gotten used to the place. I am a bit behind with the journal posts but on the other hand always quite up-to-date with the pictures. The following describes event from Thursday June 6 until Tuesday June 16.
Sunsets
Sunsets are different everywhere. On Thursday we took a trip to the tip of the isle on which Reykjavík is located to a separate town called Seltjarnarnes. Since we were there around sunset, I took some (quite colourful) pictures.
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| 2009-06-11: Sunset near Seltjarnarnes |
Later in the week, when Arnar left for a workshop in Dublin, I took the bicycle out for a ride. It was nice to get some exercise again, Reykjavík being considerably hilly. When I arrived at the university around midnight, I noticed that Willard was just arriving. We had some tea, met other people that were hanging around and viewed the sun set from the roof of the building.
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| 2009-06-14: Bike trip to the RU and back |
Master and Bachelor Graduation
Reykjavík University, being a rather small university (there is also the University of Iceland here), does the graduation ceremony in one go. So, I went with some friends of Arnar to attend his graduation on Saturday. Well, this was quite different from the one I had. This ceremony is for 420 (!) candidates at once, while mine was more personal. However, they make a big event out of this which speeches and musical intermezzos while mine was rather bare in that respect.
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| From 2009-06-13: Graduation Ceremony |
After the ceremony there was a reception for all students followed by a party at Arnar’s. This party ended with hanging around in the kitchen for two hours, talking and laughing. This formula is the so-called “kitchen party” which seems to be an Icelandic thing.
Work
I ended my work here in Iceland on Tuesday with a lunch and meeting with Anna and Luca. We discussed our previous work and a way to supplement the results to be able to make it into a journal paper. The discussion was productive and we decided on a plan, so I’ll start with this somewhere in July when I return from my holidays!
Category: life | Tags: life · work · debian-planet · phd · holiday | PermalinkWorking in Reykjavík
So, I have been here in Reykjavík for a while, working, exploring, eating, sleeping. I must say, some things are totally different from everything I am used to (especially the surroundings, nature) and other things are very familiar (if not to NL, then to Scotland).
Work
I have been working at the Reykjavík University, a private university coexisting next to the University of Iceland. It is located across the street of a big mall which turns out to be very convenient for lunch and instant-need purposes. The Computer Science school has a “theory day” on the 19th and I will giving a talk which I am preparing now.
Leisure
Although I have been here for just a few things, I have engaged in many activities already. First of all there was the very nice hike to the waterfall Glymur. It has shown me a glimpse of the adventure and nature that Iceland can offer.
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| 2009-06-09: Hiking to Glymur |
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| 2009-06-10: Stroll through Reykjavík |
Besides that, the infinitely long days seems to induce a very relaxed, free view on planning. Having dinner at 23:15, going for a hike at 20:00, visiting the cinema at 22:30. This makes every work day still feel like a holiday.
Category: life/work | Tags: life · work · debian-planet · phd · holiday | PermalinkSidebar
The sidebare finally went two column! There is quite a lot of contextual information in there, but because it was single column everything was “way down there”. Also, this makes the website a bit wider without making the line length of the text too wide.
I have also added more links, improved the calendar and Twitter update display.
Category: homepage | Tags: homepage | PermalinkCategories
- debian 14
- debian/debconf 4
- gnome 3
- gnome/guadec 6
- hacking 14
- hacking/ruby 3
- homepage 23
- life 49
- life/edinburgh 10
- life/study 17
- life/work 9