CoNext II (Ph.D. studies)
Today is the third day of the CoNext conference. So far, I attended to a lot of interesting talks and during the social events I had a lot of interesting and instructive discussions.
One of my responsibilities is to organize cultural events. So, I called the visitor office of Airbus today to arrange an guided tour for me and my colleagues. Unfortunately, the office is only opened at Mondays and Saturdays. Even worse, we will leave Toulouse on Friday afternoon so we have no chance to be part of tour at Airbus. This is really a pity, because I am highly interested in the new A380 air plane.
One of my frequent blog readers told me that my last article contained a few spelling mistakes. After his notification, I fixed the bugs! ;-) I am sorry, I wrote the article while attending to a boring talk.
Posted by Thomas King at 14:25 2005-10-26 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

CoNext (Ph.D. studies)
Since Sunday afternoon I stay in Toulouse, France. Unfortunately, I am not on holidays - I am here because I already presented my shortpaper/poster on the CoNext 2005. Please do not understand me wrong, the conference is well organized and it is very interesting to meet a lot of highly skilled and highly intelligent people. However, the weather is so lovely here, it would be nicer to sit on the grassland with a cool drink in my hands! ;-)
Yesterday afternoon I presented my shortpaper to the masses! *g* An interesting discussion occured and I was lucky to speak to the famous Christian Huitema (from Microsoft Research). The photos of the discussion will be published soon (Matthias acted like a professional photographer).
As soon as I find a high bandwidth internet connection I will upload the pictures from the hotel where we reside. We pay something around 80Eur a night but the hotel is not worth the money. In my bathroom I do not have light (because the light is broken). Even worse, I can hear every event that is going on in the effluent system. ;-( Belief me, the hotel is really crap - I will never book it again.
So, now, I will attend to an interesting talk about "MRS Cross-Layer routing heuristic".

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 12:09 2005-10-25 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

"Safe" buggy (MobileKnox / Safe)
I do not know if you aware of "Safe"; "Safe" is a small tool to safely store accounts and other sensible data. You have to remember only one single password. This password is called the root password and it is used to decrypt your encrypted data so that you can lookup up your sensible data. Any stranger who cannot guess your password will not grant access to your data. And if the stranger tries to circumvent the password lock he or she will only see useless encrypted bits and bytes. "Safe" runs on any java-enabled mobile phone, smartphone, pda or desktop pc. I developed it a few years ago during a summer break at the university. It is not a large programm, it contains only a few hundred line of code. However, everything needed (as defined by my needs ;-)) is implemented: encryption, decryption, capability to change the root password, a neat graphical user interface, ... Try it out: http://www.javawi.de.
I didn't start this blog entry because I want to do some advertisements for my "Safe" application. Actually, yesterday, a guy cried for help on a forum hosted on the "Safe" homepage. He told me that his data was corrupted by multiple entering a wrong root password. I couldn't believe his words, because I know that this is impossible in the way "Safe" is implemented. However, I helped him as much as possible. And today, the guy told me that the fault is caused by his mobile phone. It was running out of memory and starts overwriting data. Fortunately, he managed to recover his data and now is one of the happiest "Safe" users. ;-)
Thus, I want to encourage everyone using a electronic device such as a mobile phone or a computer to regularily backup sensible data!!! Otherwise the best (password aggregation) tool/application is useless!

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:16 2005-10-05 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

TBM (General)
In past few days, I read TBM during my rides with the tram (mostly from home to work and back). Honestly, I am disappointed about the book. 33 of the most remarkable marketing guys gathered to author this book. This sounds impressive. However, the result is not as good as it could be.
The book contains a lot of short stories. Some are very interesting and amusing (e.g. How To Make Money With Garlic). Others are boring and stupid (e.g. Great Ideas In Bed).
My fazit: I probably expected too much; on the other side the book is a great amusement while commuting. If you have an hour sparetime the book is worth a read.
Posted by Thomas King at 23:51 2005-09-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (1)

Extreme Programming Explained (Second Edition) (General)
I bought EXE a few days ago and today I started reading. So far, I only finished the first 20 pages, however, I love Kent's writing style. Everything is so obvious and clear when I read his lines. Hopefully, I say the same in a few days when I finished the book.
In the meantime, I hope I learn a lot new stuff about efficient programming and healthy software development.
Posted by Thomas King at 22:53 2005-09-14 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

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