Hier ist immer etwas los!

I like Zurich and ETH very much, you can hardly find the time to attend all the interesting events and Colloquia. So far I've been to a natural history exhibition at Uni Zurich, the Alles ist Spiel exhibition at ETH library, which was fabulous (an exhibition of different games and how they have attracted mathematicians, in a historic perspective), and unfortunately I missed a very good Colloquium called "Joy of Programming".

And tonight I'm off to Nacht der Forschung or Researchers Night 2007 in Zurich, at the Lake of Zurich! It should be very interesting! I'll let you know! :)

Four funerals and no weddings!

I arrived in Mashhad late at Wednesday night. Watching the small light dots on the way, I was thinking "Let it crash, let it crash...". Well, it didn't crash but in the past 5 days, I've been to 4 funerals (4 different people). It seems the wish or the curse has fallen on other people and tonight at the 4th one, I was thinking of one of Parvin's poems:

سالها نرد خدایی باختی
این گره را زان گره نشناختی

But I hope things are going to be better. I've recently figured that I kind of subconsciously enjoy playing the role of a victim. I seriously need to work on it, find the courage to face my fears and accept the realities of life, learn to embrace more of it and also learn to talk.

Home, Sweet Home!

Against all my anxiety and everything to come back home, it is just great to be home. After a year again, you can't imagine what a good feeling it is to sleep under a ceiling who you had opened your eyes to for about 25 years.

My dear basketball

This year, was the first year in my life that I was away from my family for most of the important family events or holidays, like the new year and the birthdays. The side effect of being away (or perhaps the most important effect :P) was, not receiving presents! My good friends did throw me a lovely birthday party here, but when Norouz was approaching, I thought now that my lifestyle has changed, perhaps I should get myself a present. And that was how I got myself a basketball!

To my utmost grief, my dear ball, my dear companion in many light nights of Stockholm, tore apart tonight! :( A few days ago, I got the ball reinflated, but as usual I was in a hurry so I didn't check whether the pressure is right. Tonight when I took it out to play, after some dribbling, it just tore apart. But I guess I shouldn't worry much, I had to leave it behind in Stockholm anyway. One may say I'm an unfaithful owner, but anyway, I'm already planning to get a better one as soon as I arrive in Zurich :D

IAUM-CCC 4

Well, it is already four years from the first IAUM-CCC. I have some good memories from those programming contest days at IAUM and I'm very happy I am still involved (Although I'm watching what is happening from outside and as we say in Persian, "فقط از دور دستی بر آتش دارم").

The forth year of the "Islamic Azad University of Mashhad - Collegiate Coding Challenge" is going to be held this summer. Although there is a possibility that I'd miss the final, I'm quite happy that I'm going to be in Mashhad for the most of it. I bet my parents will try to kill me when I tell them I'm going to be off to good old IAUM for several Fridays, but I hope by now they are used to my "hassani habit" of going to school on most of the Fridays! :P

Anyway, here are the links:

- CCC4's details and contests' program
- IAUMCCC4 weblog

The first round is held online, so spread the word and take part if you are interested in programming contests and you can read/understand Persian!

Haft-Sin at KTH

Do you recognize the Sabze in the picture? It is the very lentil sprout dish I had posted the photos before! :)

Happy New Year!

OMII-Europe Month 9 Meeting

The all-hands meeting for month 9 of OMII-Europe was held in Bologna this time. It was quite a nice and rather eventful trip. I had been to Italy once before, but it was to Venice and apparently each region in Italy is quite different and unique. But they share something, decoration and style, you can see it everywhere.

From the point of view of JRA4, it was quite a good meeting. We got the chance to talk to our Chinese partner from U of Beihang to get more input about CROWN Grid and also had some good comments from the Globus representative from U of Chicago. I also got the chance to get some contact points for performance evaluation teams in OMII-UK and for gLite from people in INFN. The internal timeline and planning meeting for Month 12 was not that good though. I wonder whether it was due to the fact that we were terribly tired or that we feel a bit pressured with all the work that is left to be done before the EU Commission reviews in April.





INFN of Bologna was hosting the meeting. The sessions where held in a fantastic 15th century building called Corte Isolani whose preserved mediaeval decoration was quite interesting. And the banquet was also fantastic, six courses of stylish and delicious Italian food. We had a very short time to go sightseeing but we did manage to see a lot of interesting places. We had a half day of extended meetings at INFN’s CNAF site away from the old center of the city and in more modern sections of Bologna. Over all it was quite a good trip.



I should write more about it if I find the time in the future. At the moment I’m under a lot of pressure with exams and project deadlines closing in.

JRA3/JRA4 Workshop, Stockholm

We had a day and a half workshop for joint research activity 3 and 4 of the OMII-Europe project here in Stockholm (hosted by PDC/KTH). The JRA4 sessions went quite well and although we are all quite concerned with the short time we have to prepare the milestones and the deliverable for month 12 of the project, we made a good review of the current state and draw a rather acceptable and manageable outline for the remaining 11 weeks.

I presented a survey of existing approaches to Grid Benchmarking in the first session, which in spite of my being nervous and rather unprepared went acceptable (nobody shouted at me afterwards at least). The interesting conclusion after this brief review was that you can hardly design something as a Grid Benchmark that would really comply with the definition of classic Benchmarking, since we are trying to measure a moving target here! So we should come up with a new definition for Grid Benchmarking, one that would take into account all the complexities and peculiarities of the Grid Infrastructure.

Anyway I guess we have some hectic weeks ahead of JRA4, there is the month 9 all hands meeting in Bologna, Italy and there is still lots to do. I hope this won't deviate me from my course works, the semester starts tomorrow and I really should find a balance between the classic studies and more interesting and intriguing work of this project!

Northwestern European Programming Contest 2006

The ACM/ICPC-NWERC 2006 is held this weekend at the KTH's main campus. I can't wait to go and see how they hold their contest. I've already talked to the head judge and I'd be helping out as a staff I guess. I hope I'd be able to finish up the homework due this weekend in time to be able to actually go! I bet Par Austin and the other memebers of the Three-Headed Monkey will be there as well! :) Will write more about it later!

OMII-Europe project’s month 6th all-hand meeting

I have recently joined PDC at KTH as a part time programmer and started working on the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute. As a result I had a trip to Southampton, UK for the OMII-Europe project’s month 6th all-hand meeting which was held on 9th and 10th of November.

There are some 16 partners in the project from all around Europe plus US and china, funded mostly by the European Union and working on building a grid infrastructure for the three widely used grid middleware in Europe, i.e. Globus, glite and Unicore, plus CROWN which is developed and used by Chinese.

The meeting was organized in an interesting way. The first morning was comprised of very short progress reports from the different activity groups. Then the meeting was continued with parallel meetings for each activity group. KTH is mostly engaged in three Joint Research Activities (JRAs), namely Accounting, Security and Benchmarking. The later is quite an interesting topic which I personally like to work on. During the meeting the project manager, a guy from university of Southampton, was quite enthusiastic about benchmarking and he mentioned that there could be some PhDs funded through this activity (sounds quite tempting, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, it was quite a good and valuable experience. I mean if you come to think of it in terms of the scale and influence of the project and everything, you’ll see why I say it was a valuable experience. I hope the actual work would also be as fun as it sounded on the paper and during the presentations!

Erlang User Conference

The 12th International Erlang/OTP User Conference is held here in Stockholm on November 9-10.

I'm going to miss it since I have to go to the OMII-Europe's project meeting :-(. Why is it always like this that good events happen at the same time so you only got to choose one of them?

Microsoft's Guest Lecturer

We had a guest lecturer from Microsoft in the last session of our Modern Methods in Software Engineering Course. It was interesting, the way they proudly present their methodology, and with no regret, confess that they have criteria like having a release in the specified time not to loose the market with price of covering up bugs and security holes just to make the release possible and leaving out quality and functionality and security issues; in brief, the fact that their priority in selecting features and and planning and everything is to maximize the profit! Well, after all they are a company with only one aim, making more money, and they were not any shy to announce that!

To be fair, I should mention that he showed us a neat pyramid shape one with security and quality and features and something else I forgot, on its sides and he said they try to extend the software while maintaining this shape balanced and everything, but eventually in the end, he confessed that everything is prioritized when having a release becomes more important than patching known bugs!

The issue of open source was also brought up at the end of his presentation by a question from the students and he calmly said they would be happy to move to open source _iff_ it would bring them more profit!

Interesting things for me to know were that they are using a tailored Agile method for most of their software development processes (e.g. for development of windows and office) and that Bill Gates is quite fund of the Cowboy Coding! It was also mentioned that Gates has recently handed over the position of chief software architect to a person (Ray Ozzie I think) who is much more process oriented, so the Microsoft guy was hopeful that they will see more practice of software engineering processes in Microsoft in the future.

BTW, KTH students can get a license for most of the MS software like Windows and Visual Studio etc. free of charge! That is while we are students.

Exams!

:-( ... and nothing else matters!

The First AUT Annual Programming Contest

Well, I can't really help it. I'm addicted and I can't just let go. If you wonder what is this about, I'm talking about programming contests. Well, if you had a good team such as mine and the memories like I have, you might have been feeling the same.

And now, there is yet another programming contest on the plate! AmirKabir has started a set of annual programming contests (May be after the 3rd IAUM-CCC, they felt they have been left out of the league!). Everything is just like ACM/ICPC contests; i.e. participants are teams of three and contests are around 5 hours with around 6-10 problems. The online round was held quite smooth, with the help of the UVa Online Contest System, and with rather a good problem set (and the result was quite good as well!). The on-site round is on 27th and I'm already depressed that I'm going to miss it (Anyone knows of any travel grants for such contest?). Anyway, I wish my teammates the best of luck and hope they'll repeat the experience we had in Babol. I hope they won't get a single Football as their prize though! ;)

4th DYNAMO Workshop

Today I went to the DYNAMO Workshop. DYNAMO which stands for "Dynamic Communication Networks" is a research group, part of the COST program (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research). Something like the IEEE's Technical Committees, but more organized and more limited (2 members from each EU country).

I have to admit that I couldn't understand some 70% of what was presented! That is, I could hardly get the problem definitions, let alone the solutions that where presented. At the end of the workshop, I told my Professor about it and he condolences me by saying this was very focused and specialized and some kind of the edge of the ongoing research in the topics presented. Anyhow, I feel really stupid and illiterate! :( I hope the speeches of tomorrow morning (DISC) would be better.

The whole thing was quite interesting though, I met some famous and cool professors from all over Europe and sat at lunch table with them (Felt really good!). There were also some 3 presentations, which although I couldn't quite understand the solution they presented, the problem statement itself was quite interesting for me. It also showed me how much I have lost by not studying things like Probability and Advanced Algorithm seriously.

DISC 2006

The 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) is hosted by SICS and held in Stockholm, 18 to 20th of September. I am going to help on the reception day and get a free ticket to attend the presentations later on.

There are some cool invited talks, namely:

• Provable Unbreakable Hyper-Encryption Using Distributed Systems,
  Michael Rabin (Turing Award Winner).
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of My Ideas about Distributed Systems,
  Leslie Lamport (Microsoft Research, it is said that "his research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems" [Wikipedia]).
• My Early Days in Distributed Computing Theory: 1979-1982,
  Nancy Lynch (MIT Professor, TDS group)

There is also the "4th DYNAMO Workshop" held a day before the actual conference, with some interesting sessions. I am interested in the third session in particular, where algorithmic topics like "Algorithmic aspects of DHT-based overlays", "Algorithmic Game Theory: Mechanisms with Verification" and "Building a peer-to-peer system from scratch" are presented (May be the last one isn't much algorithmic, but non the less, interesting).

Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

And thus I have to learn UML!

Yes, that is true! I have to learn UML. And not just learn to read and understand the diagrams, but to be able to create some complex ones! God help me. We need it for our Modern Methods in Software Engineering Course. Actually, that is something that supposedly I had to have learnt during bachelor studies (during the Software Engineering II course). But since I didn't budge at that time, I am almost an illiterate in this language.

Reading the specifications, it may seems to be easy in the beginning, but the hard part is when you actually try to draw one of the diagrams. Everything is vague and depends solely on your judgements. For example you have to decide whether a wheel and a bicycle have an aggregation relation or a composition relation! What could be called an entity and what could only be called an interface, etc.

The other problem is the choice of the tool. There are many UML tools out there and I have not managed to mak up my mind on which tool I'm going to use. My candidates at the moment are: ArgoUML, but it is java based; Poseidon, which is a good tool, not quite free and has problems with C++ as well; Rational Rose, it is perfect, but not free; Umbrello UML, it does everything and the interface is quite nice, but it is a KDE application. You may wonder why that could be a problem, well not a problem for me, but apparently it is going to be a problem for my teammate!! (A comparison list of UML tools if you are interested, it is in German though!)

Anyway, I always used to claim that I'm fond of learning new languages, however obscured they may be. I have to add an exception here, to exclude modeling languages!