I have some problems with the pictures I took during the trip as the file system seems to be mixed up a bit. That makes from some interesting pictures but also for some unusable ones. I hope to put some pics up soon.

In October I will come to the UK – attending a wedding of two friends from Vienna, visiting Giri and Inaz in Bristol and give a short company presentation to the CS students at Kent University. I’m already looking forward to that trip too.

That’s it – next week I will be busy with our Project Experience workshop and a departmental trip to Bratislava. I shall be back on-line after the trip to the US.

A little tool called Exifer helped me to solve the following problem: given two photo collections of the trip – both cameras not synchronised on time – how can I order the pictures chronologically? Using two pictures that must have been taken within seconds apart, I determined the offset of both cameras. Then I used Exifer to change the Exif date and time of one of the photo sets. That’s it… (note, do not tick the box “Incremental”).

Furthermore, Christine visited last weekend. We went to Carnuntum, Melk and Bratislava.

I want to keep a marker to this article as it addresses several interesting issues in software development but also the metaphors used are thought provoking.

This article at Wired describes a feeling I have came to think about lately, too – technology, work load and productivity. Many people consider me to be well organised and a person that “gets things done”. However, I don’t feel the same way. I find it increasingly difficult to define my own success, i.e. a state such that I can say have I achieved something.

A friend asked yesterday, why it is that we go in to the office on a bank holiday or weekend, why can’t it wait? I answered twofold: (a) these are days where new issues hardly come in, so I can concentrate on what’s on my plate already and (b) that the rest of the week is already planned out (but 10h) and I thus feel I need the extra day to be ahead of the game again.

I don’t think I had this kind of constant pressure as a researcher or lecturer despite the fact that I was dealing with more people most of the time. It seems that students respected my time much more than most of my customers (or even colleagues). With ‘respect’ I also mean that I didn’t receive mass emails about their coursework or whatever they were working on – but I receive such emails today. Why do most people think that I need to know every little problem – most of my students tried to solve their problems on their own and then presented the solution and the problem solving process.

Maybe I make the mistake by being there too much. The students I told “go ahead, solve it on your own”, because it was part of their learning. Now I often solve the problems a.s.a.p., reducing the chance of learning for the problem holder. Maybe I am in the conflict that I believe that I have to solve the problems as a manager but good managers teach their staff to solve problems on their own. However, teaching typically takes more time initially and I’m back at the beginning, that I feel I don’t have the time… any ideas?

On Saturday afternoon I went to a Public lecture by Roger Penrose organised by the Kurt Gödel Society. Frankly, I was a little disappointed by the lecture. Roger Penrose repeated himself a few times and occasionally lost the flow. He showed a proof and then said he is not sure anymore whether this is right but assumes so. I felt it was too technical at times for a public lecture, too. Anyway, after the lecture they showed the movie “Kurt Gödel: Ein Mathematischer Mythos”. The content was interesting (most of the time) but the presentation was very old fashioned. I understand that no TV station today wants to show it. It also contained a small error as Fermats last theorem has been proved by now.

Some pictures about this event will be online soon.

Here are a couple of links about Gödel:

TIME 100: Kurt Godel

“Kurt Gödel: He turned the lens of mathematics on itself and hit upon his famous “incompleteness theorem” — driving a stake through the heart of formalism
By DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER”

http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/godel.html

“Kurt Gödel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Godel

Last week I decided that my private laptop needs a clean-up – a very thorough one. I backed up my data; basically I copied a few directories to my external HD, amongst them “Application Data”. Then I reinstalled Windows. Of course, I wanted to get my data back but what a scare as I could not find the “Application Data” directory on my external HD anymore. So I installed some recovery software to look for the data on the main drive. This takes a while and so one week was lost trying to recover my data.

Ok, I don’t know why I haven’t done the following earlier: this morning I had the great idea of starting a search over my entire external HD for “App*”. Of course, there it was… The settings in the Folder View of the reinstalled Windows Explorer hide systems folders and apparently “Application Data” is a systems folder… How stupid of me not to think of this earlier – how stupid of MS to be so rigid.

Anyway, I am glad to have my data back as I feared the worst, namely that I lost a few years worth of email. Now I can also continue to install some of the essential programs again and put up the pictures from my trip to Canterbury soon. Though, this will still have to wait for one week as I have to get some work done. Great weekend in the office – here I come.