Bye bye Florida

So just to tease relatives, friends and colleagues back in Sweden as they have some extremely early winter weather conditions back there right now(!) I'll provide some more pictures from Florida. At almost 30C the weather is comfortable, the pool is still awesome, beaches nice, shopping great, relaxation level high, grilling/barbecuing is great and the restaurants are nice. Kennedy Space center has now been graced with my presence as well, something that was better than expected actually.

Unfortunately I left this paradise yesterday (Saturday) afternoon and I'll be back in Sweden today (Sunday). I'm currently waiting in Copenhagen for 4h for the last short (45min) flight, then I'm almost home.

Pool at night

A nice Florida beach, just south of Cocoa Beach (east coast).

Front of the house...

...and the back.

And another of those lovely sunsets as seen from the balcony outside my room.

Pictures from Florida

I'm not sure why that is so but I like it here at my uncle's family's house outside Tampa, Florida. It could be the weather, almost 30 degrees Celsius while it's almost freezing(!), though that is extreme, back home in Sweden and the fall-storms raging there. Or it could be the nice company, especially the little attention stealer that my lovely half year old cousin is. Or it could be the totally relaxed atmosphere after a busy week at a conference. Having a drink handed to you by your nice uncle coupled with wireless Internet at your fingertips in the pool. The hottub/jacuzzi next to the pool is sort of nice too, especially if you consider that we sat in the hottub having a great time and looking up at the star filled sky last night. The incredible sunsets perhaps?

I'm not sure where to stop, nice food, nice company, lovely weather and no work. The view is rather OK too, including the skylines of two cities across Tampa Bay. One is St Petersburg a bit to the west (a little to the left as seen from the house) and the other is Tampa a little further east (to the right, not clearly seen in these pictures).

Above: Me at the pool.

Above: Sunset as seen from the house/pool with the city of St Petersburg's skyline.

After the sunset

From Portland to Tampa

The flight out from Salt Lake City was of course delayed so it didn't leave until about 1.30am instead of 11.45pm. As I had a 4h wait coming up in Atlanta it didn't matter much, other than that people, including me, were really tired. When everyone finally gotten on the plane the captain informed us of a sensor error on the door. An engineer finally signed off on the door working correctly despite the sensor reading telling the pilots that the door was not closed. He checked from the inside too and went out another door. Well he wasn't going to be on the plane anyway so it was safe for him to do so I guess...

The Salt Lake City airport was not as generous as Portland and did not provide free wifi access. On the other hand their checks to enforce this left some possibilities. I could eventually get ping, ICQ, SSH(!), Skype and google talk (Jabber) to function perfectly. I could also read web email and do other limited web surfing. Seems they only block certain ports like port 80. Port 443 worked fine for example, making everything https working and quite a few web sites have an https option, like google personalized (www.google.com/ig), and gmail. Having SSH functioning basically meant that anything could be done, but I didn't bother.

Ah well, I'm at last at my destination, but dead tired, got maybe 30min of sleep this night.

So it had gone too well so far...

Of course, all my luggage got here, flights worked, tutorials went fine, haven't lost anything, laptop still working, etc. Arriving at the airport today though I was told that my flight was cancelled due to mechanical problems. My new flight schedule involves Portland, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and then finally Tampa. So an additional flight and most importantly I'll fly during the night, arriving the following day instead of the planned arrival time this Friday evening.

Considering I slept for just 5h this night I'll probably have no problem sleeping though (got to see it the positive way). But after hours on an airplane in the middle of the night followed by a 4h wait in Atlanta will be... interesting. Anders's flight is not leaving until just before 5pm and mine a little bit after 6pm so at least I got some unexpected company here at the airport. It is a nice airport here in Portland but after 8hours here it will almost feel like home I guess. The good thing is that they have free wifi all over the place :) .

These things happen so it is no big deal. The annoying thing this time is the combination with my phone problems made it harder to update people on the flight changes. That was solved by IM-chatting with my brother who happened to be online back in Sweden and he could get hold of my father in Florida to update him on the flight changes so they can fetch me at the airport tomorrow morning instead of this evening. Such nice service. Vacation has begun!

Phone problems continued

Phone problems
Today I again spoke (twice) with the customer service for my mobile phone service provider, Tele2, back in Sweden. The short story is that it is still a mystery to them and they figure it is my SIM-card that is broken. That in a way that only makes the roaming with mobile phone service providers in the US not work. Sounds strange to me. To top it off, not having a working mobile phone service, they told me that of course this means all calls are forwarded to my voice mail and as I successfully roamed in in Germany on my way here that I will pay that call forwarding cost... Great news, so I'm not only without my paid for service I will have increased costs due to it too.

Technical details of phone problems:

• My phone, Motorola V3 Razr is unable to make use of any of the GSM networks here ("emergency calls only")
• It can list networks fine but nothing happens if I manually try to register with them
• The two networks it can find, T-Mobile and Cingular, both have roaming agreements with my phone service provider Tele2.
• The Motorola V3 Razr is a quad band phone able to use both the 1900 and 850 GSM bands over here in the States.
• Using my colleague's SIM card in my phone works perfectly (also Tele2).
• Putting my SIM card in my colleague's phone produces the same result as on my phone (emergency calls only)
• I've successfully roamed in to various operator networks with this particular phone and SIM-card, most recently in Germany at the airport there on my way over here.
• I've never been in the US with this phone and SIM-card before.

Note to self: If they ask you if you have a tri-band phone (for the 5th time) able to use the US networks, just say yes, don't say that you actually have a quad-band phone. That's apparently confusing and causes them to look up the phone details, every time.

Monday

Temperature control
What is it with the building standards over here? In our hotels rooms they have one-glass windows. Come on, it's not like Portland is close to a desert or something. It's up north! It is October and it gets freezing in our rooms in the morning. Imagine how it would be here in the middle of the winter. To be fair though, this is easily compensated by the fact that it gets way too warm in our rooms in the evening. Well sometimes at least. In Sweden, which seems to be quite similar climate wise, we have 3-glass windows. Even England now a days have standardized on 2-glass windows. On the other hand Portland has about a million small, sometimes restaurant local, beer breweries...

Aaah, a cup of free watery hot coffee later at the conference and I'm almost feeling warm again. I'm no coffee addict but it is a good thing they have so many Starbucks around here, so you can actually get a decent cup of coffee. Of course this being the US, the smallest one is called "tall" and is more coffee than I usually drink in an entire day. Don't get me wrong though, I like it over here!

The OOPSLA conference update
Monday was a busy day here. I'm still having problems with the time difference, and I woke up at 5 in the morning today too, unable to go back to sleep. Oh well that's OK and expected. Most of the day was spent in a tutorial named "Patterns for concurrent and networked objects" from 8.30-17.00 (5pm). More on that later. That was directly followed by the OOPSLA Welcome Reception (17-19.30) and then followed by other things such Eclipse event sponsored by IBM.

During the morning Jon and Niclas held their "Generate the Repetitive, Boring Code: How to Write Code Generators" tutorial, which seemed to have been very popular. Jimmy actually tried to get in there in the middle of it but was not allowed in due to the amount of people already there (people standing up in the back). I met up with them after their tutorial for lunch and the people coming out of there didn't look too unhappy.

Surprise photo of Jon and Niclas at their tutorial.

Evening
After the welcome reception, the eclipse event after that, etc, Jon, Anders and me ended up in the hotel sky lounge bar but we didn't last long there. Soon we passed out in our beds.

Tutorial
I'm not too sure what to say about this tutorial, "Patterns for concurrent and networked objects". Interesting subject for sure. Too long? Definitely Schmidt a good speaker? Sure is, and obviously very knowledgeable too. Design patterns for distributed and concurrent systems are quite interesting, but it felt like we only did that for the last couple of hours or so. At 11.00 (after 2.5h!) the introduction was over. It covered very basic topics and I'm not sure who would have understood especially the last 2h if they didn't know all those things rather well already. Sure it is nice to have a good introduction but that seemed a little too much, I'm sure most people there knew that we use OSes and middleware underneath a domain specific layer or two day!

The last part involving aasynchronous I/O in patterns was very interesting though. But the actual pattern was nothing new. Just look up any Java asynchronous I/O server example and that is the way it is done. Well I guess that's the point of a pattern and I'm probably just a little bit disappointed that most of the things were already fairly well known to me. Again though, Schmidt is a good speaker and it did give me some new insights here and there along with a slightly different view on some things. The notes/slides were terrible during the actual presentation but good to have afterwards (way too wordy!).

One of the things I liked was the real world examples he used. Very good ones I must say and the stories, patterns etc applied very well to the ideas presented. Furthermore they were both very suitable and especially the first one "sexy" (for a tech geek). The first one involved the computer software for Boeing fighter jets such as the F-18 E/F and F-15 E. When I was young(er) I loved reading all about fighter jets so of course this appealed to me on that level(plane?) too. First they had introduced a basic publisher-subscriber pattern there for all those different software modules (GPS, mission computer, weapons lock, weapons release systems etc). It was a success but after success comes the request for even more features and soon they had more things than they could handle on a single cpu board. Then when you add a second board you all the sudden have a distributed system, and you need to adapt your design patterns and/or add new ones. Very nice real world based introduction to the problem domain I must say. The second example was a more complex x-ray imaging acquisition and distribution system that provided the opportunity to explain a lot more distributed/concurrent patterns.

It's not all work...

Now that I'm over here (the American side of the pond called the Atlantic) attending the conference I'll take advantage of this and have one week of vacation here. "While I'm over there I can as well" visit my uncle, his wife and my newborn (April -06) cousin! They live in Florida though so not exactly close to Portland, Oregon, quite the opposite actually. About as far from each other as it can get but still be part of the mainland US (south east and north west corner respectively).

That will be great, and I'm really looking forward to it. As it happens, by pure coincidence (they had planned this long before this conference was planned for me) my father and mother will be in Florida as well, arriving the day before and leaving just a few days after me. Apart from having a great time with my relatives in a very relaxed environment with no work, I and my parents will go visit the Kennedy Space center. A childhood dream of mine :-) Another good thing with them coming over is that they can bring my camera which I forgot to pack...

Speaking of camera, I can still use the basic camera in my mobile phone to take some pictures, but I'm unable to use it for making phone calls... I sort of thought that was the primary purpose. Others here with the same phone provider (Tele2 Comviq) have no problems and the customer service back in Sweden didn't know what the problem could be, everything seemed fine to them, but would check tomorrow when the tech guys were back. Then what? Will they call me...?

We are still awake (it's soon 5 in the afternoon local time Saturday, but 2 in the morning Sunday in Sweden). I think we managed to stay up long enough (around 8 in the evening) yesterday to have compensated for most of the jet lag! We are to meet up with some other people at 6 for dinner and tomorrow, Sunday, the actual conference starts!

Oh almost forgot, as it happens it seems Portland is having a fashion week here at the same time. Maybe that will compensate for all geeks here for the software conference :)

Preparations...

As some of you know I arrived yesterday in Portland, Oregon in the US. The flights here were smooth even though a delay with the flight to Frankfurt caused us a somewhat short transit time, but it was of course quickly and efficiently handled by the excellent German Lufthansa staff at the gate, where we could get our boarding passes. Yes for some reason Jon and I didn't get our boarding passes for the 2nd flight in Göteborg. Go figure. Not even the security checks caused us any extra trouble due to missing boarding passes. I guess that sometimes the universe actually cooperates with you...

My reason for traveling to Portland is this big software/programming conference called OOPSLA. It's my first time attending it but with me are both my colleague Jon from Consat and Niclas Nilsson who have not only attended the annual conference before but are actually both holding tutorials here. Quite impressive. Today Jimmy (and his father) also joined us. Jon and Niclas are holding one tutorial together, Niclas two more by himself and then a fourth(!) one together with Jimmy. Each one is for 3.5h and attending those are people from all over the world paying good money to do so as well. Of course today (Saturday) they are doing some last minute preparations for tomorrows (yes Sunday!) start of the conference.

Soon we will find us something to eat and keep trying to win the fight against jet lag...

Just 4 blocks from here is the state's biggest shopping mall which at least I will check out later and maybe the others if they are not panicking too much about their tutorials. :-)

To the right you can see (from left to right) Jon-Erling, Niclas and Jimmy discussing their presentations.