Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - travel

Travelling while moving

2011-06-01T12:56:00+01:00

Last week I went to Fulda in Germany to attend the OpenNMS European User Conference. OpenNMS is an open source network management system which we make fairly heavy use of at work. The conference was an opportunity to catch up on developments in the project and get a sense of how it was being used. It was also an chance to make personal contact with a number of the developers. While open source development is typically conducted via faceless email and IRC it does help to put a face to the name every now and again.

Mindful of my experiences last year when my work trip to South Africa was affected by a certain Icelandic volcano I opted for an entirely overland trip this time. I left my house at around 10.30 in the morning and arrived in Frankfurt by 21.30. The journey was lengthened somewhat by a 2 hour wait at Brussels for the Deutsche Bhan train to Frankfurt. However I was able to find a suitably WiFi enabled place to sit down and continue work.

So while being a long journey it was considerably less hassle than going via plane. The amount of interruption to stuff I needed to do was limited to walking between platforms. As soon as I boarded the train I was able to open up my laptop and get on with some work. In fact I probably had one of the most productive days of hacking for some time as I was mercifully free of the distractions a typical day on the office throws at me.

There is a difference between the EuroStar and the DB trains though. The EuroStar trains are getting on a bit and the upholstery is a little tatty although the ride is still very smooth. In contrast the German trains are very well cared for, clean and with a silky smooth ride. I'm certainly looking forward to when DB over direct services to Holland and Germany from St Pancras. When those services start running I'll be able to the same journey door to door in around 6 and half hours which will be much more competitive time wise with those ash-prone planes.

In praise of... the Highways Agency

2010-12-20T11:32:00+00:00

It seems any severe weather brings on a large collective national moan. I don't wish to minimise the hassle to people that have been affected by the weather and trapped in places they didn't want to be however I think we are often too quick to criticise when things don't quite work out how we want. I thought I would take this opportunity to offer some praise for when things work well.

My journey up to Manchester was curtailed slightly by it taking around an hour to get 4 miles away from my house. Despite being out the doors early an incident closed 2 lanes of the main local artery leading to massive tailbacks. As the brunt of rush hour approached I decided to abandon the trek in the closing darkness and try again on the morning.

In retrospect this was a sensible choice. The side roads are fairly slippy and daylight offers a degree of protection as things are a lot more visible. We left Cambridge around 7 in the morning and had a trouble free journey up to Manchester. The main arteries where receiving plenty of grit and combined with a fewer cars on the road generally behaving sensibly we made good time. It only got slightly sketchy once we had turned onto the estate roads which were a mixture of compacted snow and bits of ice.

Sue has documented the fun we had getting up to the Fisherman's retreat rather icy hill. However once we had reached the top and had our first thirst quenching pint things went swimmingly well. I can certainly attest to having my desire for pig well and truly sated.

We made the decision to head back early to avoid any late afternoon traffic snarl ups. The corridor between Manchester and Cambridge (M6/A14) had stayed free of snow overnight and we had yet another event free trip and nice clear trunk roads. The only minor problem was my windscreen washer kept freezing up despite being practically concentrated screen wash at this point. We saw a low of around -12 degrees on the journey, the warmest being around -3.5.

I did my bit by checking the conditions before travel and making sure I had plenty of petrol in the car and emergency rations and blankets just in case. However I would like to extend my thanks to the Highways Agency for ensuring the roads we travelled were clear and trouble free. And for those places that weren't quite as smooth flowing spare a thought for those dedicated staff freezing their proverbials off while trying to get the roads running again.

Rainbow Nation

2010-05-18T17:31:00+01:00

Well I finally made it to South Africa for my whistle-stop tour south of the equator. I managed to get an exit seat so I wasn't too confined. During the 10 hours of flight I reckon I managed to achieve about 2 hours of somnolent state which has been enough to get me to the evening. Although I would heed the warnings about nocturnal wanderings outside the fortified compound that is the hotel I suspect it is a moot point for today. Hopefully I'll get out and about a bit more tomorrow evening. I fly back on Thursday evening which will make this one of the shorter African excursions on record. Now time to find a menu and eat something before I fall asleep.

Still here

2010-05-17T12:55:00+01:00

I should be on a plane at this point, however ash has conspired to cancel my connecting flight this morning. I'm now re-booked onto another flight this evening so I'll still be in South Africa in time for meetings just on considerably less sleep.

The weekend was lovely and relaxed. We attended to some wedding preparation on the Saturday including measuring me up for my suit and picking up the wedding rings. As I very rarely wear the things it still feels a little odd making my left hand hang a little oddly, I'm sure I'll get used to it soon enough though :-)

As I was due to be leaving home at 3.30 in the morning on Monday we time shifted Sunday to try and make the morning less painful. Fliss cooked me a wonderful roast Chicken dinner and we enjoyed a quite evening together. I was fairly relieved when the flight cancellation notification finally came through. It was much nicer waking up at a civilised time in the morning with my soon to be wife.

The shape of things to come?

2010-04-19T10:41:00+01:00

The ramifications of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull continue to rumble on as people suddenly find themselves stranded and reminded that the Earth is actually quite a big place. Meanwhile it's news that EU ministers co-ordinating a response has a video conference to discuss the response to the transport paralysis.

I find it interesting that the fact they had a video conference is news worthy. It implies that normally any time a bunch of European ministers need to discuss something they all de-camp and meet in a single physical locality. This is a measure of how far we have taken the ability to jet about for granted. While I'm sure there are good reasons to have conferences where close physicality to a mixture of people can result in useful side meetings I find it slightly disheartening that video-conferencing isn't used more routinely. Having said that the European project does ferry it's MEPs back and forth between two buildings every week so maybe I'm expecting too much. If Europe wants to take the lead on reducing the worlds carbon footprint it could do worse things than fixing up a few of it's inefficiences.

The news will no doubt spend the next few days reporting on stories of weary travllers making it back to the shores of old Blighty showing appropriate displays of Dunkirk Spirit. While we celebrate the return of out fellow countrymen to the this green and pleasent land I wonder if we'll take deeper stock of what the future without cheap and plentiful air travel will be like? Has anyone been in a supermarket the last few days and noticed the state of the fruit and veg section? This is the shape of things to come.

Post Travel Slump

2009-12-07T13:51:00+00:00

I got back from my Hungarian adventures at a slightly more reasonable time than Wednesday mornings departure. Never the less I find travel still zaps the energy out of me. On Friday night I managed to eat dinner before crawling upstairs and passing out.

Saturday has been ably documented elsewhere and basically involved a large amount of DVD watching. I was twiddling with my nascent Android application in the background but until I can make sense out of JDB and it's associated emacs GUD bindings it's going to be slow progress. Once I've figured out how to make breakpoints actually work as well as show position in the Android base code hopefully things will progress faster.

Sunday involved much de-construction as we took down the metal fencing at the back of the property. We are planning on replacing the boundary with more aesthetically pleasing (and fruitful) bushes. Once that was done I was minded to have a final push at getting my playlist patch into Rockbox. I also did my bit testing another outside contributors better solution to my stale hacky m4a mdat patch. I can appreciate Juliusz' frustrations with getting things into Rockbox. It's a great project and it's amazing we have truly free firmware we can install on a variety of bits of hardware. However it's by far and away one of the hardest communities I've had to deal with as a casual contributor. I don't know if the project suffers as a result, it's one of those hard to quantify things. I suspect the bar is pretty high anyway as the embedded nature probably rules out a lot of people used to desktop development unless they are really keen to dig into and learn the code.

Exploring Budapest

2009-12-03T16:57:00+00:00

After finishing work around midday I took advantage of the rest of the day to go and do a little exploring around town. There is a handy tourist bus which does a 24 hour ticket and runs a continuous loop around the principle tourist points. Hopefully I'll get a second stab at using my ticket tomorrow morning. Budapest really is a beautiful old European city, it reminded most of my trip to Prague. Although large chunks of it were destroyed during various wars (including all the bridges) the Hungarians have done a fantastic job restoring it while maintaining the 19th century grandeur.

I spent today looking around the castle area which although walled is more a massive palace complex. I did check out the curious Buda Labyrinth which is a series of interesting tunnels under the castle area. Each area has a number of Gormley style sculptures, sometimes with ambient music and set to various themes. I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a tourist destination (2000 HUF, about £6.60 seemed a little steep), however I think the place would make a fantastic LRP dungeon complex.

I didn't have time to explore any of the many museums on the castle hill and tomorrow I need to decide between going up the Zoo and impressive Heroes Square or visiting one of the many "medicinal" hot spring Spa's. My flight home is at 17.20 so I think I'll get most of the day before I have to sequester myself in the airport for my flight home.

That was quick

2009-12-02T19:41:00+00:00

I've spent about 4 hours traveling today and about 3 hours in the clients offices. Everything went fairly smoothly and despite occasional language impeadence I've only gained an extra 3-4 feature requests, none of which should be too tricky to implement. I'll probably pop into our local partners office tomorrow morning for a write-up before having the rest of the day to explore. Any recommendations gratefully received.

Weekend and Travels

2009-12-01T13:40:00+00:00

The weekend was a relatively quite one. I took advantage of the temporary loan of my Dad's bike to pay a visit into town and tick of a number of tasks in preparation for Christmas. This included by first every cut-throat* trim of the Winter Beard to prevent it going too wild. Other tasks included buying a present for Fliss and fetching silicone sealant for the repair to the show pan. All fairly mundane stuff.

I did reformat my laptop and after a little struggle with generating USB install keys massaging a version of Debian Testing onto one of the partitions. I've skipped Gnome and gone for a more netbook friendly Xfce for my desktop environment. Suspend and resume sort of works although seems to introduce an odd bug when trying to login on fresh virtual terminals. I suspect there may be screwy events being sent to X as well although existing applications still seem to be usable. It will give me something to do on the flight I suspect.

This time I've kept a spare partition free on the disk. I did attempt to get the latest Fedora installed but the installer was very confused. I may try the latest Ubuntu just to see how much difference there is between Debian and Ubuntu.

I'm up at denial a.m. tomorrow to fly to Budapest in Hungary. I have two days on a customer site to see my software being put to real use (and answer questions on its future). If I'm lucky I'll get Friday morning shopping before flying back. This week is likely to literally fly by.

* with disposable razors these days, sign of the times

Niagra Falls

2007-07-11T01:00:00+01:00

There is not much I can say about the Falls. They are as impressive as you would think but the area around is basically tourist trap hell. The parking was $18 (?9) and a good walk away from the Maid of the Mist <https://www.maidofthemist.com/>. However we did persuade the nice parking attendant to give us a temporary disabled badge so Fliss didn't have to walk quite as far.

The "Maid" trip was probably the best of the excursions you could do as it takes you up close and personal to the falls. We didn't want to spend all our money on seeing the falls in every conceivable way. The boat does a circuit past the American falls which although impressive are basically a three or four "High Forces" bolted together. The Horseshoe falls on the Canadian side is the iconic one and the boat holds it's position there for a good ten minutes. While downwind you get the full spray of the river in your face, everyone kitted out with their regulation branded ponchos.

We considered lunching at the falls but decided to make our way to Tilsonburg and ensuring we were on time.