Aug252007

My new Apartment!

US

Yeah, I’m not homeless anymore!!!! I moved yesterday into my new place in Maxwell Terrace! It is sooo great, my room is amazing, it’s very close to campus (6 blocks, 7 mins by bike), very close to Kroger (also 6 blocks) and even closer to Brian Park (4 blocks, 3 mins by bike). Here are some pictures of my room:

My bed. Yes, I’m sleeping under a German flag! I was so sick of seeing all those American flags at every corner that I just had to buy a German one. But I’m still not tough enough to hang it to the balcony :-). Next year for sure!

My working space directly next to the window with a nice green view *aaaaahhhhhh*.

The decorative wall, my bow, one of my Katanas and some cool license plates.

More Katanas and some sports stuff on the ground :-)!

The view out of my window – great! Okok, ignore those weird cables … yeah, it’s America!

Our Kitchen …. nothing to say, bright and clean! Yes, clean!!!!

The living room …

View from our balcony to the remaining complex. It’s a great place to live in!

AND: we have a WINDOW in the bathroom. Yes, a WINDOW! That’s so cool … and at the same time so non-American :-). I love it!

That’s it for today, more to come!

Aug102007

Meeting Albuquerque

Travel

I came back from the Open MPI collective meeting in Albuquerque. It was amazingly fruitful and we had many new ideas for non-blocking collectives. Many of the are actually new problems but it’s good to discuss them before I am challenged with those questions at conferences without preparation. The meeting was hosted by the university of New Mexico

To be precise, the Center for High Performance Computing at the UNM:

We ran through the discussions pretty quickly (actually too quickly for my taste, because we “dropped” (i.e., decided not to implement) most of the nice collv2 things we designed last year) so that we finished early. We had the last late afternoon (5pm) off and I decided to go with a guy from Sun Microsystems to do some sightseeing. We went to the Petroglyph National Monument to see some drawings of native americans.

We had to wak through the hot desert to see them

and they were really disappointing!!!! :-(.

Anyhow, we went on and wanted to see the “Vulcanoes”.

The first one was pretty lame …

but we had a nice view over Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains

And of course the *real* volcano!

That we finally climbed! *yeah*

So that’s pretty much it! The afternoon was over and we flew back the next day. A very productive meeting!

Aug32007

Armed Robots?

US

The US army uses the first tactical robots in Iraq – moving the war to a new technological level. Those little beasts seem pretty efficient (see video). But being in the Army and coming from an information security background, I’m wondering how the data-transmission works. I think it would be fun to hijack those thingies on a battlefield. And even if they are not easily hijackable (what I hope for the US troops), who prevents the bad guys from jamming the whole battlefield with strong signals? I could build a wireless jammer in a week … this would render their iron friends pretty useless. As a starting point for the bad guys, the manufacturer pus the datasheets online :-). I’m getting a 404 when I try to download one though ;-). They’ll need supercomputers on the battlefields soon … ah, my job is secured forever!