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    <title>Luiyolog&iacute;a</title>
    <link>http://luiyo.net/blog</link>
    <atom:link href="http://luiyo.net/blog/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
    <description>Luiyolog&iacute;a - The Science that studies my interests and concerns</description>
    <language>en-gb</language>
    <pubDate>Sun, 18 Feb 2018 16:35:15 +0000</pubDate>
    <lastBuildDate>Sun, 18 Feb 2018 16:35:15 +0000</lastBuildDate>

    <item>
      <title>Travels With Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2018/02/travels-with-Charley-by-John-Steinbeck.html</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2018/02/travels-with-Charley-by-John-Steinbeck.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8135136-travels-with-charley&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Travels with Charley: In Search of America&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is mainly what they call a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelogue_%28literature%29&quot;&gt;travelogue o travel literature&lt;/a&gt;. It&apos;s not the first time that I read one and I&apos;m starting to enjoy the genre. I added this one to my &lt;em&gt;want to read&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; a long time ago after reading some hilarious paragraphs during a couple of English lessons, and the rest of the book had not disappointed me at all.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image lateral&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/john-steinbeck-and-charley.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;John Steinbeck and Charley&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;John Steinbeck and Charley&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In 1960, a 58 years old &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;John Steinbeck&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; bought a small camper to drive around the United States with his dog (**Charley**). He called the camper &lt;em&gt;Rocinante&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flickr.com/photos/whsieh78/32182633486&quot;&gt;here you have a picture of it&lt;/a&gt;), the perfect name for a saddle in which to go on adventures. He said before the book was published:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;I was advised that the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script would cause curiosity and inquiry in some places. I do not know how many people recognized the name, but surely no one ever asked about it.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The book was published in 1962 and Steinbeck died just six years later. Reading this book you can somehow perceive his age, obviously regarding his health condition but also because he didn&apos;t care about others reading what he wrote or did. When he started the arrangements for the trip, everyone tried to persuade him to abandon the idea because it&apos;s age and chronic disease, but he felt he needed the trip and that it was &lt;em&gt;now or never&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;excerpt&quot;&gt;During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the trip was to get to know again his country and, in my opinion, as a way to say goodbye to several places, essential locations for him in the past. This quote summarizes his motivations:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;excerpt&quot;&gt;For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago, or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Steinbeck beautifully describes his feelings about the places or about the people he encountered, and that is what makes this book remarkable. He takes advantage of the trip circumstances to give his opinion on the social and political issues of 1960: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960&quot;&gt;decisive election year between Nixon and Kennedy&lt;/a&gt;, the embarrassing (even on those days for him) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges#Integration&quot;&gt;racial issues in the southern states&lt;/a&gt; and the cold war against the Soviet Union, just to give some examples.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As one can imagine reading the book, and it was confirmed some years after the publication, some of the dialogues during his encounters are purely fictional as a mean for the author to describe a situation or a way of thinking of the folks he encountered. Part of the magic resides in guessing which ones are more or less distant from his real experiences. He even describes the approach as a disclaimer:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;excerpt&quot;&gt;I&apos;ve always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The book contains dozens of brilliant quotes, some of them with a beautiful and intense description that mentally transfers the reader to a certain American landscape:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;excerpt&quot;&gt;The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It&apos;s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You cannot use this book to prepare a similar trip, or to discover any of the places that he visited. He also wrote about it in the last part of the book, as a retrospective of what he finally ended writing, in one of my favorite quotes of the book:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;excerpt&quot;&gt;If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their stored pictures would be not only different from mine but equally different from one another. If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness. From start to finish I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this my country. If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I really liked this book, and for sure I&apos;ll try to read more from Steinbeck.&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>FOSDEM 2018: Sunday</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2018/02/fosdem-2018-Sunday.html</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 8 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2018/02/fosdem-2018-Sunday.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;After an interesting Saturday, finished with a great dinner with some friends in one of our favorite restaurants in Brussels, my Sunday at &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FOSDEM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; started again very early.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image lateral&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-logo.png&quot; alt=&quot;FOSDEM 2018&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;FOSDEM 2018&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;My choices for the Sunday were again diverse and (in most cases) successful. Apart from the closing keynotes, I spent some time in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/&quot;&gt;Legal and Policy Issues devroom&lt;/a&gt;, a couple of talks in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/hpc,_big_data,_and_data_science/&quot;&gt;HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom&lt;/a&gt; and half the afternoon in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/geospatial/&quot;&gt;Geospatial devroom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Before continuing, if you want to read my summary of the previous day you can follow this link: &lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2018/02/fosdem-2018-Saturday.html&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FOSDEM 2018: Saturday&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You will also find there general info and details about the event itself.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Let me summarize:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Talks&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/gdpr_identity_management/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Capture the GDPR with Identity management&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/juraj_benculak/&quot;&gt;Juraj Benculak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This first talk was a bit disappointing. The intro about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GDPR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; took most of the talk, and I bet that almost all of us who where there at 9am in a Sunday knew what GDPR is.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The recommendations for GDPR arrived very late. The speaker made a brief overview of how you can benefit from a nice data mapping and data governance, and how good it is to observe privacy by default and by design. Then, he introduced Identity Management as the ideal tool for the job demonstrating the lawfulness of all the data processing. The fact that he develops Identity Management software has something to do with it, of course.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/ai_right_to_be_forgotten/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Artificial intelligence dealing with the right to be forgotten&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/cristina_rosu/&quot;&gt;Cristina Rosu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The next talk in the Legal and Policy devroom was luckily more interesting, but again the title was misleading. Most of the talk was an intro to the right to be forgotten, including an overview of all the relevant legal cases starting with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Spain_v_AEPD_and_Mario_Costeja_Gonz%C3%A1lez&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google Spain&lt;/strong&gt; v &lt;strong&gt;AEPD&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Mario Costeja González&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Cristina Rosu complemented the legal intro with some metrics about GDPR compliance in some countries.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-gdpr-compliance.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Some statistics on deletion for GDPR compliance&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Some statistics on deletion for GDPR compliance&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In the last slides, the only part related to Artificial Intelligence, the speaker commented some possible approaches to enhance the right to be forgotten in the AI environment: Obfuscation strategies, data minimization, personal data stores, algorithmic transparency or ethical boards inside companies.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/hpc_uclouvain/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Behind the scenes of a FOSS-powered HPC cluster, Ansible or Salt? Ansible AND Salt!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/damien_francois/&quot;&gt;Damien François&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The speaker, as a systems engineer, is responsible of the automation of a medium-sized HPC infrastructure at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://uclouvain.be/&quot;&gt;Louvain University&lt;/a&gt;. The purpose of his talk, quite interesting, was to advocate for the use of similar tools at the same time, instead of using the same tool for everything. Some features overlap, but he claimed that each tool can be more powerful in certain tasks, and separating tools also helps in defining responsibilities.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;They use &lt;a href=&quot;https://cobbler.github.io/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cobbler&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to install and deploy Operating Systems and set-up hardware specific configuration, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ansible.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ansible&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for one-off operations (setup RSA keys, register node to services or prepare config files) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://saltstack.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Salt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for daily management (configure system, install admin software or mount the user filesystem).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He ended comparing Ansible and Salt, reviewing the best characteristics of each of them as you can see in the picture that I took:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-ansible-salt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;What the speaker loves about Ansible and Salt&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;What the speaker loves about Ansible and Salt&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/deeplearning_osm/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How DeepLearning can help to improve geospatial DataQuality, an OSM use case&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/olivier_courtin/&quot;&gt;Olivier Courtin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The speaker started his talk reviewing some of the Quality Assurance tools available in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstreetmap.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OpenStreetMap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ecosystem, being the main ones: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Keep_Right&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep Right&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmose&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Osmose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Inspector&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OSM Inspector&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapRoulette&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maproulette&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The problem of them, and I know it very well because I&apos;ve used them a lot, is that the detection can be automatic but only sometimes the tool is able to provide fix suggestions or a standard correction guide, and eventually all the corrections need to be done manually by a mapper (like me).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The premise of the talk was about using other datasets to highlight inconsistencies and, potentially, to predict some characteristics not present in the map using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DeepLearning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and satellite imagery. The results that he showed were impressive, but he also showed that a lot of work needs to be done in order to have enough quality to consider a more automated approach for Quality Assurance in OSM.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Completeness in OpenStreetMap starts by detecting inconsistencies as soon and as detailed as possible.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-deeplearning-osm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Applying DeepLearning techniques to improve OpenStreetMap&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Applying DeepLearning techniques to improve OpenStreetMap&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/libreoffice/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/michael_meeks/&quot;&gt;Michael Meeks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After some interesting networking in the stands, I entered this talk with low expectations. I did not regret it because it was very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The talk was about the huge refactor that was needed in the codebase of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libreoffice.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LibreOffice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to make it work in the Cloud. The speaker explained clearly why they needed to re-structure at all, the main problems that they faced (Windows and Linux rendering APIs) and how they solved critical issues like extreme coupling and threads management.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The summary of the talk in a quote is: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Fix each bug only once&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. What a great statement.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-libreoffice-refactor.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Re-structuring LibreOffice&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Re-structuring LibreOffice&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/geo_rock/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Building Rock Climbing Maps with OpenStreetMap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/viet_nguyen/&quot;&gt;Viet Nguyen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This was my first talk in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/geospatial/&quot;&gt;Geospatial devroom&lt;/a&gt;, it was somehow inspiring despite I can&apos;t say that I learned a lot. The speaker explained that, as a rock climbing lover, he couldn&apos;t find good data regarding climbing routes, walls and sectors so he started introducing that information himself in OpenStreetMap. He summarized his experience, the decisions that he had to take, and how he is trying to get more contributors for his project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://openbeta.io/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OpenBeta&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/geo_osm_from_scratch/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Building OSM based web app from scratch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/nils_vierus/&quot;&gt;Nils Vierus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I could imagine that this talk was going to be very basic and I guessed right, but I wanted to stay in the devroom for the next talks so I stayed in the room retaining my seat.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The speaker made a general overview about Programming languages to build an OSM based web app, IDEs, mapping libraries, OSM data retrieval tools, routing tools and even version control systems. Good introduction to the topic from a good speaker but I&apos;m not sure if this kind of talks should have a place in FOSDEM.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/geo_cityzen/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Privacy aware city navigation with CityZen app&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/redon_skikuli/&quot;&gt;Redon Skikuli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The speaker was nice and funny, but again the talk was not very advanced. It was more interesting when he talked about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openlabs.cc/en/&quot;&gt;Open Hackerspace&lt;/a&gt; that he collaborates with in Tirana (Albania) than the part related to the CitiZen App. The claim that the app is privacy aware is very limited. They just don&apos;t keep your navigation data but in the end whenever they ask for the location of the user, an Android device stores the location anyway (directly or when requesting the nearest POIs).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As a nice addition, CitiZen allows the users to modify or insert the POIs retrieved from OSM by editing them inside the app.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/geo_subway/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Every subway network in the world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/ilya_zverev/&quot;&gt;Ilya Zverev&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This talk was refreshing and reconciled me with the geospatial devroom. Ilya (software engineer at &lt;a href=&quot;https://maps.me/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maps.me&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) explained how he ended building the offline subway navigation feature for Maps.me. As he explained, when they started reviewing the available data in OpenStreetMap related to subways they realized that the information was very poor and incomplete. For example there was no way to map properly the connections between lines.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He started building a validator and then station by station, city by city, he improved the subway information in OSM. He even presented a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal_process&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; for the subway geospatial information, including new relations for the transfers.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-OSM-subways-schema.png&quot; alt=&quot;Subway stations schema in OpenStreetMap, according to Ilya Zverev&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Subway stations schema in OpenStreetMap, according to Ilya Zverev&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/upsat/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story of UPSat, Building the first open source software and hardware satellite&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/pierros_papadeas/&quot;&gt;Pierros Papadeas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One of the most inspiring talks of the entire FOSDEM with a packed full Janson Room (with capacity for 1415 people).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The speaker explained how during 2016, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libre.space/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Libre Space Foundation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; a non-profit organization developing open source technologies for space, designed, built and delivered &lt;a href=&quot;https://libre.space/projects/upsat/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPSat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first open source software and hardware satellite.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-UPSat.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Pierros Papadeas explaining the UPSat design and building process&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Pierros Papadeas explaining the UPSat design and building process&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He explained with some detail how he got involved, the current status of the project, the design, construction, verification, testing and delivery processes, etc. You should consider watching the video :-)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/closing_keynote/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exploiting modern microarchitectures, Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/jon_masters/&quot;&gt;Jon Masters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The closing keynote was given by &lt;a href=&quot;http://jonmasters.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jon Masters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Computer Architect at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/en&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Red Hat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_%28security_vulnerability%29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meltdown&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28security_vulnerability%29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spectre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, as he was tech lead for mitigation efforts against them in Red Hat. Jon was surprisingly capable of explaining in less than 50 minutes what are those vulnerabilities about, how they were possible in the first place and what are the consequences of avoiding them. I already knew most of it but Jon made it even clearer for me, and surely for the rest of the audience given the applause he received.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It was specially amusing for me, as I&apos;ve been refreshing my knowledge about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasulo_algorithm&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tomasulo Algorithm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; these past months.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-Meltdown.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Microcode, Millicode and Chicken bits&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Microcode, Millicode and Chicken bits&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And that&apos;s all. &lt;strong&gt;See you in Brussels for FOSDEM 2019!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>FOSDEM 2018: Saturday</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2018/02/fosdem-2018-Saturday.html</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2018/02/fosdem-2018-Saturday.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;After an uncertain landing a few hours ago (the airport in Madrid was barely working due to a snowy morning), I&apos;ve just arrived home but instead of having some rest after an intense and though-provoking FOSDEM I felt the urge to start writing about my weekend in Brussels.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve been there not only to enjoy this wonderful city with its trappist beers and great food, but specially to attend &lt;strong&gt;FOSDEM&lt;/strong&gt; as I intend to do every year.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image lateral&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-logo.png&quot; alt=&quot;FOSDEM 2018&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;FOSDEM 2018&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For those of you who don&apos;t know &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FOSDEM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it&apos;s the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to &lt;strong&gt;Open Source&lt;/strong&gt; development. It&apos;s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the &lt;strong&gt;FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)&lt;/strong&gt; ecosystem. It&apos;s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with faces (or with voices, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/lekum&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;@lekum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;!) you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I already wrote about it a couple of years ago, when I even gave a lightning talk in one &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/fringe/&quot;&gt;FOSDEM Fringe event&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;http://flosscommunitymetrics.org/&quot;&gt;Floss Community Metrics Meeting (FCM2)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2016/03/fosdem-2016-friday.html&quot;&gt;FOSDEM 2016: Friday&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2016/03/fosdem-2016-saturday.html&quot;&gt;FOSDEM 2016: Saturday&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2016/03/fosdem-2016-sunday.html&quot;&gt;FOSDEM 2016: Sunday&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The numbers of this year speak for themselves:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;more than 8,000 attendees in only two days&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speakers/&quot;&gt;652 speakers&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/events/&quot;&gt;690 different events&lt;/a&gt; (talks or workshops, mainly)&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/roomtracks/&quot;&gt;57 tracks&lt;/a&gt; in 33 different rooms&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://video.fosdem.org/&quot;&gt;more than 350 hours of content&lt;/a&gt;, almost all of the events are &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/streaming/&quot;&gt;available online with live streaming&lt;/a&gt; during the conference&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/stands/&quot;&gt;56 stands&lt;/a&gt; of all kinds of projects: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/&quot;&gt;FSFE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/psf&quot;&gt;Python Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/&quot;&gt;the Apache Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/&quot;&gt;the Eclipse Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oreilly.com/&quot;&gt;O&apos;Reilly&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://getfedora.org/&quot;&gt;Fedora&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensuse.org/&quot;&gt;OpenSUSE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kde.org/&quot;&gt;KDE&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://gnome.org/&quot;&gt;Gnome&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.libreoffice.org/&quot;&gt;LibreOffice&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://videolan.org/&quot;&gt;VLC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://jenkins.io/&quot;&gt;Jenkins&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perl.org/&quot;&gt;Perl&lt;/a&gt;, ...&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To make it more impressive, take into account that FOSDEM is &lt;strong&gt;organized by volunteers&lt;/strong&gt;, everything is &lt;strong&gt;community driven&lt;/strong&gt; and it&apos;s &lt;strong&gt;free to attend&lt;/strong&gt;. You don&apos;t even need to register beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-banner.png&quot; alt=&quot;FOSDEM 2018&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;FOSDEM 2018&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Talks&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/osi/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consensus as a Service, Twenty Years of OSI Stewardship&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/simon_phipps/&quot;&gt;Simon Phipps&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/italo_vignoli/&quot;&gt;Italo Vignoli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt; label was born in February 3rd 1998, so we celebrated its 20th Anniversary during the opening day of FOSDEM 2018. Simon (President of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;) summarized the evolution of the Open Source environment in the last two decades, also guessing what are going to be the main challenges for the Free Open Source Software for it&apos;s third decade.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He remarked that Open Source (OS) projects should not have a business model, the companies that uses those OS projects are the ones that need a realistic business model. I totally agree with this, OS projects can be relevant and positive for the society in a lot more ways than profitability of the founders. Open Source allows software users and developers to advance in their software freedom at work as well as in private.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He labeled the first decade (1998-2008) the decade of &lt;em&gt;Advocacy &amp;amp; Controversy&lt;/em&gt;. We all still remember when &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/&quot;&gt;in 2001 Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft said &quot;Linux is a cancer&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (although now &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zdnet.com/article/ballmer-i-may-have-called-linux-a-cancer-but-now-i-love-it/&quot;&gt;apparently he loves it&lt;/a&gt;), or in 2005 when UNIX was made Open Source, or 2007 when Java was also made Open Source. In the beginning most OS was a proprietary replacement, but at the end of the decade everyone understood OS as a benefit.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Simon labeled the second decade (2008-2018) the decade of &lt;em&gt;Adoption and Ascendancy&lt;/em&gt;, with three main aspects: broad enterprise adoption, problems with software patents and GPL enforcement. Since 2008 most &lt;em&gt;hidden&lt;/em&gt; infrastructure is based in OS, since 2011 OS enabled the web service business era, since 2013 the OS is powering the cloud/containers revolution, ... to the point that nowadays we can realize that Open Source is at the heart of most new software.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Simon quoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen&quot;&gt;Eben Moglen&lt;/a&gt; and his &quot;Licenses are Constitutions for Communities&quot;, and explained that &quot;Open Source licenses are the multilateral consensus of the permissions and norms for a Community&quot;. That&apos;s why it&apos;s important to respect the licenses, and that explains why for the community any violation of the license it&apos;s felt like an awful aggression.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Derived from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot;&gt;four essential freedoms of Free Software&lt;/a&gt;, Simon emphasized the real value of Open Source:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Innovate without needing to ask first&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Start where others reached&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Stay in control of your own resources&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Share upkeep of your innovation&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Influence global ecosystems&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Be protected from others doing the same&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Maybe my favorite talk this year. Don&apos;t expect summaries as long as this one for other talks :-P&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cypher_for_apache_spark/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/martin_junghanns/&quot;&gt;Martin Junghanns&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/max_kiessling/&quot;&gt;Max Kießling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://neo4j.com/&quot;&gt;Neo4J&lt;/a&gt;, the speakers explained why and how they created &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opencypher/cypher-for-apache-spark&quot;&gt;Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS)&lt;/a&gt;, to provide graph-powered data integration and graph analytical query workloads within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spark.apache.org/&quot;&gt;Apache Spark&lt;/a&gt; ecosystem. They presented the internal architecture, made a live demo with Spark and &lt;a href=&quot;https://zeppelin.apache.org/&quot;&gt;Apache Zeppelin&lt;/a&gt; and explained that CAPS is released as Open Source inside &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opencypher.org/&quot;&gt;OpenCypher&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/computer_science_of_modern_distributed_database/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Computer Science behind a modern distributed data store&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/michael_hackstein/&quot;&gt;Michael Hackstein&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/mchacki&quot;&gt;@mchacki&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The first thing that Michael Hackstein (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arangodb.com/&quot;&gt;ArangoDB&lt;/a&gt;) explained was that he was replacing the original speaker (Max Neunhoeffer, that couldn&apos;t attend for personal reasons), but in the end he gave a great talk about a complex topic, being clear and precise. Anyone could notice that the substitute speaker knew the subject perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Michael explained the main challenges when building or using a modern distributed data store. He started with an important advice: &quot;The first law of distributed data is... don&apos;t distribute data&quot; :-) Having said that, he clarified that sometimes you cannot avoid it because you need to scale and/or you need to be resilient.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In a distributed system different parts need to agree on things (consensus) but it&apos;s not always easy because the network has outages, drops, delays or duplicates packages, any disk fails or even an entire rack fails. He explained the basics of Consensus, as explained originally in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29&quot;&gt;Paxos Consensus Protocol (1998)&lt;/a&gt; and later in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_%28computer_science%29&quot;&gt;Raft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Another important thought was related to sorting. Most published algorithms are nowadays poorly efficient because the problem is no longer the comparison computations but the data movement between data stores. He explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_merge-tree&quot;&gt;Log Structure Merge Trees (LSM-trees)&lt;/a&gt; as a possible solution.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He also summarized other problems like the synchronization of machines (mitigated with &lt;a href=&quot;https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com.es/2014/07/hybrid-logical-clocks.html&quot;&gt;Hybrid Logical Clocks&lt;/a&gt;) and Distributed ACID transactions, only supported as off today by &lt;a href=&quot;https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf&quot;&gt;Google Spanner&lt;/a&gt; (because they have the money to use atomic clocks) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach&quot;&gt;Cockroach DB&lt;/a&gt; an Open Source clone of Spanner that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/&quot;&gt;achieved it without atomic clocks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-lsmt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Log structured merge trees (LSM-trees)&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Log structured merge trees (LSM-trees)&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/digital_archaeology/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Digital Archaeology, Maintaining our digital heritage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/steven_goodwin/&quot;&gt;Steven Goodwin&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/MarquisdeGeek&quot;&gt;@MarquisdeGeek&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Steven Goodwin is the founder of &lt;a href=&quot;http://marquisdegeek.com/digital_heritage&quot;&gt;the Digital Heritage&lt;/a&gt;, a (let me quote) &lt;em&gt;&quot;plan to collate the learnings and knowledge of computer systems from 1975 onwards so that students of technology and scholars of the future can understand how they work, how to use them, and how they affected the culture of the 20th century&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He explained how in a few years time it will be difficult or even impossible to study retro-computers given the fact that its software is either proprietary, closed-source, written in an obsolete programming language or &lt;em&gt;protected&lt;/em&gt; to prevent copying. Not only this, the hardware is also failing, the magnetic devices are no longer storing the information and so on.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After raising awareness of the problem, he also gave several recommendations and methods necessary to preserve our legacy using emulations, mainly based in Open Source projects.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/jvm_startup/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JVM startup: why it matters to the new world order&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/daniel_heidinga/&quot;&gt;Daniel Heidinga&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;old world order&lt;/em&gt; the deployments were infrequent so the startup time was a very small fraction of the total up time. Now in the &lt;em&gt;new world&lt;/em&gt; with CI/CD systems, microservice or serverless architectures controlling the startup time is essential. This topic is very hot right now.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Daniel (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/&quot;&gt;OpenJ9&lt;/a&gt; Project Lead) explained the problem and provided possible solutions inside the JVM, focusing mainly in the use of OpenJ9&apos;s SharedClasses.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-startup.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;OpenJ9 startup sequence&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;OpenJ9 startup sequence&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/class_metadata/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Class Metadata: A User Guide&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/andrew_dinn/&quot;&gt;Andrew Dinn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Andrew Dinn (&lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/&quot;&gt;Red Hat Open JDK&lt;/a&gt;) explained clearly what is the Class Metadata and why it matters inside the JVM. He also gave some real-life use cases to explain how design decisions can incur or avoid Class Metadata costs.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-metaspace-pool.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Java&apos;s Metaspace Constant Pool Objects&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Java&apos;s Metaspace Constant Pool Objects&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/java_world_containers/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Java in a World of Containers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/mikael_vidstedt/&quot;&gt;Mikael Vidstedt&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/MaximumGilliard&quot;&gt;Matthew Gilliard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Mikael (Director of the JVM group at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/index.html&quot;&gt;Oracle&lt;/a&gt;) and Matthew (also from Oracle) explained that Oracle is focused on maintaining Java as the main language in the containers ecosystem thanks to, according to them, some of its characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Managed language/runtime&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Hardware and operating system agnostic&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Safety and Security enforced by the JVM&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Reliable as compatibility is a key design goal&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Runtime adaptive&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Rich ecosystem&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Also related to reducing the startup time and footprint needed, they also explained how (using the modular system of Java 9) creating custom JREs allows you to reduce the size of the JDK needed inside the Docker container. A full JDK weights around 568 MB, the java.base module just 46 MB and a reasonable set of modules with complete capabilities could be around 60 MB. It can be further optimized using &lt;em&gt;jlink --compress&lt;/em&gt; but it&apos;s a trade-off between size and compressing/uncompressing effort.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After reducing the &lt;em&gt;JDK layer&lt;/em&gt; of a container, the next battle is in the operating system layer. They announced and presented &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/projects/portola/&quot;&gt;OpenJDK Portola Project&lt;/a&gt;, a port of the JDK to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.alpinelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Alpine Linux&lt;/a&gt; (the base image weights just 4 MB) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.musl-libc.org/&quot;&gt;musl C library&lt;/a&gt;. Very impressive.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-portola.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;OpenJDK Portola Project&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;OpenJDK Portola Project&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/class_data_sharing/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Class Data Sharing, Sharing Economy in the HotSpot VM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/volker_simonis/&quot;&gt;Volker Simonis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Volker (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sap.com/index.html&quot;&gt;SAP&lt;/a&gt;) introduced &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/class-data-sharing.html&quot;&gt;Class Data Sharing (CDS)&lt;/a&gt;, explained clearly the implementation details and finally he demonstrated it&apos;s advantages in some use cases.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
 &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/02/fosdem-2018-class-representation.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Class Representation in the HotSpot VM&quot;&gt;
 &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Class Representation in the HotSpot VM&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/hairy_security/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hairy Security, the many threats to a Java web app&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/romain_pelisse/&quot;&gt;Romain Pelisse&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/speaker/damien_plard/&quot;&gt;Damien Plard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Romain (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/en&quot;&gt;Red Hat&lt;/a&gt;) and Damien (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.solarisbank.com/en/&quot;&gt;Solaris Bank&lt;/a&gt;) gave a fun and instructive talk about security, challenging some myths.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;They reminded us that it’s not a question of &apos;if&apos; but &apos;when&apos; you’ll be hacked.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If you want to read my summary of the next day you can follow this link: &lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2018/02/fosdem-2018-Sunday.html&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FOSDEM 2018: Sunday&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Some things that Java developers really need to know in 2018</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2018/01/things-that-Java-developers-really-need-to-know.html</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2018/01/things-that-Java-developers-really-need-to-know.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;A couple of days ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://dzone.com&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DZone&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; published an article called &lt;a href=&quot;https://dzone.com/articles/5-things-java-programmer-should-learn-in-2018&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;9 Things Java Programmers Should Learn in 2018&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I liked the idea and I even recommended the article to a couple of colleagues who are trying to reorient their professional career. After the advice I added some personal disclaimers about the content, to the point that one of my friends wisely told me:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;br/&gt;if you don&apos;t agree with these recommendations, why don&apos;t you write your own article?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;...and that brought us here :-)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The article in DZone is fine and very detailed with good recommendations but it&apos;s not realistic. Some of the things that the author considers essential (Android development or Spring Security, for example) for me are not that important, at least from a general perspective. You can (and should) learn them if you need them, but 99% of you will survive without them.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Instead of sharing my view only with a couple of colleagues, I&apos;ll try to give a realistic and opinionated (yes, I like the word) list of things in no particular order that you need to know or learn in 2018 if you are a Java developer. Some of them are not new, but you need to be sure that you know (or master, if you want) them by the end of the year.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m addressing only Java developers, but hopefully you&apos;ll find something of value even if you&apos;re not.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Learn Java 8, and then Java 9&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;January 2018 and I still find a lot of Java developers who do not know much about &lt;strong&gt;Java 8&lt;/strong&gt;. Regarding this, my recommendation clearly is to learn separately Java 8 with the huge amount of improvements it brought to the language and then, and only then, start playing with &lt;strong&gt;Java 9&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You will be a better developer after you learn Java 8, even if in your current project they force you to code in Java 6. You&apos;ll understand why some improvements were needed in the language and you&apos;ll be the first in the line when a migration to Java 8 or 9 approaches in your surroundings (and it will, eventually).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But let me remark this, it does not matter if you have dozens of badges in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codecademy.com/&quot;&gt;Codecademy&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codeschool.com/&quot;&gt;Code School&lt;/a&gt; if by the end of 2018 you are not familiar with Java 8 and Java 9.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Unit Testing as the logical choice&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If at this point of your career you don&apos;t write unit tests you can stop reading the article right now, this is not going with you. If on the contrary you are already used to write unit tests for your code, your next goal is to write better tests.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Are you stuck with JUnit? &lt;a href=&quot;http://junit.org/junit5/&quot;&gt;JUnit 5&lt;/a&gt; was released recently and I haven&apos;t checked it yet, but let me recommend a more logical choice: &lt;a href=&quot;http://spockframework.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spock&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Less verbose, more idiomatic, integrated stubbing and mocking, easy parametrized testing, test data tables, ... If you are using JUnit, there is nothing that prevents you from going to Spock (totally or at least partially to test the new features).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Beside the framework, now that you are familiar with the classic code coverage metrics, take a look to &lt;a href=&quot;http://pitest.org/&quot;&gt;Pitest&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing&quot;&gt;mutation testing&lt;/a&gt; principles in general.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;JVM internals&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Yes, performance tuning is important and learning about it will help you in your daily work, in yearly rise negotiations and job interviews in general. But let&apos;s take a step back, do you really know the JVM internals enough before looking at it with a magnifying glass? I&apos;ve met a huge amount of developers and Java Architects that don&apos;t even know what &lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/d77yltz&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is, what does &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-the-world&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stop The World&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; mean or how does a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Classloader&quot;&gt;dynamic class loader&lt;/a&gt; work.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Yes, it&apos;s great to know how to analyze and profile an application to figure out why it&apos;s so slow or why it crashes. But unfortunately for you, you can not always blame others. Make your best effort to understand that not everything is magic.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Learn Apache Groovy&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Once you know your weapons, it&apos;s good that you know what you&apos;re up against. Forget for the moment about &lt;a href=&quot;https://kotlinlang.org/&quot;&gt;Kotlin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scala-lang.org/&quot;&gt;Scala&lt;/a&gt;, focus first on consolidating your Java skills. As with Spock, there are few excuses to prevent you from coding in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.groovy-lang.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apache Groovy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and the learning curve is totally flat.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGpJafTYwOQ&quot;&gt;Groovy is not only Java without semicolons&lt;/a&gt;. The description in the project website is clear enough so let me quote it:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;Apache Groovy is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. It integrates smoothly with any Java program, and immediately delivers to your application powerful features, including scripting capabilities, Domain-Specific Language authoring, runtime and compile-time meta-programming and functional programming.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;OK, I said that you will likely survive without Android knowledge and for sure you&apos;ll probably survive without learning Groovy. But even if you find it difficult to use it in your projects I firmly believe that learning Groovy will have a substantial impact on your career and will even make you a better Java developer.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Join me in the next &lt;a href=&quot;http://2018.greachconf.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greach Conference&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and you won&apos;t regret.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Code regularly&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As the DZone article remarks, sadly it&apos;s usual practice to spend less time coding as your experience grows. This would deserve a totally different article, but for the moment let me stress that whatever your work experience is, you should not disconnect from programming and source code in general.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of online resources about problems to be solved or challenges in general, but you don&apos;t even need to complicate yourself or challenge others. You can simply think about something you need at home (or at squad level) and try to create a software tool to mitigate or solve those problems. I personally would recommend both approaches: try to enjoy the technical and social part of the hackatons or coding challenges but also try to solve your needs in solitude at home.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Try new data structures, learn new algorithms and understand the pros and cons of them. Force yourself to struggle solving a specific problem without using the most appropriate data structure or without loops, for example.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Learn from others and let others learn from you&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As others say there are only two ways to improve yourself, learning from your own experience (which is very limited) or learning from others experience (which is unlimited).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Ask for recommendations and read technical books, related to the Java ecosystem or not. Learn first about the principles: clean code, design patterns, testing, functional programming, ...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Read more code. It can be code from an open source project or code from your squad&apos;s fellows. Try to find both the good patterns and the bad smells. Discuss with your peers about it (always politely) and let them also learn from you.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Write about your experiences, in a blog preferably. The writing exercise itself will help you consolidate what you are learning. Use an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staticgen.com/&quot;&gt;open source static site generator&lt;/a&gt; and you&apos;ll also learn designing your site and deploying your blog posts.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Get involved with your community. Try to attend local &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.meetup.com/&quot;&gt;Meetups&lt;/a&gt; and technical conferences, eventually you&apos;ll find the courage to even send proposals for those meetups and conferences.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Luis, I already know everything!&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;OK, it&apos;s not my case but if you already know everything that I mentioned (or so you think) let me give some bonus recommendations:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;If you are a &lt;strong&gt;proficient&lt;/strong&gt; Java developer, you should consider staying in the back-end. It may seem that it is unavoidable to code front-end, but there is plenty of fun and complexity in the back. Nowadays you can evolve and grow your career without changing the platform.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;Learn about performance and fine tuning, at least the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;Learn about &lt;a href=&quot;https://kafka.apache.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apache Kafka&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it&apos;ll open you some doors now and probably lots more in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;Improve your knowledge and skills about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps&quot;&gt;DevOps culture&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing&quot;&gt;Cloud Computing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;Do not settle for anything. If your job/company does not give you what you&apos;re looking for, you must run out of there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Feedback&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Remember, this opinionated recommendations are focused on Java developers about what they could do in 2018. It does not necessarily apply to other professionals.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Let me know in the comments!&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Mi 2017 lúdico</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2018/01/mi-2017-ludico.html</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 4 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2018/01/mi-2017-ludico.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;Vuelvo al castellano, para dar continuidad a esta serie de análisis sobre las partidas que he jugado durante el año anterior. Podéis leer lo que escribí anteriormente en:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2017/01/mi-2016-ludico.html&quot;&gt;2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2016/01/mi-2015-ludico.html&quot;&gt;2015&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2015/01/mi-2014-ludico.html&quot;&gt;2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2014/01/partidas-jugadas-en-2013.html&quot;&gt;2013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2013/01/partidas-jugadas-en-2012.html&quot;&gt;2012&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2012/01/juegos-los-que-mas-he-jugado-en-2011.html&quot;&gt;2011&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Todo, como ya sabéis, gracias a &lt;strike&gt;la manía&lt;/strike&gt; mi hábito de registrar en &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boardgamegeek.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;b&gt;Board Game Geek&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; todas las partidas según las estoy jugando mediante esta &lt;a href=&quot;https://market.android.com/details?id=com.boardgamegeek&amp;amp;hl=es&quot;&gt;aplicación para &lt;b&gt;Android&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (que hace poco fue aparentemente forzada a declararse como no oficial).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;table style=&quot;width:100%&quot;&gt;
  &lt;caption&gt;Evolución de las partidas jugadas en los últimos años&lt;/caption&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;2017&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;2016&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;2015&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;2014&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;2013&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;2012&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;Total desde 2006&lt;/th&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;Total de partidas jugadas&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;84&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;98&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;84&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;81&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;161&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;952&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;Juegos diferentes jugados&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;72&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;55&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;71&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;52&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;81&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;80&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;356&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;Juegos con dos o más partidas&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;161&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;Sesiones de Juego&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;30&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;44&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;41&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;36&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;322&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2018/01/2017_partidas_jugadas_por_mes.png&quot; alt=&quot;Partidas jugadas por mes hasta 2017&quot; title=&quot;Partidas jugadas por mes hasta 2017&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Partidas Jugadas por Mes hasta 2017&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Análisis&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;En 2017 he jugado menos partidas que en 2016 volviendo a las cifras de 2015 y 2014, pero curiosamente he jugado a 72 juegos diferentes. Una cifra muy alta considerando el total de partidas (84).&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;De los 72 juegos diferentes que he jugado este año, 43 de ellos eran totalmente nuevos (para mí). Nuevamente una proporción altísima.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;En el análisis de 2016 ya anticipaba que en 2017 lo tendría mal para jugar a Steam y así ha sido. Tengo &lt;strong&gt;cero&lt;/strong&gt; horas registradas en 2017.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mi &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index&quot;&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;h-index&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; como jugador se mantiene en &lt;b&gt;11&lt;/b&gt;, es difícil que suba con mi dinámica actual de no repetir mucho los juegos.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Retrospectiva&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;El tiempo que puedo dedicarle a los juegos de mesa siempre es limitado, el tiempo de ocio en general lo es, pero tengo como propósito mantenerlo y darle cierta prioridad este 2018.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Sigo sin poder retomar con cierta continuidad el rol, ni como jugador ni como director. Este año apenas he jugado un puñado de partidas y ha sido principalmente en jornadas o demostraciones. Este año haré un nuevo intento de arrancar algo estable, veremos si tengo éxito.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Como ya pasó en 2016, aunque sigo perteneciendo a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asociacionludo.com/&quot;&gt;Asociación Ludo&lt;/a&gt; el tiempo que he podido dedicarle tanto a la asociación como a jugar prototipos ha sido nulo. No digamos el tiempo dedicado a diseñar algo... una lástima porque echo mucho de menos a algunos compañeros :-(&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Brittany: a brief opinionated guide</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2017/12/Brittany-a-brief-opinionated-guide.html</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2017/12/Brittany-a-brief-opinionated-guide.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;As explained in the previous post, I&apos;ve recently been in Normandy and Brittany with my friend &lt;strong&gt;Agatha&lt;/strong&gt;. After publishing the first part of the trip (&lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2017/12/Normandy-a-brief-opinionated-guide.html&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Normandy: a brief opinionated guide&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) now I proceed to do the same with Brittany.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It has been quite complicated because we saw a lot of awesome things and for me it still takes a lot of time (several hours) to write this kind of articles.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;What to expect from this guide&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t like to repeat myself, so I invite you to read the disclaimers in the &lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2017/12/Normandy-a-brief-opinionated-guide.html&quot;&gt;Normandy&lt;/a&gt; article. I&apos;ll simply put here the map of Brittany prepared by Agatha.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Brittany_places.png&quot; alt=&quot;Map with the main places to visit in Brittany&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Map with the main places to visit in Brittany, prepared by Agatha&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Let&apos;s start!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Dol-de-Bretagne&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Our first stop in Brittany from Normandy was precisely in a town that was besieged several times by the Normands. In 1924 the town changed its name from Dol to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dol-de-Bretagne&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dol-de-Bretagne&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, maybe to discourage a new attempt by their neighbours.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Dol-de-Bretagne deserves a quick visit, not only to see its Cathedral and the quaint &lt;em&gt;Grand Rue des Stuarts&lt;/em&gt; (Dol is considered the origin of the famous royal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Stewart&quot;&gt;House of Stewart&lt;/a&gt;) but specially to see a huge menhir (the estimated weight is 125-150 tons).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Dol-de-Bretagne.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dol-de-Bretagne menhir&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Dol-de-Bretagne menhir&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Cancale&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We arrived &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cancale&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; at the right time, just before lunch. This fishing village is famous for its oyster beds, its oyster farmers everywhere, its popular oyster market, and its countless restaurants where you can order oysters. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale#Oysters&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the oyster beds of Cancale cover more than 7 square kilometres, and they harvest about 25,000 tons of oysters each year. Impressive, even for someone like me who finds eating raw oysters quite disgusting.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Cancale-oyster-beds.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic with lots of oysters beds and the popular Oyster Market&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic with lots of oysters beds and the popular Oyster Market&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Cancale&apos;s Oyster Market is famous because in the stalls they sell freshly caught oysters on a plate or tray with a slice of lemon, and people eat them right there by the sea. The initial plan was to visit the market before lunch so that Agatha could satisfy her appetite. After seeing one after another the handful of stalls that were there open, the rumors say that Agatha did not find the idea very pleasant and had to settle for trying the oysters in the restaurant.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;There were countless restaurants, I suspect that in high season it will be difficult to come and eat in a decent place without reservation.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1645737171&quot;&gt;Restaurant Le Cancalais&lt;/a&gt;, one of the finest restaurants in Cancale, although perhaps also one of the most expensive. Great menu with several seafood and fish dishes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Saint-Malo&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Malo&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Saint-Malo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was one of the main positive surprises of the trip. With an historic center that is itself a walled citadel, Saint-Malo was in the past notorious for its privateering and pirate activities. Today, it is considered the most visited place in Brittany.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Although the day was windy it was not very cold, and with a &lt;em&gt;vin chaud&lt;/em&gt; in the hand we took a very cool walk over the city walls. I thought initially that it was the standard insipid posh town with glamorous sites everywhere but I found a charming town with (yes) lots of glamorous places everywhere. Maybe I put a lot of my part, but I perfectly imagined the streets and beaches full of corsairs.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Saint-Malo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic on top of the Jardin des Petit Murs, Saint-Malo&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic on top of the Jardin des Petit Murs, Saint-Malo&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3741618983&quot;&gt;Café La Java&lt;/a&gt;, by pure chance we stopped for a coffee in this spectacular place. The decoration was based on dolls, puppets and lots of circus material. The chairs on the bar were swing chairs hanging from the ceiling... everything was incredible, even the blow they gave us when we asked for the bill.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Dinard&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After the positive surprise of Saint-Malo we decided to visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinard&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dinard&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, another famous tourist destination for wealthy people in this case mainly from the United Kingdom. We took a short walk after the sunset that did not allow us to see much but we ended with the feeling that the place looks nice for the spring and summer but it&apos;s basically dead in the low season.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The most remarkable moment, and it was not prepared in advance, was the photo that I took next to an statue of &lt;strong&gt;Alfred Hitchcock&lt;/strong&gt; with an Alfred Hitchcock&apos;s t-shirt. Hitchcock visited several times the town for holidays, to the point that the locals even claim that the house used in &lt;em&gt;Psycho&lt;/em&gt; is based on a still standing villa of Dinard. The statue is full size a replica (or viceversa) of the trophies for the winners of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.festivaldufilm-dinard.com/en/home-en/&quot;&gt;Dinard British Film Festival&lt;/a&gt;, held here every year since 1989.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Dinard-Alfred-Hitchcock.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;In Dinard, with Sir Alfred Hitchcock&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;In Dinard, with Sir Alfred Hitchcock&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Dinan&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinan&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dinan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was also one of those villages that could deserve a relaxed weekend getaway. We quietly walked through its center despite the rain, crossing countless streets and squares with picturesque facades and shops. We couldn&apos;t climb &lt;em&gt;La Tour de l&apos;Horloge&lt;/em&gt; to see the views from up there, but maybe you should.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I think that Dinan was the first town where we enjoyed a town center more or less protected from the cars and the traffic. This helped a lot to improve our sense of comfort there. As happened in Saint-Malo, the town center was full of nice shops and restaurants, giving the pedestrian the feeling of being inside a spectacular outdoor mall.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Dinan.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic in Dinan&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic in Dinan&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Côte de Granit Rose&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B4te_de_Granit_Rose&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Côte de Granit Rose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Pink Granite Coast) is a &amp;gt;30km stretch of coastline famous due to its unusual pink sands and rock formations. This is an unique place, and several curious and picturesque areas can be seen from different places. Beside the coast and the cliffs, most of the house and chalets in the area were also built with this pink granite.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We went first to some viewpoints inside &lt;strong&gt;Perros-Guirec&lt;/strong&gt; and then to &lt;strong&gt;Ploumanac&apos;h&lt;/strong&gt;, close to the main area for visitors to the Pink Granite Coast in the &lt;strong&gt;Pors Karmor&lt;/strong&gt; bay. It is supposed to be more startling during the summer because there is more sunlight, but it&apos;s a recommended visit at any time of the year.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Cote-Granit-Rose.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic in the Côte de Granit Rose&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic in the Côte de Granit Rose&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/81970326#map=19/48.83152/-3.48326&quot;&gt;Restaurant Le Ker Louis&lt;/a&gt;, again we ended there a little bit by chance, because we tried before in several places that turned out to be closed, and it was a tremendous luck. Our lunch was spectacular, very well prepared and quite inexpensive.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Rumengol and Le Faou&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We planned &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Faou&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Faou&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Rumengol&lt;/strong&gt; (a small village that belongs to Le Faou as well) as two quick visits in our way from the northern coast of Brittany to the Pointe du Raz, and we were not mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rumengol has a curious church (Notre-Dame-du-Tout-Remède) that hosts a significant pilgrimage ceremony, one of the main ones in Brittany. We only saw the church from the outside and after the sunset, but it looked very special and quite different from others. Le Faou has a couple of cute streets, nice but nothing remarkable where almost all the villages have the same.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Pointe du Raz&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointe_du_Raz&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pointe du Raz&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is one of the sites that most impressed me on the trip and one of the places that I will remember the most. It is a rocky promontory that is just embedded into the sea, but the sensation there with strong waves crushing the cliffs and hurricane winds was really special. Totally overwhelming, to the point that it seemed dangerous to go near the edge of the cliffs in case the wind blew you away. I&apos;m not surprised that the French considered it the end of the world.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;From the headland, you can see several lighthouses of different sizes located on rocks or small islands. It&apos;s the place that I know where more lighthouses can be seen.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Pointe-du-Raz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Notre Dame des Naufrages looking into the sea&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Notre Dame des Naufrages looking into the sea&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Locronan&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We really wanted to see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locronan&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Locronan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and we were not disappointed. Narrow streets, cute shops, houses made of stone and slate,... Our only problem was that we arrived exactly when dozens of workers and gardeners were conditioning and decorating the entire town in a big way for XMas. It was full of vans, tractors, boxes, sacks,... but despite all this, the town looked beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Locronan is a deserved member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Plus_Beaux_Villages_de_France&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Plus Beaux Villages de France&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (The most beautiful villages of France) association. Le Faou is also a member but there are huge differences in terms of beauty and care.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Locronan.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic of the Place de l&apos;Église in Locronan&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic of the Place de l&apos;Église in Locronan&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5292491660&quot;&gt;Ty Kouign Amann&lt;/a&gt;, one of the finest chocolate shops we&apos;ve seen in the trip. It was so tempting that we left there with a bag full of chocolates.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Quimper&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Among all the large towns (or small cities) that we visited, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quimper&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quimper&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was one of the ones I liked the most. Several gardens, beautiful houses and the usual town center full of nice shops, boutiques and restaurants. Also, the Cathedral has a feature that makes it special. The main nave is bended in the middle, so much that it is clearly perceived both inside and outside the temple.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2027870260&quot;&gt;Le Sistrot&lt;/a&gt;, this marvellous place is both cider house and refined restaurant, they served us one of the best meals of the entire trip. They had in the menu dozens of different ciders from all over the world and of many different types, for example I ordered one made of 5 different kinds of apples. I was left wanting to order the add-on for the menu that included a different cider to match with each plate, dessert included.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Ville Close&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_town_of_Concarneau&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ville Close&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Walled Village) is a fortified island forming a medieval small village inside the town of Concarneau. It was nice but somehow disappointing because it&apos;s very very small and 90% of the shops and restaurants inside the fortress were closed. It is sized for many people, and they even had an outdoor theater, so surely in other seasons it will be much more attractive.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Ville-Close.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic of the Ville Close and the Marina of Concarneau&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic of the Ville Close and the Marina of Concarneau&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Pont-Aven&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont-Aven&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pont-Aven&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is mainly known for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont-Aven_School&quot;&gt;Pont-Aven School of Arts&lt;/a&gt;, a group of artists in the 19th century led by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Bernard&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Émile Bernard&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gauguin&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paul Gauguin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that painted every corner of this town. Now Pont-Aven is full of tourists, restaurants and art galleries.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To reinforce the &lt;em&gt;impressionist atmosphere&lt;/em&gt; that inspired (and inspires) the painters and charmes the visitors, the entire village specially around the river was illuminated in a very special way. I&apos;m not sure if this is always like this or only on these pre-XMas dates.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Pont-Aven.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic of the River Aven passing through Pont-Aven, with nice colours and lights&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic of the River Aven passing through Pont-Aven, with nice colours and lights&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Auray&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We made a quick visit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auray&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Auray&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, just to walk a while through the center and to have dinner. It&apos;s nice, not as interesting as other places in Brittany but I&apos;d recommend a visit if you pass near there.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Carnac&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Carnac&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is renowned for the Carnac stones, one of the most extensive Neolithic menhir collections in the world. Within the limits of the town you can visit several areas with kilometers of alignments of stones of different sizes, some of them over two metres high. I&apos;m not sure what is more impressive, the fact that they could do that around 4500 BC or that most of them in this area are still standing in the 21st century.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Near a couple of alignments you can also find a huge menhir, brilliantly called &lt;em&gt;Le Géant du Manio&lt;/em&gt;, with more than 6m of height. Le Géant is hidden inside a forest, so you need to walk for 10-15&apos; to reach there but the short walk is worth it because the forest is impressive. I would love to have forests like that near my house.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Carnac.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Inside one of the stone alignments in Carnac&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Inside one of the stone alignments in Carnac&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Vannes&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannes&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vannes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was also a positive surprise. It&apos;s quite big (more than 50K inhabitants), but the town center is again very well preserved and luckily for them restricted to vehicles. Narrow streets with nice shops and restaurants everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One of the differential elements of Vannes is his port, built in an elongated way to take the sea into the center of the city.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Port-de-Vannes.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic of the Port-de-Vannes, with the famous Place Gambetta in the left&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic of the Port-de-Vannes, with the famous Place Gambetta in the left&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2429336056&quot;&gt;Restaurant Rive Gauche&lt;/a&gt;, possibly the restaurant that we liked the most. The plates were spectacular, refined and inexpensive. It&apos;s very small, so you should book in advance.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Malestroit&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We only had time for a quick walk through the center of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malestroit&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Malestroit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and it was raining a lot, so we couldn&apos;t see this small village as calmly as we normally do but what we saw was very beautiful. They were celebrating a charity market, and we were able to buy them &lt;em&gt;vin chaud&lt;/em&gt; so our memory of them will always be positively biased.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;La Gacilly&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Gacilly&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;La Gacilly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is famous for two things: it&apos;s local craftsmen stores (not as valuable as they were described) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Rocher&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yves Rocher&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This cosmetic company was founded here, and everywhere you look you&apos;ll see something related to it: shops, restaurants, cafés, spas, hotels,... the company even maintains a botanical garden in La Gacilly, open to the public without charge.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Rochefort-en-Terre&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochefort-en-Terre&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rochefort-en-Terre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was perhaps the most anticipated destination by Agatha. During the entire year is just another nice village with stone houses, attractive restaurants, galleries, cute shops... but during the last days of the year it changes entirely to transform the entire village into a magnificient XMas market. It&apos;s true that after the sunset the environment is magical with all those lights and even some artificial snow flakes in some streets. The magic disappears partially because it was infested with visitors, even more than Mont Saint-Michel.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That night we slept in another small town close to Rochefort-en-Terre so in addition to seeing it at night, the next day we walked by there with sunlight and it was also interesting, specially because we were almost alone. The bad thing is that everything was closed that early in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Rochefort-en-Terre.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Rochefort-en-Terre at night&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Rochefort-en-Terre at night&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Josselin&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josselin&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Josselin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is considered one of the most beautiful medieval villages in Brittany. In addition to having the typical facades with wooden beams, here I had the impression that they were painted with more care and style. We took a good walk but we could not enter the castle, things that happen when the monuments are privately owned.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Josselin.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Josselin&apos;s colourful facades&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Josselin&apos;s colourful facades&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Brocéliande Forest&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We really wanted to spend a few hours hiking through the forest of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broc%C3%A9liande&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brocéliande&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (a legendary forest commonly considered to be the &lt;strong&gt;Paimpont forest&lt;/strong&gt; in Brittany) but two things crossed our path once we started the route: a copious rain and a sign forbidding us to continue. The forest, at least the part that tourists cross, is privately owned and that makes it possible that the main forest area only opens from April 1st to September 30th.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyway, our limited walk was great specially under the rain.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Broceliande-forest.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Inside Brocéliande forest&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Inside Brocéliande forest&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/69883117&quot;&gt;Crêperie La Fée Gourmande&lt;/a&gt;, we had a lot of trouble finding a place to eat in Paimpont because everything was closed, but in the end someone told us how to get to a creperie in the outskirts that would surely be open. La Fée Gourmande is not in the center of the town but it&apos;s amazingly located in the shore of the &lt;em&gt;Étang de l&apos;Abbaye de Paimpont&lt;/em&gt; and the galettes were amazing. a total success because they were also very nice with us.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Fougères&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We were on the verge of not being able to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foug%C3%A8res&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fougères&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; due to the lack of time and I&apos;m very glad that we could finally make it, even if it was at the cost of having cut the walk through Brocéliande.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The Château, a huge stronghold built atop a granite ledge, is one of the most famous attractions in the area. It&apos;s very well preserved and the visit with the audioguide explains clearly the history of the castle and the city in the Middle Ages.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As in many other places, we were almost alone so we could make funny things like climbing two different towers so we could take each other a picture on top of the other tower. I have several epic pictures in this castle, it&apos;s a pity that I didn&apos;t have my bow and some arrows to pose properly.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Fougeres-castle.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Panoramic inside Fougères Castle&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Panoramic inside Fougères Castle&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The town itself is nice, specially because it&apos;s located on top of a hill and the views are magnificient both from the village to the castle and from the castle to the village. The garden sorrounding the Cathedral was full of lights and XMas figures (and people).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Rennes&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Our visit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennes&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rennes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was slightly disappointing, we planned one evening and a morning there but we could only see the Cathedral. We tried hard to visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlement_de_Bretagne&quot;&gt;Parlament de Bretagne&lt;/a&gt; but they exhausted us by making us cross the center of the city to go to a tourist office that later turned out to be closed... Rennes is very big (10th largest city in France) and it seemed to be a very lively city but they did not prove to be very well prepared for tourists out of season.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I would not mind coming back and spending a quiet weekend here.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Rennes.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Typical pedestrian street in Rennes, the house on the left is unique because the wood is painted in 3 different colors&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Typical pedestrian street in Rennes, the house on the left is unique because the wood is painted in 3 different colors&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Vitré&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitr%C3%A9,_Ille-et-Vilaine&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vitré&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was our last stop in the trip through Normandy and it was not a bad culmination. We were able to take a pleasant walk under a light rain, and after lunch we visited the castle. The part of the castle that you can visit is small but interesting, the other part holds the Town Hall and other official dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Vitre-castle.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The entrance to Vitre Castle&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;The entrance to Vitre Castle&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3142793928&quot;&gt;Restaurant Le Petit Bouchon&lt;/a&gt;, it&apos;s outside the historic center, so it&apos;s almost impossible for you to end up eating here if it&apos;s not after a recommendation. We ate very well and were treated perfectly. Their Café Gourmand is delicious.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Le Mans&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Mans&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Mans&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is not in Brittany, but it was on our way to Charles de Gaulle to return the car and flight back home. They claim to be the second most known french city around the world, and this is because since 1923 the city hosts the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Le_Mans&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;24 Hours of Le Mans&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; endurance car race.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We couldn&apos;t enter the Cathedral but we liked a lot the rest of the town center. It&apos;s nice and very lively. They have a cute area around the monument to the 24H of Le Mans race, which is indistinguishable from a shopping mall due to the amount of shops of all kinds.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_des_24_Heures_du_Mans&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Museum of the 24 Hours of Le Mans&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is full of real sport cars and bikes with a few replicas, very interesing to any aficionado of the races. The vehicles were grouped by category and year, so it was easy and educational to follow the evolution of the technological improvements. One of the most curious things were some showcases with minuatures of all the cars that participated every year.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Le-Mans-Museum.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The last items in the collection of the Museum of the 24 Hours of Le Mans&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;The last items in the collection of the Museum of the 24 Hours of Le Mans&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In addition to the museum, it&apos;s possible to do a walking tour through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_de_la_Sarthe&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Circuit de la Sarthe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The visit includes access to the stands, bleachers and the pelouse area. I enjoyed it but it would have been nice to be able to visit other interesting areas like the boxes, the workshops, the VIP areas... or even lending us a car to make a whole lap to the circuit :-)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Le-Mans-Circuit.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Circuit de la Sarthe, the main part of the 24 Hours of Le Mans circuit&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Circuit de la Sarthe, the main part of the 24 Hours of Le Mans circuit&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I hope that you enjoyed the guide!&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Normandy: a brief opinionated guide</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2017/12/Normandy-a-brief-opinionated-guide.html</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2017/12/Normandy-a-brief-opinionated-guide.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;Some months ago I wrote in the blog about &lt;a href=&quot;/blog/2017/05/Romantikstrasse-the-Romantic-Road_1.html&quot;&gt;my road trip through the Romantikstraße in Austria&lt;/a&gt;. I shared the trip with Agatha and it went great, so we took advantage of the fact that we both had several pending holidays for this year and repeated the experience in two of the most beautiful regions in France: Normandy and Brittany. This post will be a summary of our experience in Normandy and hopefully I&apos;ll be able to write a similar one for Brittany.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;What to expect from this guide&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The trip was decided and confirmed like four or five days before leaving so we couldn&apos;t prepare a lot but at least Agatha was able to prepare a list of places to visit in both regions. Specially for Brittany she even made the effort to collect several articles with comments and recommendations of places. Being honest, we could not follow most of them (they were written for other times of the year and other kind of travelers) but it was very helpful anyway.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So, our trip started with many places to visit, a few notes and very few hours of daylight to see things. We had to be very practical and extremely flexible, but in the end almost all the decisions went well so I decided to relate the trip from an opinionated point of view, as I have been asked by several colleagues and friends.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Normandy_places.png&quot; alt=&quot;Map with the main places to visit in Normandy&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Map with the main places to visit in Normandy, prepared by Agatha&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For each place, I&apos;ll summarize our experience there with the list of places we visited and some comments on them. There is much more to visit, It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the essentials of each city or town.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I will not include purely practical info like ticket prices and opening times, it changes a lot and sooner than later it becomes obsolete info. Alas, we were forced to visit some places only during the evening/night with all the museums and attractions closed.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The entire trip was made by car and we booked all our stays in the same day. Normally around 5-6pm and some days even later, the advantages of traveling in the low season.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m afraid I&apos;ll forget a lot of things, maybe in the next trip I&apos;ll choose to be copilot so I can take notes during the trip.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Let&apos;s start!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Rouen&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After landing in Charles de Gaulle around 3pm, we picked the rental car and our first destination was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouen&quot;&gt;Rouen&lt;/a&gt;, capital city of Normandy. The city is known for its gorgeous downtown, its famous gothic Cathedral and for being the place where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc&quot;&gt;Joan of Arc&lt;/a&gt; was burned at the stake.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We arrived later than expected so everything was closed. The Cathedral was supposed to be open (according to the web) but it wasn&apos;t. Luckily in front of the cathedral there was a Christmas Market so we had our first &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_chaud&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;vin chaud&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to warm ourselves for a walk the town center.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Places we visited:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notre Dame Cathedral&lt;/strong&gt;, it&apos;s huge and awesome, specially from the outside. One of the finest gothic cathedrals around Europe.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Rouen_-_Notre_Dame_Cathedral.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Notre Dame Cathedral, Rouen&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Notre Dame Cathedral, Rouen - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gros Horloge&lt;/strong&gt;, a fourteenth-century two-sides astronomical clock, not as spectacular as the one in Prague, for example, but you should not miss it as it&apos;s close to the Cathedral.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Place du Vieux Marché&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;Church of St Joan of Arc&lt;/strong&gt;. Joan of Arc was burned alive for heresy in this square in 1431, there is a small memorial with a huge cross marking the spot. The church was completed in 1979, quite modern but the place it&apos;s very interesting. The stained glass windows are from the 16th century, retrieved from other church, and the building itself is worth the visit. It&apos;s very long, crossing almost entirely the square, and evokes both flames and an overturned ship. There is also an interesting gourmet market beside the church, following the same design.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Rouen_-_Vieux_Marche.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Place du Vieux Marché, Rouen&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Place du Vieux Marché, Rouen - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Church of Saint Ouen&lt;/strong&gt;, the largest gothic temple of Rouen that started as an abbey church but was vacated and it serves now other purposes as part of the Town Hall. When we entered, there was an organ concert and a moder art exposition.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Church of St Maclou&lt;/strong&gt;, this 15th century gothic temple is much smaller than the other touristic temples but in my opinion it&apos;s the most quaint one. Also, the best streets to find a good place to eat or drink (as a resident told us) are the ones surrounding St Maclou.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aître Saint-Maclou&lt;/strong&gt;, It is one of the rarest ossuaries remaining in Europe. It&apos;s origin as a normal cemetery dates back to the Black Death. After a new epidemic in the 16th century it became necessary to increase its capacity so they build galleries with several rooms to contain the bones.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Other interesting places we couldn&apos;t visit properly: the &lt;strong&gt;Musée des Beaux-Arts&lt;/strong&gt;, the &lt;strong&gt;Musée Le Secq des Tournelles&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;Tower of Jean of Arc&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5292325973&quot;&gt;Restaurant L&apos;Anticonformiste&lt;/a&gt;, the food was great and they have an interesting atmosphere and decoration. It was full of locals, but the place is tourist friendly.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;The Normandy Abbeys Trail&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This interesting trail starts with the Church of Saint-Ouen in Rouen, and continues near the city following down the course of the Seine River.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Saint-Georges Abbey&lt;/strong&gt; in Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville, sadly it was closed so we couldn&apos;t enter (not even the gardens) but there is a remarkable bakery that compensated us.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jumièges Abbey&lt;/strong&gt;, it was a Benedictine monastery, now turned into a nice ruins. The remains are perfectly preserved and the audioguide tells a lot, but maybe I missed more context information about the place. We had the entire place almost empty for ourselves, I feel that the visit will lose a lot if crowded with people.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Jumieges_Abbey.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Jumièges Abbey&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Jumièges Abbey - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Saint-Wandrille Abbey&lt;/strong&gt;, we arrived late for the guided visit (in French) so we had to settle for being able to take a walk around. The place is still hosting a community of monks, so you cannot see a lot without a proper tour. Nice but you can skip it if you are not going to enter and visit the place properly.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Étretat&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tretat&quot;&gt;Étretat&lt;/a&gt; is known for its cliffs, including three natural arches and a pointed formation called L&apos;Aiguille (the Needle) which rises 70 metres above the sea. We lunched there the typical mussels before walking through the beach to get to a cave by which you can cross to another rock beach to see the largest arch and the Needle, not visible from the town. As many other things around here, with high tide you cannot reach the tunnel so we were more or less lucky. There is also an interesting trail through the cliffs, so we hiked for a while and enjoyed a couple of viewpoints.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2687649645&quot;&gt;La Salamandre&lt;/a&gt;, the typical restaurant to eat Mules e Frites (mussels with french fries), the waiters were friendly and both the building and the decoration are unique.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Etretat.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Étretat beach and cliffs panoramic&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Étretat beach and cliffs panoramic - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Honfleur&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Sadly we had to choose between Le Havre and Honfleur (the northern and southern banks of the estuary of the Seine River, respectively) and we opted for the latter to continue exploring the good rural taste of Normandy. Probably we made a good choice because we loved Honfleur, a lot, and we only regret not having been able to walk it during day.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honfleur&quot;&gt;Honfleur&lt;/a&gt; is full of restaurants, boutiques, chocolate shops, art workshops and galleries. Almost everything was open until late so I can imagine that they are used to receive a big bunch of tourists. Lucky us, we visited everything almost empty and we could had dinner in a great restaurant without a previous booking.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Saint-Catherine&apos;s Church&lt;/strong&gt;, this temple was built almost entirely with wood and incredibly it is still standing. It is the largest church made out of wood in France. To add more value to the place, it&apos;s said that it was built without using any saw, only cutting the wood with axes. It&apos;s very beautiful both inside and outside.&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vieux Basin&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Le Lieutance&lt;/strong&gt;, close to the church you can find the picturesque old port, one of the finest that we&apos;ve seen in the entire trip, and the old house of the Lieutenant.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Honfleur.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Le Vieux Basin, Honfleur&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Le Vieux Basin, Honfleur - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Jardin du Tripot&lt;/strong&gt;, one of those marvellous places that only locals, very well informed tourists and geocachers get to visit. Don&apos;t miss it, I won&apos;t tell more to avoid spoiling the surprise.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5292329900&quot;&gt;L&apos;Homme de Bois&lt;/a&gt;, Honfleur is full of restaurants for all pockets but this one convinced us just by crossing ahead. We could not have dinner better, I tried their grilled stingray fin and it was delicious.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Normandie Battle coast, museums and memorials&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We visited several landmarks related with Second World War, the Battle of Normandy and the Normandy landings. We didn&apos;t enter all the museums as they are apparently very similar, but we probably visited the most relevant ones.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie&lt;/strong&gt;, one of the biggest colection of vehicles and weapons (mainly originals with some replicas). The way they present the collection may have aged too much, they would improve a lot if they changed the appearance of some posters and displays, and the approach of the signage in some areas.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Musee_Memorial_Bataille_Normandie.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;German Cemetery&lt;/strong&gt;, our first truly sad place of the trip. Many years have passed but it continues to impress me the amount of people involved in WWII. The cemetery was totally empty for us, and it was specially impressive thanks to a chilly atmosphere with some fog and the early sun.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/German_Cemetery.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;German Cemetery&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;German Cemetery - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Pointe du Hoc&lt;/strong&gt;, one of the most representative places of the Normandy landings, as it still concentrates most of the remaining bunkers, and dozens of huge craters caused by the bombings. Again, visiting the place almost alone was specially valuable as you could enjoy the silence and try to imagine the place during those terrible days. The storming of the place by a couple hundred american rangers is one of the most epic episodes of the entire Battle of Normandy.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Pointe_du_Hoc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Le Pointe du Hoc&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Le Pointe du Hoc - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Omaha Beach&lt;/strong&gt;, maybe the most famous landmark and the one with less &lt;em&gt;present day&lt;/em&gt; remains. The beach is huge, no wonder it was a key point in the landings being also the most heavily defended beach.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Omaha_Beach.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Omaha Beach&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Omaha Beach - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;American Cemetery and Memorial&lt;/strong&gt; at Colleville-sur-Mer. Another iconic visit, with its countless tombs overlooking the sea. The contrast with the German cemetery was huge, in many aspects. Curiously, a couple of big murals in the memorial helped me understand much better some concepts and tactical explanations that I&apos;ve read the day before in the Normandy Battle Memorial Museum.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/American_Cemetery.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The German Batteries&lt;/strong&gt; at Longues-sur-Mer, another typical visit with several german batteries preserved almost perfectly with only the damages caused by the war conflict itself. Walking by the closest ones to the coast, it&apos;s enough to turn yourself to feel still threatened by the batteries that are still standing.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/German_Batteries.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;German Batteries at	Longues-sur-Mer&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;German Batteries at	Longues-sur-Mer - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Port Winston&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Mulberry harbours&lt;/strong&gt;. Most of the &lt;em&gt;temporary&lt;/em&gt; portable harbour in front of Arromanches is still there, exactly where they were voluntarily sunk. They were developed by the british and meant to be used until the allies captured a normal french port. Another example of the logistical effort that both sides reached during the conflict. What a pity of wasted resources and talent.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Port_Winston.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Port Winston or Mulberry harbours&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Port Winston or Mulberry harbours - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mémorial de Caen&lt;/strong&gt;, the biggest museum related to WWII in Normandy. The visit is supposed to be essential, but for us it was more and more of the same content. I&apos;d recommend to visit it before going to the rest of the Normandy landing areas. Again, we could enjoy it a lot being almost alones in the entire museum, including a 25-30&apos; projection of a film in a 200-250 seat cinema for us alone.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Memorial_de_Caen.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mémorial de Caen&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Mémorial de Caen - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Bayeux&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux&quot;&gt;Bayeux&lt;/a&gt; itself is nice and deserves a visit, but it&apos;s specially advisable because it is the home of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry&quot;&gt;Bayeux Embroidery&lt;/a&gt;. It has always been called the &lt;strong&gt;Bayeux Tapestry&lt;/strong&gt; although it is not technically a tapestry, but this is a different story. It&apos;s a 70 metres long embroidered cloth which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England. It was supposedly made in the 11th century, a few years after the Battle of Hastings.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The tapestry consists of about 60 scenes, like in a comic book, and was meant to be displayed annualy in the Bayeux Cathedral so all the citizens could learn about the epic victories of William, Duke of Normandy. Now it&apos;s exhibited in a specific museum with some interesting information about its construction and design. This museum is also sized for hundreds of tourists, and it was great to be able to enjoy it almost alone. The audioguide of the museum is mandatory, not only because of the detailed information that it provides but also because the locution of the guide forces you to go along the cloth following the story. A clever way to shepherd tourists.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Bayeux_Embroidery.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bayeux Embroidery or Bayeux Tapestry&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Bayeux Embroidery or Bayeux Tapestry - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Caen&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In order to reach Mont Saint-Michel before the high tide, we dedicated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen&quot;&gt;Caen&lt;/a&gt; less time than it would normally deserve. We crossed the town center, viewing from the outside the main attractions: the &lt;strong&gt;Church of St. Etienne&lt;/strong&gt; (a.k.a. the Men&apos;s Abbey), the &lt;strong&gt;Church of Ste. Trinité&lt;/strong&gt; (a.k.a. the Women&apos;s Abbey) and the Château de Caen, that hosts a couple of museums that we would have visited if only we had 2-3 more hours to spare.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Caen.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Caen&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Caen - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Mont Saint-Michel&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;A lot of people recommended us to spend the night inside the &lt;em&gt;island&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Saint-Michel&quot;&gt;Mont Saint-Michel&lt;/a&gt;, even someone said that ideally you should spend two nights: one outside to view the island from the &lt;em&gt;land&lt;/em&gt; and another one inside. This is a very poor recommendation, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that I was disappointed with the Mont Saint-Michel, on the contrary I loved it, but it&apos;s extremely expensive and I don&apos;t see the value of spending even one night inside. We slept in one of the handful of small hotels inside the rock, and for us it was not very abusive but the price of the same room during the high season was more than 400 euros, with an additional 19€ per person for the breakfast.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The restaurants were, as the hotels, very scarce and therefore very expensive. Normal menus for 40, 60 or even 80€. The speciality is a giant french omelette, normally with nothing at all (for about 25-30€) but sometimes with other ingredients as cheese, mushroom or even lobster, asking for up to 75€ per omelette. Ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For the first time in the trip, we saw there several tourist groups but it was clearly below the normal occupation. Maybe in Spring or Summer it has more value to spend one night, as it can be the only way to walk by the streets, the walls or the abbey without crowds everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For me, the most impressive part is not the tides and the water going up and down covering the entrance to the island. The most impressive part is the abbey internals. In order to place the transept crossing of the church on top of the mount they had to build a lot of chambers, crypts and corridors to sustain the upper floors of the Abbey (and the church on top of everything). Again, it&apos;s impressive the amount of logistical and technological talent wasted in superstitions.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus recommendation&lt;/strong&gt;: Spend some hours during the day, being aware of the tides schedule to see at least one high tide, but don&apos;t spend the night. The visit to the abbey takes about 2h, and the rest of the mount can be seen calmly in another 60-90 minutes, so you don&apos;t need more than 4-5 hours to see everything properly and leave with your wallet as harmless as possible.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class=&quot;image central&quot;&gt;
    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/12/Mont_Saint_Michel_at_night.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mont Saint-Michel at night&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Mont Saint-Michel at night - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Let&apos;s see when I can write about the other part of the trip, travelling through Brittany.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Stay tuned!&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Big Data Spain 2017</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2017/11/Big-Data-Spain-2017.html</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2017/11/Big-Data-Spain-2017.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;Last week I attended &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Big Data Spain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (BDS), a renowned event focused particularly on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data&quot;&gt;Big Data&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning&quot;&gt;Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt;. It&apos;s a reference event about Big Data, not only in Spain but across Europe. The event is almost entirely held in English and attracts top level speakers and public.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I couldn&apos;t take a lot of notes, but I&apos;ll summarize the talks that deserve your attention (among those that I heard):&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Talks&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/tbc&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence and Data-centric businesses&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/omendezsoto&quot;&gt;Óscar Mendez&lt;/a&gt; (Stratio)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The first keynote was the typical inspirational talk to open an event. Óscar focused on the growing relevance of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. It&apos;d be curious to compare it with the opening keynote from previous years, the revolution is always just around the corner.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyway, Óscar gave some interesting concepts. I specially liked the way he explained the next relevant disruptions:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;First disruption, use big data also for Operational purposes (and this is the key, IMHO)&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Second disruption, use distributed applications via microservices&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Third disruption, smart data centers moving first to IaaS and then to PaaS&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;twitter-tweet&quot; data-lang=&quot;es&quot;&gt;&lt;p lang=&quot;en&quot; dir=&quot;ltr&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/omendezsoto?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;@omendezsoto&lt;/a&gt; talking about the future of &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/hashtag/bigdata?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;#bigdata&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/hashtag/ai?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;#ai&lt;/a&gt; with microservices and containers, great message of flexibility and growth. &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/hashtag/BDS17?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;#BDS17&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://t.co/0i1b7oyemc&quot;&gt;pic.twitter.com/0i1b7oyemc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; Michael McCune (@FOSSjunkie) &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/FOSSjunkie/status/931099635816509440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;16 de noviembre de 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;script async src=&quot;https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/big-data-and-tax-fraud&quot;&gt;Big Data, Analytics, and Tax Fraud&lt;/a&gt; - José Borja Tomé (Agencia Tributaria)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;José Borja started with the disclaimer &quot;As you can imagine, I&apos;m not here to show you how to pay less taxes&quot;, and just with that he got all my attention and friendship. He also explained, for the greater tranquility of the Spanish audience, that Agencia Tributaria (the Spanish Tax Agency) is trying to modernize itself in terms of combating fraud and help the tax payers fill in the required forms. He delivered this messages with some slides that looked like they were made with Office 95 but the important thing is the content, not the appearance.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He ended his talk with several surprising and exciting figures. For example, and according to his own figures, Spain performs better (despite our usual perception) than the EU-27 median regarding the difference between the VAT that should be payed and the one that is really payed.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
  &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/11/BDS_Jose_Borja.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;the difference between the VAT that should be payed and the one that is really payed in the EU-27&quot;&gt;
  &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;the difference between the VAT that should be payed and the one that is really payed in the EU-27&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/big-data-security-facing-the-challenge&quot;&gt;Big Data security: Facing the challenge&lt;/a&gt;, by Carlos Gomez (Stratio)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Carlos gave a technical overview of how to protecting the data and services of a company in a Big Data environment when everything is data-centric. He summarized that it is distributed in two areas: protect the data and protect the service. You should review this talk if you are in the security business.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;twitter-tweet&quot; data-lang=&quot;es&quot;&gt;&lt;p lang=&quot;en&quot; dir=&quot;ltr&quot;&gt;Listening to Carlos Gómez&amp;#39;s master class about how to securize a BigData platform &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/hashtag/BDS17?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;#BDS17&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://t.co/RoSebEwqVc&quot;&gt;pic.twitter.com/RoSebEwqVc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; Daniel Carroza (@danielcsant) &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/danielcsant/status/931122319573114880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;16 de noviembre de 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;script async src=&quot;https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/apache-spark-machine-learning&quot;&gt;Playing Well Together: Big Data beyond the JVM w/Spark etc&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/holdenkarau&quot;&gt;Holden Karau&lt;/a&gt; (Google)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Holden gave several good tips and tricks about &lt;a href=&quot;https://spark.apache.org/&quot;&gt;Apache Spark&lt;/a&gt; in general, and specifically about using it from outside the Java ecosystem in Python. As a Python connoisseur, but not a Spark user (yet), I just learned a couple of usable tips but the talk was great anyway and it was a pleasure to meet Holden.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;twitter-tweet&quot; data-lang=&quot;es&quot;&gt;&lt;p lang=&quot;en&quot; dir=&quot;ltr&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/hashtag/BDS17?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;#BDS17&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/holdenkarau?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;@holdenkarau&lt;/a&gt; starts reminding everyone that we all come from different places, and this is great!! :-) &lt;a href=&quot;https://t.co/Sceqz0oh8I&quot;&gt;pic.twitter.com/Sceqz0oh8I&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; Luis GC (@luiyo) &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/luiyo/status/931129784498782208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;16 de noviembre de 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;script async src=&quot;https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/why-big-data-didnt-end-causal-inference&quot;&gt;Why big data didn’t end causal inference&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/totteh&quot;&gt;Totte Harinen&lt;/a&gt; (Uber)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This talk was one of the most promising for me after reviewing the schedule a couple of days before the event. Several years ago there were rumours of the death of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference&quot;&gt;causal inference&lt;/a&gt; at the hands of Big Data. The main reasons why Big Data might have done it are:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Humans are bad at coming up with causal hypotheses&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Correlational models form a more accurate picture of reality&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Data analysis just seems to be headed towards the correlational approach&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;According to the speaker, causal inference is today more relevant than it’s ever been. In fact, bigger data normally implies a better causal inference and not the opposite. Also, Big Data findings can inspire causal hypotheses and Machine Learning methods can help us to estimate causal quantities.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I probably will watch again this talk if the video is published.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
  &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/11/BDS_Totte_Harinen.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Some general ways in which Big Data and causal inference complement each other&quot;&gt;
  &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Some general ways in which Big Data and causal inference complement each other&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/towards-biologically-plausible-deep-learning&quot;&gt;Towards biologically plausible deep learning&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/nikolaymanchev&quot;&gt;Nikolay Manchev&lt;/a&gt; (IBM)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Another of my favorite talks of this BDS, and very difficult to summarize. Nikolay reviewed where deep learning currently stands, what are the current limitations and challenges, and how neuroscience and psychology can bring us closer to human-level intelligence (or even beyond).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
  &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/11/BDS_Nikolay_Manchev.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Deep Learning performance vs human-level performance in object recognition tasks&quot;&gt;
  &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Deep Learning performance vs human-level performance in object recognition tasks&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/Foundations-of-streaming-SQL&quot;&gt;Foundations of streaming SQL – learn to love stream &amp;amp; table theory&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/takidau&quot;&gt;Tyler Akidau&lt;/a&gt; (Google)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Tyler based his session on a very simple but interesting concept: &quot;Tables are data at rest, Streams are data in motion&quot;. He explained why it&apos;s important to know perfectly the status of the data at each stage, and how to make the most of both data structures mastering the operations and transformations between streams and tables.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;image&quot;&gt;
  &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/11/BDS_Tyler_Akidau.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tables are data at rest, Streams are data in motion&quot;&gt;
  &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Tables are data at rest, Streams are data in motion&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/the-data-errors-we-make&quot;&gt;The Data Errors we Make&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor&quot;&gt;Sean J. Taylor&lt;/a&gt; (Facebook)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This was a surprisingly interesting talk, despite I entered the room with very low expectations. In summary, Sean emphasized the necessity to think about errors, to prevent them and to estimate the uncertainty based on the fact that there will always be errors. He gave several examples and some useful tips and tricks.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;twitter-tweet&quot; data-lang=&quot;es&quot;&gt;&lt;p lang=&quot;en&quot; dir=&quot;ltr&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/hashtag/BDS17?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;#BDS17&lt;/a&gt; very interesting insights from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;@seanjtaylor&lt;/a&gt; explaining his experience dealing with Data Errors in Facebook &lt;a href=&quot;https://t.co/W9aiJpP2or&quot;&gt;pic.twitter.com/W9aiJpP2or&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; Luis GC (@luiyo) &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/luiyo/status/931480332599287808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;17 de noviembre de 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;script async src=&quot;https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/tbc-michael-ludden&quot;&gt;AI in VR&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/Michael_Ludden&quot;&gt;Michael Ludden&lt;/a&gt; (IBM Watson)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;this session was very funny and interesting. Michael summarized the current ecosystem regarding AI in VR, explained the current approaches to AI (and the pros and cons of each) and even made some predictions about what will happen in the future. As Director of Product of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ibm.com/watson/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IBM Watson&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, he presented as an example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ubisoft.com/en-US/game/star-trek-bridge-crew/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Star Trek: Bridge Crew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an amazing VR game that reacts not only to the player movements but also to voice commands. I&apos;ll just leave you with the trailer:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;iframe width=&quot;560&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; src=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Sg3lEIGQyo?rel=0&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bigdataspain.org/2017/talk/streaming-analytics-ing&quot;&gt;Streaming analytics @ ING&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/davidvaquero&quot;&gt;David Vaquero&lt;/a&gt; (ING Bank)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;My last choice could not be other than my colleague David. He explained what we are building in ING to be used by any business unit around the world. It was only a short talk, but David could have spent hours talking about the project transmitting the passion he has for this.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In summary, what ING is building is an event-driven architecture delivered as one platform, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://kafka.apache.org/&quot;&gt;Apache Kafka&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://flink.apache.org/&quot;&gt;Apache Flink&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sas.com/en_us/software/real-time-decision-manager.html&quot;&gt;SAS RTDM&lt;/a&gt; in the core. I hope that you&apos;ll listen more about this in the future.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;center&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;twitter-tweet&quot; data-lang=&quot;es&quot;&gt;&lt;p lang=&quot;en&quot; dir=&quot;ltr&quot;&gt;Time to see how &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/INGTechIT?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;@INGTechIT&lt;/a&gt; is using streaming thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/davidvaquero?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;@davidvaquero&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://t.co/Mag9BB9kEg&quot;&gt;pic.twitter.com/Mag9BB9kEg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; David Gómez G. (@dgomezg) &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/dgomezg/status/931523731754815490?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&quot;&gt;17 de noviembre de 2017&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;script async src=&quot;https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/center&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It was my second or third presence in Big Data Spain. I attended a couple of years between 2012 and 2014, but I ceased attending because the content seemed too focused on marketing and business. This year I have finished (again) with a similar feeling, but at least some of the sessions were worth the visit. Anyway, the event itself is much more professional than in the past and everything looked controlled and very well organized. I&apos;ll consider attending again next year.&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>On being a Senior Software Engineer</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2017/09/On-being-a-senior-software-engineer.html</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2017/09/On-being-a-senior-software-engineer.html</guid>
      	<description>
	&lt;p&gt;For many different reasons I have had to discuss quite a lot recently about the professionalism of some people, technical and non-technical. Sometimes, because a person feels that she (I will use the feminine as neutral gender) is not being treated fairly with respect of her category, or because her performance is disappointing for others, sometimes after unfair comparisons between colleagues, ... As a common element, a diabolical concept was almost always being misused in these situations: &lt;strong&gt;Seniority&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Having several years of experience does not make you a better engineer &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. A very common case is that someone has experience with something but knows nothing (or knows little) about everything else. Worse than that, in some organizations the &lt;em&gt;senior&lt;/em&gt; label is even used almost automatically to justify a promotion or a salary raise after a certain amount of years in the same job.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;About 5 years ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kitchensoap.com/about-me/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;John Allspaw&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (former CTO at &lt;a href=&quot;http://etsy.com/&quot;&gt;Etsy&lt;/a&gt;) wrote an article called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Being a Senior Engineer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that has aged very well. I would sign that article today, as it details perfectly what could be the differences between a &lt;em&gt;senior&lt;/em&gt; engineer and a &lt;strong&gt;mature engineer&lt;/strong&gt;. As the author says, you can expect a senior engineer to be a mature engineer, but sadly it&apos;s not always like this.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In his article (I recommend its complete reading) Allspaw describes a list of traits or characteristics of mature engineers:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers seek out constructive criticism of their designs&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers understand the non-technical areas of how they are perceived&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers do not shy away from making estimates, and are always trying to get better at it&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers have an innate sense of anticipation, even if they don’t know they do&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers lift the skills and expertise of those around them&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers make their trade-offs explicit when making judgements and decisions&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers don’t practice CYAE (“Cover Your Ass Engineering”)&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers are empathetic&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;Mature engineers are aware of cognitive biases&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The first thing that you need to realize is that almost all the characteristics described are non-technical. Allspaw article can be can be summarized in this quote:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;Being able to write a Bloom Filter in Erlang, or write multi-threaded C in your sleep is insufficient. None of that matters if no one wants to work with you. Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are &lt;b&gt;assholes&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If I had to choose, I&apos;ll always pick a &lt;strong&gt;mature&lt;/strong&gt; engineer over any so-called senior (or even &lt;em&gt;ninja&lt;/em&gt;!) in a particular technology or programming language. In fact, I would not change a good &lt;em&gt;junior&lt;/em&gt; for a ninja, but that is another story that will have to be told in another moment.&lt;/p&gt;
	</description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Susan Gerbic in Skeptics in the Pub Madrid</title>
      <link>http://luiyo.net/blog/2017/09/Susan-Gerbic-in-Skeptics-in-the-Pub-Madrid.html</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">2017/09/Susan-Gerbic-in-Skeptics-in-the-Pub-Madrid.html</guid>
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	&lt;p&gt;&lt;center&gt;&lt;i&gt;This entry is also published in Spanish in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.escepticos.es/node/5374&quot;&gt;the website of ARP-SAPC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/center&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, we are celebrating the &lt;strong&gt;XXX Anniversary&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://escepticos.es&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ARP-SAPC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.escepticos.es/escepticos-en-el-pub&quot;&gt;special event this next Saturday (Sep 30th)&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;Alfonso López Borgoñoz&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.twitter.com/lopezborgonoz&quot;&gt;@lopezborgonoz&lt;/a&gt;). As an addition to this celebration, a week later we&apos;ll be honoured to host a &lt;strong&gt;Skeptics in the Pub Madrid&lt;/strong&gt; special event with &lt;strong&gt;Susan Gerbic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Affectionately called the Wikipediatrician, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Gerbic&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Susan Gerbic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the cofounder of &lt;strong&gt;Monterey County Skeptics&lt;/strong&gt; and a self-proclaimed &lt;em&gt;skeptical junkie&lt;/em&gt;. Susan is also founder of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.com.es/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW)&lt;/strong&gt; project&lt;/a&gt;. She is a frequent contributor to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_Inquirer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skeptical Inquirer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticality&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skepticality Podcast&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. She is the winner of the &lt;em&gt;CSI In the Trenches Award&lt;/em&gt; from 2012, &lt;em&gt;James Randi Award for Skepticism in the Public Interest&lt;/em&gt; from 2013 and a Scientific and Technical Consultant for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Skeptical_Inquiry&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Our SitP event will be the last stage for Susan in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fundly.com/about-time-tour-skeptical-networking-across-europe#home&quot;&gt;huge tour all through Europe&lt;/a&gt;. She&apos;s been (or plans to be, as the tour is currently ongoing) in Oslo (Norway), Stockholm (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark), Malmö (Sweden), Prague (Czech Republic), Wrocław (Poland, for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://euroscepticscon.org/en/&quot;&gt;17th European Skeptics Congress&lt;/a&gt;), Göttingen (Germany), Frankfurt (Germany), Zurich (Switzerland), Cesena (Italy, for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cicap.org/convegno/2017/&quot;&gt;CICAPFest 2017&lt;/a&gt;), Budapest (Hungary), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Sofia (Bulgaria) and finally Madrid. For more details about her tour, you can start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/Gerbic/videos/10155586328243771/&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; of Susan explaining the details.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One important thing. &lt;strong&gt;The talk that Susan has prepared for us will be in English&lt;/strong&gt;, although in the Q&amp;amp;A it will be possible to make questions in Spanish and we will translate whatever is necessary. The content of the talk, as described by herself:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;You supported the March for Science. Now what? Susan Gerbic will be explaining why the answer is to join her project, Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW). She will explain why improving the pages for Science and Scientific Skepticism on the 10th most popular website improves education world-wide. GSoW works to support the people and organizations that do the research, write the books, organize the conferences and take the heat from the anti-science and paranormal world. GSoW gives them the best possible Wikipedia pages possible, while following all the rules of Wikipedia. The GSoW has had a large impact on education around the world since 2010. The GSoW has written and rewritten over 400 Wikipedia pages in many languages. All training is done online, self-paced and with a personal trainer. All GSoW members join the Secret Cabal hidden away on Facebook where new recruits learn the secret handshake. Previous pages include; Spontaneous Human Combustion, Facilitated Communication, Catherine de Jong, Cornelis de Jager, Massimo Polidoro, Massimo Pigliucci, Leo Igwe, Gábor Hraskó, VoF, ARP-SAPC, Klub Sceptyków Polskich, Chupacabras, CICAP, CSICOP, Association française pour l&apos;information scientifique, GWUP, and many many more.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The poster, masterfully designed by Emilio Molina (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ej_molina_c&quot;&gt;@ej_molina_c&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;
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    &lt;img src=&quot;/blog/img/2017/09/EeeP_Madrid_8_Octubre_2017.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Susan Gerbic in Skeptics in the Pub Madrid&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;caption&quot;&gt;Susan Gerbic in Skeptics in the Pub Madrid&lt;/div&gt;
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&lt;p&gt;As usual, the entrance is free. During the realization of this cultural activity is allowed the presence of minors under 18, provided they do not consume alcoholic beverages, and children under 16 if accompanied by a parent or guardian.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&apos;ll be waiting for you at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://moeclub.com/&quot;&gt;Moe Club&lt;/a&gt;, at Alberto Alcocer 32 on Sunday, October 8th at 19:00.&lt;/p&gt;
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