Visit to the Museum for Communication Berlin

Some time ago I visited the Museum for Communication in Berlin, for the first time in many years that I live here. It was a pleasant experience: I was kept interested by the various ways in which the content was presented, the interactivity of the exhibition (especially in the first floor, with quizzes, robots, and various other funny art-like devices). I was not the only one having fun: there were two groups of children, who ran across the museum in detective suits, looking for specific items and solving riddles, following a tour designed by the museum. As children learn and remember by doing, I find that this kind of tour was a terrific idea to let them have fun and be active during the exploration of the museum.

There was definitely a lot to see! I was especially fascinated by the ceramic insulators display, and the lovely set of historical and iconic post-horns. Among the postal carriages there was an old Italian model from late 1800s that had “Impostazioni” written on the side – in modern Italian, “impostazioni” means “settings”, especially in the IT domain; at that time, it meant “items transmitted per post”. Funny and interesting find!

Outside the museum there are traffic lights, whose poles are completely covered by stickers. A closer look allows to recognise the museum stickers, which work as a ticket, and that one wears during the museum visit. Apparently, visitors who just exited the museum have taken the habit of peeling off the sticker and transferring it to the nearest pole. The whole looks both shabby and artistic:

That’s a museum I surely will recommend to friends who visit Berlin, and to anyone who hasn’t visited it yet 🙂

 

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Science blogs I follow

Flame tests – source: Pinterest

As a follow-up of my post about food blogs I follow, today I wish to share with you the (much shorter…) list of scientific blogs in my feed reader. The first scientific blog I found is Simply Statistics, that I started reading when I was programming with R. I like the authors’ approach to complex problems, that take into consideration much more than the simple statistic/computing task at hand.

Math with Bad Drawings is my second favourite: it’s a blog with, well, math explained with comics. Drawings and puns can be a faster way to good understanding of an abstract mathematical concept, and for sure it’s funny! I recommend it to people who feel scared by maths but are curious, and to kids of course.

For my weekly moment of astronomy wow, I have chosen ESA’s Picture of the Week, by space telescope Hubble. On spacetelescope.org you can find this feed and a lot more pictures and information about outer space, planets, galaxies… have a look for yourself!

One that I don’t follow anymore, but is definitely fascinating and amusingly accurate, is What If? from xkcd’s author Randall Munroe.

 

Do you follow scientific blogs? Do you have some to recommend? Let me know in the comments 🙂

Copying a print from artist A Ge

Last week I accompanied a friend to their class of Chinese for beginners, and I decided to draw something while listening to them. On Wikipedia I looked for Chinese art, and stumbled upon A Ge, a contemporary Chinese artist (Wikipedia page, homepage). I picked this print of a child holding a dove, with a few more doves around on the ground, and took nearly one hour to draw half of it. I finished it during the second lesson I attended, and this is the result:

I like it, even if the pen I used was rather large, and many details were lost in copying. I took half of the total time to sketch the proportions with a pencil, and I am satisfied with the result 🙂 It is true that when I switched to the black pen, my focus was on details, so I had to rely blindly on the pencil lines.

Any comments on how to experiment further? I’d love to hear from you!

Lesson about gesture drawing

Today I watched John Muir Law’s workshop about gesture sketching, that focused on the preparation phase of a drawing: getting proportions right, identifying useful reference lines, blocking shapes, all before diving into details. It put together a lot of tips and gave many occasions to test these by copying from pictures. It is quite useful to learn to put the sketch together rather quickly, for the cases when the subject is an animal that moves fast.

Here is the sheet of paper that I filled while watching the video (notes both in English and Italian, as the video was in English but I write faster in Italian!):

FOSDEM 2018: the Geospatial devroom

Sunday, February 4th, was the second day of FOSDEM and the day dedicated to the Geospatial devroom. Back from the times when I was active in OSGeo, I co-organised a developer room focused on mapping technology, that hosted presentations for the whole day.

This year we had 15 talks about a broad variety of topics:

 

Intro Geospatial devroom	Johan Van de Wauw
Join the FREEWAT family FREEWAT (FREE and open source software tools for WATer resource management)	Pieter Jan Haest
Bicycle-sharing stations: profiling and availability prediction	Raphaël Delhome
Pronto Raster: A C++ library for Map Algebra	Alex Hagen-Zanker
GDAL Tips and Tricks GDAL installation, Python usage, and Cloud GeoTIFFs	Jeremy Mayeres
GRASS GIS in the sky GRASS GIS as high-performance remote sensing toolbox	Markus Neteler, Moritz Lennert, Markus Metz
GeoPandas: easy, fast and scalable geospatial analysis in Python	Joris Van den Bossche
Open source Big Geospatial Data analytics	Marc Vloemans
Spatial Support in MySQL 8.0	Norvald H. Ryeng
Distance computation in Boost.Geometry	Vissarion Fysikopoulos
Building Rock Climbing Maps with OpenStreetMap	Viet Nguyen
Building OSM based web app from scratch How to find the way through the open source jungle	Nils Vierus
Privacy aware city navigation with CityZen app The free open source app that let’s you explore your city and contribute to OSM	Redon Skikuli
Every subway network in the world	Ilya Zverev
Rendering map data with Mapnik and Python	Hartmut Holzgraefe
Efficient and interactive 3D point cloud processing Combining the strengths of pdal, ipyvolume and jupyter	Mathieu Carette
AMENDMENT Mapping FOSDEM for accessibility	Johan Van de Wauw

As I helped Johan with the devroom organisation, I was in the room for the whole day except a couple breaks, and listened to all presentations. There are a few that I liked more, but what fascinated me was the variety of topics that the presenters offered to the audience, and that kept my interest always high. Coming from an OSGeo background made me think too: I thought that most (at least big) projects were part of OSGeo Foundation, but at every FOSDEM I discover projects that have their user-base, history and solidity, and were unknown to me. It makes me believe that geospatial technology is more widespread than what OSGeo shows, and there are a lot of actors who don’t see the need to belong to the Foundation. It doesn’t have to be the goal, it’s more a reality check for me.

If you are interested in these talks, you can watch the video recordings and browse the slides used during the presentation. They are available in the pages linked to the table above.

FOSDEM 2018: the talks I followed

As promised, here is my post about the talks I managed to attend at FOSDEM this year. I must say that I was interested in only two talks when I went through the schedule, and both were part of the Community devroom. It was sort of expected for me, as I am currently not active in software development. But when I entered the Community devroom (after a long queue!) I decided to stay for a few more talks, that proved interesting and thought-provoking.

The first talk I followed was “What community can learn from marketing”, by Matthew Revell. My take home message is manyfold:

• Marketing and  FOSS community management differ on a few but crucial fundamental principles. Therefore it makes sense to apply marketing’s lessons learned only when the core principles of FOSS projects are respected.
• Marketing has done great work on the analysis side. Applying its tools to a free and open source projecs can help refine its goals and target userbase.
• Similarly, marketing puts a lot of importance into planning future development. This attention can prove useful for FOSS projects too.
• Matthew has been careful in wording his talk with variations of “if you do X, Y will likely happen” rather than “you have to do X”. It helps me filter the possible actions according to their consequences instead of following a protocol.

Then it was the turn of “You’ve Got Some Explaining to Do! So Use An FAQ!” by Simon Phipps and Rich Sands. It was great to listen to them unwind the topic together, with ease and humour! Here are the messages I brought home:

• FAQs are great to showcase the project’s ideas, and are going to be read and tested by the developers, who will inevitably ask the project to make clear and precise statements.
• FAQs require the ideas and principles to be transparent to the reader. It must be clear to all project members, especially the leadership, that showing transparency builds trust, even if it is not always easy to do.

I moved to the large La Fontaine room for “Python 3: 10 years later” by Victor Stinner. I’m ashamed to say that I never learned Python 3 properly, and I was so surprised to read that this version is around since so long. The release strategy was not really made to push for the new major version, so a lot of production code has not been migrated. Given the growing amount of user-provided packages, and the multiple options for distributing a Python app, the actual drop of Python 2.x doesn’t look imminent, but hopefully will be done more easily than before.

Overall, I got the impression that more speakers than last time were mentioning empathy, and more in general the importance of positive human interactions in the softtware development environment. I think it helps including more people, first of all the users, in the discussions, especially in this time where software users are the majority of the population, and therefore represent a wide variety of personalities and backgrounds. I am hopeful for the future of FOSS, in any form it will take, if it will be considered part of human culture as a whole.

Welcome to FOSDEM 2018! keynote – slides from the volunteer organiser

Value study: kitchen chair

Yesterday I wanted to draw, after a week of total break. I walked around the house in search for an interesting subject and decided to draw a part of a kitchen chair, that had a nice combination of lights and shades.

I tried to remember the explanations and tips given by John Muir Laws in his workshop about colour and value, namely nailing the value of a given part of the drawing rather than focusing on colour. I translate it as getting the shades right, by guessing the black component of the colour of that area. I’m not sure if this is technically correct, but it is a good approximation. Another source for a cool explanation of value, hue and contrast is this colourful post from Tin Can Knits.

I’m quite satisfied with the light areas of the top of the chair and the contrast with the dark background, while I think that the rest of the drawing is not as realistic. My drawing is more the effect of starting the shading from the top of the drawing and progressing one patch at a time. This has the risk of drifting values, especially in a large drawing. I think I can do better by doing a longer observation phase before starting any shading, so that I will keep track of areas with the same value. Another help can come from a black and white preview made with a phone/camera.

Further tips are welcome!

The migration route

This weekend I have been at FOSDEM in Brussels, to meet the usual immense crowd of open source software enthusiasts:

… and to help with the management of the Geospatial devroom together with Johan Van de Vauw. I’ll write more about this in another post, because this one is dedicated to the way to and back from Brussels. The way back, especially, that took me and my friends back to Italy.

As I lived in Italy, my geeky friends and I used to rent a van and drive all the way up to FOSDEM. I taught them the route that my family travelled since I can remember, as I moved from Belgium to Italy at two years old. It felt like teaching them my migration route, and passing on our knowledge of the good rest spots, cheapest petrol stations and so on. I have moved to Germany four years ago and didn’t have the chance to travel that route anymore, therefore it was a special joy to drive back with my friends once again. I took pictures like mad, like a tourist, and I was moved to tears when I heard my friends talking about the places along the way with more confidence than myself.

We left FOSDEM on Sunday evening, headed south. We had dinner in Belgium and continued towards Luxembourg, surrounded by snow. Belgium’s highways are lit, an exception in Europe. We stopped at a hotel in Luxembourg for the night.

To Luxembourg

Snow and highway lights

The next morning we were greeted by sun and cold.

We quickly drove through tiny Luxembourg and entered France, following first the directions to Metz and Thionville, passing alongside the “highway cathedral”, the Église Saint-Joseph et Saint-Louis, then following the signs for Strasbourg:

Towards Metz

Thionville

Metz

Towards Strasbourg

Approaching Strasbourg there was snow again. We passed under the wildlife bridge (apparently used only by hikers, instead of deer and other large mammals), and through forests, white with frozen snow.

We didn’t drive through Strasbourg, and took the road for Karlsruhe instead; we exited the highway and crossed the border with Germany at Gambsheim, over the Rhine. We had booked a table at the Rhinkaechle, but arrived a bit too early, so we walked around the mighty hydroelectrical dam and its fish pass, one of the two largest passes in Europe:

Towards the dam

The dam

Fish pass: the sequence of steps

After the meal and the required barge-spotting at the locks, we entered Germany and drove to Basel, where we would enter Switzerland:

Basel – the customs

Towards Luzern and Gotthard

The leitmotiv of Switzerland are the tunnels (the longest being Gotthard and Seelisberg) and the mountains:

Lake Lucerne

Seelisberg Tunnel: 9.2km

Gotthard tunnel: 16.9km

Gotthard tunnel

We came out of the Gotthard tunnel to meet the blue twilight at Airolo, and drove uneventfully south until the border crossing at Stabio-Gaggiolo and finally Varese. The pictures came out increasingly blurred, and moreover it is a very familiar part of the road for me, so I didn’t take many.

Thanks to a comfortable car and change of drivers, we didn’t arrive too tired at our destination. It was great for the driver to have cruise-control, and for everyone a smooth ride at high speed.

I cherish this route and I’m happy to drive along it every now and then. For my friends it has become part of the FOSDEM experience, and the occasion for endless discoveries along the way (especially restaurants and industrial masterpieces). I thought about my affection for this route, that I felt stronger than the love of the places where I lived. And happier, too.