These guys obviously had fun doing their paper. I am usually sceptical about the real-world applicability of computer vision algorithms, but I can immediately see the value their algorithm has for geeks who regularly tele-conference or work from home. Check it out and you'll see what I mean ;-)

Last week was spent at the IROS 2009 conference in St. Louis, MO. When starting this conference report, I realized that IROS has been a conference of repetitions for me:

Tim Bray has started (another) interesting concurrency discussion over at his blog. While, to me, he was originally "that XML guy", I soon learned that cares a lot about concurrency. One of the big things he started was the "Wide Finder Project", a language comparison with submission by lots of people.

There are many classic computer science books that nobody bothers to read anymore because what people feel to be their "message" has become commonplace. Dijkstra's "Structured Programming" is an example: All (well, almost all) current programming languages are structured, so why bother?

Earlier this week, Sebastian Wrede and I visited the Fifth Event Processing Symposium. The symposium took place in beautiful Trento, in Italys northernmost region "Trentino-Alto Adige" (Alto Adige is better known as "Südtirol" to most Germans and Trentino is southwest of it).

In my previous post on grouping, I had been working from documentation on XSLT 1.0, but using both a 1.0 (libxslt) and a 2.0 (Saxon) processor. However, XSLT 2.0 has been out for quite a while (the current TR is from early 2007) and I was wondering whether what had been improved. As it turns out, the mail on Muenchian grouping I refered to was be Jeni Tennison, a well-known XML/XSLT expert from the UK who has written prolifically on these topics.

One of the goals I have with the FTS library is that users should be able to write down their desired graphs in a language that is close to their domain. The transformation between that and the FTS XML specification language could then be done, for example, by an XSLT stylesheet.

Nachdem wir gestern unterhalb des Clemensberges unser Lager aufgeschlagen hatten, und ein Schauer in der Nacht schon Böses ahnen ließ, belohnte uns der Morgen dann doch wieder mit strahlendem Sonnenschein. Flugs abgebaut, ein leckeres Müsli reingeschaufelt gings dann zur zweiten und schon letzten Etappe.

Am letzten Tag der ICRA 2009 hat uns unsere liebe Kollegin Yukie irgendwie noch in eine eigentlich geschlossene Party im 30. Stockwerk des Kobe Portopia Hotels geschmuggelt und das war ein echt sehr netter Abschluß ;-) Leider hatte ich keine Kamera dabei, aber die Aussicht war ungefähr so wie auf dem Bild links. Dank sei flickr und JennyHuang (die ich nicht kenne, die aber das passendste Foto hatte ;-).

Was mich jetzt daran erinnert ist ein Gespräch das ich dort mit meinem Chef hatte und in dem wir ein paar Sachen angesprochen haben, zu denen wir sonst eher nicht so kommen. Es ist schon ein bisschen lustig, dass man manchmal mit den Kollegen in der Ferne mehr redet als zu Hause, aber so gehts ;-) Gespräche mit meinen Chef sind eh selten, weil der ja doch recht viel auf Achse ist.

Ein Thema, und damit wäre ich auch beim Thema dieses Blog-Eintrags, war, was uns so motiviert bei unserer Arbeit.