Random thoughts

68 kilometers, 1525 m elevation, 90000 steps – that’s how far I got this year at the Wien Rundumadum, the running event around the city of Vienna. While I dropped out again, it still marks the longest distance I ever did, albeit at a decreasing pace, but more on that later.

Last year I felt much better prepared but had screwed up on coordinating with family, now I had everyone’s blessing, although my family still thinks I am crazy, and probably rightly so. There were many familiar faces among the 83 runners who gathered in the early morning, ready for the 130 km course. After picking up the GPS trackers and getting a quick race briefing, we started at 05:30 am.

Having failed on the training plan and skipped most long runs, I knew that I lacked both mental and physical strength for a long distance run and was expecting some ups and downs. What I was not prepared for was the first energy low and a serious slowdown after merely 5 kilometers at a comfortable pace. An energy bar later I was back on track and happily moving along, except for a short detour to Cobenzl after missing a turn at Kreuzeiche. Reportedly, I was not the only one literally going for the extra mile here.

The first supply station had little to offer that appealed to me, heavy donuts are not my favorite food during activities. Tired of cold iso drinks I settled for only two bottles of sweat hot tea, which unfortunately didn’t go well with the sweat gels, so I skipped those. The second supply station after Lainzer Tiergarten had sweat rolls, which were not too bad once salted. The only real food was the soup generously provided by Traildog Running, many thanks to the team for offering something hot and salty.

There I was joking about having enough of a buffer to finish the remaining distance by walking, however moving on, my pace, which was already around 40 seconds per kilometer slower than last year, continued to drop and I was only half way through. Despite the optimistic predictions of my smartwatch, it became painfully obvious that I would not reach the finish line within the 24-hour cut-off time. The only co-runner going at a similar pace had fallen behind a while ago, and the prospect of doing the next segment through the Lobau national park all by myself wasn’t terribly attractive.

As night was falling, I decided to drop out. I had done more than half of the course, including most of the inclines, run longer and farther than ever before, and overall was at peace with myself and the world. Needless to say that after a lovely family dinner and a good night’s sleep I wonder if I should have done another segment, or maybe more.

If nothing else, the experience certainly has prepared me better for the next opportunity to go around Vienna: looking forward to WRU 2020!

Labels: austria, personal, running

Related links

• Day 1 conference notes

Labels: austria, technology, wearedevs, webdevelopment

Some 8,000 developers are getting together this week in Vienna for the WeAreDevelopers 2018 world congress.

Registration was surprisingly fast and painless, a Graham roll and an energy drink as developer breakfast maybe slightly too clichéic (or I am getting old), but fortunately there was plenty of coffee available all day, including decent cappuccino at one of the sponsor booths.

Asked at the conference opening what topics people would be most interested in hearing about, Blockchain came out first, followed by machine learning and, still, devops.


Steve Wozniak rocked the Austria Center with an inspiring “fireside chat”. Talking with the brilliant Monty Munford, The Woz answered questions submitted by the audience and shared his views on anything from the early days of computing and why being a developer was great then (“Developers can do things that other people can’t.”) to self-driving electric cars (overselling and underdelivering) and the Blockchain (too early, similar to the dot com bubble), interspersed with personal anecdotes and, as a running gag, promoting the Apple iCloud.


As a long-time mainframe guy, I liked his claimed his programming language skills too, FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, and IBM System/360 assembler, although he did mention playing more with the Raspberry Pi these days.

Mobile payments was a good example of the design principles that made Apple famous and successful. Steve mentioned how painful early mobile payment solutions were, requiring multiple manual steps to initiate and eventually sign off a transaction, compared to Apple Pay where you don’t even need to unlock your device (I haven’t tried either one, and they don’t seem to be too popular yet.)

The most valuable advice though was to do what you are good at and what you like (“money is secondary”), to keep things simple, and live your life instead of showing it off, which is why he left Facebook, feeling that he didn’t get enough back in return. For an absolutely brilliant graphical summary of the session, see Katja Budnikov’s real-time sketch note.

Johannes Pichler of karriere.at followed an ambitious plan to explain OAuth 2.0 from the protocol to to a sample PHP implementation in just 45 minutes. I may need to take another look at the presentation deck later to work through the gory details.

A quick deployment option is to use one of the popular shared services such as oauth.io or auth0.com, but it comes at the price of completely outsourcing authentication and authorization and having to transfer user data to the cloud. For the development of an OAuth server, several frameworks are available including node.oauth2 server for NodeJS, Sprint Security OAuth2 for Java, and the Slim framework for PHP.

In the afternoon, Jan Mendling of the WU Executive Academy looked at how disruptive technologies like Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, and Process Mining shape business processes of the future. One interesting observation is about product innovation versus process innovation: most disruptive companies like Uber or Foodora still offer the same products, like getting you from A to B, serving food, etc. but with different processes.

Tasks can be further classified as routine versus non-routine, and cognitive versus manual. Traditionally, computerization has focused on routine, repetitive cognitive tasks only. Increasingly we are seeing computers also take on non-routine cognitive tasks (for example, Watson interpreting medical images), and routine manual, physical tasks (for example, Amazon warehouse automation). 

Creating Enterprise Web Applications with Node.js was so popular that security did not let more people in, and there was no overflow area available either, so I missed this one and will have to go with the presentation only.

Equally crowded was Jeremiah Lee’s session JSON API: Your smart default. Talking about his experience at Fitbit with huge data volumes and evolving data needs, he made the case why jsonapi.org should be the default style for most applications, making use of HTTP caching features and enabling “right-sized” APIs.


Hitting on GraphQL, Jeremiah made the point that developer experience is not more important than end user performance. That said, small resources and lots of HTTP request s should be okay now. The debate between response size vs number of requests is partially resolved by improvements of the network communication, namely HTTP/2 header compression and pipelining, reduced latency with TLS 1.3 and faster and more resilient LTE mobile networks, and by mechanisms to selectively include data on demand using the include and fields attributes.

Data model normalization and keeping the data model between the clients and the server consistent was another important point, and the basis for efficient synchronizatiion and caching. There is even a JSON Patch format for selectively changing JSON documents.

Niklas Heidoff of IBM compared Serverless and Kubernetes and recommended to always use Istio with Kubernetes deployments. There is not a single approach for Serverless. The focus of this talk was on Apache OpenWhisk.


Kubernetes was originally used at Google internally, therefore it is considered pretty mature already despite being open source for only a short time. Minikube or Docker can be used to run Kubernetes locally. Composer is a programming model for orchestrating OpenWhisk functions.

Niklas went on to show a demo how to use Istio for versioning and a/b testing. This cannot be done easily with Serverless, which is mostly concerned about simplicity, just offering (unversioned) functions.

The workshop on Interledger and Website monetization gave an overview of the Interledger architecture, introducing layers for sending transactions very much like TCP/IP layers are used for sending packets over a network. Unlike Lightning, which is source routed so everyone has to know the routing table, Interledger allows nodes to maintain simply routing tables for locally known resources, and route other requests elsewhere

Labels: austria, technology, wearedevs, webdevelopment

Today we take ubiquitous Internet access for granted and feel lost when our network connection briefly drops. It wasn't always like that.

On August 10, 1990, Austria became connected to the Internet with a 64 Kbit/s leased line between Vienna University and CERN in Geneva. Having Internet connectivity at one university didn’t mean everything moved to the Internet immediately.

The first online service I had used was CompuServe in 1985 while visiting friends in the UK. Watching the characters and occasional block graphics slowly trickle in over an acoustic coupler at 300 baud transfer rate was exciting (and expensive for my host). Back home, the post and telecom’s BTX service and Mupid decoders promised a colorful world of online content at “high speed”, relatively speaking, but most of the online conversations still happened on FidoNet, which was the easiest way to get connected. “His Master’s Voice” and “Cuckoo’s Nest” were my favorite nodes. At university our VAX terminals in the labs continued to run on DECNet, as did the university administration system. We learned the ISO/OSI reference model and RPC over Ethernet, but no word of TCP/IP. At work my 3279 terminal eventually gave way to an IBM PS/2 with a 3270 network card, and some foresighted folks in our network group Advantis and in IBM Research started putting gateways in place to link the mostly SNA connected mainframes with the Internet. The BITFTP service Melinda Varian provided at Princeton University opened another window to the Internet world (belatedly, Melinda, thank you!)

Meanwhile Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau made the first proposal for a system they modestly called the World Wide Web in 1989, and further refined it in 1990.

I don’t recall when I got my first Internet e-mail address and access to the Internet gateways after signing agreements that I wouldn’t distribute commercial information over NSFNet and only use the Internet responsibly, but it was only in 1994 when I took notice of the first Website, the now defunct Trojan Room Coffee Machine at the University of Cambridge, and another year before I had my first homepage and my own domain. As many Websites those days would read, “Welcome to the Internet”.

Happy 20th anniversary to the Internet in Austria!

Related links:

• 20 Jahre Internet in at – Die Revolution fraß ihre Kinder (derstandard.at)
• 20 Jahre Internet in Österreich (Futurezone interview with Austrian Internet pioneer Peter Rastl)
• 20 Years of Internet in Austria/20 Years of ACOnet Infrastructure

Labels: austria, technology

Today I attended the Internet Summit Austria 2009 held by the Internet Service Providers Austria association at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The motto of the event was “We are Internet”, referring to the fact that the Internet is created by people and used by people.

ISPA chairman Andreas Koman opened the session with statistics about Internet use in Austria and an overview of current developments and challenges.

Claudia Bandion-Ortner, minister of justice, admitted her preference for paper files and reminded the audience that the Internet is not an area unregulated by law. There are legal issues specific to information technology, such as data theft and violation of data privacy rights. While fraudsters and other criminals use the Internet, most crimes are media neutral. One area that is closely linked to the Internet, though, is child pornography. Bandion-Ortner referred to the controversial German pilot for blocking access to illegal sites. Needless to say, the same filter technology could be used for censoring access to legitimate information or enforcing intellectual property rights.

Volker Grassmuck delivered a keynote about the reformation of intellectual property law in the digital age. Established “common sense” can block creativity and innovation. Some ideas worked well although most people would have assumed they wouldn’t:

• Shared space pioneered by Hans Moderman–“If you treat people like idiots, they will behave like idiots.”
• Shared code with the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• Shared profits with the micro-payments of the Grameen bank– “People behave in a trustworthy way when they are trusted.”

Grassmuck touched on aspects of the digital age, the 40th birthday of the ARPANET and the 10th birthday of Napster this year, and the end-to-end principles in system design laid out by Saltzer, Reed and Clark at the MIT. Laboratory for Computer Science in 1984. The network is a universal transport mechanism, intelligence and innovation are at the ends of the network. “Today’s optimization is tomorrow’s bottleneck.”

On net neutrality Grassmuck mentioned a speech by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski and a refined view on the issue, with net neutrality but with network management to handle congestion or spam and with provisions for law enforcement, and transparency which would allow blocking or throttling certain types of traffic as long as customers are made aware.

There is no one solution that satisfies the needs of content producers, consumers and intermediaries. Working models will require a combination of an agreement between creative professionals and society, markets, free licenses, public subsidies and a “cultural flat rate”.

One of the conference gifts was, ironically, a USB stick with a locked down installation of Firefox using the Tor network to ensure privacy.

The keynote was followed by a lively discussion about intellectual property rights, including but not limited to compensation for the creator of content. The composer Johanna Doderer and the author Gerhard Ruiss pointed out that they want to maintain control over what happens with their works and reminded the audience that creative professionals are typically paid by how often their works sell. Georg Hitzenberger of Play.fm and Bettina Kann of the Austrian National Library outlined some of the challenges with obtaining rights for use in digital media and making content available. For example, the digital Web archive maintained by the Austrian National Library has unreasonably strict access requirements in selected locations only, one person at a time. Franz Schmidbauer touched on legal aspects and the adequacy of intellectual property rights enforcement.

MEP Eva Lichtenberger made an interesting comment about giving young people the ability to purchase digital media without requiring a credit card, quoting the large amounts spent on ringtones where suitable payment solutions are offered by telecom providers.

After the lunch break, Peter A. Gloor gave an entertaining presentation about “Coolhunting by Swarm Creativity” (that’s a lot of buzzwords for a title), explaining how their system combines different inputs–the wisdom of the crowd in the form of the Web, the wisdom of the swarms in the dynamics of fora and blogs, the knowledge in news and Wikipedia–to understand networks, trends and content. “Experts are right – in 50% of the cases. You never know which 50% you have.” swarmcreativity.net and ickn.org have good information about the concepts and the Condor software for non-commercial use.

Two panel discussions about social networks and business on the Internet concluded the agenda.

Labels: austria, events, technology, web2.0

The disputed presidential elections in Iran reminded me of an observation a few weeks ago when the European Union held elections for the European Parliament.

Absentee voting, and mail voting in particular, present some interesting security and privacy challenges. For the European election, voters who wanted to cast their vote outside of their electoral district could request absentee ballots to vote in other districts or by mail. In a commendable effort to make voting as convenient as possible, the administration only required name, address and passport number for requesting absentee ballots and delivered them to voters by regular mail, leaving ample room for misuse already.

But I was unpleasantly surprised when I found a sticker(!) on my mailbox indicating that “important electoral mail” had been delivered:



Well intended for sure, but in my opinion the service orientation really went overboard here. With all the trust in the administration, the electoral process and the people in our neighborhood, privacy and security concerns should be considered.

Labels: austria, security

The EURO 2008 will start tomorrow night with the opening matches in Basel and Geneva, followed by matches in Vienna and Klagenfurt on Sunday, not that I am interested in soccer or suddenly became overly patriotic (which probably wouldn't be a good idea based on what I read about our soccer team :-))

The only reason I care really is that our apartments are close to one of the venues, the Ernst Happel stadium, and we expect to see and hear crowds of fans passing by.

One of the positive side effects of the event was an improvement to the already excellent public transport system. The U2 metro line was extended to the stadium and will be extended further in the coming years. The upcoming event certainly added a little pressure to complete the extension on time.

The most notable change, however, has been the plethora of cars decorated with national flags, mostly Austrian, some foreign, and a few mixed. Signs to the stadium and the fan zone in the city center have popped up everywhere over the last few days, all kinds of merchandise are offered (anyone care for a football shaped loaf of EURO 2008 bread?), additional waste bins have been installed, and even the sausage stand around the corner looks much more colorful and inviting than usual.

We had actually planned to leave Vienna for the duration of the event and go on vacation but had to change our plans, more on that later. Let's hope for some exciting matches to please the fans and most importantly for a peaceful event.

To probe further: Official UEFA EURO 2008 Website

Labels: austria, home, personal