Another June, another Glastonbury :-) This year, however, it didn’t rain! The weather was amazing. The festival was amazing! I do think that it gets better and better with every year. Well, I am surely enjoying it more. I’ve been going since 2004 and, still, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.

This year I managed to arrive on Thursday, with the sun still shinning (i.e. I didn’t need to search for a camp spot and then set up my tent at 2am like last year). On the way, and while waiting at the Bristol bus station, I met this charming gentleman who is in his 80s, full of energy, and with so many great stories (especially about ladies since his wife passed away few years ago… >50 years of marriage). He travels around and enjoys life even though 10 years ago he was completely parallelized because of a rare virus. He fought back and made quite the comeback!!! I tried to persuade him to come to Glastonbury but he was on his way to Cambridge. Perhaps next year.

Glastonbury is such an amazing site! Art, lights, random ad-hoc shows, all types of large and small stages, ethnic food, shops, tents with shows, workshops, poetry, theater, circus, discussions, dance music. Hippies, rockers, ravers, lefties, environmentalists, music lovers, families, singles… just name it; Glastonbury has it all. 180,000 people! It even has its own newspaper for the duration of the festival :-) All these years, I’ve been walking around for 15-16 hours every day and I still don’t think that I’ve visited everything that Glastonbury has to offer. It’s truly a different type of city that comes alive only for a long weekend each year, while acting as a farm for the rest of the time.

And then, there are the bands on the ~20 main stages (not to mention the various music/dance tents). How can you possible choose from all the great bands playing at the same time? It’s really overwhelming for a music lover. One really just needs to accept the fact that it’s not possible to see all the bands, to do everything there is to do.

I started exploring on Thursday, after setting up my tent. The site and the tents were already buzzing with life even though the stages were quite (no big bands on Thursday).

           

On Friday, I started at 11am and went to bed at 5.30am the following day :-) Poetry, humor, a lot of walking around, small shows, workshops, and of course Gorillaz :-)

       

I had to eat a baked potato since I promised Mary :-)

It was great seeing and spending some time with Carole and David, as always :-) I love you guys! :-)

    

Gorillaz were great. The show was not as good as the one at Coachella because it felt a bit random. They didn’t follow their show’s usual storyline but that was because of the many guests they had. For me, the highlight was the appearance of Lou Reed.

       

From the bands that I saw on Friday, I really enjoyed: Vampire Weekend, Willie Nelson (well… I only enjoyed him a bit before going to other stages), Florence and the Machine (just for a couple of songs), Dizzee Rascal (had to see him because I wanted to be right in front of the stage for Gorillaz but he was ok), Phoenix, and others!

In the early hours from Friday to Saturday, a small tend was full of random shows... juggling, comedy, fun stuff. Then, I made my way to my tent (30-40mins walk through the site) while the sun was coming out :-)

   

 

Saturday was as long as the first day. A lot of walking around and enjoying the colors and ambience.

    

Muse was the highlight of course. It was the fourth time I was seeing them since December and it was by far their best performance. They were absolutely awesome! The big surprise was The Edge’s (of U2) appearance to play with Muse a U2 song. WOW!

  

The first day I missed Hot Chip but guess what... while walking around the various fields, I saw them playing at a tent afterhours, just like that... for fun!

Bands that I saw on Saturday: Scissor Sisters (how fun!!!), Shakira (had to see her while waiting for Scissor Sisters and Muse), The National, and other random bands the names of which completely escape me at the moment.

 

Sunday’s highlight for me was Slash and his band. They played Guns ‘n’ Roses songs and they were awesome! What a vibe. Even though they were playing in the middle of the afternoon and at the same time as the England-Germany football game (with many people opting to go to the football field to watch the game on a large screen), the Pyramid stage was packed and the vibe was amazing!

   

More random shows!

   

Faithless were a LOT of fun! They absolutely had everyone going. I opted to skip Stevie Wonder (not really my style), who closed the Pyramid stage, and opted for Orbital and We Are Scientists. I stayed a lot at the Cabaret stage for the closing stand up comedy, with Ed Byrne really enjoying it despite clashing with Stevie. Then weird comedy, shows, partying, dancing!

     

 

Glastonbury celebrated 40 years. Here’s to another 40!!!

 

Is it June 2011 yet?

It’s been two months since my last travel/music post. I am in a hotel in Athens waiting for the hours to go by before my return flights to Seattle tomorrow so I thought of recording some of my activities/travel/festival highlights over the last couple of months.

There was that May dual sport ride and a night out with my fantastic team (including the Shanghai part who were visiting at the time).

 

There was that hiking day with friends… Rattlesnake hike. Maria was visiting from Baltimore. It was great seeing her. Together with Tini and Mia we had a great day. The landscape was gorgeous :-)

    

Then, Mary took me to the Sounders – Boca Juniors game, in style… food and drinks from a suite. Sonja and John joined us for drinks before the game.

 

After Coachella and some concerts in between, Mary and I went to the Sasquatch festival. There we found Lee and Sheldon. We all had an amazing time! It was a great festival! The Gorge is definitely one of the best concert venous in the world.

             

Music-wise, I found that the following bands were great...

• LCD Soundsystem (they were awesome)
• Massive Attack
• Passion Pit
• The Temper Trap
• Tegan and Sara (second time that I thought they were good)
• The National

Any Sasquatch weekend has to be followed by a weekend in New York City :-) Cris came from Washington DC for a day. There was a lot of walking, some jazz, good food, stand up comedy, random encounters at the Central Park, brunch at a restaurant overlooking Central Park from far high up, theater (“La Cage Aux Folles” starring Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge was awesome), and more! Oh… we are going to be sooooo frequent over there.

       

 

And finally… there was Glastonbury two weeks ago, which deserves its own blog post of course :-)

 

This summer is going to be great music- and travel-wise. I am soooo looking forward to it :-)))

Sad day today at “the borg”. I really liked Robbie Bach’s and J Allard’s styles. I am sure they have their reasons (the ones they talk about and those that they keep to themselves) for leaving the collective.

I liked J Allard’s farewell message. I couldn’t agree more with the last paragraph, especially the note about agility! We soooo need to be more agile. We are currently soooo slow :-(

[…]

Find a college student that claims we don't get it and blogs tirelessly about our lack of agility. Track down an EE that has been focusing on fuel cells and has radical thoughts about power management. Or a social networking whiz who is tired of building little islands that go hot and cold and can't break the mainstream. Hire a designer who's given shape to 2 decades of beautiful automobiles and thinks we can sculpt technology to better connect to users. Infuse them with our purpose. Give them the tools. Give them lots of rope. Learn from them. Support where they take you. Invite them to redefine The Tribe.

Decide. Change. Reinvent.

(source: Gizmodo)

Here’s the advert that the Financial Times didn’t run (commentary from the Guardian). Share it through your Facebook account, if you have one.

I’ve been boycotting Shell for years now (even came close to running out of gas in the middle of nowhere recently because of my refusal to use one of their stations). I am sure that the other petroleum companies are not better :-( However, I believe that if we all did/said something concrete, perhaps they’ll start listening.

My “REST in Practice” co-authors, Jim and Ian, have been doing an amazing job at creating presentation/courseware material for the book. It’s really humble to experience the kind of interest we’ve had so far from academics, even before the book is published, based on the presentation material that we have made available.

Now that a complete first draft of the book is done,* I thought of sharing something funny from Ian’s presentations. As he gives many invited talks on all things related to the Web, he talks about our ideas and the work that we’ve been doing for the book. He, of course, cites us all as co-authors. Last time I was in London at Jim’s place, where we all got together to chat and co-ordinate, he showed me the slides that he’s been using. I thought they were hilarious, so I asked for his permission to blog about them :-)

 

BTW... all presentations, courseware material, code, and much more will be available through the book’s Web site soon.

 

* Finally! Checkout my previous entry for more information regarding the completion of the first draft of the book: “REST in Practice in editing/review/correction state and available on Amazon”.

It’s been a loooooong road, I think it might even be more than 2 3 years. Jim and I had talked about writing a book together about the Web, its design principles, its technologies, and its potential role in distributed applications. We love working together so we wanted this to be our next project. Little we knew it would have taken so long. Many of the original ideas got revised along the way, Jim changed continents, I changed 3 different teams, Restfulie got inspired from our Chapter 5 even before its publication, we talked to publishers and at the end we were in the fortunate position that we had to actually choose amongst them, and we even invited a third co-author to join us. It was apparent that we needed help. Ian Robinson joined us relatively early in the project. Jim knew him from ThoughtWorks and I got to know him along the way and realized why Jim thought so highly of him. His knowledge of Web technologies is amazing and he’s great to work with.

There have been heated moments, periods of hard work, and periods of not-so-hard work. I now know that I should have followed the advice Jim Gray once gave me about writing a book. Something along the lines of “take few months off and go finish the thing”. That’s how he wrote his famous book on Transaction Processing with Andreas Reuter.

Last night, I was the last of the co-authors to check in the last remaining chapter, the “Semantics” one. Of course, we are not done with the hard work. We need to review some of the chapters amongst us, apply the feedback that we get both from our own reviewers and then from O’Reilly’s ones, build a website, etc. However, there is now an end-to-end first draft and, to us, that’s a huge milestone.

O’Reilly has made “REST in Practice” available on Amazon with a publication date of September 2010. Jim has already blogged about it. He also mentioned the many people that have helped us along the way. I’d very much like to extend my personal thanks to them again (and will do so again in the future). Their help, throughout the last year in particular, has been amazing. Quoting Jim from his post on REST in Practice available for pre-order on Amazon:

“…big thanks go out to Solomon Duskis, Rafael de F. Ferreira, Glen Ford, Martin Fowler, Colin Jack, Ken Kolchier, Eric Newcomer, Chris Read, Ryan Riley, Scott Shaw, Guilherme Silveira, Halvard Skogsrud, Nigel Small, Stefan Tilkov, Jon Tirsen, Spiros Tzavellas, Steve Vinoski, Lasse Westh-Nielsen, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen, and everyone else who helped review proposals, provide feedback on chapters, made cups of tea or was otherwise understanding.”

Here’s where you can find out more about our book:

• “REST in Practice” on Amazon
• “REST in Practice” on O’Reilly Rough Cuts
• “REST in Practice” on Facebook
• “REST in Practice” on twitter (#RESTinPractice) (stay tuned for an opportunity to get a free copy of the book through our twitter channel).
• “REST in Practice” on the Web (coming soon)

Stay tuned for more information about the book and our next project :-)

It’s been two weeks since Coachella 2010 but I only now got the chance to blog about the experience. Work and the focus on finishing “REST in Practice” have kept me really busy.

The Coachella festival is definitely not Glastonbury, not even close! It occupies a very small space and the few stages are very close to each other. However, its location (in the desert :-) means that the weather is in most likelihood warm/hot. It was a great experience music-ways. The bands were great.

Here’s the list of bands I saw.

• Friday
  • Sleigh Bells
  • Yeasayer
  • She & Him. Cute... see photo.
  • The Specials. Yes, they are still around and they are still fun
  • Gil Scott-Heron. Only briefly.
  • Them Crooked Vultures. Only briefly because my guest didn’t like them… they were great, as when I saw them during their visit in Seattle
  • Echo & the Bunnymen. Fun!
  • Vampire Weekend. First time I saw them was in December... still very good.
  • Benny Benassi
  • Ceu. Great Brazilian Jazz music.
  • deadmau5. Rave in a tend, at the end of a long day :-)
• Saturday
  • Porcupine Tree. Pleasantly surprised.
  • Camera Obscura
  • The Temper Trap
  • Gossip. I had seen them in Glastonbury as well. Still amazing and sooooo much energy!!! A LOT of fun.
  • The xx. Only briefly and not very impressed. I know my friend Michele Myers likes them so I want to give them another chance at their own concert.
  • Faith No More. Well… perhaps “legends” is too strong but they were definitely awesome and fun… I was right in front, almost touching them.
  • Muse. No doubt the world’s best band at the moment for me. Mary and I saw them live in Seattle and I had also seen them in Dec. They followed Faith No More so my guest and I were again right there, in the very front. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow my usual pattern of avoiding the hotheads so we were squeezed. The effort took some of the enjoyment but Muse were still awesome.
  • Tiesto. Great to see 10s of thousands of youngsters raving in front of the main stage at the end of the night.
• Sunday. Weird day because I didn’t enjoy it as much. Long story, related to my guest. I stayed away from the front of the stages :-( Oh well. Good lesson though.
  • Florence & the Machine. As always, great! Second time I see the band, after Glastonbury.
  • Jonsi. I had really enjoyed Sigur Rós when they visited Seattle (saw them together with my friends Tini and Nuno). He was good on his own too.
  • Phoenix. I enjoyed them the last two times I saw them but I thought they were particularly good on this occasion. Their lights guy didn’t make it from France due to the volcanic ashes, so their stage performance was unique, focusing on just the music. I really enjoyed that.
  • Gorillaz. Well... I was really really looking forward to seeing them. Too bad I was far away. Nevertheless, I enjoyed them very much so. They are great!

I think I am going to be there next year as well :-)

During the festival, Mary joined us as well. We all headed towards the Pacific ocean and spent two relaxing days at Santa Monica, cycling and running on the beach, dinning, and just chilling out :-) I hear that David Heckerman has his lab there. Something to think about :-)

The photos

Here are some representative photos from the weekend and the trip to Santa Monica.

  
(Isn’t it crazy that you have to be behind a fence in order to drink alcohol?)

  
  
  
  
(yes, there was a fire on the roof of the main stage for a while)

  
  

 

It’s soooo great to see the Chemistry addin for Word (previously known as “Chem4Word”) on Codeplex as an open source project. Congratulations to all the folks over at External Research and to Alex Wade in particular for driving this wonderful project and making it what it is today.

Few years ago, Tony Hey and I started brainstorming about various plugins for Microsoft Office that could help researchers/scientists. We started discussions with Prof. Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge, about one such plugin for Chemistry.* The Unilever Center for Molecular Science Informatics team had some great ideas about how to semantically describe and store the parts in a document that related to chemistry.

We started by talking with the Office team (very interesting discussions... ask me over a beer :-). It was at the time when Lee Dirks joined the team and started overseeing the efforts. I met Peter during WWW2007 (I believe) and started shaping up the project. Then Alex Wade joined the team and took over as the Research Program Manager and really made the difference. Alex lead the project and made it what it is today. It’s been an absolutely pleasure seeing him execute. Joe Townsend and Jim Downing from Cambridge did an amazing job from the Cambridge side.

In addition to helping with the project getting started, I also wrote the original design for how the Chemistry Markup Language would be stored inside a Word file, how the chemistry zones would be described inside an OpenXML document, the way WPF would be used inside Word, worked on the beginnings of the Ribbon, etc.

Well done to everyone involved. This is a great project, which has many inside and outside Microsoft excited. And it’s open sourced too. How cool is that? The potential impact of this project is huge. I know that the number of downloads in just the first few days has been incredible, beyond what the team had even imagined. Chemistry authoring won’t be the same.

 

* Other plugins of which you might have heard are the Creative Commons, Ontology plugin, GenePattern, etc.

I have written about the Word add-in for Ontology Recognition (the focus of the BioLit project) in the past. The project was also mentioned in my contribution to the Fourth Paradigm book and our “A ‘smart’ cyberinfrastructure for Research” article. It was one of the projects in which I was actively involved while in Microsoft Research, together with Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and Pablo Fernicola (who took over on the technical side and did a remarkable job).

I think the project was a great success. It was lead by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink. Lynn did an absolutely amazing job at shaping and managing the project and it was a pleasure working with her.

The work is now reported at the BMC Bioinformatics journal: “Word add-in for ontology recognition: semantic enrichment of scientific literature”. The paper is already marked as “highly accessed”, which is great to see.

Great work everyone!

Next time you get that steering wheel in your hands, think of us bikers...

Great British commercial. Check out the “making of” as well for some of the thinking...

The Zentity folks at MSR’s External Research group (Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and Oscar Naim) and the wonderful guys at the University of Southampton, School of Engineer Sciences (Steven Johnston, Mark Scott, Kenji Takeda, Simon Cox, and Less Carr) organized a Dojo event at Dev8D around Zentity. It was great seeing the reports and the interest.

The winner of the challenge, Martin Evans, created a Web API on top of Zentity to expose JSON-formatted representations of the entities in the Zentity graph store. Cool stuff.

Well done to everyone involved, especially to Kenji, Steven, Mark, and Oscar!

Remember the “No pants light rail ride”? This time we did a “Choo Choo train” in downtown Seattle :-) Like before, it was organized by the “Emerald City Improv”. That was last Sunday and it was soooo much fun. There were so many surprised and/or laughing faces of people as the train was going around. It was great! :-)

A funny moment (at least I thought it was funny at the time), when Gina and Eric were running around the streets to catch the train :-) They were late and the Choo Choo train had already departed so I was texting them with the location and they were trying to come find it. But then our “driver” would take a sudden turns... :-)

Yes, we even had our own live “rail-cross bar” doing “din din din” noises :-)

Here’s an article and photos about the event from Seattle’s PI: “Did you catch the ‘choo-choo train’ in downtown Seattle?”

  
(source: Seattle PI blogs)

It’s been some time since my last “travel” blog entry. I still plan to write about the fun/skiing week in Italy but I am not finding the free time to finish the video I am editing :-(

Last weekend, I rode my motorbike to Vancouver to experience some of the Olympic Games vide, hang out with my friends there, and attend one of the events. It was a fantastic experience.

The weather throughout the weekend was amazing. I took the scenic way up to Vancouver, enjoying the sun, the wind on the motorbike, and the landscape. Highway 11 in particular, along the Pacific Ocean coast and just before Bellingham was gorgeous.

 

After a long wait at the border, I went straight to a small park to meet my friend Colette, who was there proof-reading her PhD thesis. Since my visit, she’s submitted it!!!!!! I am sooooo happy for her. Such a huge milestone in her life. Well done my Coco!

Then, out and about in Vancouver, absorbing the vibe. Soooooooooo many people!

I met my friends Theoni and Simran. A great surprise was that Angela (Theoni’s and Dennis’ mom) was there too. It was soooo nice to see her again. More people joined and we ended up at an Irish bar for drinks, live music, and Olympic games on large screens :-)

 

After sleeping for 4 hours or so, we woke up early to get the buses to Cypress mountain. I was very lucky to have found a ticket for the same event as Theoni and Simran, even though we had to take different buses, at 5-6am. The stand for the spectators they had built was a really impressive structure.

The sun came out and the fun begun!

 

The event was ski cross, a first time for the Winter Olympic games. It was very very exciting to watch.

If you watched the coverage, you might have spotted me taking a photograph of the camera looking straight at me :-)

 

I was really impressed with Chris Del Bosco, the skier competing for Canada. Unfortunately, he came forth overall, after crashing from 3rd position at the final corner jump. I only found out about his story afterwards. It’s amazing how he turned his life around.

At the end, he came up to the stand. Everyone was hugging me and congratulating for his efforts. He was pleasant and was talking to everyone, giving autographs. I really like personalities like his. He’s definitely a winner in my eyes!

Since Theoni and Simran were very shy, I went and talked to him, congratulated him, and asked for the photograph :-)

 

On the way back, I decided to get Highway 11 again. It was getting dark so I thought it’d be an excellent opportunity for some sunset shots. I was not disappointed. The ride was great and the scenery was amazing.

 

Great weekend!

The Zentity team is soliciting your feedback. They just broadcasted a message that I thought might be good to redistribute through this blog as well. Please note that the deadline for paper submission is FAST approaching. I’m looking forward to seeing all the things that the Zentity community is doing with the platform.

Furthermore, if Oscar Naim (Zentity’s great Program Manager) manages to pull things off, I will be staying up all night Thu->Fri in order to virtually participate, through videoconferencing, at the DEV8D conference and answer any Zentity-related questions that developers might have.

We are very excited about the fact that you have deployed or are evaluating Zentity, and we would very much like to hear from you in order to keep improving our product.

We are particularly interested in the following information (although all feedback is welcome):

1. Installation/deployment experience
2. Zentity as a platform
3. Available documentation
4. Tools to help you get started
5. Intended and actual use
6. Performance
7. Dataset size currently in use
8. Pain points

This is a great opportunity for you to help influence the direction that Zentity will follow in future releases, so we hope you will share your experience!

As you may know, the annual Open Repositories 2010 conference will be held in Madrid, Spain this July.  This would be an excellent opportunity for you to come and present your experiences with Zentity and to learn more about what’s coming in our next version of Zentity. Hundreds of people in the repository space will attend, discussing the latest innovations in repository technologies and implementations. The Microsoft Research team is planning to have a Zentity community presence at the Open Repositories conference.  We wanted to raise this point because we wanted to suggest that you might consider putting forth a proposal to speak at the conference.  We have registered a good deal of interest in Zentity, but we’d very much like to see papers/sessions at the conference where you would be able to share your experiences (good and bad) with the platform with the wider community.  Please note that the deadline for submissions is March 1st.

On a related note, Microsoft is hoping to convene a Zentity half-day workshop/tutorial in conjunction with this conference in Madrid.  This will hopefully be another opportunity for our nascent community to learn what's new with the platform, as well as to discuss practical implementation issues, suggest new features, etc.  Assuming you are able to attend, we would be very pleased if you would consider participating in this event as well.  Please, let us know if you are interested and we can provide additional details.

(For those of you in the UK, we also wanted to point out that there will be a Zentity Lab NEXT WEEK as part of the DEV8D conference in London, UK on February 24-27th, and you are welcome to join us.  Hope to see some of you there!)

Thanks again for using and evaluating Zentity and we looking forward to hearing your feedback and comments!

Today at yoga (yes, I woke up at 5.15am again for a 6.30 class ), our lovely instructor Jen shared a poem with us that I really liked:

“To laugh is to risk appearing a fool,

To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.

To reach out to another is to risk involvement,

To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.

To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.

To love is to risk not being loved in return,

To live is to risk dying,

To hope is to risk despair,

To try is to risk failure.

But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.

He may avoid suffering and sorrow,

But he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live.

Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom.

Only a person who risks is free.

The pessimist complains about the wind;

The optimist expects it to change;

And the realist adjusts the sails."

UPDATE: I changed the title of the post to the correct title for the poem and the poet’s name. Thanks to Mike Amundsen for letting me know.