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Earthquake in L’Aquila

14 April 2009

I would like to answer all the messages I have received asking whether my family and friends were involved in the earthquake in L’Aquila. Thanks everyone for the interest!

My family lives in Tortoreto, which is a small town on the Adriatic coast, about 100 km far from the epicentre of the earthquake. My parents were only woken up by the vibrations and spent the rest of the night in their caravan, but the distance was enough to avoid any damage there.

Many of my friends who live in L’Aquila, however, are without a roof now: the lucky ones are sleeping at some relatives or in hotels, the unlucky ones are sleeping in tents. At least all of them seem to be in good health and relatively confident about the future.

What makes me sad is to see the city where I studied for six years transformed into a sort of city of ghosts. I am sincerely sorry for all the victims of the earthquake. But I know that people from L’Aquila are strong, and I am sure they will manage to recover from this disaster.

NWPT’08

8 December 2008

As always with some delay, I can finally write a bit about what my experience at the NWPT’08 workshop in Tallinn, Estonia. The trip started immediately with some strong emotions: my colleague Adrian realised that he forgot the passport home just before catching the taxi to the airport, so we asked the driver to run to his place first and to the airport next. Fortunately, we made it, and late in the night, we were in the old city of Tallinn.

The workshop encompassed several theoretical presentations, and I have to admit that I did not understand many of them, but this is probably (hopefully? 🙂 ) normal when people are coming from heterogeneous fields of research. I finally had my first presentation as well. We had indeed two extended abstracts accepted at the workshop, and I presented the one titled “Version Control in MDE.” Despite the initial stage fright, I have to say that the presentation was smooth.

I had the chance to go a bit around the old town of Tallinn during the weekend, and I loved it. There is a lot of history everywhere, and sometimes it seems to be back in time. However, despite the old-fashion look, Tallinn is ahead in time for what concerns the adoption of Internet. In fact, Internet access is available for free everywhere through WiFi. Note that with “for free” I do not mean that you can steal the connection from some unwary network owner, but that the municipality provides it. Estonian people I met seemed helpful and friendly, and most of them were able to speak English fluently. In the end, it was a pleasant experience, except for the last detail…

The journey back to Bergen was a sort of odyssey. We had a connected flight to Bergen, with a stopover in Copenhagen. The day that we were supposed to leave, we woke up in the middle of an extreme snow storm. Our flight was not cancelled, so we had to reach the airport at 16:30, with expected departure at 18:00. The taxi driver had even problems to come to the airport because of loads of snow all over the streets. The situation did not look promising at all, but the Airport kept delaying our flight rather than cancelling it. After waiting many hours at the gate with no precise information, the flight was eventually declared cancelled at 00:00. The airline could not provide us with a hotel since they had to handle many cancellations during the day. After having our flight rescheduled for the day after, we had to come back to our hotel, where they, fortunately, had two rooms available for the night. But the story does not end here. We had the same schedule for the day after, but luck was not with us. The flight took off at 21:00 instead of 18:00, and we apparently missed the connection in Copenhagen. We hoped that they could reschedule us to take the last flight from Copenhagen to Bergen at 22:45, but guess what? It was cancelled due to another snow storm in Stockholm, which meant another night abroad, this time at a Radisson SAS hotel. After more than two days of journey, we finally landed in Bergen the morning after.

MoDELS’08

11 November 2008

One month ago I attended the MoDELS’08 conference in Toulouse, France. Sounds important, isn’t it? 🙂 Well, it was to me. MoDELS’08 has been the first international conference I attended, and I am glad that I started with a relevant one. I had the chance to go there because my colleague Adrian and I had the paper “A Tentative Analysis of the Factors Affecting the Industrial Adoption of MDE“—the first paper accepted in my PhD programme—at the ChaMDE 2008 workshop, a satellite event of the conference.

The six-days conference had plenty of researchers from all over the world, including many of the “big names” in software engineering. Getting in touch with some of them was an honour. Many of the works presented at the conference were interesting. I even learned what “megamodelling” means. In my opinion, megamodelling is the most childish keyword ever appeared in computer science… However, the majority of these works were rather theoretical. The industry may never adopt model-driven engineering if the academy does not (quickly) provide anything useful to them. Of course, theory is fundamental, but sometimes I had the feeling of listening to speakers “selling thin air” rather than showing concrete results. Maybe one day I will be selling thin air as well, who knows… But for the time being it seems to me that research is software engineering is taking a dangerous path.

The city of Toulouse is gorgeous. So old and so modern at the same times, it offers a lot of sightseeing, attractions and restaurants where we had delicious meals and wines. I am waiting to upload a bunch of pictures on Flickr. Unfortunately, my Ubuntu 8.10 provides a buggy version of Digikam, and I have to wait for the developers to read my bug report and fix it.

That’s it folks at the moment. My next destination? NWPT’08 workshop in Tallin, Estonia, where I will have my first presentation. 🙂

Norge-Italia-Norge-Россия

6 August 2008

This year for the first time I had to apply for 20 days vacations… It made me realise even more that I am a full-time worker now. 🙂

Planning my vacations was not easy. I wanted to go home in Italy, but at the same time, I wanted some action somewhere else in the world… And I had to make it fit with some deadlines at the University. The final choice was the following: Italia at the end of June, and Россия—it just means Russia, but I could not resist writing it in Cyrillic :)—at the end of July.

A journey to Italy always gives me a mixture of contradictory feelings. On the one hand, it is pleasant to come back to my home-sweet-home after a long while: family, friends, sun, sea, tasty food, good wine. On the other hand, the provincial mentality of some Italians can easily piss me off.

My hometown is not that big, and I did not do that much there except sunbathing and swimming. But at least one day I was brave enough to hike the Gran Sasso mountain up to the top (2912m). This was the most exciting moment of my vacation in Italy, and I have to thank Antonio for being my guide.

If the first vacation was calm and relaxing, the next one was thrilling and exhausting. I visited St. Petersburg and Moscow, together with Diego and Federico, probably the best—or the worst depending on the point of view—travelling companions I could ask for.

St. Petersburg is a lovely old-fashion city, similar to other Eastern European capital, but still with a Soviet touch. Full of art, it was a good place to practice photography. Moscow is metropolitan and dynamic, somehow too big for my taste, but magnificent. Exhilarating nightlife, even though we had only a couple of chances to experience it. It is hard to compare these two cities, they are considerably different, but I was fascinated by both.

One thing I noticed is that Russian women dress up on more occasions than many European women do. Even to go for a casual walk, a Russian woman could wear high heels and feminine dress. A hardcore feminist might have the wrong impression that women do this because they are objectified, but Russian women themselves explained it this way: “We only live once; I want to look and feel at my best”. I could not agree more. 😉

What else can I say? I will probably be back in Russia one day! I uploaded pictures from my trips. Check my Flickr photostream, and do not forget to leave comments!

До свидания.

7-fjellsturen

26 May 2008

There is a town in the world where once every year almost 6000 people are waking up with only one desire: hike seven mountains before the day is over. The name of this town? Bergen.

I was one of those crazy people who managed to finish the so-called “7-fjellsturen”. My equipment was just a backpack with beverages and food, a rain jacket, and a camera. But what I needed the most was a lot of motivation and adrenaline.

I started at 9:00 and finished at 23:00, walking for about 35 km and going up for about 2400 m in total.

I am exhausted, stiff, and aching, but it was worth doing it. The weather was perfect, with clear sky and mild temperature. I have never enjoyed the nature that much, and at the end of the day, I felt part of it. Now I am left with a diploma, an exclusive t-shirt, and a lot of good memories…

I want to thank Synnøve, for being the best company I could desire for this trip, and Francesca, for giving me a chocolate bar when I needed sugars the most.