Wednesday, September 27th

Aftermath


Our success at the AHM2006 is still paying dividends. We have been invited to give a talk on a dependability conference and in a few workshops wihtin the eScience community. In addition people from the Oxford Comp. Sci. Lab have invited us to start a dialoge on how our work can be used on some of their projects. I am giving a talk this Sunday on an SRDS 2006 workshop before our visit to Oxford University. I also envisage visiting prof. D. Chadwick soon to discuss the potential for collaboration between our Labs.

On a totally unrelated subject I was pleased to hear today that a good friend of mine Yiannis T. is returning to the UK for this coming semester. I look forward to our fun and banter, I will be visiting him in London. Given the forthcoming Greek Local elections I am considering visiting home briefly sometime in October. I guess the bug of not being able to sit in one place for a long time has yet to take its toll smile
more soon...
panos on 09.27.06 @ 05:44 PM gmt [link]

Saturday, September 23rd

Back Home


After a couple of weeks on the road with more incident and variety than my whole summer I returned home on the 22nd. The last stop of my journey was the AHM2006 at which i prepared a slideshow about GOLD. The talk was ok apart from an incident which resulted in an attendee walking out frustruted. The rest of the meeting consisted of a number of demostrations of the GOLD infrastructure as well as meeting a number of interesting people which gave rise to some potential collborations with Comp. Sci. depts in the south. My Boss informed me that we had interest expressed by the Permis people at KENT, MS and Oxford who were interested in the security work I am doing. It is all very flatering I guess. I have to prioritise my Book this week as i have a number of reviews to post as well as catching up with my colleagues from MS. will post soon....
panos on 09.23.06 @ 02:49 PM gmt [link]

Tuesday, September 12th

D.C.


I arrived to D.C. and the G.G.F. conference from N.Y.C. where I spent a few days with Elias A. and co. I travelled down on Amtrak which was around a 3 hour journey. I haven't had time yet to see any of the sites I was planning to visit in Washington. I only manged a brief walk to the capitol where I took this picture. If you look closely you can see that I am wearing my conference badge. I doubt I will be able to visit the space museum. I'm hoping however to book one of the guided tours to Georgetown before I depart. I took another 2 pictures of the capitols which can be seen here and here. :-)

GGF had a number of interest talks most notably the state of the union address by I. Foster and the Enterprise Grid Computing talk by P. Strong of Ebay. There are a couple of talks I am looking forward to inlcuding the security talk by the Microsoft folks. The keynote talks seem to be more interesting this time around. more soon....
panos on 09.12.06 @ 07:38 PM gmt [link]

Saturday, September 9th

Inconvinient Truth


I saw a great documentary on global warming that is both very informative and at the same time provocative. I highly recommend you to watch the incovinient truth, Al Gore's lecture/documentaty on Global Warming. Unlike previous attempts to explain this global problem, he uses hard data to show the immediate and future impact on planet and man. It is definately worth seeing...
panos on 09.09.06 @ 02:41 PM gmt [link]

Thursday, September 7th

Snakes on a Plane


I'm off to the States this week to attend GGF18 alongside some meetings I have arranged with a number of interesting people. I also look forward to meeting a couple of colleagues from Microsoft to exchange ideas and experiences on access control languages for Grid related technologies. GGF takes place in Washington DC this time around and I will try to take this opportunity to visit the famous Space and Science museum and the infamous Georgetown. it is a great time of year to visit the North East coast as the weather is pleasant (22c) which helps if you want to walk around a lot. I'm back in the UK and in particular Nottingham for the AHM2006 event, for which I am preparing my slides as I write this entry. I will be talking at the SAP workshop and my talk will be on Business Grids (as long as i find out what they are by the 18th of September). I'm in Newcastle at the end of the month.

In my previous entry it seems I was proved wrong and on the last game of the tournament we bottled it. Ah well....
panos on 09.07.06 @ 12:46 PM gmt [link]

Friday, September 1st

In retrospect it was easy....


The first thing I did at work today was to hook a MacBook on a TV projector and watch the semi final of the world basketball championship via an internet live stream.

It couldn't have been a better start to the day. We managed to beat the US by 6 points (101-95) to reach the final for the first time in our history while sending the States home outsmarted, outclassed and outplayed!!! After a nervous start we got a safe 12 points difference which was carefully maintained up until the last minute of the game. Some people say it was unbelievable, but in retrospect it was easy. Once we got ahead we never looked back and the Americans never threatened!

On Sunday we will be counting 3 major trophies in as many years having won the Football Euro 2004 trophy, The Euro 2005 Basketball Trophy and looking to add another against Spain in the Final. Roll on the good times....

panos on 09.01.06 @ 08:11 PM gmt [link]