Pete's Log

sometimes you don't notice until it's over

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:12:00 EST

I am at the Munich airport, waiting for my flight to Düsseldorf to board. It didn't really strike me until today that it's been more than seven weeks since I last was on an airplane. Which is a nice change compared to averaging almost two flights per week in the first half of 2011. And thinking about it, I didn't submit any expenses for November, which is the first month that happened in a long while.

Similarly, I didn't notice until it started raining this week that we basically had no rain at all in November. Apparently it was the dryest November in 50 years.

Oracle Database 11g: Analytic SQL for Data Warehousing

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:56:00 EST

Yesterday I got to take the one day course "Oracle Database 11g: Analytic SQL for Data Warehousing." It's an official Oracle course, but I received the training through an Oracle training partner in Munich.

It was entertaining. I'd say I already knew about 40% of the course content. Among the material I didn't know were the options for GROUP BY such as CUBE and GROUPING SETS, the PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators, and the MODEL clause.

Even though we went over the material pretty quickly, it was good to be exposed to some new functionality. I can definitely see using the new group by features I learned and the pivot/unpivot feature. On the other hand, while nifty, I don't really ever see myself using the model clause in my current job.

Topics covered that I already knew: analytic functions (I was hoping to learn more in this area), hierarchical queries, and regular expression functions.

But my favorite part of the course was probably learning the keyword UPSERT, because every time the German instructor said it, it sounded like "absurd." Which it quite possibly is.

bonanza, commitment schemes, and oblivion

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:34:00 EST

The Thursday before last, I found myself at Molly's with Tony, Tim, and a couple of Joes (Arizona Joe and Kentucky Joe). One highlight of the evening was Arizona Joe telling me that he'd been spreading the word that Bonanza is the chemotherapy of songs, which apparently I had told him about the last time I saw him.

That evening I also discussed my checksum storage idea with Tim, who is wise in the ways of security. We had an interesting talk about how you can only prove that you knew something at a certain time if you have a trusted third party involved. We also came up with the idea of a service that creates a new public/private key pair every day and discards the private key at the end of the day, but makes all public keys available with dates. If you send a checksum to this service, it will sign it with the private key of that day. Again, this is a trusted third party sort of service.

But Tim told me to look up non-repudiation. This was a search term that actually led to relevant results. And then through a random and unrelated sequence of web-o-something, I stumbled upon commitment schemes, which is pretty much the problem I was wanting to solve.

Here, by the way, is how I came across commitment schemes: last Monday's XKCD referenced the Waterman butterfly projection, which had a comment on its discussion page by Strebe, who has a SHA-512 commitment to his real life identity on his user page. Very random sequence that led to me discovering more on this topic.

The moral of the story is: you will generally have more success if you know terms related to the problem you are trying to solve instead of terms related to your personal solution to the problem. Since odds are that people smarter than yourself have already solved the problem.

So yeah. Non-repudiation commitment schemes.

I bought the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion off Steam. For 5 Euro. Since Skyrim is getting so much hype, I figured I'd opt for the cheap predecessor. And once Elder Scrolls VI comes out, maybe I'll buy Skyrim.

This past weekend involved a couple birthdays. So Friday and Saturday both involved late nights out. But I still made it to Frisbee on Sunday. In five degree weather we managed 6 on 6. Not bad.

Google Pete View

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:55:00 EST

While visiting Rebecca last October, I saw a Google street view bike ride by. I've been checking about once a month since then to see if Google put me online yet, and today I finally discovered that they had! Internet fame at last!

Google Pete View

I can't remember what book I was reading, though.

checksum storage service

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:29:00 EST

Does this make any sense at all?

Lately I've been pondering ... I dunno ... let's call it "private cloud infrastructure," since that sounds fancy. But what I've been thinking about is what sort of things I want to keep online and which of those things I want to make publicly accessible.

Since I have access to my own hosting and since my trust in companies such as Facebook has been decreasing of late, one thing that's important to me is solutions I can host on my own, so that I control the data. But while pondering such things, the following idea came to me:

What if there were some sort of service to which you can upload timestamped cryptographic hashes?

Would that be useful at all? Here's the scenario that first caused me to think of it: a smart phone app that uploads location data to a private web hosting service. This would allow you to track your own location over time without having to entrust that information to a third party. But what if you found yourself in a situation in which you needed to prove that you were (or were not) at a particular location? I'm not sure how reliable data that has been under your sole control will be as proof. But what if you had uploaded a hash of each dataset with a timestamp to some remote checksum storage service? Would that make the information more reliable?

Another use case I just thought of was if you are writing notes for some project and want to keep them private, but think you may need to use them in the future to prove prior art or something along those lines.

I am far from being an expert on cryptographic hashing, but as far as my understanding goes, good hash functions, such as SHA-2, have no known collision or preimage attacks. Maybe for good measure one could upload a public encryption key to the service when signing up and then upload the signatures for the data instead, but it is my understanding that in general a signature is generated by encrypting a hash of the data with the private key, so one is just as dependent on the hash function being cryptographically sound.

Anyway, I've googled a bit and not come up with any information about such a service existing. (The term "hash storage" was a particularly useless search term, since it only came up with information about how to store marijuana.)

So three questions to the internet:

Is this feasible?
Does it already exist?
Would there be any demand for it?

It's not something I personally could imagine paying for. But maybe if it existed as some free trustworthy distributed cloud service, I might consider it.

Toby Keith

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:20:00 EST

Last night, I saw Toby Keith live in Munich:

It was pretty absurd.

recent amusements

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:39:00 EST

I discovered gog.com recently and purchased Rollercoaster Tycoon. It's nostalgiariffic.

I also bought Portal 2. It took me about 10-11 hours to play through single player mode, versus 3-4 hours for Portal 1. It's fun. This (don't click if you plan to play the game but haven't yet) is the only part I couldn't get past. I tried probably 20 times. But I swear that white wall in the distance did not appear in the game until after I cheated and watched the video.

It's funny that the philosopher to face off against mashy spike plate is Aristotle, since that is the philosopher being featured in the episodes of the history of philosophy podcast that I am currently listening to. It's a great podcast for when I go to bed, since it is interesting to listen to when I can't sleep, but doesn't keep me up if I am tired. My favorite part about the podcast is the random connections my brain makes listening to it while falling asleep.

Last night, for example, he was discussing Aristotelian logic and how Aristotle apparently believed any premise was false if any object therein did not exist. And I thought "just like how Oracle deals with NULL values!"

The weekend before last, Mamie and I attended Mord in Giesing with a few other friends. It was amusing, except I decided the obvious answer must be wrong, since it was so obvious. In the first bar we were at, we found the clue "Ingolf hit the murder victim over the head" and so I thought, that clue is too blatant, it couldn't have been Ingolf. But no, it was Ingolf.

thanks windows

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:56:00 EST

"Search for solutions to problems that have not been reported yet"

Maybe something got lost in translation. Or maybe it sounds like windows is psychic.

Either way, I'm amused.

Chicago!

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:38:00 EST

I traveled to Chicago for George and Stacy's wedding last weekend. It was a great trip.

I flew out of Munich on Wednesday the 12th. I was feeling a bit sick, but the airport pharmacy sold me some stuff that made the flight bearable. A group of about twenty German exchange students headed for Iowa was seated all around me, but that just made for extra entertainment. Passport control and customs were no problem and I got into the city by about 6 pm.

Met up with Annie and we headed to Marge's Still. Meg, Buzz and George stopped by and I managed to stay awake and with it until 9 or so. We then headed to Annie's place where we finished the night up with buffalo piss and unpacking the goodies I brought her.

Annie had to work on Thursday, so I mostly chilled and did my own thing. But I got to grab dinner with her and then see a Comedy Sportz show she was in. So that was awesome.

The rehearsal and rehearsal dinner were on Friday. Luckily I realized that I am supposed to be doing the second reading, and George had sent me the text for the gospel reading. So I guess this is why you rehearse things. The dinner was good, but I was still jet lagged.

Saturday was the wedding. It was a great ceremony, with a very Chicago Catholic priest. Like, imagine Mike Ditka as a priest. After the mass, the wedding party were off to do some picture taking, so Brian and I found a bar to watch some football while we waited for the reception. The reception was great fun, since I got to see a number of ND people: Arun, Shelece, Perk, Anne, Joe and Pat were all there.

Sunday I mostly chilled with Annie, then we had dinner with David and Bob, Lisa and Laurel. After dinner we played a game of racehorse rummy.

Monday was already my last day. Met up with Emily for lunch. Did some last minute shopping. Caught the train out to O'Hare. Flew home. It was a quick trip. But a lot of fun. Annie and I drank buffalo piss most evenings and also made it through a couple Disney movies. I also had a number of good American microbrews.

Good times...

The path "/usr/bin/gcc" is not valid path to the gcc binary.

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:17:00 EST

VMware Player recently prompted me to upgrade to version 4.0.0 build-471780. The upgrade went fine, but then of course when I next booted my Debian VM, I was informed my VMware Tools were out of date. So I told VMware to install the new version. But things were not as easy as expected. The VMware Tools that tried to install were VMwareTools-8.8.0-471268.tar.gz. The first few steps ran fine, but when it came time to compile the kernel modules, I was given the following error message:

The path "" is not valid path to the gcc binary.

Strange. gcc is installed. So I manually entered the path to gcc, but that only changed the error:

The path "/usr/bin/gcc" is not valid path to the gcc binary.

Bizarre. Google eventually led me to this VMware forum thread in which Deryni provided the correct answer:

apt-get install libglib2.0-dev

I didn't need it for the previous version of VMware Tools, but this version wants it. No useful error message from the Tools installer, but things work now.

I was going to add a post to the thread thanking Deryni, since there seemed to be a bit of doubt that this was the correct solution. But before they would allow me to post, VMware wanted me to fill in a whole bunch of mandatory information about my company and such, and I didn't want to do that. So instead, I'll have to post my thanks to Deryni here and hope that by linking to his post, I'm (ever so slightly) increasing its google page rank.

Oh, HW, you magical place

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:38:00 EST

Today I was paid in beer to listen to some obscure 50s song and write down the lyrics for Antje.

Oktoberfest #7

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:37:00 EST

This year is the seventh Oktoberfest in a row that I have been to. Of course, given that I am getting older and such, it took me until day 4 to get there this time around.

So we had a work-related event at the Ochsenbraterei. It was fun. After Mamie got off work, she joined us there. I took her on some roller coaster rides, including my all time favorite, Olympia Looping.

well this is discouraging

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:02:00 EST

Alpine view

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:13:00 EST

I love days when I can see the Alps from our office:

That is a low quality picture taken with my phone and doesn't do them justice. But it's the best I could do.

Of course, from where I sit, I cannot see them. But I love my view of the city that I get instead.

Herbstdult in Regensburg

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:55:00 EST

Our friend Megan recently move from Munich to Regensburg and invited us to come visit. So this past Saturday, Tony and I made the trip. Since Megan was actually in Munich last week, she met us at Hauptbahnhof in the morning and we trained up to Regensburg, getting there about noon. We first walked over to her apartment, which is near the Danube. There she changed into a Dirndl. Tony and I were already wearing Lederhosen.

Once we were all trachted up, we made our way along the Danube to the Wurstkuchl, the oldest bratwurst restaurant in the world. Had a beer and some sausages and enjoyed sitting by the Danube. Afterwards we wandered around the city for a while, then stopped by Apotheke, a bar that offered good people watching. We then bought a selection of different beers from the area and found a nice spot to sit by the Danube. The weather was perfect, so it made for a nice afternoon.

We then met up with Megan's flatmate and headed over to the Dult, which is Regensburg's biannual folk festival. We grabbed a table in one of the two tents. The atmosphere was great and several more of Megan's friends joined us. It was a good warmup for Oktoberfest, and the beers were a couple euro cheaper than Wiesnbier.

Tony and I caught the last train back to Munich, which left Regensburg at 10:44. We were home by 1 am. All in all a fun little day trip. Regensburg is a cute city and the weather was perfect.

five years

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:57:00 EST

My day yesterday: drive five hours to Wolfsburg, four hours meeting with the customer, drive five hours back to Munich, have a beer at Hüttnwirt. So in the end, not too bad.

Today marks five years working for amasol. Last Sunday was five years in Munich.

Weekend in Northern Ireland

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 09:12:00 EST

I recently made a brief visit to Northern Ireland with Tony and Irish Pete. It was pretty excellent.

Friday (August 11th) night Tony and I flew from Munich to Dublin. The original plan had been to land in Dublin about 21:30 and have Pete pick us up and take us to a pub in Blackrock, his home town. However, our plane was delayed about two hours, so it was almost midnight by the time we met up with Pete. So we headed straight to his parents' house, where I was instantly offered tea and biscuits. After a bit of chat we headed to sleep.

The next morning we drove up to Belfast where we picked up Pete's friend Myles, then drove to the East Down Yacht Club on Strangford Lough. Here we met up with Pete's friend John, whose boat we'd be sailing on today. We got our gear sorted out and then the five of us got onto John's boat Jezebel.

We sailed North for about an hour to the Strangford Lough Yacht Club, whose regatta we were going to participate in. It wasn't long before the race started. It lasted about two and a half hours. We came in last (though rumor has it that once handicaps are factored in, we may not have been last), but it was a fun time. My role was mostly to be balast, which meant moving from one side of the boat to the other on a regular basis. But I also got to help navigate and pull on some ropes from time to time.

After the race we hung out at the SLYC for a few beers, then made our way back to EDYC. The wind had been decent so far that day, strong enough to be fun but not so strong as to make things stressful for us newbies. But on the way back to EDYC, the wind died down, so we used the outboard motor.

At EDYC, John took off pretty quick, but Pete, Myles, Tony, and I hung out for some food and beer with a few other club members. We dropped Myles off at his house, then headed to Pete's house in Belfast. After dropping off stuff we headed out for a few pints, but I was pretty exhausted at this point, so it was not a long night.

We started the next day off with a proper Irish breakfast. I had a full fry and tea. It was excellent. With our bellies full, we then drove around Belfast a bit. Pete gave us a tour that included Queen's college, the city hall, and then some of the interesting spots from the troubles, such as Shankill Road where we got to see crazy murals and so called "peace walls" that divide catholic and protestant neighborhoods.

We then drove up to the North Coast, stopping first in Ballycastle and then driving West along the coast. We stopped at Kinbane Castle, the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, Dunseverick Castle, the Giant's Causeway, and Dunluce Castle. We grabbed dinner in Portrush and then drove back to Belfast. The drive along the coast was beautiful. I didn't realize you can see Scotland across the Irish Sea from there. So now I can say I've seen Scotland.

Back in Belfast we met up for pints with Myles and a bunch of other friends of Pete.

On Monday, after another Irish breakfast, we drove back to Blackrock and then Pete's Mom drove the three of to the airport for our flight back to Munich. It was an excellent weekend, if a bit too short.

I didn't take many pictures, but the ones I did take (with my phone) are online.

Starcraft 2 Season 3

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 05:58:00 EST

I placed in silver after beating a Zerg.

At least it's not bronze.

How is this possible?

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 07:43:00 EST

Apparently there are still some serious holes in my music knowledge. How, for example, had I not listened to X before this weekend?

e-tracking

Tue, 17 May 2011 09:40:00 EST

We have a new ticket system at work. The splash screen says the product name and then "the e-tracking system."

That is great. Now I just need a way to keep tabs on the other 25 letters.

Mamie!

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 06:32:00 EST

I picked up Mamie at the airport this morning. Ridiculously early. I was in Düsseldorf again Monday/Tuesday, but will now be in Munich for six whole days. The longest I have been here since the middle of February.

The plastic is off the window at work. So here is my view now:

The Frauenkirche, the Olympia tower, the BMW building, the Hypo-Haus and various other landmarks are all visible. Not necessarily in that picture, though. But from where I sit I can see them. I will try to take another picture with a better camera on a clearer day.

From the South side of the office one can apparently see the Alps on a clear day. This is only my third day in the new office, and none of those days have been clear. So I will have to wait and see.

View from the new office

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:05:00 EST

Our new office is in the seventh floor (eighth if you count American-style). I am on the North side, so I should have a pretty good view of the city. Here is what it currently looks like:

April already?

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 08:11:00 EST

I am in the office in Munich. This has become a somewhat rare occurence of late. In March I was in the office all of two days. The office is a new one. My company moved the Friday before last. The office is twice as big as the last one. When I started with the company (four and a half years ago!), the last office was only half full. When we moved, it was full.

I was in Düsseldorf Tuesday-Friday last week, and will be in Düsseldorf again Tuesday-Friday this week. I now have silver status with Air Berlin. I did not get seat 23F for my flight home last Friday, and it was already taken for my flights this week. So as per Diana's suggestion in my last entry, I have reserved seat 22 A for my flight tonight. My boarding pass has a little "Fast Lane Priority" symbol on it, so I will get to go through the fast lane for security. Because I belong to the globetrotting elite.

The weather in Munich was beautiful this last weekend. So I fit in a brief beergarden visit on Saturday, and yesterday we opened up the Ultimate Frisbee season. It was fun, but I need to get in shape.

The rest of my Massachusetts visit

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:35:00 EST

After spending a weekend in Lee, Sara drove me back to Boston last Monday. We stopped in Springfield on the way for Sara's A Cappella rehearsal. She is an alto in Strike A Chord and it was fun to meet the group.

In Boston we hung out with Dan and Tony. Dan worked Tuesday and Wednesday, but joined us in the evenings. Tuesday was mostly a shopping day. Wednesday we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It was interesting, though rather dark. Supposedly it is better on sunny days.

I did manage to play some chess with Dan. In a reversal from last time, I won the regular games and Dan won the speed games.

Thursday was the big day, St. Patrick's! We had green pancakes for breakfast, then corned beef and cabbage for lunch. Dan went all out. We then headed downtown and found a table at an Irish pub. We spent all day there, met some interesting characters, and had some green beers and other beverages.

Friday we tried to visit the Custom House Tower, but it is closed to visitors on Fridays. So we went and sat by the harbor for a while, then went to Villa Mexico Cafe in Beacon Hill for some burritos. It's a little place inside a gas station, but the food was excellent.

Sara and I then headed back to Springfield, where Strike A Chord had a show that night. It was a fun show. Afterwards, a bunch of the people in the group went bowling and I got to tag along. I managed to break 100 in two out of three games. Sara won all three games in our lane. We then returned to Lee for the night.

Saturday Sara drove her third round trip to Boston of the week. We got there about 1 pm and joined Tony and Dan for a trip to the top of the Prudential building. Then it was off to the airport and back to Munich and reality.

I'm now back in Düsseldorf for the week. I have flown 16 times in 2011, 12 of which I sat in seat 23F.

Weekend in Lee

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 03:29:00 EST

I am currently in Lee, visiting Sara.

Yesterday we drove to Albany to see the St. Patrick's day parade there. Branden was marching in the parade. Sadly, due to trouble finding parking, we only caught the tail end of the parade and did not see Branden. But we met up with him at the Hibernian hall in Albany and had a couple beers with him. Sadly a short visit, but it was still good to see him.

Today we had a goofy afternoon, trying Sabrage, which is opening champagne bottles with swords. We also played around with Mentos and soda. It was a lot of fun. We documented some of our experiments:

A weekend with Sara

Sara is a lot of fun.