Midsummer punting
Madness, but we did it. Twelve hours after landing at Luton airport, I was in Cambridge where we took a party of twenty or so punting from Newnham Mill Pond, over the rollers onto the upper river, then for a picnic and a swim in Grantchester meadows. Enrico distinguished himself on his first punting trip. He may come from Milan, but the gondolier blood showed. Two punts returned downstream, while the rest of us continued to Grantchester and tea in the orchard before the long, lazy evening trip back to Cambridge. Truly a perfect day, and perhaps the best punting expedition ever.
» Candace had a different experience
» Clara has posted her pictures
» Francisco punted without us
Having spotted the folly of finishing the day by driving to Birmingham, I’d got us a room in nearby Saffron Walden, at the Saffron Hotel, my very favourite kind of English country hotel: a 2-star hotel in a building spruced up but too old to spoil. Creaking floorboards, odd-shaped rooms and twisting corridors.
Princess Polly I went to Tampere on Friday. It was closed.
Or at least the airport was. An 8-hour wait between flights had not seemed problematic when I booked: airports are designed for waiting and I would have work with me. An opportunity to get on with it. But arriving at Tampere after lunch I found the Ryanair terminal locked and dark, and the Finnair terminal at which I had just arrived just about to close. Should I take a cab into town, or a nap under the trees in the fine Finnish midsummer? I should decide before the two standing taxis left, for the drivers would surely ask me if I wanted a ride. But no, to my quiet amusement, they each emerged from the closing terminal, glanced at me and drove away. Dour Scots seem positively frivolous by comparison. I counted reasons for visiting the town and got as far as zero. I made my bags into a cushion on the bench, closed my eyes and was just drifting off when a voice asked Are you Australian?
And so I met Polina Sergeyevna Shayksi, who was hoping to board the same flight as I, but wearing roller blades.
Полина — if you’ve been writing emails, please write again, for I suspect the spam filters on the webmail service that handled my mail while I was travelling are allergic to messages from Russian mail servers. Better still, write to phone at 5jt.com. You need to hear about the British Society of Aesthetics conference at Oxford in September.
Improbable reconciliations Also on the bus is author Barry Boehm, whose Software Engineering Economics (1980) led the way to the industrialisation of programming in the 1980s and 90s. Originally an enthusiastic convert to formal methods, I eventually became disenchanted with what software development was turning into, and left the field for 15 years. I used to enjoy casting Boehm as a villain in this story, but without his work I should never have been able to bring back to programming whatever I have learned from philosophy, sales and psychology. Good and bad; is it ever time to judge? I was enchanted at dinner to discover that Boehm remembers studying under Ken Iverson at Harvard.
Santa says hej.
Arctic Insomnia
This year the Midsummer Night Picnic was inside the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi in Lapland. My reservations about joining the long, straight tourist trail north would have melted away long ago had I known we would be led here by native son Pekka Abrahamsson and his wife Katja. Professor Abrahamsson was the XP2006 conference chairman; he teaches extreme software at the university in Oulu, following earlier extreme activities such as championship swimming, and (as an impoverished student) getting himself home from the French Riviera by buying a bicycle in Nice and riding north.
Pekka and Katja took us to dinner in an elaborate wooden pleasure dome designed for refuge from the winter dark and from the summer mosquitoes. There we were introduced to the kantele, a Finnish kind of harp, by Matti Korva, who turned out to be a relative of Pekka’s. (The Arctic is thinly populated and the winters are long.)
A waitress emerged with a tray of tiny glass bottles on leather thongs, which we immediately supposed to be mosquitoes, one for everybody. Not so: each contained a flake of gold panned from the river. In the photo, Pekka is wearing his around his neck. As do I, now I at last have a pension fund.
Today we shall visit Santa and enjoy a raft ride in white water.
Conference close At the conference dinner, besides an acappela group reminiscent of the tralalero genovese with which we were entertained at XP2003, a choir of Finns, scorning accompaniment, came and shouted at us. (See Hubert Baumeister’s pic.) The bar manager at my favourite pub in the town square tells me this is a local group, usually booked up two years ahead. They gave us, among other items, an article from the EU Maastricht Treaty, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”. We were stunned and then enthusiastic.
On the last afternoon of the Oulu conference Eric Lundh made a brief but forceful attack on the assumption that agile development and formal methods are necessarily opposed, just in time to prepare me to meet Emine, who is preparing a doctoral thesis on formal methods at the University of York.
A new and impressive speaker on the last day of the conference: Jack Järkvik whose height, dry wit and mop of hair seemed uncannily reminiscent of KEI. We look forward to hearing more of him.
If I lived through the winters as described by Artop, an Oulu teacher I met at the town’s river beach, I would not want to sleep for the three summer months. Apparently other share this sentiment, and by autumn are slightly crazed with dropping by their neighbours at 3am for more coffee. I’m reacquiring a taste for Finnish humour. A compliment from Artop: “you’re not stupid enough to be happy.”
Meanwhile insomnia runs wild here. The sun will set on 27 July. Until then we shall stagger on with snatched hours of sleep and more excellent Finnish coffee. Or head south. Could always do that.
Northern lights Greetings from north Finland, where I'm at XP2006 in Oulu with north European luminaries like Morten Kromberg and Gitte Christensen of Dyalog, and Jutta Eckstein, the XP coach.
If the light never changed
I’d go mad in an hour.
Marilyn Hacker
I’ve already learned lessons worth the whole trip. From Geoffrey & Emily Bache, an alternative to defining unit tests as assertions about the states of variables. Instead, software can write a narrative of what it's doing, and a testing framework can compare narratives. And from Professor Giancarlo Succi, that there is really no way to recover a presentation when the chairman truncates it. Obvious in retrospect, but I had no idea; a lesson well worth learning.
The sun at midnightAnother surprise: Finns not only have a taste for cider, but keep a light perry, “Golden Cup”, on draft, serving it in pints with a fistful of ice. Bit girly, but a very refreshing summer drink.
tangled in red marks
a north truer than magnetic
New journeys To the Lansdowne pub in Primrose Hill on Friday evening to celebrate Miki’s second London journey by bicycle with pints of a light, fragrant French-style cider that the pub keeps on draught. Then on Saturday by the Regent’s Canal, Little Venice and the white-hot streets of Notting Hill to a garden party in Kensington to celebrate the engagement of Peta McRedmond and Enrico Montanari from Rapallo.
Ionia
Just back from a fortnight’s busman’s holiday working with Paul Mansour and guests at the Villa Loukia on Kefalonia. Got coached by Morten Kromberg of Dyalog on the use of SALT, his new Unicode source repository for APL scripts, and on OO design issues in Dyalog APL version 11. Paul showed off his flipdb database, and I got code reviews for my nth rebuild of the Surrender application, coding late beneath the stars.
Found new friends Zakis & Theodora Kounadi in the village, and bemused to find we knew Aspa Stassinopoulos among the London refugees from the 1967-74 junta.
Stretching the Ionian link (think of “The Tempest”) watch out for Aussie singer/songwriter Miranda Barber, heard recently at the Bullet Bar in Kentish Town.