What’s in a scrum?

The IEEE Technology Management Council organized a workshop on agile development strategies in Großwallstadt near Frankfurt on November 20, 2009. The most frequently heard key to agile management of development processes was scrum.

The wall fell on CNN

Today, November 9, 2009, most likely all German bloggers will muse about what they did when the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, and I don’t want to be an exception.

Of course I remember what I did when the news came in – I was at home, with my family. Home, at that time, was Washington Street, Red Bank, NJ. The phone rang, my mother was on the other end, and urged us to turn on CNN (our window to the world outside of the US).  Something was happening which my generation, and certainly that of our parents, never expected to happen in our lifetimes – the cold war was coming to an end.

A new semiconductor research paradigm?

The recent issue of the IEEE Spectrum online news letter has an article entitled The Recession’s Silver Lining in which two top representatives of the Semiconductor Industry Association deplore the fact that for 50 years, no major (in the sense of radically new) development has taken hold in the semiconductor industry. They call for a concerted effort of semiconductor companies to fund academic research centers in a pre-competitive fashion, and hail the graphene based BiSFET as an example of such an undertaking.

Illegal to exhale

The new head of the Umweltbundesamt, the German environmental protection agency, Jochen Flasbarth, expressed the vision of a CO2 free Germany by 2050, according to German TV station ZDF.

Now, even assuming what he really meant was that Germany should be CO2 emission free by 2050, doesn’t that mean that it would be a federal offense for humans (and animals) to exhalte?

I’ll be 93 by then and might still be around, so I do care …

Emergency use of Echolink technology

Hilltop crossband repeater

Echolink as a communication link for emergencies sounds like a stupid idea, at first. After all, doesn’t the attraction of amateur radio in emergency situation lie in its ability to communicate without infrastructure? So how much sense is there in using an Internet-based technology like VoIP, which forms the foundation of Echolink?

But then, all disasters are regionally limited in scope.  So it may very well be that, say, 30km away the infrastructure is in perfect working order. Accessing an Echolink node there would provide highly reliable connections to the outside world, with 24h availability. What is more, connections could be made into emergency operations centers without amateur radio capability, using Internet connections only (even though that would require either access to the firewall, or use of an Echolink proxy server).  I recall that this is how storm spotters in the US routinely communicate with the National Weather Center offices.

Sluggin’ it out with an emergency radio afficionado

I should first mention that I am big into emergency applications of amateur radio. Firmly believing in ham radio’s ability to provide vital communication links “when all else fails”, I am using my activities in Emergency Medical Services at the county, and over the last years also at the state level, to plug this topic (which is not that popular in Germany) wherever I can.

So naturally I was looking for emergency radio applications when visiting the Ham Radio 2009 convention in Friedrichshafen. Little did I know that this quest would leave me quite upset and even physically assaulted …

Selective Perception

“We’re just glad you escaped the witch’s cauldron in Ulm.” I encountered this statement, uttered in a very serious tone, when arriving at our company’s board meeting on May 2. It left a rather strange impression on how different news and own experience can be.

Redundancy boys, redundancy …

Leading German mobile phone operator T-Mobile was struck by a major outage yesterday. For reasons yet unknon, two of three Home Location Register servers failed for several hours, possibly after a software update gone awry. This left about 75% of T-Mobile’s subscribers without service for several hours.

In cold blood

Swabia, the area of South Germany we live in, has a reputation to be safe, affluent, and a bit boring. This atmosphere of sedateness has lately been shattered by two incomprehensible crimes, both committed by young men (boys, really), both at present without apparent motives.

Hams 1 – Vandals 0

LinkedIn’s ARRL HAM Radio Operators group made me first aware of an interesting story which unfolded in Silicon Valley on April 9, 2009. A group of as yet unknown vandals cut multiple fiberoptic transmission cables which link the South Bay area and several Californian counties. This affected mobile and fixed phone service as well as broadband Internet access, including the 911 emergency system.