Hello again, Davos, AI ethics, cybersecurity, Db2 events and IBM Cloud

Hello, here I am again after a while. I hope you had a good start into 2019. I enjoyed being offline for a while, then got busy with not much time to blog. So, here is a roundup of things going on.

Impressions from Zeppelin flight

Zeppelin flight

Recently, I had the opportunity to fly on a Zeppelin NT, the kind of Zeppelin I had blogged about before. The 6+ hour flight was a once in a lifetime opportunity because it could not be booked. It took as from Bonn Hangelar (EDKB) to Friedrichshafen (EDNY). Our journey started with a detour over Cologne, then following the Rhine up to Karlsruhe, taking a turn to Stuttgart and from there down south to Lake Constance (see the rough route we took on the right).

Aero Expo, Drones and the IBM Cloud

The Aero Expo, the Global Show for General Aviation, is running in my hometown Friedrichshafen from today until the weekend. One of the expo and conference topics is drones of the future (AERODrones UAS Expo). Drones or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have been and are a hot topic for IBM and its customers. Let me give a brief overview of some interesting work where drones, artificial intelligence, analytics, database systems, Internet of Things (IoT) and the IBM Cloud come together.

DIY: 3D-printing a quadrocopter (or hardware for IoT)

3D-printed quadrocopter/drone

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to get deeper into 3D printing. I got invited to Maker World 2015 in Friedrichshafen and to a workshop run by the guys of Construction Zone. The goal was to get an overview of 3D printing by designing parts for a small quadrocopter, printing them, and eventually assembling printed parts and electronic components to a flight-ready drone. Creating the casing for Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices basically is the same.

The mini drone and its parts can be seen on the picture above. It has a printed body, a printed cover, a small board (in the middle of the drone), a battery pack, and 4 motors. The first step in getting the copter up into the air was to design the body and cover as seen on the picture below. Some attention needs to be applied to keeping the rotors in a safe distance to each other and to have space within the body to house the battery pack and the controller board.

Design process for a DIY quadrocopter

Once the design is complete, the next step is to create a STL file and/or G-code for the 3D printer. During that process the printing quality is specified. It is based, among others, on the number and thickness of printing layers. And that directly impacts the time needed for printing. What I learned is that patience is a virtue...

My DB2 pureScale / Parallel Sysplex Moment

Last week, members of the German union for train operators/engineers were on strike and only a fraction of trains were operating. I had to go to Zurich, Switzerland, but most of the trains on my usual route were out of service. That's when I had my DB2 pureScale or DB2 Parallel Sysplex moment.

What is special about a DB2 Parallel Sysplex or DB2 pureScale configuration? It is a data sharing cluster. If one node in the cluster or a network connection goes down and is inaccessible, the other components can pick up the work. All this is usually transparent to the application. In my case I was the application and data at the same time: Try to get me to Zurich, discuss some issues in person, get back home.

From Lake Constance with love: A new Goodyear Blimp

A new Zeppelin (Zeppelin NT with NT as in "New Technology"), the next generation of Goodyear Blimps, it scheduled for its first flight today. It is the first of three. The components have been built in my current home town Friedrichshafen and been shipped to Goodyear to Ohio. There, the semi-rigid airship has been assembled.

BTW: Zeppelin flights in Germany can be booked at Zeppelinflug and you can learn more about the Zeppelin history at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen.

Puzzling: Enterprise Amnesia vs. Enterprise Intelligence (IBM Redbook Video)

A very interesting video featuring IBM Fellow Jeff Jonas has been published on the IBM Redbooks site. The title is Enterprise Amnesia vs. Enterprise Intelligence. Jeff talks about how organizations have trouble making sense out of the growing amount of data, how Big Data changes some of the existing laws ("physics").

In the video a puzzle is used as metaphor and practical example on how context information can be used to make sense of data. What was also interesting to me was the use of Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles for his experiment (watch the video!). The company Ravensburger is located in Ravensburg in direct vicinity to Friedrichshafen. Interesting to see how old fashioned stuff from the Lake Constance region helps understand leading edge IBM technology for Information Management. Still puzzled? Watch the video...

VIP jets, clouds, and DB2 on cloud

Two years ago I wrote about the "parking problems" at the meeting of the World Economic Forum. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos, Switzerland, and many of the participants have to fly in through the Zurich (ZRH) or Friedrichshafen (FDH) airports. (I have not been invited so far, but could go there by car. Any invitations...?)

This year's meeting is about to start and so it happens that out of the clouds business jets descend to Friedrichshafen and more helicopters can be seen. With that impression on my mind I came back from an after lunch walk and asked myself: Where is a good overview of cloud offerings for DB2? Well, it seems it is on this page at IBM developerWorks. Offerings like the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and services like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and RightScale are listed. There are also some cloud computing resources at the bottom of that page.

While I continue to wait for an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, you can directly get started with DB2 on the cloud.

Winter at the lake

A Katamaran and the car ferry seen in front of the Swiss Alps on Lake Constance (as seen from Friedrichshafen).

Welcome to Switzerland! Choose your database territory wisely...

One of the many international aspects of living in the Lake Constance region is that you encounter Swiss, Austrian, and German people, and even those from Lichtenstein on a daily basis. Language (mostly the dialect) is the most obvious differentiator in direct contact as well as a license plate on car. Sometimes, there are also the small and funny struggles with technology which show country-specific preferences.

Depending on the weather, it often happens that you walk in downtown Friedrichshafen and suddenly receive a text message "Welcome to Switzerland!" and your mobile phone started roaming using a Swiss mobile phone company instead of your German mobile provider. Similary, depending on the weather again, you can easily pick up a German provider along the Swiss shore or in Romanshorn waiting for a ferry to Germany. Always make sure that your phone has the right provider, else it will be expensive even receiving a call.

Then, there also funny annoyances like Google Maps. It is showing the Swiss-German border in a very liberal way. The German Reichenau island is, according to Google, Swiss territory. Fortunately, the borderline is clear to everyone and the countries are cooperating and helping each other across the lake.

When working with a database system like DB2, you also have to select the territory, codepage and collation for a database. You could have German, Swiss, Austrian (though no Lichtensteinian) databases side by side in a single DB2 instance. One thing you cannot do is to change the territory as we can do on the mobile phone when picking our home provider. So it would continue to say "Welcome to Switzerland!"


Larger Map

Two whales in the air: Zeppelins over Friedrichshafen

Yesterday I got the sudden chance to climb up a church tower in Friedrichshafen. It was also the rare opportunity to see two Zeppelins side by side (taken with my mobile phone). One had just departed with new passengers, the other was approaching the Zeppelin landing site.
What can also be seen close to the center is the runway of Friedrichshafen Airport, on the left of it the Zeppelin hangar and the Friedrichshafen Messe (expo & fair). The open space in the foreground on the right will be home to the new headquarters of ZF.

A box of ice cream?

Some years back IBM was advertising a very special box. In the commercial they showed what it could be good for. One thing is definitely missing: ice cream. Today is a hot day here in the South of Germany and I am looking forward to some ice cream after work and then some fun at the Kulturufer ("shore of culture" - a well-known tent festival at the shores of Lake Constance in Friedrichshafen with music, theater, comedy, magic, and much more).

But now back to the magic box:

Aero Expo and Database Monitoring

Some years back (is my blog really that old...?) I had written about the AERO Expo, a global general aviation show in Friedrichshafen. Today, I received an invitation/marketing email reminding me about the upcoming expo. Looking over the list of exhibits and demonstrations, it is very similar to database systems or even information management. There is the core product (the aircraft/engine or database system) and then a good chunk is about the tooling and maintenance.

What - to me - stands out is the monitoring. It is critical in flight, to keep both your aircraft and your database system up and flying. I am not a pilot and cannot really comment on what is crucial, but for database systems performance monitoring is a very interesting topic. Did you know that InfoSphere Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition is capable of monitoring the application stack ("end to end monitoring")? To me as a frequent traveller this looks like making sure that both the aircraft is running well as well as understanding what is happening in terms of air traffic and on the ground, i.e., it provides the whole picture, not just a fragment.

Not sure whether I will visit the AERO this year (tickets anyone...?), I would look around to see if something similar to end-to-end monitoring is available.

BTW: For those in Switzerland or South Germany, take a look at this cool project for displaying air traffic.

Friedrichshafen, Dornier, Herschel, Planck, Hubble, Zeppelins, and Codernauts!

In the past I have written a couple times about Zeppelins and their role in Friedrichshafen and the connection to the Bay Area (my former home). Today, it is time to extend the Zeppelin stories to Dornier, one of the many spin-offs of the early Zeppelin company. Dornier went through several mergers/transitions and many assets are now part of EADS / Astrium (still following me?).

Tomorrow, an Ariane 5 will carry two satellites, named Herschel and Planck, into space (follow the live video stream). Parts of it have been developed and built at Astrium in Immenstaad (Friedrichshafen) and many in the Friedrichshafen area are following that event with excitement.

What's missing? The link to Hubble which is undergoing repair again. The Faint Object Camera on Hubble was built by Dornier with its roots in Friedrichshafen and the Zeppelin. Both Hubble and Herschel are/will be used to look deep into our Universe. And that reminded me about something (very) old: Codernauts! Enjoy the video.

A day at AERO 2009: About aviation and databases

To my excuse let me start this post stating that to a database guy everything looks like a database.

On Saturday I took my oldest son to AERO 2009, the biggest European expo for General Aviation that included an air show in the afternoons. We went there half on foot and half by shuttle bus, but many visitors actually flew there with their own planes and Friedrichshafen's airport area and airspace was crowded.

Both I (and to some degree my son) can be labeled "experienced passenger", nothing more. In the database world this would compare to "having used an ATM" (this is not Air Traffic Management) or "received database-generated report in mail". At the expo were many commercial and private pilots, aircraft mechanics, aerobatic pilots, some flight attendants, air traffic controlers, some government agencies, and many more. In my (our?) world this would compare to DBAs and sysadmins, performance specialist, maybe application users, your management, auditors, etc. Of course there was finance and insurance companies present (and possibly lawyers...).

From strolling around I learned how much software is now used even by private pilots. Simulation, flight planning, navigation, in-flight monitoring and control, the electronic fligh bag (EFB), air traffic control/management (ATC/ATM), and many more require special software. The electronic flight bag can even be a collection of XML data. Statistical data such as that from ATADS is nothing more than your typical database application. A very nice air traffic visualization is using XML, web serivces, Google Maps, MashUps, and a database.

Thus, even if you were only an IT guy, you would have gotten your share of information. I won't write about the special deal I could have gotten for a private jet, how the goodies are different from an IT expo, and why I am lucky my wife is not a wing walking lady (or here)...