Lisbon - Week1

It is one week since I arrived at Lisbon (the 23rd of August)! I have started settling down. Since I got two Portuguese speaking apartment mates, and a friendly Portuguese landlord, I am pretty sure, I will be able to learn Portuguese pretty quick. It is my first time staying away from home for a long period. My longest was the recent stay of 10 days in New Delhi.

I was the first to arrive. Since this is a vacation time, the university, including the university bank branches, is closed almost completely. Probably since this is the end of summer, the weather in Lisbon doesn't feel like a summer, rather it was mildly cold with 20°c, along with long days. The Sun sets around the 8.20 p.m.

We were able to grab some useful and interesting tips from the landlord. In the supermarkets, the brands marked as "%" are the own brands of the super market, and are generally cheaper, though are of the same quality as the others. Pingo Doce and Minipreco, the two super market chains of Lisbon, provide the economic options.

We will be provided with a SIM for our phones by the university, where we will be able to call anyone in the university network free of charge. That will surely be fun, as we will be calling our friends free! Apart from the regular grocery shopping, we also did minor road trips. The upcoming days will surely be more interesting, I feel. :) boa noite!

Year 2012 - a year of changes

Opposite to IST, Alameda, Lisbon

Time has gone pretty fast. When I was selected to follow the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing (EMDC) in the first half of this year, going to Lisbon seems to be far away. But sorry for repeating the phrase again - time has gone pretty fast. I was selected to DMKM (Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Data Mining and Knowledge Management) as well, where the first year will be at University of Lyon Lumière Lyon 2 in France and the second at University Polithenica of Bucharest in Romania. Distributed Computing and Data Mining both are my research interests. Considering the advantages of both the courses, finally I decided to follow EMDC. I quickly accepted the offer for EMDC, and started working on that.

Getting the Portugal study visa of course needed a considerable effort. It also made me travel twice to New Delhi. I utilized my first trip to New Delhi in summer as a sight-seeing tour in New Delhi. It was a great experience, including the negotiations with the three-wheeler drivers. The second trip made me float. I was even worried whether my travel documents got wet by the heavy showers, on my way to the Portugal Embassy in Chanakyapuri. Thanks to God, my bag was strong enough not to let the water in.

I was working at WSO2 for the last 2 years, and it was my job since I graduated. Interestingly I was an intern too at WSO2. It was a great learning experience, as my first job. For some unknown reason, the Emirates decided to send me in the business class, though I had bought a ticket for the economic class. That gave me a positive feeling (Feeling lucky.. :D)

Lisbon seems pretty cool, and started to settle down here. Along with these changes, Llovizna too is facing a few changes (may I say, improvements?) I foresee, the completely new set of blog posts dominating the blog, along with my traditional mixture of technical and personal posts. I see a few posts on my experience on studying abroad, and related tours. Hope that will make Llovizna sexier. ;) To match with this, I have enabled the Google ads into my blog, as I feel they give provide some advertisements that are related and useful to the readers. For example, I could see the advertisements of the European scholarship programs in the blog post that mentions about the European Study visa. Hope the overall reader experience is made more positive.

I hope the upcoming days will be more exciting, as the course is starting on the 17th of September. I will keep the readers updated on this. Tenha um bom dia!

Diaspora - an open source alternative to facebook?

I recall, one of my tweets, two years back.

hopes #diaspora* (http://www.joindiaspora.com/) will become a nice alternative to #Facebook soon, as ppl hav started to realize fb's tricks. May 29, 2010  

Diaspora is supposed to be an open (open source) alternative of Facebook. As the same case with Windows, we claim Facebook too an evil, regardless of its popularity, and regardless of the fact that all of us use it. Nevertheless, nothing hasn't overtaken Facebook yet, and the attempts to mimic or replace it have generally failed. Google+ appeared to be a competition. Still it seems to be a mere cross of Facebook and Twitter, while not causing the much expected stir. Many of the users haven't failed to notice when Google+ follows what Facebook already does. For e.g., the cover photo. Facebook fanatics have already started claiming Google+ a failure.

An interesting fact of diaspora is, as a community run, distributed social network, it tends to have so many installations online, where you can register for one of them. joindiaspora was the first of them, and https://diasp.eu
and https://wk3.org are two among the other few. Much attention to diaspora is not given from the general user base. Probably because of its community driven and distributed nature, it lacks a central location or network to evangelize about, except the excitement from the open source enthusiasts.

For me, it seems it is not that easy to replace Gmail or Facebook that easily. All the gmail-killers or facebook-killers that have been introduced lately failed to grab the attention of real users, except the reviewers.

Micronations and ocean colonization

Two years back, I got to know about the Republic of Rose Island. An engineer, along with some professionals, gets creative, and decides to build an island nation in the mid of the sea. However, later it was dashed by Italy, due to the legal violations of Italian law. Probably he could have implemented it legally.

Stories of micronations resemble fairy tales, and in the worst cases, they sound like a mere hoax. After 2 years from this, recently I read about another micronation, known as Sealand, which also seems to be active till present. Interestingly, the Principality of Sealand has been selling the titles of Lord, Lady, Baron, Baroness, Count, and Countess through its website. 

I still feel, ocean colonization is interesting. If living in these artificial islands in the mid of the international sea borders is possible, living in another planet won't be that hard either. Let's first colonize the ocean, and secondly we can colonize the space!

Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing

God Ganesh was kind enough to relocate to Lisbon, with me!

To begin the next episode of my journey, I am joining the European Master in Distributed Computing, starting the 10th of September 2012. As a joint master degree under the Erasmus Mundus, the first year (the first two semesters) of this course will be at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal and the third semester at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, followed by an internship for the last semester.

Degree outcomes

IST, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal:

Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing

KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden:

Master of Science (120 credits)

"The Erasmus Mundus programme in Distributed Computing is a cooperation between KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain. It is a two-year Master's programme including compulsory mobilty for the students."

Llovizna is mostly a technology blog, that often comes with the personal touch, on topics varying from open source technologies, cloud computing, web services middleware, to end user applications. It often has discussed the general topics, deviating from this niche as well. As a postgraduate student following an Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Europe, I will also blog on the modules that are taught in the lectures, as well as some posts on my travels.

I guess, I have already started blogging on this. Thanks for following. Hope to see you again here. até logo.