Aare Marzili Fun

It's very hot in Switzerland at the moment -- so for lunchtime I went running along the Aare river but then for the way back couldn't be bothered and just jumped in with my running gear on. Water temperature has reached a record 22"C (live recordings here). Even on a weekday like this hundreds of people are on the river floating downstream. Sometimes the speed is around 15 km/h. great fun!!!

Next plan is to go Waveboarding on the river. I've seen some people do this with home-made boards and elastic ropes attached to the trees. Tension is built up on the rope by drifting downstream (stalling the board against the flow); then they get quite some speed as the rope contracts again. Excellent! Now i just need to find somebody who can teach me how to build one of these ....

WorldWind: Aletsch Glacier

An amazing satellite image of Aletsch Glacier from WorldWind: Aletsch is the largest glacier in the Alps. It emerges from a giant snow bowl called Konkordiaplatz where three ice streams meet. This bowl is surrounded by the Bernese Oberland's highest mountains: Eiger, Jungfrau, Mönch.

Lake Thun and Lake Brienz are visible in the background. The Aare river emerges from Lake Thun and from which it makes its way to Bern. The city itself is just clipped off the top of the image.

JUnit Testing von Sonic ESB Services

Da Services ja nur via Message-Austausch (im Idealfall) kommunizieren faende ich es ideal, wenn man die korrekte Nachrichtenverarbeitung eines Services durch In/Out/Fault/Error Endpoints simulieren koennte. D.h. der Test wuerde Messages auf dem In-Endpoint produzieren und korrekte Resultate auf den anderen Endpoints ueberpruefen.

Ich koennte mir folgende Vorgehensweisen vorstellen:

1. JUnit standalone Testing der einzelnen Services: Befuellen der init(…) und service(…) Methoden via Mock Objects. Exit/Fault-Endpoints koennen ueber weitere Mock Objects simuliert werden. Vom Service produzierte Messages koennen damit wieder dem Test zur Verfuegung gestellt werden.



2. ESB-basiertes Test Framework fuer Einzelservices :
• Automatisches Deployment des Einzelservice in einen ESB Container incl SonicFS Eintraege, Service Configuration;
• Automatische Verbindung und Konfiguration von Service Endpoints, notwendigen Queues und Verbindung der Endpoints mit dem Service;
• Eine solche ESB-Konfiguration fuer einen Service koennte z.B. in XML (oder einem XAR File – ausser Queues) beschrieben werden und automatisch via esbadmin-Skripting bereitgestellt werden.

Sonic at CERN

SonicMQ has been used by CERN from the early days. They started developing the architecture on SonicMQ 2000.1. The deployment platfrom is OC4J and currently they have 2 projects running. The 2 projects are called TIM (Technical Infrastructure Monitoring) and LASER.

TIM is responsible for the monitoring and reporting of alerts triggered by malfunctioning smoke detectors. LASER is resposible for the monitoring of the particle accelerator's state and event display. Note that shutdown during malfunction is managed entirely at the hardware level.

The Kaif is in Switzerland

A while ago my friend Tusitha told me the Sri Lankan story about the elephant and the monkey:

The monkey jokes with an elephant, asking for a ride up the elephant's trunk. Annoyed, the elephant sucks the monkey up through his trunk. Somehow it gets trickled and loses control and so the monkey passes all the way through the elephant's internals until it reappears at the elephant's backside. Both, elephant and monkey are a little surprised but then decide that it was fun and that they should give it another spin. After repeating the procedure a couple of times, they have the glorious idea of connecting the elephant's trunk to his backside. an infinite loop of pleasure or as Tusitha says they call it in Russia: "Kaif"! The ultimate feeling of well-being ;-) [Not so good Kaif is called "Bale" if I remember correctly]

Well, seems I discovered Kaif swimming in the Aare river. There is an incredibly tight bend just a few k below Bern. The loop is about 1.5k long, but at its extreme points connected by a 150m pedestrian tunnel. You can jump in the river, swim all the way round and then race through the freezing tunnel to do it all over again!

Excellent weekend

I spent an excellent weekend packed so full with events that it seemed like a mini holiday:

• Friday evening straight after work we went to Montreux for a swim in Lake Geneva and afterwards attended the famous Jazz Festival. What an experience even staying on the fringe and not attending the "official" concerts. We saw a Swedish a capella group that had 20 singers and about that many voices. Lovely food too!
  
• Saturday BBQ and swimming in the Aare in Bern. We went to the amazing Aare loop in Felsenau.
• Sunday mountain biking in Valais. Thomas and I cycled from Fiesch to Kühboden and on to Märjelensee with views across the Aletsch glacier (26km long, 81sqkm surface), then back downhill via a single trail above the Fiesch glacier. From there, Thomas in his usual kamikaze manner took an almost vertical downhill. Having sweated enough with fear already I descended more leisurely over Riederalp and Bettmeralp towards Brig and also took in the panoramic views from the top of Eggishorn.