Mug Xmas Tree

Los colores del otoño

Once upon a time...

Waiting for the next guest...

Burning the sensor

nilreB

A contraluz...

Photowalk - September

After a long day of rain, the weather gave us a break exactly when we needed it for the photowalk. The bounty is several nice photos, great conversation ans lots of fun. We will keep doing this now in a regular basis, great excuse to get out and enjoy Berlin.

Ten years ago I took a photo from pretty much the same place. That one was ten years. Time flies.

Photowalk - July

Last Saturday I went out again with some colleagues on a photowalk. Really good fun, great company and great photos. Each of us has uploaded five photos to a shared album and we have 15 points to give away as we see fit, so the fun continues for a few days. Good example of how gamification of activities can have a benefitial effect.

From all the photos I took, this is the one I like best.

Españoles en Alemania: Muchos más datos (2016)

El servicio estadístico alemán ha publicado recientemente el informe sobre población extranjera en Alemania con los datos de diciembre de 2016. Siguiendo la pequeña tradición de los últimos años, aquí va la entrada analizando los datos actuales de los españoles.

La tendencia sigue igual, es decir, el número total de españoles en Alemania sigue incrementándose, aunque el ritmo sigue decreciendo. En los doce meses de 2016 la población española en Alemania creció en unas siete mil quinientas personas hasta las 163,500, frente al incremento de once mil en 2014 y de nueve mil en 2015. El número de españoles ha aumentado otra vez en todos los estados federados, y los mayores incrementos se han dado en Nordrhein-Westfalen (2,700) y en Berlín (1300). Este año los españoles que han elegido Baviera como destino es menor que el pasado. Como de costumbre, muchas altas y bajas y, algo que no había notado hasta ahora, muchos más niños españoles que nacen en Alemania. En 2013 fueron menos de 500 y en 2016 han sido casi 1200.

Por edades, ya hay unos quince mil quinientos niños menores de quince años, casi el doble que en 2013.

La distribución por estados:

	2016			Deltas
	Total	Hombres	Mujeres	Total	Hombres	Mujeres
Baden-Württemberg	25205	13005	12200	388	216	172
Bayern	22055	11250	10805	766	365	401
Berlin	9710	4795	4915	1268	653	615
Brandenburg	1020	560	460	148	79	69
Bremen	2305	1230	1075	209	114	95
Hamburg	5915	2975	2940	169	65	104
Hessen	25055	13060	11995	794	350	444
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern	890	490	400	117	67	50
Niedersachsen	11770	6235	5535	238	161	77
Nordrhein-Westfalen	46600	24350	22255	2702	1596	1111
Rheinland-Pfalz	5590	2905	2685	243	136	107
Saarland	990	455	530	28	12	11
Sachsen	2010	1090	920	213	126	87
Sachsen-Anhalt	655	375	280	136	72	64
Schleswig-Holstein	2855	1520	1335	140	83	57
Thüringen	930	595	335	78	67	11

Y a continuación, la serie actualizada de gráficos similares a los de las entradas anteriores:

Callejón

El Muro

Serenity with a twist

It´s been a while since I last went for a photowalk. Yesterday a couple of colleagues and I spent two hours walking from Treptower Park to the East Side Gallery. When we were about to go home I saw this guy reading and asked him if I could take a photo, which he agreed to.

After I took the photo he asked me if I was going to post it somewhere so I came closer to give the address of this blog, and then I noticed that he had his mobile on top of the open book!

Scary street

Serenity in CoderDojo

Last photo was about starting a book and this one shows one almost finished. I guess serenity and serendipity are not that far away.

Españoles en Alemania: Berlín, barrio a barrio - Datos de 2016

Esta entrada es una actualización de esta otra con los datos de diciembre de 2016

El servicio estadístico de Berlin-Brandenburg tiene datos muy detallados de los residentes, por ejemplo los españoles residentes en cada barrio e, incluso, casi calle a calle (los datos están divididos en unas 450 zonas, incluso más detallado que por el código postal. Creo que estos datos no incluyen a los que tienen la doble nacionalidad, que posiblemente aparecen como alemanes.

	Datos de diciembre de 2014	Datos de diciembre de 2016	Diferencia
Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf	1690	1664	-26
Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg	2869	2732	-137
Lichtenberg	356	457	101
Marzahn-Hellersdorf	101	153	52
Mitte	2694	2929	235
Neukölln	1658	1523	-135
Pankow	1866	1865	-1
Reinickendorf	304	365	61
Spandau	254	304	50
Steglitz-Zehlendorf	713	676	-37
Tempelhof-Schöneberg	1018	1158	140
Treptow-Köpenick	244	320	76
Grand Total	13767	14146	379

He creado un mapa interactivo, así que pinchando en cada círculo aparecen los cuatro niveles organizativos en los que están disponibles los datos y el número de españoles inscritos en diciembre de 2014 y diciembre de 2016 (este número no es el número de inscritos en el consulado, sino en el registro alemán).

Starting a new book

Geeky Father's Day

Today is Father´s Day in Spain, so I gave myself a mini present, a new free app. The twist is that I have programmed the app myself using MIT App Inventor. Ok, not really programmed anything, but I put together a few blocks and made sure the logic holds.I started with this tutorial and it delivers what it says.
The main screen has a few buttons and when one of them is pressed a time stamp is created in a database. The set up page makes it possible to give names to each button (names not shown above) and a user name, so you can keep track of several preset items without always having to change the name of the button first. The nice thing is that data persistence is possible for multiple users as timestamp data is not stored locally in the phone but in the cloud, more specifically in a fusion table. This means each user can log whatever is relevant for them, things like times arriving to and leaving from work, starting and finishing homework, time jogging, etc. Names are locally stored for each user in his/her phone.
Surely there are thousands of apps which do this better, but the fun is learning how to do it yourself and exploring what else could be done. There is no point telling our children to think of the phone as a handheld computer if we don´t apply the same principle to ourselves.
The next step would be to use the same layout and the bluetooth connectivity module to link this to a raspberry pi driving a couple of motors. More TK...

Iniciales

Lo que me llamó la atención de esta decrépita puerta en la calle de la Trinidad en Alcalá fue que tuviera iniciales (supongo que de los dueños). Además, hizo que me acordara de esta otra puerta que fotografié hace ya varios años.

Hash Code 2017

I participated yesterday in a team coding competition, Hash Code 2017. Teams were 2 to 4 people and, rather conveniently, it was possible to participate online (although it would have probably been a bit more fun to attend a nearby hub). I asked a few guys at work, but they all were busy for different reasons. In the end, I teamed up with an ex-colleague who does not even live in Berlin and decided that remote collaboration with Google Drive and Skype would have to be ok. However, a couple of minutes into the challenge, he got a work related call and had to drop the challenge. I don´t think he even finished reading it!

I decided to press on alone and spent the next four hours trying not to end with a blank score. The challenge was about optimizing cache servers for YouTube. Cache servers are constrained by size but offer smaller latency times than far away data servers. The question is which videos to store in each cache server based on expected usage.

I started working on the code to read the data in and after that, I went to the chapter on optimization of my dearest Python book. I noticed today that I should have searched online for this (as rather predictable it was available in MITOCW), but I simply copied the code from the book and modified it to fit my input. In my case, for each cache server there is a loop going through all the requests and endpoints. With the knapsack problem model in mind, the value is the number of times a video is called times the latency saving, the weight is the size of the video and the constraint is the server size. Unfortunately I did not do any early submissions to check which option would give me a better score (value, weight or density). I went for density but I just checked now and I should have gone for value (that alone would have given me an extra hundred positions in the scoreboard, i.e. out of the very deep bottom up into the deep bottom). Whatever, by the time I was there I was at least happy to have something to submit. My computer slowly cranked up through the next problem set, but I had not had time to do any data exploration, so I pretty much blindly fed it into the algorithm. With a bigger team, I think we could have explored other options. Maybe next time. The computer somehow managed to finish the second problem set (out of four) at 22:29 but I could not make it to the submission as the deadline was at 22:30!. Final rush but unlike in the films, I missed it by a couple of seconds.

The chart below shows endpoints to the left and cache servers and data center to the right. As it can be seen, the algorithm I used did not really capture well many of the videos requested and three cache servers did not even get populated (they actually did but the list of videos was duplicated with other servers linked to the same endpoints, as this kind of finesse was not considered in my code). All in all, with a bit more time, there are a couple of tweaks which I could have done for a better solution, but the challenge was never meant for a single person!

So, summary line, really good fun and a lot left to learn!

Aulas de Lengua y Cultura Españolas 2017

Las Aulas de Lengua y Cultura Españolas ofrecen clases complementarias de lengua materna a aquellos alumnos cuya nacionalidad o la de sus padres es o haya sido la española. Para el curso 2017-2018 el plazo de matrícula es del 6 de febrero al 24 de marzo de 2017 (la fecha límite se ha adelantado comparada con la del año pasado).

Toda la información se puede obtener aquí. Al igual que en años pasados (2015 y 2016) he hecho un mapa interactivo con la lista de escuelas. De nuevo, varias escuelas han cambiado de ubicación y algunas han desaparecido. Sin embargo hay aulas nuevas en ciudades donde antes no había, como la de Leipzig.

Es importante difundir lo más posible los plazos de matrícula, y recordad que puede abrirse una nueva aula a partir de 14 inscripciones. Los detalles están en el Artículo 18 del BOE-A-2010-18555

• Hoja informativa 2017-2018 / Infoblatt
• Relación de aulas del presente curso
• Impreso de solicitud de continuidad
• Impreso de solicitud de nueva inscripción

La distribución de las aulas, lógicamente, está relacionada con la presencia de españoles en Alemania.

Against all odds

I spent more time than I would have liked to in several airports last week. Paper books are quickly becoming a rarity. And people reading on electronic devices don´t seem to show the same level of concentration. Right after I took this photo, another lady took the empty seat next to me. She was reading something on her iPad and, at short intervals, having a whatsapp conversation. Not quite the same.