Introduction to Technology Thoughts Series

The travel blog I started back in Spring 2008 was in fact a coincidence. I bought the Sony Ericsson P1i smartphone at the time and it came with a native Blogger client app. It was not about any serious blogging though: the app was limited to entering a title, choosing a photo, adding a description and hitting the Publish button. I started using the app on the road as I was carrying the P1i everywhere and as an Ariba consultant, I was traveling quite a lot to different places around Europe.

I keep using the same schema since then to maintain what I would call a "travel log" - a stream of postcards from places I am vising. May be, one day in a distant future, over a cup of good coffee, I will be recalling my memories by scrolling through the travel blog and reminding myself of the past adventures. You know - these nostalgic moments. ;-)

Coming back to today and to all the hot stuff happening around me, I realized I feel an urgent need to start a real blog to capture my thoughts on my professional life at GoodData as well as technology related hobbies and interests like mobile devices which I follow for almost 15 years. Let's hope this blog to be a valuable addition to the blogosphere - both inspiring and sparking discussions in the target communities.

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Coasting Like a PRO

Roughly three months into driving 225xe, it seems about right time come back to revisit the initial impressions and see how the car fares in long-term usage. In this post, I want to focus on the 225xe driving modes of which the car offers aplenty. First, there are the three traditional BMW Driving Experience modes: COMFORT, SPORT, and ECO PRO, which come fitted on non-hybrid powertrains as well. Then there are the eDrive modes: AUTO eDrive, MAX eDrive, and SAVE BATTERY. To complicate this even further, moving the gear stick to the left at any time switches the automatic gearbox to the sports mode, so there are two gearbox modes: Drive and Sport/Manual which allows sequential gear shifts. So in theory, there are 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 combinations, in practice, some of the combinations are mutually exclusive, so it is not so extreme as it seems. What is apparent though is that BMW keeps adding new options while maintaining the legacy options as well without thinking about consolidation. This...

First Month of Active Touring

Putting my money where my mouth is, I took on the adventure of buying a plug-in hybrid. A few years back, I used to drive a car only for weekend getaways, so an SUV seemed to be a logical choice. At only fifteen thousand kilometers driven annually, the fuel economy was not a significant issue, the driving experience was the main thing. During the past few years with family and small kids, the car usage became more spread out throughout the week. With that said, I noticed we maintain two very distinct driving patterns: many short trips around Prague during the week to get kids to school and sports and then longer trips, roughly 100 miles each direction, during the weekends. With short distances and many cold starts due to the city driving on the workdays, the already poor fuel economy of an SUV deteriorated further. I realized when our car was up for renewal that it was almost as if we needed two different vehicles for two different use cases - an electric vehicle for city driving a...

Agile on Overdrive

It may sound old-fashioned and laughable these days when techniques like UML are so unsexy, but I can still remember the days back at IBM T.J. Watson in the early 2000's when we were working on a prototype of a new VoiceXML browser to inform IBM's standardization efforts in the space. (The language was supposed to be VoiceXML 3.0, and we abbreviated the research project to "V-3" - pronounced "fau drai" in reference to the German V-2 rocket .) We took VoiceXML 2.0 as a foundation but added full DOM and DOM Events support together with XForms as the data model representation. It was shortly after IBM's acquisition of Rational Software , so we took advantage of that deal and got our hands dirty with Rational Rose . While one of our colleagues kept pushing us to start coding and iterate towards the result in the agile fashion, given the incomplete specs and many open questions stemming from the combination of so many complex technologies in one piece...

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