and again

Lake Lugano

Cassis

port-pin and port-miou

apero after another beautiful day in the calanques of Marseille Vert

Les calanques de Marseille (Sugiton)

Festival de théâtre de rue d'Aurillac

Walking by St Malo

Painting the sky

Les gougins, france.

Feeding horses in les gougins

Out of Nowhere on the roof of the hotel in Barcelona

the hotel offers free water bottles all day long, for Nowhere people, this is paradise.

Lugano estival Jazz, view from an art gallery

Baignade au bord du lac, Cassarate

First water paintings

Le Rozel - La Hague - Cotentin

Cédric, 11 ans

We make Love, Gold, Fire, Fly in Time and Space !

Celebration

Teaching software engineering under the Sun

The weather was so nice we decided to have the class outside, we spoke for 1 hour of deployment of Ruby On Rails applications and the differences between development and production modes and discussed the students projects. Without computers, neither slides. Then we came back in to look at the status of their projects, debug some code and look at some documentation.

David Parnas and Mehdi Jazayeri

That was the end of a week of lectures by David Parnas who received an honorary PhD from our university. Mehdi gives him the last presents, the usual USI cap and a plate with some inscription about the degree :)

Is blog social software?

I have been at the csoa molino this saturday, the band circo abusivo was playing, it was quite an experience. The name comes from their interest in the concept of circus, traveling craziness, and the eye symbol from a friend of them belly dancer... The coincidence was too obvious not to write about it, I have been painting eyes recently and read a book by Paolo Coelho on the sorceress of Portobello who enters in trance by dancing, the one who sent me the book does a thesis on circus, fair grounds and mary go rounds in the digital age. Their music is indeed quite moving, I danced for hours. I look forward to the concert next week by Ciuciakamarononè.

Qu'est ce que c'est? C'est un oeil.

Pourtant

Recent events

Thesis design.

Painting at Mircea's and Jeff's place.

Education

"Notre jeunesse est mal élevée, elle se moque de l'autorité et n'a aucune espèce de respect envers les anciens. Nos enfants aujourd'hui ne se lèvent pas quand un vieillard entre dans une pièce, ils répondent à leurs parents et bavardent au lieu de travailler"

Socrate

Thanks to Elodie who sent me this quote

I found the problem!

Didn't someone say that abstraction is the key? I found that one in the street last week before my drawing class...

Divertimento :)

We are the 24th February, I didn't post anything since January. Time flies. Yesterday, I went to a Jazz concert given at the Café Olimpia on Piazza della Riforma. I heard about it thanks to Giovanni who sent us an email about another concert listed on http://www.jazzy-jams.ch/. Otherwise, here are some of my recent paintings :

Contemplation

Digital and physical community cultural experience memory representation?

I watched Exils yesterday, recommended by Elisa. I was so enthusiastic about it I cut a sequence of it and posted it to youtube, first time, quite an experiment :-)

A 90s sequence from the French movie Exils , written and directed by Tony Gatlif with Romain Duris as Zano and Lubna Azabal as Naima. Zano and Naima decided to travel from Paris to Algeria to find their family roots. They walked, took the train, the bus, the ferry, crossed borders illegally to reach this moment.

Painting via Muggina

How I see it

Painting Notebook

Morning chocolate with lake view

Morning thought

The painting is from the Lascaux cave, 16000 years old.

Week end in Caen

I spent the last week end of my vacation in my university town, Caen. I played chess next to the fire with Cyril while eating home made blackberry jam with toast bred. I then stayed at Gaspard and Elodie's place. We went into a cooking frenzy. Each of us cooked an evening. In time ordering :

• Tagine au boudin noir. (Gaspard)
• Fried fish with rice and steamed vegetables. (Elodie)
• Omelette portuguaise. (Cédric)

You can vote for your favorite dish by commenting on this post... Or visit the blog of the two other competitors, propscope.

Many eyes

Logging activity on sailing boats

I visited Kalibee today and had lunch with two of the people who work there. Kalibee is a small french company based in Caen who develop an interesting concept for sailing boats. Their product, tinycoach, is a device which logs all the information such as the wind, the GPS position or anything else monitored on a sailing boat during competition. We discussed together with Cyril how they collect data over the internet and played around with some of the devices they designed. I remember when we first spoke about this at the beginning of their project some years ago. I was happy to see that they are still developping and experimenting.

Lost at Sea.

Astrology

Aries

Taurus

Gemini

Cancer

Leo

Virgo

Libra

Scorpio

Sagittarius

Capricorn

Aquarius

Pisces

Torigny sur Vire

Walking in Cherbourg

A hand on the harbour

A woman in the garden.

We come from Mars

Martian Reflection

The Gift of Freedom.

What is it?

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

Jean Piaget

There's no time for angels, only questions.

1 connection between Jim Jarmusch and me

Mehdi, who organizes film festivals and is a student in Master TEC-CH, here stands with me in front of a photo of him and Jim Jarmusch, a director I respect a lot (he directed Dead Man, for instance).

Navigation devices

I currently use 2 notebooks and a pen. The first notebook is a Moleskine calendar composed of a page per week. This is write I write lists of things To Do. The second one is a Moleskine of 192 white pages. I write text in there about what To Think. My next step is to have only one white pages notebook.

Les ailes brisées, chagrin, Khalil Gibran, 1912

Cette année-là, je naquis à nouveau et tant qu'une personne n'est pas née une seconde fois, sa vie demeure une page blanche dans le livre de l'existence. Cette année-là, j'ai vu les anges des cieux me regarder à travers les yeux d'une belle femme. J'ai vu aussi les diables de l'enfer tempester dans le coeur d'un homme méchant. Celui qui ne voit pas les anges et les démons dans la beauté et la malice de la vie restera éloigné de la connaissance, et son âme sera dépourvue de tout sentiment.

LetterToGoogle

Dear Google, for this end of the calendar I would like to receive,

• A google radio where I could play randomly any song on earth and store my favorites.
• A button in Picasa "blog this" which would create a new post in my blogger account with an image or add the image to the one I am currently editing.
• A world wide google wifi internet.
• A scientific bibliography manager integrated with google docs and google scholar.
• A latex import/export in google docs.
• A function to import posts from my old wordpress blog into blogger.

Thank You, I might send you more letters. Cédric.

Burning together

Interviewing Mauro Pezzè

Today I interviewed Mauro Pezze about his experience in Software Engineering. After explaining my goal (work on epistemology of Software Engineering), he directly asked the right question "Why is it important? Does it matter?" To which I answered using the example of Charles Darwin who discovered serendipitously the theory of evolution by asking himself "What is it we are studying?" from within the taxonomy field. Obviously I don't have the ambition to make such finding, I just put myself in a serendipitous context. We then discussed the nature of SE, is it a science, an art, engineering? Is Computer Science Science? as Peter J. Denning put it. Well these seem to be irrelevant questions, from a philosophical stand point. Why, because you can not answer, who knows if computer science is science or not, is this an epistemological question? Almost. What is Software Engineering? What is Computer Science? How does Software Engineering relate with the rest of the world? These are epistemological questions which are not new, the first occurrence seems to be the NATO report from 1968. Let's go back to the discussion. From Mauro's point of view, a pragmatic answer to what is software engineering is "building software" and how to use tools such as mathematics towards this goal. The follow-up question is then "What is software?" "Is it just a program?" , we agreed that a program is what is run on a machine, such as a Turing Machine. Is that what is software, software in his opinion is much more, it is the program and the requirements, the documentation, the process of building it, the usage of it. What would Turing think about this? He probably would not care.

Mauro Pezzè studied Computer Science in Pisa and did his master at Olivetti in telecommunication to go back to Academia he started a Phd in 1986 in Politecnico di Milano under the direction of Carlo Ghezzi. He focused during his PhD on the representation of time information in Petri nets his main contributions was the definition of strong and weak time semantics to assess the reachability within the model, research which lead to model-checking. He then worked on flexible semantics, which question is how to represent formal semantics and keep the ability to change the semantics of the model.

I asked about the main articulation or revolutions in his opinion in the software Engineering field. The concept of Software Architecture and Object Orientation seemed to be two major events. He pointed me to a paper from David Parnas in 72 about Object Orientation and a paper from Alexander Wolf and Paola Inverardi on "Formal Specification and Analysis of Software Architectures Using the Chemical Abstract Machine Model". The 5 top people in Software Engineering in Mauro's opinion are:

• David Parnas
• Carlo Ghezzi
• David Notkin
• Lee Osterweil
• Jeff Kramer with the fact that the fifth was difficult to choose as there are many others.

So what is Software Engineering? Mauro sees it as a trade off. It is not about improving the efficiency of one algorithm by 0.2%, it is to propose real life solutions to problems, possibly a set of solutions and implement it. We briefly discussed Model driven SE, which seems to be the current buzzword. The main goal of model driven SE is to reduce the amount of programming, reducing the amount of bugs introduced by humans. We then discussed how and what I should write in the paper for the ICSE doctoral symposium.

Interviewing Carlo Ghezzi

Wednesday 5th December, I interviewed Carlo Ghezzi about his opinion on Software Engineering. I first explain the goal of the discussion. I am questioning about the nature of Software Engineering. The first answer of Carlo was to point to the book he has written together with Mehdi Jazayeri, my advisor, and Dino Mandrioli, "Fundamentals of Software Engineering". So it is "where" to find definitions, which I will do soon. We discussed the history of SE. The first appearance of the term is in the report on the NATO conference on Software Engineering from 1968. The first ICSE conference (International Conference on Software Engineering) took place in 1970. Carlo Ghezzi went for the first time to ICSE in 76 in San francisco where he met with Mehdi, at the time they were both assistant Professors, Carlo was specialized in programming languages with the goal to facilitate the production of reliable software, the inspiration from the Ada language from 78 lead him to write a paper in TSE in 1990 about extensions to the Pascal language. Coming back to our question, Carlo defines SE as "a systematic approach to produce quality software" which is in my opinion a clear engineering definition. The question of what is software is still pending. We spoke of the principles to develop software, basically in Carlo's opinion, there are two main abstractions in SE, the processes and products. Then there is a variety of activities on these abstractions, such as understanding, reasoning, designing, implementing, testing, validating, evolving, maintaining, observing... The traditional development cycles implies an order in the realization of these activities, such as in the waterfall model and its derivatives. According to Carlo, innovation in sequential development methods does not work. The agile methodology, fast prototyping, extreme programing are cycles which allow more innovation, more like hacking.

Today, Carlo researches on self organized software architecture to respond dynamically to request for changes and stay dependable and reliable. The difficulty in SE has always been to combine the software quality attributes : flexibility, dependability, reliability, efficiency, security, safety... The main activities of Carlo are now the management and research within European projects, teaching software development and engineering, coordinating the evaluation of research in politechnico di Milano. We came to the end of the discussion, so I asked "Who are in your opinion the 5 top people in Software engineering?", now I realize I should also have asked about the main events, anyway here is the list that Carlo listed :

• Mehdi Jazayeri and Mauro Pezze, here in Lugano
• David Parnas
• Lee Osterweil
• Lori Clark
• Bertrand Meyer
• Dick Taylor
• Michael Jackson
• Jeff Kramer
• Barry Boehm
• David Notkin.

Interesting to notice that when you ask for 5, people give you ten, if you ask for ten they give you nothing. Carlo asked me "Why are you doing this?" to which I answered that I want to work on the epistemology of Software Engineering in my PhD dissertation, and why, because I started to use computers when I was a kid, I want to understand why, to get out of this box I put myself into.

Painting for St Nicolas at Nikos

Thanks to Nikos for taking the picture :-)

What are the Human Rights?

Yesterday, I ended the anniversary of the declaration of human rights at Stefano's place where I met Nikki. We spoke of travel, boats, forge, axes and swords, dragons of comodore, the azores islands, the south pole. I painted Fortuna and gave it to Nikki, I also received many presents, it was Christmas before Christmas.

Before I went to a talk at the university given by Amine Sidhoum who spoke about his experience in Algeria and the current difficulties with the system. The human Rights are clearly not respected there as they are not anymore in many places. What can we do about it? Write. So be it. I ask you the question which you must never stop asking yourself. What are the Human Rights? Do you prefer to see what happens when you do not respect Nature anymore?

Fire

Recent times

This afternoon I painted the cross above. It symbolizes the connection or passage between earth and the sky, the Key. I had promised to Stephan yesterday I would do a painting on canvas today.

I was at Stephan's place taking pictures of Ticinese symbols, sequoia pines and Stephan behind UBS' boat.

We asked the fate, the alchimist came out with the 32 number, we drew a square and spread our objects on it. It was Stephan's Birthday.

We looked at his paintings, which contain lost of symbolism too. We painted a volcano. Thank you Stephan.

Before I went to the Tra, in which I gave a small painting to the bar, there was a concert of good folklore music.

I started the evening with a Tino pizza at Tino.

What is a program?

Program Name	Output(an index, the tape)
Input( a index, the tape)	Codex

What is an Abstraction?

Name	Icons
Symbols	Index

The key to computing

Teaching Software Engineering

Operations on binary numbers

- What is an abstraction? draw me an abstraction. Let us look at Daniel Jackson's book, "Software Abstraction" The only useful piece of text I read in this book is the last paragraph of the introduction or was it forewords :

"That is why I have chosen the title Software Abstractions for this book. The lure of coding, and pressure to deliver elaborate features on short schedules, often draw programmers away from designing abstractions to coping with the intricacies of transient technologies, and to inventing clever tricks to overcome their limitations. If we focused instead on the underlying concepts, and struggled not for small performance gains or ever more complex features, but for simplicity and clarity, our software would be more powerful, more dependable, and more enjoyable to use. Like the best artifacts of civil and mechanical engineering, the best software systems would be a marriage of utility and beauty. And as software designers, we'd have more fun: we'd spend less time working around basic structural flaws in our software, and our ideas would have more lasting impact."

I draw an unbalanced cross on the paper. What is it? that's a table... Symbols, icons, index. Can I have a concrete example? Yes. I make a table for the addition on binary numbers. This is your exercise, now you have to fill in the index.

+	0	1
0
1

Addition on binary numbers is that a logic "or"? I don't know. Where can I find out? Good question! Is it in the book? No, I didn't find it in the Algorithms and data structure book. Look at wikipedia then. Make the other operations. He makes multiplication. Should I make the other operations? What else do you have to do? Subtraction and division. Then do it. Is that to understand the abstraction or the operation? Both. Now let's count. Let's execute a list of programs. 1+1? 1+2? 3+7? 5*6? 12/4? 9-6? So what do I do? You execute these programs by using the algorithms you drew. An algorithm is an abstraction. How do you write a number in binary? 1, 7, 5, 3. Okay now let's make 5 * 6 ? So 101 * 110 ? Can you compute it? we go back to primary school :-) What is it to compute? To think like a computer. We count in base 10, computer count in base 2.

Operations on abstractions.

So what is an abstraction? What is the data structure of the algorithms we drew before? A table? A table is what we eat on. Yes, so we call that an array. A two dimensional array. This is abstraction. What are the operations? add, remove for + and -. * and / I don't know. All right let's create an array. What can we do in it? Set numbers to each case, erase a case, change the value in a case. So create, set, get, erase. The 4 operations. I don't know what to do. You have to write the pseudo code. What is it pseudo code? You have to program on the machine. What is a program? It is an abstraction. What is an abstraction? A table. The operation in the first case, Input on a side, output on another and the program in the index. It looks like that:

Operation	Output
Input	The program in pseudo-code

How to write pseudo-code? You have to write in english what to do to execute the operation.

create	a position in memory
size	program?

He wrote :

We define space in memory as a structure that will store data in an index based system, like little boxes one beside the other, each box can contain whatever element string, int, object.

... I wrote the code:

create	a position in memory
size, type of element	allocate a free space in memory of size (size * size of type of element). return the address of the beginning of this space.

All right, now write the other operations in abstractions.

Perfect Communication

Point of views on doing PhD research

Butterfly on Fire - Roses of Europe & Cross

Things are created in the violence of fire

Diner at Tino

Yesterday I had a very good and enjoyable diner in a restaurant I had never been to and which was, obviously right in front of my eyes and close to my flat. I went there with Vova, an Ukrainian friend. We had planned to go to La posta but it was closed (it is closed on Wednesdays). I recommend the pizza la specialità and a glass of red wine, merlot del ticino. For desert, I took a tartuffo which reminded me of a french desert, mystère, which I was having quite often in the créperie of my parents when I was a kid. The waiters and cooks were really friendly. Looking at the cooks preparing the tagliatelle for tomorrow felt like being within a family. I can only tell you to go experience by yourself. here is the address :

Ristorante Pizzeria TINO
Via Lugi Taddei 1
6962 Viganello
Tel: +41 91 972 80 60

Nepomuk STC meeting in Lausanne

I never loved, I love you, I am afraid to love you

Gunnar's birthday - Sagittarian freesbee

Créer c'est résister - A la station dimanche dernier

Résister en famille

La Libellule Révolutionnaire, 198-

Notebook painting

Résister, c'est créer - Au petit Parapluie

Voyager, c'est resister

La solution, greve des guichets, trains gratuits.

Angels

There is a silver bullet.

This article is not finished yet.

Who, Where, What am I?

I am Cédric Mesnage. I was born in Cherbourg the 7th April 1980. My Parents had an Art Gallery at the time, my mother was teaching Art in a technical high school and my father worked in a bank, insurance companies and real estate. When I was one year old they started a Créperie, la créperie du port, right in front of the harbor. When I was 7, I received my first computer, an Amstrad cpc 6128 and my parents opened a sportswear shop in which they worked until 2 or 3 years ago. I was already programming and painting, creation activities. Now they have a woman cloth shop named Teranga, still in Cherbourg. I moved to Switzerland, Lugano to finish my studies. What am I doing here? A PhD in Informatics. Quite unusual for someone who spend most of its time painting, feeling and thinking of old mythology, looking for profound and abstract meaning in life. I am sitting in my office as depicted in the picture, with Sasa, Navid and Edgar who's not on the picture. The office is full of my recent paintings. The green one (Many Eyes) just behind me was done the 13th September, 2 months ago. I produced and evolved so much since then. Since I left France I have been analyzing myself, quite like a psychoanalysis, without the psychoanalyst. I destroyed the walls I created around me to protect myself, involving in this inquiry the people around me, not always in a good way. I am learning. Why do I write now? I feel the need to explain myself, with me and with you. As what I started is coming back to me, through many ways. I was wrong in my last article (processes), I didn't look at all the point of views. I contradicted myself. We need to look on the bright side. We can choose to look on the bright side. And yet I wrote this :

Living on the paradox, that's what we do. What is Art? Transcribing the paradox. When you find the paradox, open the door and step in. I want to be free and I love women. There is no such thing as marriage for me. I want to be free and people do bad things. There is no such thing as Justice. I want to be free using my software and my needs change with time. There is no silver bullet. I want to be free and write a good thesis. There is no question.

There is a Silver Bullet. There is Marriage. There is Justice. There is a Question. There is Love. And that's what I want to speak about. How? I don't really know. I am experimenting with discussing as Socrates did. Asking questions to people, asking the right questions, listen to them, to their point of views, to my point of view, show them and show myself how things are simple once you synthesize them. And to communicate this understanding I get, the only way is to speak through experiences, to show things from my subjective point of view, the most honestly and respectfully I can.

There is a silver bullet

As a reference to the article of Fred Brooks from 1986, which I am browsing right now for the first time. How imprecise I have been, not reading the most important papers of software engineering until now. It is never too late. And I should also look at his latest works. Let us quote this article. He analyzes the "nature of the software problem and the properties of the bullets proposed" to show "why" improvements in "productivity, in reliability, in simplicity" are so difficult. He mentions that "skepticism is not pessimism" and that "there is no royal road, but there is a road", statements which I agree with. But the influence of looking at software engineering from his point of view results in an incredible pessimism of the whole profession at every level, from the maintenance person who answer hotline calls, to the developers, the architects, the analysts, creating great money in the market for management people. Brooks says, speaking of the difficulties of our technology :

Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence, the difficulties inherent in the nature of software, and accidents, those difficulties that today attend its production but are not inherent.

I follow Plato, therefore I ask questions. So what are speaking about here? The nature of software engineering. What is the nature of Software engineering? I am not afraid to say that it is time for software engineering to start a serious epistemology of itself. What is it, epistemology? The oxford dictionary definition contains :

Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

What does that mean? I will certainly explain myself more in the methodology section of my dissertation, simply put, in the divided line concept of Plato, the opinion is what you perceive through the light of the Sun, when the beliefs are what is actually existing which is in the light of the Sun. Leading then to the intellect world, which is divided in the same way between the sphere of understanding and the world of ideas. One can find more in Plato's Republic. So how do we distinguish between justified belief and opinion? First of all you need to look at every side, every opinion in order to reveal truth about the nature of what is studied. This is the main principle of the dialectic method and the concept of dialogue, central to philosophy. Now you tell me, there is a philosophy of computer science, made by philosophers. But a true epistemology is reflexive. Meaning that it should be done from within, that the very people who are think are knowledgeable about software engineering need to interrogate themselves about what we are doing, as Darwin did for taxonomy which lead to the theory of evolution. Isn't that a silver bullet? Yes and no. As there is much more to understand about life.

What are we doing in Software Engineering?

The socratic method involves asking questions to people. To whom? Interviewing people, I started in the Nepomuk European project... Jeff Kramer started with a question, he asks

is abstraction the key to computing?

To continue, I'll keep editing this article until it is finished.

References

• Alan Turing wikipedia page.
• "No Silver Bullet - essence and accidents of software engineering" by Fred Brooks in 1986
• Plato's Republic wikipedia page.
• Is abstraction the key to computing?, Jeff Kramer, Communications of the ACM, Volume 50 , Issue 4 (April 2007), Pages: 36 - 42.
• "The NEPOMUK Project - On the way to the Social Semantic Desktop", Proceedings of I-Semantics' 07, : pp. 201-211, by Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Knud Moeller, Gunnar Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Enrico Minack, Cedric Mesnage, Mehdi Jazayeri, Gerald Reif and Rosa Gudjonsdottir.

2 paintings for 3 glass of red wine

Pour estella

Pour Monica

The painting on the bar.

Painting at an engagement party.

Photos by Sarah and her boyfriend.

And the result.

Serena and Thomas.

The marriage of Mars and Moon, Fire and Water, Heaven and Hell.

Processes

The Love Factory is still in Dublin, on the move today to another place in Ireland which name is still forgotten. God I need a new digital camera. I have been rethinking my bag recently, to make it more efficient. What do I really need? Painting material, Digital camera, my nokia, my ipod, pens, notebooks and don't forget the tobacco. The painting material is now composed of 5 tubes of color. Red, yellow, blue, black and white. I should move to 6, 2 tubes of white would never be too much. A painting knife, a tape of sticky paper to create margins and structures, a pencil to paint symbols, scissors... And carton canvases. I need to buy a lot of them :-) I am listening to the new album of Led zeppelin. The mothership. The song remains the same and indeed it makes sense and does not matter. As in any process, the sequence of the 3 things does not matter. Even the numbers do not matter, it depends at which level of abstraction you feel more comfortable. What is this article about, oh yes, processes. Let me roll a cigarette from outer space.

Done. I now take my pocket weekly notebook. I need to buy a notebook of the same size for longer notes. Does size matter? Yes and no. In painting, I have been searching long time for the right size, my mother always asked me : "What size is it?". Now I know it does not matter. Same thing with signing. Do I need to sign paintings? The one I finished this morning, displayed here, is not signed. The one from the day before, I signed it and then, oh sacrilege! I changed it after signing, a lot. The first painting of the Love Factory, which I did the 13th is not signed. What does that tell me? I went further than signing, it is not important anymore. What about the size? neither it is. You create with what you have, the settings are always different. A whole lotta Love. I want to give you my Love. Oh! As in writing usage scenarios in a European project. A sentence from Rosa: "we describe the feeling of something happening" and as in anything, the explanation comes afterwards. Why? This question is a question of the future. You explain, combine, assemble the past by answering why something happened. What is the present, How, the past. What is my question? my research question? for my thesis?

Last Saturday I wrote the first page of my thesis, at the time I entitled it : "Teaching How to Teach Yourself". Is that good? Yes and no. What does that mean? Well How is a typical computer science question. And in software engineering, the main ability you need is teaching yourself. The settings change so fast, new programming languages, new frameworks, new projects. Always need to learn. Difference between learning and teaching, well it only depends where you position yourself. I consider to be always teaching and learning during fruitful discussions. As in the one of yesterday. A What question? That's where I am heading to right now. To figure out what it is I am questioning about. I got a clue by discussing the state of the industry of software maintenance and development with Clement the flatmate of Thomas. Clement is a french friend from Biarritz. He works in a large software company here in Dublin. He just comes back from vacation in Thailand and plans his next trips to Rome, Amsterdam and la Bretagne for the new year's eve. We spent the evening together with Pyer, a friend from high school who when he came to Lugano in September was coming back from a year of traveling in Asia, China, Mongolia and many other places.

Fellow travelers. Immigrant song. We are nomads. Traveling, what is that? Finding a process, connect people, learn, discuss, adapt, discover, who am I? Who are You? What do I need in my bag? Stones, jewels, paper, a razor, a tooth brush and a piece of soap. And or Or? And and Or? What is the question? To be or not to be, that was the question of Shakespear. What is mine? Now for my thesis? What is it I spent the most time doing? Working in the Nepomuk European project. Analyzing the methodology of developing systems. Is that it? Yes and no. In Nepomuk I recently conducted developers interviews, when months before I attended to Rosa's interviews of users, clients. Who are our clients in the project? Hewlett packard, IBM, SAP, Mandriva, the institut Pasteur, the PRC group. Who are the developers? NUIG in galway, FZI, L3S, DFKI in germany, EPFL in Switzerland. Who are the architects? myself at USI and Gerald in UNIZH in Switzerland, Tudor and Siegfried at NUIG and Gunnar at DFKI. Am I writing this article about Nepomuk? Yes and no. It is so cold here in Ireland. The sky is all gray, reminds me of the town where I was born, cherbourg, the sea.

So what is it I am doing? A methodology to analyze the system development methods? An Analysis of the System Development Methodology? System Methodology Discussion? It is not an analysis, I use the dialectic method of Socrates, asking questions, looking precisely to different point of views to synthesize the truth? What is the truth? Ther is no method? Plato's truth in the Republic where he analyzes the nature of Justice, there is no Justice, each point of view is right and they all contradict themselves. Living on the paradox, that's what we do. What is Art? Transcribing the paradox. When you find the paradox, open the door and step in. I want to be free and I love women. There is no such thing as marriage for me. I want to be free and people do bad things. There is no such thing as Justice. I want to be free using my software and my needs change with time. There is no silver bullet. I want to be free and write a good thesis. There is no question.

The last paragraph is certainly a synthesis of the discussion so far. I have so much more to say though. The Painting process is a 2 side cycle in which you must do in whichever order construct, uniform, assemble and destroy, differentiate, divide. Is that the painting process or the creation process? I am quite confident you can apply this to many domains. Software development? For sure. Oh I have drawn a cycle for Nepomuk. It was a what cycle, I'll do a how cycle soon. And speaking with Clement I understood the cycle in industry is the same, they listen to customer request by answering calls on the hotline, what they call level 1 in terms of job; figure out processes to solve the customer's requests, that's what they call level 2; creating. adding functionalities, deciding, they call level 3. The other side, the development side of the cycle, I don't know yet, but I believe there are 3 levels of abstraction understanding and learning abilities. Interviewing people, that's what I do. Transcribing reality. It makes me wonder, there is a feeling I get. Led Zeppelin, the mothership has landed, the 10th December in London. I want to be there, that's where I am going now, and it does not matter if I go or not as the road my change. Who am I looking for? The painting from yesterday told me a Libra. Enjoy! Thanks for reading, thanks for sharing. I found what I'll offer to Thomas. A pipe I took from home. oh Woman, Climb the stairway to Heaven! Heaven and Hell. It depends how you look at it. Always look on the bright side of Life.

When I was

I was a kid, dreaming of being a prince from outer space,
What have I become?
Am I still dreaming the same? Yes.
Walk your way, climb the stairs, looking for what you were,
for what you knew, for what was told.
And together, we will go home.

The Love Factory is in Dublin

Painting in the notebook with Sarah, 11th November

Love Factory advertisement

Invent a bicycle for me.

to create the Love Factory

Jump in the Fire.

Me and Me.

Many questions

What am I looking at?

Taurus and Cancer

Painting on my way...

We are Angels.

Create Me.

Recent paintings

Here are two pictures of paintings I did this week end. I need to take better shots, in the mean time, here they are.

Your Love, 12th October 2007.

I Love Myself, 14th October 2007.

Le vent.

Je marche, Je cours, Je vole et Je coule.

Je suis Toi.

Mon Père, Ma Mère, amis, ennemis;

Je suis Vous, fou, fou de vous.

A Ma Haine, A Ta Joie, A Nos Peurs, A Vos Peines,

A Leur Souffrance

Je Te vois, Je Te dis, C'est fini.

Tout ira bien, Nous sommes avec Toi.

Je cris, A l'aide, A l'aide, Entendez, Entends-tu.

Je suis là, Je suis Moi, infini, invisible.

Je suis Un, Je suis Nous, vois-Tu, Tu es là.

Aveugle, Je serais, J'étais, Ici avec Toi, Je vois.

A la Mer, A la Terre, Aux Cieux, Aux Enfers,

Allons-y, Devenons.

Lake painting.

The Moon loves the tide; with the Sun, she shines.

I looked at Her to see the journey We take, the mirror I make.

I saw us; in your tears, the stars won't leave.

We shine.

Written with Tomas.

You and Me.

I Love You.

It is time. Daemons are flying back.

They are dancing in our Art.

Waiting for us to reveal them.

Angels are coming. It is time.

Burning Heart.

I feel European. I am human. I was born in France. For my daily work, I travel around Europe, was in Germany last week, in Sweden 2 weeks ago and will be in Ireland in 2 weeks. For my private life, I enjoy Italy, was in Rome 3 week ends ago, in Aosta and Torino 2 week ends ago, was in Vienna 4 weeks ago for the birthday of a friend and co-researcher, and will be in Berlin, Dresden and Halle in Germany in a month or so. My advisor is originally from Iran, lived in the United States, Italy and Austria and today is the dean of my faculty, here. My office mates are from Iran, Serbia and Croatia. I go for lunch with Germans, Australians, Italians, Russians, Brazilians, Polish, Americans, Canadians, Israelis, New-zealanders ... Last evening We enjoyed the food Christina cooked for us, Ukrainians, Finish, Estonians and French. We spent a gracious morning speaking to ourselves together with Steffi. French and East Germans enjoying together to speak about their History and sharing life. We walked out. The sun was struggling under a cloudy sky.

Do you understand how it is painful for me to read your writing? To see this image of a burning European flag? All these memories we had turned into beauty, coming back from the darkness to invade my freedom. Don't you remember, we were divided. Don't you remember we suffered. Why Switzerland does not remember why we have built Europe. Why I don't want to see this flag burning in the very place where I set my home, where I feel European in the heart of Europe. Is that what politics has become? Why do you vote for anger?

Creation Loves You.

I Create Love.

The Leo.

Red Triangle.

Many Eyes.

Goddess offering a feather in a golden box.

Homme.

Deviens qui tu es. Soyons un.

Homme crée du merveilleux. Né de terre et d'eau, cousin d'air et de feu, est de toute chose. Enfant, Nature. Adulte; vole et se brûle; coule et se noie; courre et s'essouffle. Homme marche. Voyage; va d'idée en pensée, par montagne et océan, vents et lumières; révéler et écouter, autres hommes et vallées.

Homme aime. Souffrance est joie, rires sont pleurs. Sentir sa peau. Offre tout. Dansons nues, jeune et belle. Fumée bleue, rougie de plaisir, illumine. Partage le pain, prend sa main, embrasse.

Homme. Papillon enragé. Sous lune ensoleillée, respire et se nourrit. De pierre, des ruines construit. Océan de feu, souffle de terre. D'une brûlante fraîcheur, combat amis, aime ennemis. Sud nordique aux couchants aurores, Homme est merveilles.

Asseyons nous. Regardes les étoiles.

First Daemons.

Contact

if you want to leave your contact information, just drop a comment on this post, with a small description of yourself if I don't know you yet...

Cédric Mesnage

Email : cedric.mesnage@gmail.com

Tel : +41 77 44 14 928

Mail : Via Giuseppe Buffi 13, CH-6904 Lugano, Switzerland

Curriculum

Studies

• 2005-today Phd Student in Informatics under the direction of Mehdi Jazayeri, University of Lugano, Switzerland.
• 2005 Master in Algorithms and Models of Information, University of Caen, France.
• 2003 Bachelor in Computer Science, University of Caen, France.

Teaching

• 2006 Teaching Assistant for the course "Software Atelier IV" for second year students in the faculty of informatics of Lugano. In this course, we taught the ruby programming language, the ruby on rails web framework, some software and database design, javascript and other web technology.
• 2006 Teaching Assistant for the course "Algorithms and Data Structures" for second year students in the faculty of informatics of Lugano.
• 2005 TP/TD Algorithmic and C++ in the ESITC of CAEN

Projects

• Nepomuk, the Social Semantic Desktop, European project

Companies

• 2003 CEO of tty0, a company of software design; the main product was ttyDoc, a python/GTK documentation manager to maintain the center of documentation of the Conservatoire du Littoral de Caen.

Program Committees

• Majecstic 2007 (MAnifestation des JEunes Chercheurs en Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication), 29, 30 et 31 octobre 2007, Caen, France.
• SemDesk Design 2007, 1st Workshop on Architecture, Design, and Implementation of the Semantic Desktop @ ESWC2007 6th or 7th of June 2007, Innsbruck, Austria.
• SAAW2006 - 1st Semantic Authoring and Annotation Workshop co-located with the The 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2006) Athens, GA, USA, Monday, November 6th 2006.

Publications

This post collects my publications. It will be updated.

• A flexible integration framework for Semantic Web 2.0 applications. E. Oren, C. Mesnage, B. Heitmann, A. Haller, M. Hauswirth, and S. Decker, IEEE Software, Sep. 2007.
• The NEPOMUK Project -- On the way to the Social Semantic Desktop. Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Knud Möller, Gunnar Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Enrico Minack, Cedric Mesnage, Mehdi Jazayeri, Gerald Reif, Rosa Gudjonsdottir. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Semantic Technologies (I-SEMANTICS 2007), Graz, Austria, 2007.
• Extending Ruby on Rails for Semantic Web applications. C. Mesnage and E. Oren, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Engineering, Jul. 2007, Demo presentation.
• Collaboration on the Social Semantic Desktop. Gerald Reif, Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Cédric Mesnage, Mehdi Jazayeri and Rosa Gudjonsdottir, In UMICS 2007 (Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems), Jun. 2007.
• Specifying the Collaborative Tagging System. Cédric Mesnage and Mehdi Jazayeri, SAAW (2nd Semantic Annotation and Authoring Workshop) co-located with ISWC, November 2006.
• Towards Global Collaborative Tagging. Cédric Mesnage and Mehdi Jazayeri, Submitted to 'Mastering the Gap: From Information Extraction to Semantic Representation', April 2006.
• White Coats: Web-Visualization of Evolving Software in 3D. Cédric Mesnage and Michele Lanza, VISSOFT : IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis, September 2005.
• Interactive and Cooperative Visual Data Mining of Evolving Software, Cédric Mesnage, Master thesis, September 2005.