Back from Malta

After a number of adventure- and/or conference trips, I decided to make a more ordinary vacation. Since the goal was to extend the summer a bit, we decided to travel in the first 2 September weeks (when German weather can already start to suck) and move to the southernmost country, which can be reached without many difficulties. Easy traveling for Europeans means to stay within the EU (and Euro zone), so the destination was chosen to be Malta.

I knew a bit about Malta from TV documentaries, and while reading the Wikipedia article a bit, I became even more curious.

Here are some facts I figured out. For pictures click on the Wikipedia links, they have higher quality than the ones from my crappy mobile.

• It was damn hot and humid. Not all people from the Northern countries can withstand that. I was happy to find out that after surviving 4 weeks in the monsoon season in Southern India, I'm more heat resistant than my Greek companion.
• It is indeed very stress-free because everyone speaks English (unlike in other Southern European countries) and the islands are small enough to reach practically every destination by bus. Just make sure you stay in the capital Valletta, almost all bus routes start there. On the smaller island Gozo, all busses start in Victoria.
  
• It has an extremely rich 7000 years old history. You can visit prehistoric temples (probably the oldest of their kind worldwide), churches, fortresses and remains from the Romans and Phoenicians. I already saw many churches from the inside before, I was not really a fan of Latin language and Roman history in school, and my companion didn't want to bother looking for sight seeing destinations at all. So I decided to concentrate on the prehistoric stuff.
  
• We saw the temples of Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra (both covered with giant protective tents now), Tarxien and Ġgantija. The latter ones were the most impressive, especially after we reached them after a long walk in the afternoon heat 20 minutes before the last admission :)
  
• The temples of Skorba are the oldest ones, but not very spectacular and not accessible for the public.
  
• No chance to get into the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni. It was booked out 4 weeks in advance. That sucked.
  
• If you like beaches, Malta is definitely not the #1 destination for you. There are just a few, a nice one we visited is Ramla Bay.
  
• If you like diving at cliffs, Malta is a paradise for you.
  
• Funny is the bit of British culture (Malta was British until 1964). People are driving on the left, you get chips with most meals, and the phone booths and mailboxes are red, like in the UK.
  
• Some Maltese people know more German soccer teams than me.
  

Shortly after coming back home, German weather started to suck.

Lessons from LAC

I was at the Linux Audio Conference in Parma/Italy. The weather sucked most of the time, but everything else was great. These are the most important things I learned:

Jack rules
Of course I already heard about the Jack sound system before. But since I never had a linux distribution, which installs jack by default, I didn't pay much attention to it.

If you go to the LAC, you start to think that there is hardly any audio architecture besides jack. After looking a bit into Jack (and writing gmerlin plugins for Jack audio I/O) I learned, that it's actually pretty cool. I like especially the way, you can connect arbitrary jack applications together while they are running. This is a nice feature for the gmerlin-visualizer since it relies on grabbing the audio stream from another application.

Ambisonics rocks
I also heard about Ambisonics before but mostly ignored it. If you read the Wikipedia article, you get the impression, that ambisonics is a quite exotic recording/playback technique, which is used only by a small group of enthusiasts.

If you go to LAC, you get the impression that Ambisonics is the standard and things like stereo or 5.1 are quite exotic recording/playback techniques, which are used only by a small group of enthusiasts.

Audio vs. video development
I told the audio developers that they don't know how lucky they are. They agreed on an audio capture/playback architecture (jack), they all use the same internal format (floating point, not interleaved) for processing and they manage to make a conference each year.

In the video area, things are much worse. Capture and playback APIs exist, but they are far too many. Some people do internal processing in RGB, others prefer Y'CbCr. Converting to a common internal format is not feasible because video has much higher data rates than audio and conversion overhead must always be minimized. Also the video developer community is very fragmented, centered around different frameworks (each one being the standard). Cross project communication is sparse. The only common code is ffmpeg for video en-/decoding, but mostly because nobody wants to reimplement such a beast.

Gmerlin development
I talked a lot with Richard Spindler from the openmovieeditor, which makes heavy use of gmerlin libraries. We agreed that our collaboration works quite well because the development activities of gmerlin and openmovieeditor are nicely decoupled. Let's proceed like we already did.

Back from California

My job sometimes requires me to attend international conferences and workshops. It's pretty exciting, but also very hard work. You have to prepare presentations, posters and articles for the conference digest. You must concentrate on others presentations (ignoring your jet lag) and the brain gets much more input per day than usual. Some people, who wish me a nice holiday before I leave, don't really know what this is about :)

This year, I had the honor to make a 2 weeks trip to Southern California, first to San Diego and then to Pasadena. It was my first visit to the US so here are some differences I noticed with respect to Old Europe. Of course these are highly subjective and based on what I saw in two weeks in just a tiny corner of a huge country.

Shops, Restaurants
If you are used to the unfriendlyness of German shop employees and waiters, you'll be positively surprised in the US. They always have some friendly words for you. They might not be serious with that, but they do it well enough so it works. This is definitely something, where Germans can learn from the US.

Public transport
As a resident of a big German city, I can live perfectly without owning a car. Of course people here always complain about the local trains being too expensive, finishing operation too early in the night etc. But this is still paradise compared the US. At the bus stops in San Diego I saw mostly people who didn't really look prosperous. It seems that everyone who can afford a car, buys one. For a reason.

International news
If you want to learn about a foreign society it's a good idea to watch their TV programs. I learned that American TV news (aside from being extremely hysteric) mostly deal with domestic issues. I talked to an American colleague about that. I was quite surprised that he told me exactly, what I already thought: Americans are self-centered. Maybe a bit of information about foreign countries and societies (especially the ones you plan to bomb) would make some things go more smoothly.

Freedom
Both Western European societies and the US appreciate personal freedom. But the definitions of freedom seem to be somewhat different. In Europe you can usually drink alcohol in public and on many beaches you can decide yourself how much you wear. Americans want to be able to buy firearms, drive big cars and put their dishes into the trashcan after eating. In Europe, I don't miss any of the American freedoms. Not sure about the vice versa.

Shows
Shows of any kind in the US have definitely another dimension. Germans seem to be way too modest to do something like the killer-whale show in the San Diego Seaworld or the shows in the Universal studios in Hollywood.