6. Jahrestagung DGSD

Since June 2012 blue elephant systems is member of the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für System Dynamics” (DGSD), German chapter of the “System Dynamics Society” (SDS), the institution for the advancement of the system dynamics methodology for modeling and simulation of complex dynamic systems. On the 21st to the 22nd of June 2012 the DGSD held its 6th yearly conference on system dynamics (SD) in Frankfurt Main in the rooms of the PA Consulting Group and I had been participating for the 2 days for the first time.

A series of presentations, mostly in the areas of business and jurisdiction showed applications of SD from purely qualitative to very data-centered quantitative models, from very high-level academic to pretty practical levels. For me the purpose was mainly learning about system dynamics, seeing practical SD models and their applications in various fields as well as getting contacts in the SD community. In that respect it was a very interesting and mind-opening event that got me started in modeling and simulation.
I am a the moment evaluating SD tools, from XJ Technologies AnyLogic, via Consideo MODELER to Vensim, so I also wanted to see what tools other people use. Apparently due to the excessive price of AnyLogic a lot of people use Vensim and Consideo, although those usability is not even remotely comparable to AnyLogic. Well we need to see how we can solve this problem.
As an interesting fact, I found out that the University of Stuttgart, with Prof. Dr. Meike Tilebein is very active in the field, whose doctor father is obviously the BWL Prof. Dr. E. Zahn. When I studied BWL as my minor field of study at university, Prof. Zahn had been my professor in Organization (in-depth elective).

I especially liked the openness of the SD people, it was obvious that they are happy of every new member that is deeply interested in system dynamics, and obviously blue elephant is bringing in a new application field where SD is not yet widely applied.

BarCamp Stuttgart 2011

I just a week ago got a tip from some ex-HP colleague that there is a yearly event of the local Web 2.0 scene here in Stuttgart, the Bar Camp Stuttgart (BCS4) for the forth time already. So this weekend from Friday to Monday the event took place in the Literaturhaus (Bosch Areal, MFG etc.) with main event days Saturday and Sunday (1.10/2.10). Unfortunately I could only attend on Sunday but still it has been an interesting experience. Dresscode relaxed of course, at the begin, after a gratis breakfast and a short introduction round for new attendents like me, the group of max 250 persons proposes sessions and plans the day on a board in front. Then one had the day over sessions in various rooms of the MFG as well as outdoor. That’s the sessions that I had attended:

  • Xing — how to use Xing in combi with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter for self-marketing
  • FAQ Existenzgründung
  • Stuttgarter Startup Szene — Networking
  • Deutschland den Geeks — political discussion about Pirate Party
  • Coworking

Unfortunately one could only attend one of the up to 8 parallel sessions, there were quite some interesting topics, sometimes far away from the actual topic of startups or Web 2.0, but everyone is free to propose a topic as long as it finds some interested people to attend.

The whole event was free, sponsored by MFG and others with optional sponsor tickets. Excellent catering framed the sessions. It was interesting to see how much potential for new startups and innovation ideas there is here in Stuttgart after all, although there were barely any potential founds in the FAQ session, only already-entrepreneurs. Obviously the climate for IT startups in Stuttgart is not as ideal as in other places like Berlin, although there is not some Coworking facilities, places like the IBH, where we had started and several events for new companies like this one.

So pretty interesting experience and I’ll sure attend next year’s BarCamp again. My page on Mixxt.

JUFS 2009

On 2nd of July this years’ Java User Forum Stuttgart took place at the conference center of the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, as usual organized by the Java User Group Stuttgart (JUGS). As any year, I joined together with some collegues from blue elephant systems GmbH: Georgios, Max, Stefan and Florian. All of us found that the sessions did not quite reach the level of the previous years, maybe because there were merely no gurus or experts from abroad participating in the event. Most presenters were mostly german or local consultants. This domination by consulting companies was also obvious in the exhibition floor, apart from one or two tool vendors already known from previous years.

Apart from a refresher on REST, Spring 3.0 and Eclipse 4 I found especially interesting a presentation os open-source single-sign-on solutions (SSO), especially CAS (and OpenSSO). Talking with some consultants at the end provided some interesting insight. I was especially eager to understand how to support single-sign-on solution in MIDAS in order to allow users logged-into other tools already (e.g. the HP OMU Java UI) to avoid a re-login into the MIDAS GUI given proper credentials. It looks like it does not make sense to integrate such a tool directly but rather be able to validate a SAML(2) token given by such a tool in order to accept a authentication. The only problem is of course that there is no standard backend for a ESB request-based authentication as MIDAS implements it (instead of web-container based authentication that obviously only works for web applications). We in MIDAS need to support also API and CLI clients of all sorts and not only web clients and thus cannot apply such simple scheme. Also there is no standard protocol or API between a PEP and the SSO server such that we could easily use a CAS for authentication itself.

Well so a, though not optimal, but still work-free and interesting day, meeting old HP-collegues etc. and finally with a very cute piano playerin in the evening.

Joel on Software

By case I just stepped over a interesting other blog called “Joel on Software” from Joel Spolsky. Bad that I only noticed that just now, not earlier as he seems to be a celebrity. I saw that they now print stuff from his blogs in a printed book, seems odd though. But the articles on his blog are quite interesting, check it out! 

The stuff with .Net is evil of course, use Java instead! 🙂