Diogo Gomes Blog

Today was a very important day, as I finally defended my Phd Thesis under the title “Resource Optimizations in Broadcast enabled Networks”.

I was probably a bit nervous as the defense was about the start, as shown in the above picture. The defense started with a 30 min delay, as one my jury member was held in traffic. But in 2h30m time I would be out of the room with boosting confidence levels, as I had finally successfully completed one my most important milestones.

Today I concluded a path, which started 5 years ago when I accepted the challenge of my supervisor to conduct research in an area that was then not very clear if it would become the next hit or flop in Telecom. Today we have very successful IPTV services and operators that cover several technologies (which include broadcast) under a single service platform.

I don’t think my research work in the area is done, far from that, I still believe much needs to be done and changed in the Telecom industry in order to survive in this century without becoming a fossil. But I leave all my new ideas to projects to come

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MTB and OpenStreetMaps

February 1, 2010

Although the weather wasn’t the most pleasing, I decided to get back to my MTB weekend rides. Today (as a warmup ride) my brother and I took an all road ride to Praia da Barra, that is approximately 15km away from Aveiro.

Since I haven’t done any exercise since summer, my legs are very sore (can’t wait for tomorrow, when they will feel completely numb). But hopefully I will be back in shape in no time, in order to start doing more appealing tracks offroad.

An interesting side effect of these bike rides is that I’m taking a GPS with me that enables me to log the track. This information is very useful for the OpenStreetMap Project that requires your GPS logs to build a free geographic data repository (resembling Google Maps and Bing Maps). I’ve already contributed to the project in the summer, mapping some streets in Aveiro, but lots of places are still missing information.

My challenge is for you to take your GPS along with you next time you go out and upload back your tracks into OpenStreetMap.

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OS X – basic apps

December 14, 2009

I recently got a new Macbook Pro, which means I also moved to Snow Leopard (not that I couldn’t have stayed with Leopard).

I keep a Time Machine backup, and could have used it to move all my files to the new system. But since I had to many things installed which I don’t use anymore, I decided to move just my personal settings to the new system.

This constituted a great opportunity to list the applications I consider essential:

1 Password
Adium
Flip4Mac
git
Growl
Handbrake
KisMAC
Freemind
MacPorts
NetNewsWire
Office 2008
Papers
Perian
Seashore
Skype
Telephone
VLC
VMWare Fusion
Wireshark
XCode

And had to leave GPGMail out (no snow leopard version currently available)

The question now is: What am I missing ?

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Back in Berlin

November 20, 2009

Here I am, back in Berlin.

This has suddenly become my second city, since this year I’ve spent more time in Berlin then in Faro, Portugal…

I’m back in Fokus for the final meeting of project C-Cast. And as I prepare to leave, I know that I’ll be back in the beginning of next year for the project Workshop were we will be doing demos of the work done.

Unfortunately I’ve never took some days off to properly explore the city, one of these trips I must bring my family with me and show them around this great city.

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