Last week I participated the OpenPower Summit. I enjoyed it, even if I was on sick leave with a fever. There were many interesting talks, ranging from open source and education through Power10 to instruction development. All sessions were recorded. Hopefully recordings will also be shared, as I did not have the strength to visit all the sessions I wanted. And, as usual, some of the interesting talks were given in parallel.

As you might have already noticed from my blogs, I am a music maniac. One of the factors influencing your music listening experience is what speakers you use. I was lucky right from the beginning, my parents are music maniacs as well. In this blog I introduce you to the speakers I listened while living at my parents, and three pairs of speakers I bought myself. I must admit that I never did a really thorough research about speakers and acoustics.

I love conferences. Now, that most conferences are either virtual or hybrid (both virtual and on-premises), people often say that it must be heaven for me. I can visit many more conferences and give many more talks. Well, it is not just this simple. Virtual conferences are a love-hate relationship for me. Of course, there are some advantages, but also disadvantages. Giving virtual talks Yes, I could give more talks. Even overlapping conferences are not a problem any more: I can give a talk at a European conference in the morning, and give another talk at a US conference in the evening.

Ever since I started this personal blog site, I was curious if people actually read what I write. Luckily, based on the responses I received on Twitter, LinkedIn and in private, there is no problem with that. Next I wanted to see numbers. I was told, that Google Analytics is the gold standard of measurement. Well… Google Analytics Lets start it with the basic problem: even my own visits are not counted.

Qwant is a European search engine that respects your privacy. I learned about it from a Twitter thread. The European Processor Initiative announced last week that their first RiscV test chip samples were delivered and booted successfully. I tweeted that I would be happy to see not just European CPUs but also European software services, alternatives to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Someone responded that a search engine is already available: https://www.

Whenever I talked to people about POWER, someone asked if I am an IBM Power Champion. My response was that I do not even know what it is, and I am not affiliated with IBM in any way. Recently I came across a blog by Torbjörn Appehl which describes what is an IBM Power Champion and lists the European champions: https://builtonpower.com/2021/09/the-2021-ibm-power-champions-in-europe/. Finally I know what an IBM Power Champion is, and I feel honored to be mistaken to be one of them :-) Normally I do not care much about titles: I have seen too many empty people with well sounding titles, and fantastic people without any titles.

The promise of “boring” ARM hardware has been with us for almost a decade. And a couple of years ago it really arrived: easy to use, standards compliant ARM hardware is now available on the market. However, not for everyone. When it comes to buying ARM hardware you still need to decide if it is “boring” or it is affordable. There was one notable exception, the SoftIron OverDrive 1000. It had its limitations, but it was standards compliant right from day one, affordable, and easily available not just for large companies.

When I published my blog about openSUSE a couple of weeks ago, most questions I received in private were about the Russian students I mentioned. In that blog I quickly described how my interest in information security started, about 25 years ago. This blog gives you a bit of historical background and a few more details. Historical background It was 1995. I was studying at a university, but I was already running one of the servers of the faculty.

A couple of weeks ago editors of https://opensource.com/ sent a question to contributors: What was your first programming language? Thinking about the question brought back some nice memories about the beginnings. You can read my answer below: What was your first programming language? My first ever programming language was BASIC in the early eighties. One of my relatives bought a C64 for their kids to get started with learning computers. They only used it for gaming, and I was also invited.

Most people only know that I work in IT. Some even call me a hacker – which I really appreciate :-) However, by university degree I am an environmental engineer (and English - Hungarian translator). Even if I never worked in my field, except for some student jobs, I still follow any news related to the environment closely. This is why I was very happy to learn, that my home city, Budapest, introduced bee pastures in the city.