Salam!

The Egypt experience was totally winter healing.

We flew to the utter touristic city of Hurghada where we enjoyed the underwater beauties of the red sea and the always present and warm sun.

Princess was feeling particularly adventurous so she veiled her head and we took the local bus to Luxor. By local bus I mean those buses used by local men (not women) and their respective pets such as chickens, swans, serpents or whatever might fit in a card-box of a suitcase size. The five hours bus through the desert mountains of upper-egypt revealed as a great touristic entertainment which Disneyland unsuccessfully tries to recreate. After crossing the desert, to arrive at Luxor and experience the explosion of life in the Nile's margins was close to have an oasis hallucination.

In the city, the everyday Egyptian life mingles with the ancient Pharaonic culture and everything is covered with desert dust and Qur'an chants. I am always overwhelmed by the multi-phonic sound produced by mesquites. It is an amazing sound installation which I cannot find parallel in any western city.

As a take away Egypt, I propose the following menu:

Naguib Mahfouz the Egyptian Nobel laureate novelist. He wrote the Cairo trilogy which I manage to buy in Luxor for less than five euros a piece. I recently read "Respected Sir" (1975) a story about life in general and ambition in particular and "Wedding Song" (1981) a psychological thriller seen from the perspective of the four main characters. Cannot wait to read my new acquisitions.

In your mp3 players you will feature the nationally proclaimed Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum, and the tribute to her by the cairo orchestra. This music is quite hypnotic. I also listen to Ganoub the album "... En Arabe Veut Dire Sud" which I do not think it is Egyptian, but it is excellent therefore I feel like mentioning it here.

I had the fantasy of painting the walls of my bedroom with Schiele drawings. I changed my mind when I discover the work of the Egyptian painter Ghada Amer. Much of her work displays female nudes engaged in sexual acts as a subtext to apparently abstract art. Have a look at Knoty but nice and tell me whether you wouldn't love to have one at home too.

There are plenty of fascinating Egyptian contemporary art such as the scultures/installations of Salah Hammad.

If you are not satisfied yet, you might enjoy the online reading on Egyptian modern art at the metmuseum.

The world could surely afford a second wave of Egyptomania but this time focused on Egyptian contemporary culture, as opposed to the post-pharaonic fascination with ancient Egypt.

Anyway, I recommend Egypt in any form and at any time.

My first consultancy writing

In my opinion:

1) You will always be constrained by a software team.

2) Change your software preserve your data.

3) General solution tend to be more feasible than custom ones.

4) Is your company planning to make their solution open source and available to other cultural institutions?

This is as succinct as I can be. If you agree with the first three points and your answer to the question number four is No then you should read point number four (appendix). If you agree with the first three points and your answer to the question number four is Yes then you are done.


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1) You will always be constrained by a software team.

Whether you will hire a company (that uses open/close source software) or team-up in-house software developers you will always be tied and constrain by their expertise. No illusions here.

2) Change your software preserve your data.

About sustainable software: good documentation and following existing standards are honorable efforts towards sustainable systems. However, such efforts are hopeless when submitted to the years pressure. Software is just like any modern product. It is cheaper to buy a new one than to repair an old one.

Such a thing as a long-lasting software does not exist neither it is desirable. Whatever you will choose now it will be different in a couple of years, either because it evolved or because it died. Software changes are not only healthy, they are essential to survival.

Your most valuable treasure is your data not your software. Your data should be protected and untied from your software. Your data should be exportable from the software to a standard format (plain XML, RDF or other).

3) General solution tend to be more feasible than custom ones.

General solutions are those that do not reflect the idiosyncrasies of a particular institution. Therefore, it is easier to architect a general solution when the software in development is targeted on several similar institutions.

The greatest dangerous of in-house software is customization. Furthermore, constant changes in requirements are common while developing in-house software and often drive projects to failure.

In general, in-house software development brings high risk to a project. Can you afford it? It is very difficult to create a 'winning' software team. This often involves try-out periods with a couple of iteration. The success of your software will reflect how successful you were team-up the software developers.

4) Is your company planning to make their solution open source and available to other cultural institutions?

I am very impressed by your actual research. I think that you walked a long path and you further deepened the subject. You should not underestimated, neither should you discharge the information you have gather so far. I think this is the most valuable achievement.

There are several cultural institution having exactly the same worries/necessities. My proposal is to create a package that can be reusable by other cultural institutions.

The best way to achieve a general and sustainable solution is to involve several institutions in the developing process.

Such a package can include the information you collected so far (in the form of a wiki?). If you decide to exclusively use open source software, you can include a set of instruction explaining how to assemble it and the main problems you have found, etc. You should invite others to talk(write in the wiki) about their experience using such a package. This is easier than it sounds now. Well, I can try to explain how an open source project is baked in another email.

The decision of making your solution open source does not exclude the option of hiring a software company. Have you proposed to the employed company whether they will be interested in making your solution open source? In another email, I can explain why a commercial company might be interested in making your solution open source and free (as in freedom and as in beer).

The decision of making your solution open source should be taken in an early state and not after the production of FACT Online.

Just as a final remark, I think the main advantage of using open source software is to make your own project open source too and benefit from the advantages of an open source community.

As Palavras

São como um cristal,
as palavras.
Algumas, um punhal,
um incêndio.
Outras,
orvalho apenas.

Secretas vêm, cheias de memória.
Inseguras navegam;
barcos ou beijos,
as águas estremecem.

Desamparadas, inocentes,
leves.
Tecidas são de luz
e são a noite.
E mesmo pálidas
verdes paraísos lembram ainda.

Quem as escuta? Quem
as recolhe, assim,
cruéis, desfeitas,
nas suas conchas puras?

In Coração do dia.

Depressive lucidity

Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.

Houellebecq, Michel. Atomised. pag. 270. Vintage U.K., 2001.

boys have expensive toys

We turn our shirts inside-out
running until our breath gets lost.

We place our guns side-by-side and laugh,
laugh away ridiculous tension that was not supposed to be there.

Aiming and shooting like men
just to see ammo vanishing in the air.

We play tricks on tedium as if fear never existed,
as if time was playing on our side.

We keep an eye on each other and
photograph our bodies morphing into something different.

One day there won't be verbs.
Quietness will be absolute and beauty will be home.

to Wim de Jonge.

Individual consciousness seemed to emerge among animals for no apparent reason

[...] As he did so, he realised that around the world, researchers were trapped in a senseless empiricism. Nothing in their experimental results brought them closer to a conclusion, nor did they provide support for any particular hypothesis. Individual consciousness seemed to emerge among animals for no apparent reason, and seemed largely to predate the capacity for language. Darwinians, with instinctive determinism, put forward hypotheses about how natural selection might have benefited from the emergence of consciousness, but these in no way explained anything; they were Just So stories, no more. Then again, the anthropogenic model was hardly more convincing: life had thrown up something which could contemplate it, a mind capable of understanding it, but so what? That in itself did not make understanding consciousness any easier. Self-consciousness, which is absent in nematodes, was clearly observable in inferior lizards like Lacerata agilis, implying the presence of both a central nervous system and something more. What that something was, remained completely mysterious; consciousness dod not seem to depend on any single thing, whether anatomical, biochemical or cellular. It was all rather pressing.

Houellebecq, Michel. Atomised. pag. ?. Vintage U.K., 2001.

Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do

[...] what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood. When I was a child I use to feel this way about all sort of things - Mecano, The jungle Book, Biggles, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, the ABC Minors... I could forget where I was, the time of the day, who I was with. Sex is the only thing I've found like that as a grown-up, give or take the old film: books are no longer like that once you are out of your teens, and I've certainly never found it in my work. All the horrible pre-sex self-consciousness drains out of me, and I forget were I am, the time of the day ... and yes, I forget who I'm with, for the time being. Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it's weird, then, that it's the only thing which can make me feel like a ten-year-old.

Hornby, Nick. High fidelity. Pag. 100. Penguin Books, 2000.