See the flowers? Oh, that’s only an hour by car from Villach. We took the highway straight down to Italy, left just south of Udine, and there it was: an approximation of spring

Of course for Italians this is still winter, but as soon as you leave the Alps behind, the climate gets mild.

We didn’t search for anything special, just a little bit of cruising around in the sun, enjoying the afternoon warmth of around 15 degreen Celsius.

Other than that, my mind is full of plans at the moment. Software. If you are only interested in photography, I suggest you stop reading now

Every once in a while I make a big project, that then occupies me for a few years. It’s always about software engineering tools. The first big one was a tool for specifying remote procedure call interfaces, and then to generate code for all the glue, i.e. a server main program that had only to be linked with the implementations of the remote procedures, and a client library for calling such remote procedures, without having to know where the servers are, without any initialization mumbo jumbo. The tools produced server stubs for C and Cobol, and client stubs for C and Visual Basic. The project was implemented in C and Tcl/Tk.

The second big project was a tool and method for what we now call Model Driven Design. About ten years ago I had to construct a relatively big web application. I had six months of time, and I knew that it was damn short, given my lack of tools. For political reasons I had to use a primitive Perl CGI framework, and I spent five months to develop a development method and a code generation tool on top. Then I used the framework to make the whole application in the remaining month.

Basically you defined an application as a set of pages, available to a number of roles. Every role has at least one start page, events bring you from page to page, an event normally a button press. Think of it as graphs. For every page transition you have to write a piece of code that processes the input from the last page and fills in the blanks for the next page. If you don’t write the processing code for such a transition, nothing gets processed and the next page is initialized with default values or blanks. Thus the system was perfectly suited for prototyping as well.

It’s a little more elaborate than that, but the principle was to specifdy as much as possible in XML, and then to generate everything but the actual application logic. Of course if you know that much about an application, you can automatically generate all sorts of useful documentation. This one was implemented in Perl.

Since then I have worked shortly in Python (the reason for my profound hate of that language) and now for years in Java. I like Java, I like Eclipse, but I miss my Model Driven Design framework. With Eclipse and Java, the tools have become better, but the category of problems that I solve now, is actually more primitive. I write more glue code, things have not improved. Thus I think it’s time to do it once more, to go and make a big software project.

Of course I am not the only one, there are lots and lots of MDD projects, a lot of clever people working in that arena, but I guess I have a sound understanding of the field, tons of experience, a strong vision, and, building upon two big projects based on specification and code generation, I should be able to come up with some very useful things. Whatever, I’ll try.

The Song of the Day is “Beautiful Italy” from Franz Lehar’s Paganini, sung by the great Richard Tauber in 1937. Hear it on YouTube.

Sundays, you know? This lazy feeling, and then on a day like this. According to the web cam on mount Dobratsch, even above the dense fog cover, it was cloudy and the light was flat. No reason to drive up the mountain, instead I have squeezed one more image out of yesterday’s collection.

The result is maybe not too bad, I have even made it another wallpaper in my small collection of downloadable wallpapers. The problem is, most of my images are composed for exactly the format that they are published in. In this case, with the trees that are cut off anyway, it was possible to produce wallpapers in the most common sizes, without really changing the character of the image.

They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, so feel free to use and share them.

It’s interesting: the wallpapers are the most popular content on this blog. Of course I have expected them to be popular, but the extent took me by surprise

The Song of the Day is one more time “Postcards From Italy” from the fantastic 2006 Beirut album “Gulag Orkestar”. See the video on YouTube. It’s a somehow melancholic song and I like it greatly.

Carinthia is covered in fog. Yesterday a look at the webcams made it clear: Italy was the place to go.

We started out late, and although we certainly enjoyed the sun, I didn’t make many usable images. I have some more, but definitely not of the “Sunny Italy” kind.

This particular image was taken under a highway bridge. The challenge was to both contain the tonal range and, on the other hand, to convey the sense of being blinded by the light. I finally ended up using black and white, with a combination of Photoshop’s “High Contrast Blue” filter for most of the scene, and “High Contrast Red” for some highlight regions, and I really like the result. It combines both the texture in the concrete (via the blue filter) and the dramatic contrast (via the red).

The color version is definitely more cheerful though, and because it better reflects yesterday’s mood, this time I leave you the choice.

The Song of the Day is “Under The Bridge” from the 1997 self-titled All Saints album. See a video on Dailymotion.

Interesting. This is the third time that I use this title (see “222 – Two Of Us” and “580 – Two of Us“), and it is the first time that it actually makes sense

We were in Udine today. Udine is just round the corner, one hour from Villach, the first city in Italy, with a population of about 100.000 it is slightly larger than Klagenfurt, almost twice as big as Villach. Udine is much more beautiful though. Udine is an Italian city.

Isn’t it strange, that this was my first photo trip to Udine? Many years ago, when Italian food was hard to come by or prohibitively expensive in Austria, we had bought olive oil and pasta here, but never had it occurred to us, to visit this city as tourists. Why? It is too near! 30 minutes longer and you are at the shores of the Adriatic, and the environment of Udine is really beautiful as well, whereas the outskirts of the city are the usual commerce and industry. And then there is the highway that makes you rush by, and then …

I don’t know. It’s pretty stupid to live near such a place and don’t spend time there. It’s inexcusable. Life is to short for such blunder.

Anyway. We have learned our lesson, we’ll be back more often.

The Song of the Day is once again “Two Of Us” from the 1970 Beatles album “Let It Be”. See the video on YouTube.

It was extremely hot yesterday. We had intended to go to Salzburg to visit Michael, but thankfully I remembered that at this time school holidays in southern Germany start, and that means hours of delay due to traffic jams in front of the two big tunnels on the highway that crosses the Alps.

We used the time for shopping and then for a short trip down top Italy, just across the border, near Tarvisio, where we wanted to drive up to Santuario Monte Lussari.

There is a church on a mountain with a spectacular view. According to our street map, a road goes up there, coming from the Saisera valley. Fact is, there may be a road, but neither did we find it, nor (if it exists at all) is it open to the public. The first image was taken near the end of the valley.

The other image, the Image of the Day, was taken much later. We had returned from Italy and driven straight to our lake for swimming. After we left, the sun was not yet down, but beginning to vanish in clouds and haze in the west. I stopped at a meadow full of flowers and took a series of images, trying to capture that feeling of a summer evening. While I had used the Tokina 11-16 in Italy, this image was made with the new Sigma 28/1.8.

The Song of the Day is “In Summer” from Jon Hendricks’ 1990 album “Freddie Freeloader”. See him perform it live in 1986 on YouTube.

A dam, and not only a normal dam, one of the highest dams of its time, that’s a very prestigious project, and even more so, it is an enormous investment.

Imagine a mid-sized valley in the Italian Alps, the river Piave running through it from north down to the Adriatic Sea. Not much north of the provincial capital of Belluno, a small valley, the valley of river Vajont, joins it from the east, narrowing to a gorge where it meets the Piave. Just there, smug to the hillside, on the opposite shore of the Piave, lay the village of Longarone. 1500 people, a church, a train station, hardly worth a stop.

The first two images, the Image of the Day and the historic photography (about 1950), were taken from approximately the same point. On the left side of each, you see the cleft in the mountains, the gorge of the river Vajont.

A dam is a big investment, and when you see that the project goes awry, when you get first indications of a coming landslide, and when a first landslide occurs, and when all experts tell you that there is more to come, much more, what do you do?

You may be lucky, they may be wrong, and your investment is saved. On the other hand, when they’re right, you’ve lost nothing more than you lose when you cancel the project in face of the warnings. Thus if you persist, you have some chance to get away with your money. If not, well, what’s the difference?

Such may have been the thoughts of the managers of SADE (Società Adriatica di Elettricità), and purely from an economic point of view they were right, but the difference were between 2000 and 2500 lives.

Initial reports of landslides were suppressed, journalists were sued by the company and by the government, local protests were suffocated, and even the dire warnings of an imminent landslide on the day before the catastrophe were ignored, and even worse, the people down in Longarone were kept ignorant as well.

It is very likely that it would have been possible to at least partially evacuate the people in the danger zone, it is very likely that it would have been possible to at least begin to empty the storage lake, but nothing was done.

Finally, on 9 October 1963 at approximately 10:35pm, the whole side of mountain Toc came loose and slid down at an enormous speed of up to 110 km per hour (68 mph).

An enormous landslide, 260 million cubic meters, crashed into the almost full storage lake, squeezing out about 50 million cubic meters of water, producing a wave that destroyed the lower houses in the village Casso on the opposite bank, 260 meters above water level, and then overtopped the dam by about 245 meters, a fuming inferno of water and mud, that crushed down upon the sleeping residents of Longarone, within an instant killing everyone but a few children, who survived by freak chance.

Wikipedia has more background information and you may also want to read the original report in Time Magazine. See the analysis of Dr David Petley for a more scientific view of the event. Marco Paolini has made a famous TV film, half theatrical recount, half documentary, showing much original footage. It is available via Google Video. Finally the Italian movie “Vajont – La diga del disonore” tries to reconstruct the events.

Now, if you expect the most dire consequences for those responsible, don’t be a fool. Too much money was involved and too many men in highest positions. In the end everybody went free.

One engineer committed suicide, and that’s ironic in itself, because the work of the engineers was sound, the dam never broke. The fault can’t be blamed to the geologists either. Their reports were correct, but ignored. It was a matter of greed and irresponsible management that led into disaster.

All images, along with those of the previous entry, were taken on Friday afternoon, a mostly sunny, partially overcast day. I used the Tokina 11-16/2.8 and the Nikon 70-300 VR. Two images were taken from Longarone up, two from the landslide, over the dam, down to Longarone, and one from just below the village of Casso, i.e. from the opposing side of the valley, down onto the aftermath of the landslide. With some images I have taken more liberties than with others

The Song of the Day is the “Dies iræ” from the 1995 recording of Verdi’s “Requiem”, directed by John Eliot Gardiner. YouTube has a video with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Claudio Abbado. Not a bad choice either.

This is the church of Longarone, Italy. Longarone is a small town north of Belluno, and if we hadn’t seen a documentary on Arte about an enormous landslide and flood catastrophe, that had occurred there in 1963, we probably never would have bothered to visit the place.

And if we hadn’t, we would never have seen one of the most interesting examples of modern sacred architecture. The church was built between 1966 and 1976 by the Italian star architect Giovanni Michelucci, in order to remind of the more than 2000 victims of the disaster.

The church has a central room with circular rows of benches, that rise more like in a theater than in a traditional church. There are side rooms with the baptistery and an open room looking east to the valley of Vajont, from where the flood had come, that almost completely destroyed the old village of Longarone. In fact, the only building that had survived the event, was the steeple of the old church. For some time the old steeple was left standing beside the new church, but in the meantime it must have been torn down, it’s not there any more.

On top of the church, reached by a spiral ramp, there is another arena, and that’s what you see in the Image of the Day, looking east. On the left you see a cleft in the mountains, that’s the entrance to the valley of Vajont, that’s from where death came in the form of an enormous wave of tens of millions cubic meters of water and mud.

The catastrophe of Longarone, better known under the name of Vajont, was not a freak accident of nature. It was a case of human error and reckless greed. There’s more to that in the next entry.

The Song of the Day is the “Requiem” by Johannes Ockeghem, maybe one of my most favorite Renaissance composers, not as well known as Machaut or Josquin des Prez, successor to the first, predecessor to the second, creator of the most wonderful “L’Homme Armée” mass of all times. I have several recordings of this “Requiem”, and although I have no way to check from here in Carinthia, I believe the one that I’ve linked to is one of them. YouTube also has a version.

It’s Sunday, exactly noon as I’m writing this, and it just begins to rain again. I should have risen early, because we had sunshine in the morning. Oh well, we’ll see what I get for today, but let’s postpone to for the next entry

This is one image from yesterday’s short trip down to Italy. We wanted to escape the bad weather in Carinthia, and escape we did.

The image was taken from the yard of the church of Cesclans. See the map for directions. If you ever happen to be in the vicinity and need an impressive view, this is the place to go.

The Song of the Day is “Wild World” from the 1970 Cat Stevens album “Tea for the Tillerman”. See a live video on YouTube.

Oh dear! This habit of using song titles, it’s killing me! I’ve just whiled four hours away because of all that associations that connect me with this song.

But first things first: Here’s another image from the gardens of castle Miramare. I simply forgot to use it two days ago.

Of all lenses that you could have on, while you encounter a seagull, sitting on a wall, of all those lenses, a wide-angle, even if moderate, is one of the most awkward. Imagine me with the Nikon 24/2.8, trying to silently approach this bird, and just as I get too near, just as it takes of, I manage to release the shutter. Well, it could have been worse: only minutes later I changed back to the Tokina 11-16

Actually I like the image. The tips of the wings already show some motion blur, but the moment is just right. With the Nikon 70-300 this could have been a really great image. But then, if I had tried to change lense, I most probably would have ended up with no image at all.

The Image of the Day shows part of the window of a long-since closed shop. The yellow frame and the blue paper attracted me, and it was only during post-processing, that I recognized the text. “Revolution”, “Love”, the guitars, that immediately triggered memories, and while my first impulse was “Revolution #9″ by John Lennon, I finally settled with Marc Bolan and “Children Of The Revolution“.

And then it happened. I searched for a video, found the classic performance with Elton John on piano and Ringo Starr on drums, another video with the album version, and then I began to follow links.

I couldn’t stop for almost four hours, and the trip took me all that impossible way from Marc Bolan via British glam rock band Sweet (my most favorite band when I was 10), to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Tom Waits.

Really, I love YouTube and the influence that this website has on our culture. It’s really a great place to find things, that with traditional distribution models would be impossible to come by. I’d say, from time to time, just do yourself the favor and listen to some music from your childhood. You deserve it.

It’s Sunday evening, I’m on the train to Vienna, and here are the images from our second day in Italy.

After breakfast I went swimming, and at 10am we left the hotel for castle Miramare. Maximilian had a strong interest in botany, and the castle gardens are lush evidence of his passion.

The castle itself has an interesting ground plan. These two images actually show the same building. In one it looks like a sturdy tower, almost like a cube, while in the other you see the long front that faces the harbor.

Originally all ways in the park seem to have been paved in this typical Italian way with small stones, but today most ways are bituminized.

There are loads of tourists, but the area is so big, that they blend in, and you have hardly a problem getting images without them. Apart from that, the whole park is a paradise for cats, thus you better have some cat cookies with you. Of course we had

The last image looks back from the park, over the harbor of Grignano, to the shore where just right from the middle, you can see the tower in front of our hotel, the tower with the lift down to the beach, the tower from where I took yesterday’s images.

It was extremely hot (well, at least that was my view) and after our visit to the park of Miramare, we simply drove home. In Carinthia I went swimming one more time, and we finally concluded the day on our balcony, sipping delightfully cool Prosecco

The Song of the Day is “In The Garden” from Bob Dylan’s 1980 album “Saved”. Hear it on YouTube.

EDIT: After much consideration, I have just replaced the Image of the Day with a slightly warmer version.