Meandering in Malta

Yes, another travel post... well gosh, I have been busy, haven't I ?

Yes, yes I have. And I'm very glad to have an entire month of staying put before I need to go anywhere else again. I actually quite like being in different places, I just hate going between them. Especially on this particular trip, where out of the total of 10 days away, three of those had 10-12 hours of travelling apiece. That's a bit much for my liking.

Anyway, at the end of the last post I was just about to embark to Malta. This was an uneventful but boring trip : 6am start for the taxi to the bus stop, two hours on a bus (quiet a scenic route in daylight, lots of barren rocky mountains), two hours in the airport, couple of hours or so flight to Rome, 2.5 hours layover, 1.5 hours or so to Malta, half hour taxi to the apartment. It was indeed a full 12 hours of just moving from place to place interspersed with long bouts of absolute nothingness.

Worth it ? Yeah, I'd say so. First because the conference (and it was a proper conference this time) was useful, but also because Malta is a fascinating place with history in every step. I'd definitely come back.

 

Melting in Malta

Why Malta ? The "Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems" conference was recommended to me at last year's All Hands (the same meeting as in Granada this year). Everyone there really seemed to like my code – though predictably I had exactly no feedback on it in the intervening year – and someone suggested ADASS would be a good venue to promote it to a wider audience.

This year's event, the 34th in the series, was hosted by the University of Malta. I'd booked my trip for the day after the All Hands, figuring it would be better to have a spare day somewhere I'd never been before. A wise decision. I should also mention (and I swear nobody's sponsoring me for this) that this included a free taxi from booking.com (with whom I found accommodation) to the apartment. That's undoubtedly the most useful free perk a travel site has ever offered me. Especially since the taxi driver was good enough to give me details for booking the return trip.

Both Granada and Malta were about the same temperature, roughly 10-20 C, slightly warmer but much, much more humid in Malta. The ADASS website says, "the weather in Malta is usually cold and wet at this time of year. Warm jackets and umbrellas are recommended" which is plainly ludicrous. Everyone was dressed for summer, and rightly so because wearing a "warm jacket" would have been like wearing a sign which said, "please hurt me". Umbrellas would be helpful : one day it did nothing but rain, and the rest of the time there were occasional light showers. I managed just fine with my light summer rain jacket. On occasion I even needed a jumper.

I arrived in my apartment at about 7pm, when it was already dark. This turned out to be thoroughly deserving of its 7.3 rating on booking.com. Basic, to be sure, but in an absolutely first-rate location. 10 minutes walk (or less) from the tourist centre with, thank goodness, not a single intimidating street gang in sight (unlike Padova). In fact it was right next to St Elmo's fort. The area itself was largely quiet. Inside it was certainly... standard, and things could do with some plastering and a lick of paint, especially the stairs; the instruction not to wear shoes inside was very much a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. But the most important things were all perfectly fine. The bed was comfy, the fridge and microwave worked, the shower was surprisingly good (if small), there was a kettle and... a huge supply of Tetley tea. I'd go there again.

Basic, to be sure, but quite comfortable all the same.

The ceiling beams would however make this unsuitable for anyone taller than 5'10" or so. I'm short enough that this wasn't a problem for me, though I did have to stoop a little in the shower. The air conditioning was very effective though, not needed so much for the temperature as the humidity.

Mind you, I do sympathise with people complaining it wasn't suitable for its advertised maximum of 4 people, though it does clearly specify it has one double bed and one bedroom. Unless you're really, worryingly close with some very good friends, three would be silly, and four would be an absurd joke.

I had that first evening and the next day to explore my surroundings. One of the first things I was struck by was just how very, very British Malta feels. This was my first time in which I got to use my UK adaptor outside of the UK. But there are a lot more vestiges of British rule all over the place : phone boxes, post boxes, pedestrian crossing buttons, shops (Accessorize, M&S, Spar – among others), even a Cardiff Snack Bar (!)  that I saw from the taxi on the way back. Tourists too seem to be predominantly British. Even the scattered rain showers feel familiar.

From the Spar I bought Ribena, and felt like I'd come home.

Yet in every other respect it's blindingly obvious that this is worlds away from Britain. The streets are lined with palm trees and cactus. The November sun is still powerful enough that anything more than a T-shirt is usually unnecessary, sometimes even silly. Maltese is heard everywhere. And of course the architecture is altogether different. I have to say that many streets look run-down, almost dilapidated, but they are very much actively used and lived-in; a little bit of a culture-shock there. The posher places are very much cheek-by-jowl with those operating on a lower budget, and from the exterior they're not always easy to tell apart.

By the standards of Valletta this is a very wide and well-kept street.

My main bit of non-science excursion was to indulge my favourite tourist pastime of wandering aimlessly. Around Valletta this is an excellent strategy. As a capital city this is absolutely miniscule but very dense, with history in every step, and you can't fail to find something worth viewing everywhere you go. Doing a pre-planned route would be both boring and unnecessary. 

The narrow streets make finding somewhere to take a good overview photo difficult. This was about as good as I could manage. They need a few tall towers like Bologna !

The maximum elevation may only be 250m or so but the streets are very hilly. You get a lot of exercise walking around Malta.

The weather was... sometimes like this, sometimes bright sunshine. But I wouldn't want to come back in summer when it's 40 C.

The only "planned" activity I did was St Elmo's Fort, which was right next to my apartment so I could hardly avoid it. In fact I went twice. The first time I spent a good couple of hours walking around the whole fort, reading the signs and going through the series of really very good exhibits which cover the entire history of the island : from prehistory and classical antiquity to the Great Siege (1565) and WWII. I can summarise it all very simply. Malta has seen some serious shit. At one point it was reckoned among the most bombed places on Earth. But it's still here, the hulking fortresses of the knight's era still indomitable edifices of stone with walls that must be 20m thick. It is, in short, well worth visiting.

What exactly this is, if it's even part of the fort itself or technically outside it, I'm not sure.

The second time was the day after. As it happened the 10th November was the day the fort was opened for free with a military parade by the In Guardia re-enactment society, who do a parade of the knights of St John (being also Remembrance Sunday, this was preceded by a short memorial service of five soldiers which is basically identical to British remembrance practises). For a tiny local group they did an excellent job, and the acoustics of the fort made the muskets sound more like cannons. Incidentally, I also saw the 4pm ceremonial firing of a cannon from the Saluting Battery, so I have a good point of comparison.

The battery is about 15 minutes from the fort. You can pay a tiny fee to be on the platform when they fire the cannon, but I watched from the balcony like a cheapskate.

The Conferencing

This was my first ADASS so I didn't really know what to expect. Nobody made the obvious BADASS pun; perhaps that joke has long since run its course. I knew only three or four other people present but this does force one to mingle... which began almost instantly. The first day was a half-day session of tutorials. The first I simply watched along with, but the second was on user experience (UX). More on this in a moment, but the tutorial divided us all into random groups of six with the task being to design an app. The goal of this was not to make something functional but just to experience the design process as guided by a professional. 

A professional designer in astronomy ? Indeed. The ASTRON group in the Netherlands make so much software that they've hired a full-time UX designer who ran this course. The instructions filled me with dread : create a persona for people who will use your tool, write a story about how they'd use it... lordy, that sounds like corporate nonsense. Luckily for me, our group alone decided to have some fun with this. We decided to make an app to alter users of potential meteorite strikes. Our user persona was called Harald and he had a beloved cat (Whiskers) and a herd of cows. He was paranoid about meteorite strikes and his favourite activity was "not being hit on the head by meteorites". We even produced a visual of what the app ("Don't Look Up*") would look like, with a little warning message about the likely chance of a strike and options to get more details.

* Tagline, "Look At The App". 

Now, all of this is something one could do oneself without any guidance whatever. What I found the process did, however, was massively speed everything up. By delegating roles (though not very strictly) to each of the team members, everyone thinks through the process according to different perspectives. Consequently the creative juices really start flowing very quickly. How much warning does Harald need ? How does he want to receive alerts ? Does he want it to run in the background ? Do we need an Enterprise Edition that could provide warnings for multiple sites ? And so on.

The rest of the conference followed a more traditional structure. Normally conferences are subject-orientated, but this one is selected based on software. This is interesting because it brings together a much wider pool of expertise, with many people from software backgrounds who aren't professional astronomers at all. It makes the tea breaks an interesting experience, but the talks also are a lucky dip. Some were incredibly technical, more like computer science than astronomy*, others were about the history of project development, while a good chunk were on topics regular science conferences would normally consider too "soft".

* To the poor sod giving the talk about field gate programmable arrays, man, I have no idea what you were talking about, but bloody hell it sounded intelligent.

I'm going to limit myself here to the latter. There was a great deal of discussion about UX, which is about more than the software interface and actually even higher-level than that : how do users really use the software ? As various presenters said, traditionally astronomers aren't good at that. We write code that gets the right answer, but we don't do the (considerably easier) task of bothering to provide them a useful, intuitive interface. And we really should, because a bad interface means mistakes and the very inaccuracies we wanted to avoid ! Everyone likes the technical aspects and tries to avoid the social. But we shouldn't : these soft aspects can have hard results.

I have to also add that there remains an attitude in some quarters that our codes should be difficult to use, that they should only be accessible to an elite. This was firmly rejected here, with the overwhelming mood being to encourage everyone to actually think about interface design and take it seriously. No, it's not magnetohydronamics, but it's still important. I particularly liked the argument that we should presume users have the ability to understand the tool and it's only bad design which prevents them : the analogy made was that wheelchair users are only "disabled" when you don't provide them with lifts. 

As for my talk, I'm pleased to say that everyone really liked it. "I wish I'd thought of that", "I never would have thought of doing it that way" and even "Brilliant !" and "I wish I had that when I did cell biology" were mentioned. I was pleased as punch. There was even a question from the organisers afterwards as to whether we could organise ADASS in Prague. Well, I hope so. Next year it's in Germany which is much easier to get to than Malta so I'll probably try and go along; it was a welcoming affair and an interesting experience. In any case, it's clear that I need to keep promoting my code and that yes, other people want this to exist.

It was quite a large conference, with ~270 in-person attendees and another 60 or so online.

I'll close the science section with a sting in the tail. There were several nice history talks, including one on a 20-year project to digitise the entire collection of 500,000 photographic plates in Harvard. But there was also a warning. The incredibly popular DS9 software, which gets ~40,000 downloads per year, is in serious danger of running out of funding. This to me is almost literally unbelievable; it's such an indispensable tool that I just don't understand how any manager could be so ludicrously blind as to not see how its ~1 FTE requirement hasn't given back that investment a thousandfold and more over the years. Cancelling DS9 ? Have you gone completely mad ?

Ah well, a warning to us all. Anyway, the only conference socials were the welcome reception in which I managed to survive a ferocious onslaught of free wine, and a walking tour of Valletta. This helped put things in a bit more context. The guide was good, but a bit more "I've done this ten thousand times before" than the Alhambra guide. I asked her what the Maltese thought of the British when they decided for independence : was it a case of "get the hell out ?" or "we don't hate you, but please just leave". She said the latter. Which is as good as a colonial power can hope for, really.

I really liked the Tritons fountain. The way the water cascades in a shower from underneath the bowl, rather than just flowing over the edge, was somehow quite fascinating.

She also had quite an unusual take on the Great Siege. In Fort St Elmo this is portrayed as it usually is, as a heroic victory against the odds, a huge turning-point in the war between the Ottoman Turks and European Christendom. The guide, however, thought it wasn't anything in particular to celebrate, but more just pure luck : the Turks left because they were tired and wanted to go home and were worried by rumours of Christian reinforcements, rather than actually being beaten by the knights. Yet the exhibits at the fort portrayed this as a result of clever trickery in which the rumours were deliberately engineered by the knights.

Personally, for whatever it's worth, I stick with the classical view. Look, if you can hold out for so long against your enemy that they refuse to fight you anymore, if they'd rather turn tail instead of offering battle, then you've won.  It doesn't matter if this is because you actually beat them to a bloody pulp or convinced them through trickery that you could beat them to a pulp if they were foolish enough not to run away.  How you achieve victory has no bearing whatever on whether you have achieved victory. In that respect, the only thing that matter is that the enemy stop fighting. And I doubt there's a general in the world who'd disagree. 

And besides, for the massively-outnumbered knights to take out a third of the invasion force for the cost of one single fort is nothing to be sniffed at by anyone's standards.

All this being done, I went home. More conversations followed at the airport with other conference escapees who were, I'm delighted to say, enthusiastic about my presentation. Which is encouraging. Even DS9 took years to get any attention, but now practically everyone uses it : as an easy-to-use tool for quick inspection, it's second to none, and does a lot more besides. Of course the warning is that even that level of superlative success doesn't necessarily bring any benefits with it.

The return trip was just as long and uneventful as all the rest. Malta airport security have an everything scanner so that took all of five minutes. It's annoyingly busy inside (not much bigger than Cardiff despite being a popular tourist destination) but not awful. Zurich (shown below), where I had a four hour layover, is really very good indeed : absolutely massive, but with plenty of places to sit and charging points galore. Overpriced to be sure (I spent 18 EUR on Burger King because it was the cheapest option) but at least you can easily find a quiet place to sit. And so, feeling like I'd been gone for a full month rather than a mere ten days, back I went to Prague.