SURF

Yesterday’s 3rd Irish Workshop on Fibre Optic Sensing in Dublin was exactly the kind of event I enjoy: practical, collaborative, and clearly helping build a strong fiber sensing community. Thanks to Asiera , Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and Trinity College Dublin for the invitation and warm welcome. I joined on behalf of SURF to share a Dutch perspective on optical fiber sensing, and to explore where research collaboration around fiber sensing could take us next. A useful reminder from the day: we often say DAS, or Distributed Acoustic Sensing, but technically it is Distributed Dynamic Strain Sensing. Less catchy. More correct. The eternal struggle of science. The program covered everything from seismic monitoring and offshore sensing to city sensing, temperature sensing and storm tracking. A good reminder of how diverse this field has become. Great to see the Irish fiber sensing community in such good shape. I left Dublin with new ideas, useful contacts, and a boosted appreciation for how much can be learned from a strand of glass. #FiberSensing #DAS #ResearchInfrastructure #Geophysics

Three popular packages got hijacked recently. All three went after the same thing: Credentials on developer machines. In my experience, most developer laptops are full of plaintext secrets: - API keys. - Database URLs. - Cloud credentials. - Personal access tokens. - SSH keys. - Coding agent files There have been several supply chain attacks targeting packages many of us use every day across projects, including LiteLLM, TanStack, and Axios. The average developer machine is a treasure chest for attackers. One way to reduce the blast radius is to stop storing long-lived secrets in plaintext on disk. Did you know password managers like 1Password or BitWarden can inject secrets at runtime? For example, with the op CLI: op run --env-file .env -- npm run dev And your .env no longer needs to contain the actual secret values. Your local dev environment should not be a vault. Use a real one.

🌷☀️ Spring has arrived!!! This week alone started with the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) Spring School, and today I had the pleasure of supporting a Future of Social XR and Interaction in 2040 workshop with Gül Akcaova and 31 amazing PhD'ers from all walks of life and backgrounds - From Spatial Audio to Ethics to Networks to Artists, transdisciplinary was a keyword!!!! We had some inspiring conversations, giving birth to creative mental visualisations as the students explored a multitude of speculative futures. 🙏 Big thanks to Pablo César for the invitation, his supporting team and supporters, Silvia Rossi , Silke Kleinen , Moonisa A. , Thomas Röggla , Omar Niamut 🔜 Tomorrow is the SURF Futures Day at Utrecht's Tivoli Vredenburg for decision makers, strategists and policy makers from higher ed and research institutions across NL, and then on Thursday, we will run a Futures Colloquium for enthusiastic practitioners of Strategic Foresight. We will keep you posted.....

Bonjour-hi! Arno and I just attended the 56th LHCOPN & LHCONE meeting, and if this week proved anything, it’s that nothing beats meeting face-to-face. While we spend most of the year collaborating digitally, the energy, spontaneous ideas, and real connections that happen in person are what drive our research network community forward—and also what makes me love my job. A special shoutout to Richard Klinger and Andrii Lytvynov for letting us join the sacred ritual: we helped de-patch the old #MOXY and properly worship the new #MOXY (the GXP connection to #NetherLight ). Also, a massive (and slightly greasy) thanks to Richard for the gentle peer pressure to taste the Poutine—a Montréal rite of passage I couldn’t skip. This meeting was a bittersweet gathering, however, as we said goodbye to two absolute legends of the community: Bruno Hoeft (KIT) and Thomas Tam (Canarie). Both are soon retiring after contributing so much to our field over the years. It was a beautiful and emotional moment to celebrate their careers together—we will certainly miss their expertise, camaraderie, and presence! Finally, a huge, heartfelt merci mille fois to CANARIE for being such incredible hosts. The organization was perfect, the venue amazing (especially that stunning stained glass ceiling window!) and the hospitality made us feel right at home. Here are some impressions from our time in Montréal! #GREN #InternationalCollaboration #LHC #CERN #ResearchNetworking