top of the tops 2010

Without doubt 2010 was a personal best year for yours truly here.

There were many good moments, some great moments and I can't remember that many bad things that are worth remembering. Except for a company called Kanon in The Hague, but that's just a drop of shit in an otherwise perfect ocean of good things, sure it looks terrible but it gets diluted somehow... I hope.

Looking a bit further away than my pretty pierced bellybutton, I made a little list of some of the best things of the year that just passed from all the fields that I cared about. I had some fun doing it, so I hope you enjoy reading it too.

- Top Sports Moments
World Cup South Africa final
Benfica winning the Portuguese title

- Top Gadgets
iPhone 4
Android OS

- Top WTF Moments
The omnipresent sound of the Vuvuzelas
BP Oil Spill and the (lack) of real repercussion

- Top Technologies
Azul Zing
EMC vBlock

- Top Dream Cars
Nissan GT-R SPEC V
Porsche Panamera Stingray

- Top Games
FIFA 11
GT5
MW Black Ops

- Top Movies
Inception
Machete
The Social Network
Black Swan

- Top TV Series
Dexter Season 5


- Best albums
The Social Network OST (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross)
Jonsi - Go

Devoxx (half)day 2

First talk of the day:
java ee 6 platform
- java ee 6 and Glassfish 3
- history
- new features of jee6: jax-rs, jcdi, @inject, bean validation, interceptors, managed beans
- less xml
- pruning of jax-rp,c jax-r and entity cpm 2.x (jee 7 might kill them totally)
- ejb lite
- managed beans 1.0
- jpa 2.0 annotations (are cool)
- servlets 3.0
- ejb 3.1
- live coding again (have I said how cool this is?)
- jsf 2.0 (mojarra)

Second talk of the day
SOA in practice
- loose coupling is not always an answer
- technical driven vs business driven services
- esb is not always an answer
- meet the SOA stack
eam + bp + esb/web services + services (business driven self contained interfaces)
- conway's law

organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

- satir change model

- you can't buy SOA
- reuse is not a valid business case for SOA
- distributed process development brings added costs
- SOA needs to be supported from the top down and established from the bottom up

Whoa… that was heavy! Very nice presentation from Nicolai Josuttis (I even ran to buy his book afterwards).

In unrelated news… 2 days. That's how long my project lasted without me. I am going back to the office tomorrow to help fight the chaos demonstrated in the graph above... but hopefully will be present in the last 2 days of the conference!

Tot ziens!

Devoxx day 1

First victory: Got here on time despite the dutch traffic early in the morning.

First talk of the day:
jBPM in Action
Introduction:
- What are business processes;
- History.. hey it started in Belgium (humm figures);
- What is BPM and jBPM in particular;
jBPM Concepts
- BPMN 2
- BPEL 2
Demo Examples
-(cool, live coding :-D)
- how to configure Eclipse for jBPM4
- custom activity types.. nice!
- (should I have been in the cloud computing session instead? well, RH did pay my ticket…)
What's next
- Insame amount of new features in the incubator

Second talk of the day:
SOA, OpenESB and OpenSSO Programming with Passion
- Based on http://www.javapassion.com/soaprogramming
- WSDL
- BPEL
- JBI
- openESB
- Java EE Service Engine
- IEP
- EDM
OpenSSO
- SSO within an enterprise

Third talk of the day:
The Jungle of the Web - A Way to Survive by Detecting Fast Flux Botnets
- botnets
- different flux types: single, double, hydra flux
- detecting fast-flux botnets
- fluxy a tool to help detect fast-flux botnet

Fourth talk of the day:
The Next Generation Profiling and Diagnostics Tools
...
Ok, this turned out to be just a pitch for Oracle's JRockit toolset which made it pretty useless for me. As far as alternative JVM's go I'll stick with Azul. :-D

Still, I have to admit that the Mission Control toolset is pretty impressive, and the promised new features in the upcoming version 4 are making me think on how I can fit this in my Architecture.

BOFs
Unfortunately I am too tired to attend. I would have enjoyed this one and specially The Java tuning puzzlers talk. A well, I'll have to check the screencasts when they come up.

Tot ziens!

Busy week ahead

It's going to be a really busy week for me!

First of all I'm going to Devoxx in Antwerp which is one of my favorite cities in Belgium.

There will be Conferences, BOFs, talks about Clouds, BPM, Scala, Architecture, SOA, Java…



Well, I think the logo correctly expresses the absolute ehhh.. mesh(?) that this conference is going to be.

Second of all, there will be an update to the platform @work early Monday morning which I will have to support remotely.

This should prove to be an easy task, but still..

Last but not least, the final stage of my first *BIG* project as an IT Architect is also starting this week. Hurray for me, it seems to be going better than anticipated!

As a personal (added) challenge, I am trusting some colleagues to be able to follow my project plan and deliver the results in time and with quality. Delegating as never been my strong point, but this is how confident I am right now.

Well, that's it for now, I will keep you posted on significative developments.

Tot ziens!

Gran Turismo 2009

So I've bought a little car and decided to take a tour of central europe for this vacation.


View Larger Map

I have decided on the way there, but not on the way back.. So far, I have spent a night in Hanover and got to Berlin a couple of hours ago. From what I've seen so far, Berlin is one of the most beautiful cities I have been in. It's nightlife is very diverse and there seems to be a little bit of something for everyone, just like home (eheh) but with a twist that makes it very different from the night in Amsterdam. It's still hard to explain the differences but I like it here more than I had anticipated

this is in Hanover....

and this is in Berlin....

and by the way, this is my little car (actually.. mine is black, but you get the picture)

*All images courtesy of Wikipedia because I'm a terrible photographer

And now for something completely different...

yes i am alive. some news to follow....

Iceland pics

Because I promised them last year. You can find more in my Facebook page, so feel free to stalk add me there.

Amsterdam.rb meeting tonight

Location
The event will be held at the Amsterdam office of TTY Internet Solutions, which you can find here

Schedule
19:00 - doors open
19:30 - Jeroen van Dijk - UML-based scaffolding
19:50 - Martijn van Excel - openstreetmap.org
20:20 - break
20:35 - Ola Bini presenting Ioke
21:10 - TTY - About quality
21:30 - break
21:45 - Phusion's Ninh Bui & Hongli Lai - design by contract
22:10 - Axel Roest about rubycocoa
22:30 / 23:30 - drinks

This will be a exciting night out for ruby geeks in Amsterdam! I look forward to see and hear Ola Bini and the Phusion crew above all others.

I will try to write a post-meeting post with any interesting stuff that comes out of it. Stay tuned...

Let's party like it's 1234567890

It's time to party like it's 1234567890 – 'cause it is! In Unix time at least.

Apparently a much lesser celebration is also taking place now, Valentine's Day. So if you didn't understand the first sentence in this post Happy V-Day, if you did you probably don't have a girlfriend anyway so never mind.

Real men don't dance

This is the original performance that got CENSORED in '93 from the Letterman show. On January 30 2009, 16 years later, it got aired. Finally.




Enjoy.

Fuck Christmas, I got the Blues

This year I'm spending Christmas away from everyone I love.

Of course this is not the highest point of my life, but to be fair... I am going to be in Iceland seeing waterfalls, volcanoes, glaciers, whales, fjords, geysers and IF I'm lucky enough I might even catch a aurora borealis in a polaroid for posterity. All this while listening to a lot of Bjork and Sigur Ros.


Also, I will be riding a snow mobile, learning about the ancient myths of one of my favorite civilizations (wait.. vikings where a civilization, right?) drinking cheap vodka in expensive places and finally relaxing in either the sauna or the jacuzzi or even in front of a king size plasma TV in one of the most beautiful hotels I've ever seen.


I will do all these things with a cute geeky girl that has more piercings and tattoos than me (and it's getting increasingly difficult to find one... eh..).


But you know it and I know it... she's not you. Is dat een leuke ding?

Book meme

The query shown earlier on V$LOGFILE demonstrates an OFA-compliant naming convention for redo logs.

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Revelations

People ask me where I stood politically you know. It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy. But that I believe he was a child of Satan here to destroy the planet Earth.

Bill Hicks


I think I can take the stage today and speak in the name of the whole civilized world and say "phew..."

Obviously nobody knows what the election of Mr. Obama will actually mean to all of our futures, but it is clearly a sign that people believe in change. People long for change. We hope that this is a first step towards change.

Personally I will be very happy if by the end of his first term, America has a economy again. Extra points if no other third world country is invaded and double that if somehow some sort of foreign policy that involves stopping the embargo on Cuba, supporting developing nations with food, medicine and technology instead of weapons and money in the hands of right wing soon-to-become-if-not-yet tyrants is put in place.

In all honesty, I'll be fine if at least we have to try hard to make a good joke about the new government in the States, 'cause god knows that this last couple of years they've made it far too easy for us.



PS.: Here's a link to Bill Hicks famous "Revelantions" set for your entertainment pleasure. Now, go back to bed America.

slow day

Google passa a batata quente*

Nas palavras imortais do BB Marco "Nao sei o que andas a procura, mas arriscas-te a encontrar" (Possivelmente a frase nao sera tao imortal quanto isso, uma vez que nao tenho a certeza da citacao estar correcta)

A ideia nao e nova, mas lembrei-me de ver o que e que os desocupados que aqui vem parar andam a procura.

copy run start - Experimenta sem o t no fim. Se correr bem copias a configuracao actual do teu Cisco para a memoria de maneira que no proximo reboot elas nao sao esquecidas.

"list of things white people like" - Isso e aqui

0211fb618b98d794165ceb6dc8f38fbb7d260c1d28dcffc5dd70938fd723222e574ef558f1939482 - Oi?

codigos para desbolquear canais para adultos na meo - (E cerca de 100 variacoes desta query) Experimentem paga-los. There is no such thing as free pr0n.

meo ver conteudos gravados na segunda televisão - Tens de desligar a primeira. Parvo, nao e?

como limpar a cache do teu browser - Do meu? Basta pedires.

o significado segafredo em italiano - Punheta a frio. Ajudou?

what does omoos mean - Se for humus, ve aqui Se for Omoo, E um livro do Herman Melville, sequela do Typee. No meu blog e uma referencia aos comentadores.

Krav Maga - (e referencias a tecnicas, Paulo Pereira etc) - Gosto muito. O mestre Paulo foi das pessoas que mais me marcaram ate hoje (e nem tou a falar das nodoas negras). Para informacoes mais serias procurem aqui ou aqui

*homenagem a uma das minhas blogueiras favoritas. Hey, they say it's the highest form of flattery. Right?

Short explanation on the "M$" thing

Not too long ago I was reading some forum or wickedly long e-mail thread (can't remember) and someone mentioned that referring to Microsoft as M$ was immature or something close to that point.

Well I disagree. I think most people that use the M$ thingy do it because they've grown so used to checking for files with DOS line endings with grep -lR -e '^M$' *
that they just associate DOS with M$... I mean Microsoft. Wait, I'm confused here.

oh gowd.. fail

I might get a bad rep for this one.. but hey all good fun!
http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/ads/video.asp?id=MichaelandWoz

Short description:
Michael Chasen and Steve Wozniak talk about Blackboard 9 (project NG) in a "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" kind of (read: ripoff) commercial. Seriously now.. Wouldn't hiring some once-great-stand-up-comedian make more sense here?

Spoiler:
Watch the other adds. It gets worse.

Finantial advice

Because I recognize we all live in troubled times, I've decided to share some financial advice I got recently from one of my company's admins*.

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95 . With HBOS earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50.

£1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5 but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminum recycling plant, you would get £214.

So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

*actually it was a NT Admin

In repeat

Some people need to be constantly reminded that the world turns around itself and so should they.

Saturday Summer Sail (UPDATED)

Unfortunately it will be a dutch summer...

But I will update this post with some photos!