thekua.com@rest – Page 75

London Underground Decorated

September 23, 2006 Patrick UK Life

When passing through some of the London Underground stations, it is all too easy to think that they are extremely unkempt places (which is true for the most part). A rare handful of stations participate in a program encouraging ‘Platform Art’ aiming to make public transport that much more enjoyable.

The Gloucester Road station is currently exhibiting work painted by Chiho Aoshima, with the entire piece titled ‘City Glow – Mountain Whisper’. Its bright pictures are painted in what looks like classic Japanese Otaku style, and its apt theme of a cityscape transformed into human-like characters really lightens up the entire station.

Chiho Aoshima - City Glow - Mountain Whisper

You can read more about the exhibition on the Transport for London website here.

Javazone 2006 Conference

September 17, 2006 Patrick Travel, Work Related

This week I was fortunate enough to present at Javazone, the biggest conference in Norway, and as one local told me, apparently the second biggest java conference in all of Europe. The conference sold out to its maximum capacity of 1400 Norwegians one month before it even started, certainly demonstrating Java’s popularity and the talent pool this country has to offer. The IT industry in Norway appears exceptionally healthy with all of the stands aggressively recruiting people. Local Norwegians confirmed the current state constantly describing the wealth of opportunities available to them.

A lot of the developers I spoke to use the basic toolkit of Hibernate and Spring for most of their projects, and I found it a good sign most of them do automated testing of some form and some level of continuous integration. Many of them have adopted more specifically XP practices, but adoption of the agile values still seem to be missing. A Norwegian TW alumnus I spoke to confirmed this observation and is something he is struggling with in his current role.

I was surprised not to see many more sessions focused on Web 2.0 (as if there’s even a thing!) technologies, with only one session demonstrating the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Overall it was a well balanced conference with a number of sessions covering topics in core java (Swing, Java5, advanced memory tricks and tuning), enterprise java (EJB3, SOA, Webservices), web (JSF, GWT), testing (Watir, Selenium), methodology (Scrum, lean) and some fun stuff including mobile and embedded java.

Quite a number of notable java people came and spoke including the likes of Bruce Tate, James Strachan, Joshua Bloch, Rod Johnson, Gavin King, Floyd Marinescu and even a small handful of the agile community including Ken Schwaber, Mary and Tom Poppendieck and Johannes Brodwall.

If I got anything out of it personally, I now know that:

JSF still seems too complicated and immature to be used just yet (with too many XML configurations and too many workarounds for practical use)
The Java Persistence API (JPA), a part of the EJB3 spec, will not be as flexible as what JDO or Hibernate offers, and requires at a minimum at least two more XML files (orm.xml and persistence.xml). Admittedly it will offer great relief and better flexibility for standards-obsessed organisations and will be much more usable and effective than what Bean Managed Persistance ever could be.
SPOT devices (hardware running the JVM directly without any OS) will change the sorts of applications we will be able to write allowing us easier integration with hardware than ever before.
Sun’s announcement that they intend to fully support Ruby and Javascript officially on the JVM directly (with the intention of support more interpreted languages in the future), will certainly have a great impact on the industry.
The Looking Glass 3D Desktop project looks interesting though might not be entirely practical.
Joshua Bloch develops on a Mac.

I felt my presentation went successfully (on Test Driving Swing Applications) with an attendance of somewhere around 120 people. I had a great time talking and meeting people as well as sharing my experiences at such a large conference and would highly recommend anyone to present or even just there (thought it helps if you can speak Norwegian).

Oslo

September 16, 2006 Patrick Travel

Since the start of last weekend, I have been lucky to see probably the best weather that Oslo offers for sometime with bright blue skies and not especially cold days. Some of the great things that you have to do if you ever visit Oslo (at least in the summer time) is:

Take a Fjord cruise around the harbour;
Visit the Vigeland parks filled with spectacular scenery and some really interesting statues) – home of the famous Angry Boy statue;
Visit the Cultural Museums to see the evolution of houses and see grass growing on the roof of them
Walk around the Nobel Peace Centre
Visit the Giant Ski Jump at Holmenkollen
Walk around the grounds of Akershus Castle
Hang out and people watch at Akry Bryge

I think that most people have a very good lifestyle and though things appear costly, the standards of living appear much higher. For example, for the same amount of rent you might pay in London, you may still get something smallish in the centre of Oslo, but it will at least be modern, well designed and, at the very minimum, very well built. Oslo still has its fair share of problems, with many homeless people and less welcoming people surrounding the area just near the central station.

Central Oslo is not very big, most things are well within walking distance, and trams, buses and ferries make getting around to other areas further out extremely easy.

I was fortunate enough to know a few locals from my time at University, and thanks to Kurt, I even was able to attend an extremely rare and popular afternoon tea event with Steven Twining (the tenth generation of the Twining family). Though I think of tea as very English, I was surprised to find out Norwegians are large tea drinkers (after coffee) and were the reason that Twinings created the less malodorous Lady Grey tea. I caught up with a bunch of other people from University, dining at some wonderful restaurants including Plah for dinner followed by Pascal for desserts. They gave me the inside to some great places to hang out but because of the fantastic weather I spent most of my time basking in the sun by the harbour down at Akry Bryges, or on the other side of Akershus Castle looking over the spectacular harbour front.

You can check out more photos from my time in Oslo here.

It’s Pays to Really Check

September 5, 2006 Patrick Annoyances, Travel, UK Life

Or rather, you don’t have to pay (or something like that).

This weekend I booked a cheap flight with E@syj3t (no linking for your today!), one of those discount airline. Admittedly I was in a hurry and I thought I got a real bargain until I got two emails from them – one for the flight and one for the insurance! Though I checked my flight details very carefully as I don’t want to fly out of the wrong airport or dates and times, I had neglected to notice they had added insurance by default and I had to remove it. Very sneaky indeed.

Although I paid only £8 of insurance, I already have travel insurance and it added another 20% to the total cost!

The Vines @ The Forum

September 2, 2006 Patrick Music, UK Life

In November 2004 the lead singer of The Vines (Craig Nicholls) announced he had Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism). Many music sources believed that it would be a while until they did any touring, if at all. I feel especially fortunate then that they have started once again, and that I bought some tickets for their London gig on Tuesday night.

They performed at The Forum in Kentish Town, a very appropriate setting to see any rock band perform. The Forum is a decently sized venue with two floors (the second with seating), but the best part is downstairs where it is easy to get a good view of the stage.

The Vines played a great number of songs from both of their albums, Highly Evolved and Winning Days, and a handful of songs from their soon-to-be-released album, all of which the audience completely lapped up. We stood downstairs, close to the front and right on the edge of the frenzied crowd that moshed almost all night long. A huge number of people even got into the crowd surfing, and though I didn’t count exactly how many people security lifted and escorted out, it would have been easily over 30! I thought The Vines performed extremely well and I was thoroughly impressed in the encore when they got the entire crowd singing with them to their cover of Outkast’s Ms Jackson song.

TheKua.com Rating: 7 out of 10