Archive for December, 2007

Critical Mass invades the metro

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

Critical Mass Torino has tried several times to get its bikes into the metro wagons, but GTT (the Torino metro administrator) doesn’t allow that. Each time we’ve tried, the speakers said “All the trains won’t start, until every bike will get out of the station”.

This time (on thursday) we went a bit further: we wanted to eat some panettone and drink some sparkling wine in the station without making the admins angry. So we carried our bikes near the ticket machines, we didn’t cross the turnstiles and we greeted at the security cameras while having our christmas party.

The admins liked the idea: they greeted us back when we arrived and they wished us a merry christmas when we left! I think we are somehow becoming friends. Who knows, maybe someday the GTT admins will understand that we will really appreciate the possibility to get our bikes into their metro: at least during winter, crossing the city in a warm place and let our bikes care about the short remaining distances is definitely a good thing.

This video shows us packing things up and receiving the leaving greetings from the admins.

Back from JavaPolis ‘07

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Very good week, very good talks, very nice venue, wonderful croissants, very nice people, ugly photos! (photographer’s fault)

One nice note: a good number of talks was related to agile and there were always quite a crowd of people attending.

Going to Javapolis

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Ready, set, go! In 6 hours from now I’ll officially start my trip to Antwerpen and get my week of professional vacation.

I’ve just set up my agenda (beta version, of course)

Day 1

09:30-12:30 The Zen of Agile Management by David J. Anderson
Open Source ESBs by Tijs Rademakers and Jos Dirksen
13:30-16:30 Google API’s with Dick Wall
Introduction to JRuby with Brian Leonard and Charles Oliver Nutter
16:45-17:15 SoapUI by Ole Matzura (Open-Source)
17:25-17:55 Hudson, a continuous integration system by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Sun (Open-Source)
20:00-21:00 Agile development of distributed systems with Guy Nirpaz

Day 2

09:30-12:30 Swinging RIA with Richard Bair, Jeanette Winzenburg and Chet Haase
NetBeans and Java EE 5 development by Ludovic Champenois and Lukas Hasik
13:30-16:30 Guidelines and Hints to EJB3 and JPA development with Linda Demichiel and Kenneth Saks
16:45-17:15 A gentle introduction to dependency management with Apache Ivy by Xavier Hanin (Open-Source)
17:25-17:55 Easy GUI testing with FEST by Alex Ruiz & Yvonne Wang Price (Open-Source)
Task-focused programming with Mylyn by Wayne Beaton (Eclipse, Open-Source)
19:00-20:00 Great Java Desktop Apps - can it be done? by Eivind Throndsen
20:00-21:00 OpenLaszlo, From RIA to Ajax and Mobile with Geert Bevin
21:00-22:00 Clustering a Real World Enterprise Application by Ugo Landini and Sergio Bossa

Day 3

09:30-11:30 HOLE
12:00-13:00 Guice by Bob Lee
OpenJDK - The First Year by Mark Reinhold
14:00-15:00 HOLE
15:10-16:10 JSR 316 - Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 Specification by Roberto Chinnici
Java persistence - a Heretic’s demonstration by Olivier Caudron
16:40-17:40 JSR 318 - Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 by Kenneth Saks
Scrum in practice for non-believers by Jannik Persoons and Darek Krzywania
17:50-18:50 The Future of Computing panel with James Gosling, Neal Gafter, Joshua Bloch and Martin Odersky
20:30-21:30 The Closures Saga continues with Neal Gafter

Day 4

09:30-11:30 HOLE
12:00-13:00 Scala by Martin Odersky
14:00-15:00 HOLE
15:10-16:10 ServiceMix by Bruce Snyder
16:40-17:40 Close Customer Collaboration - the BMW case by Johan Lybaert
GlassFish - Bringing *you* a better application server in three steps by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine
17:50-18:50 The Java Puzzlers by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter
JSR 311 - JAX-RS The Java API for RESTful Web Services by Paul Sandoz
21:30-22:30 New Java Language Features with Neal Gafter and Joshua Bloch

Day 5

09:30-10:30 A Kanban System for Software Engineering by David J. Anderson
10:30-11:30 Evolving Agile by Scott Ambler
12:00-13:00 Real Options in a nutshell by Olav Maassen and Chris Matts
OSGi, the future of Java? by Peter Kriens
13:00-14:00 Test Driven Development, Beyond the Acronyms by Lasse Koskela

See you next week!

TED: ideas worth spreading

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

When it happens you are having a break between two sets of pomodori, you don’t want another coffee, you don’t want to read IT blogs BUT you like to enjoy your time with some science or environment or philosophy, then TED is definitely the right place.

I’ve missed last three months of talks (because of my new job), so this evening I decided to have a look at it and found a very nice video that I invite you to watch. 16 mins, so it’s even easy to take.

Javaday Wars

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

The Javaday 2007, roman edition, is over


To be continued…