If not now, when ?

The Devoxx mystery and performance anxiety

Christian — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:37:26 +0000

The Java blog space is full of stories from Devoxx. Actually I had never heard of this conference although I already hang around in the Java camp for a couple of years.
So I went looking into the schedule and found indeed a lot of high quality topics and speakers. How on earth is it possible that I’ve missed such a top notch conference all these years ?
The mystery was solved when I learned that the conference was called Javapolis before and I had completely missed the naming dispute with Sun (it seems I’m living under a rock).
Back when it was still called Javapolis I watched one of Joshua Bloch’s excellent talks (video on the net was young in these days ;-)
Tom White reports that Joshua Bloch provided his favourite talk at Devoxx this year about “Performance anxiety”. To accept performance as empirical science and giving up hope on performance predictability is tough for all us computer scientists. I think I should buy access to the video archive of Devoxx.

Quote of the month by Peter Hutterer

Christian — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:34:01 +0000

Peter Hutterer of X input fame in a post on X input grabs:

“If you think all this is confusing, look at the code that implements this :)
Also note that this post skips on a number of details and contains some amount of handwaving and sticking fingers in your ears and going “lalalala”.”

Quote of the month by Jon Corbet

Christian — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:40:20 +0000

From my favourite Linux online publication lwn.net a great quote by editor Jon Corbet in “The end of the road for the Nexus One”. This will get a classic.

“Your editor will confess that he still feels a certain childlike joy at the prospect of reflashing an expensive device that he depends on, possibly bricking it, then painfully restoring all of the settings and discovering all of the new bugs which have been added. It’s the sort of adrenaline experience that others, perhaps, seek through horror movies, bungee jumping, investing in equities, or PHP programming.”

Inspiring TED talk on corruption

Christian — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:46:53 +0000

Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International, talks about the long way of exposing the damage corruption is bringing to our world. An inspiring aura of true and utter sincerity flows through his talk.

Other’s N900 gagdet fun

Christian — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:52:09 +0000

N900 as retro gaming box.

Bambini soccer in the hood

Christian — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:43:30 +0000

It’s always quite fun to watch the Bambini soccer cups of our youngest son. Most of the teams are swirling around the ball like bees ;-)

But there are usually one or two exceptional teams which have grasped the concept of passing the ball and using the space. Quite fun to watch.

My first post from the N900

Christian — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:06:38 +0000

Let’s see if I can finally arrive in the modern times of the mobile web. Kind of hard to type on such a tiny keyboard but definitly fun.

I’m just trying to travel from Hamburg to Karlsruhe which is a major challenge in these days of snow weather everywhere in Germany. Two hours delay and counting. But a nice slowdown in a too busy work schedule ;-)

Crash course in alioth usage

Christian — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:21:51 +0000

Lessons learned today:

Debian developers already have got accounts on alioth and don’t have to needlessly create new accounts like I did
always check the project home page of an alioth project otherwise you look potentially at an old and dead cvs repository like I did instead of the current svn repository
do more research before you do ITPs otherwise there are more lessons like the above for me to learn

Returning to some Debian work in the new year

Christian — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:15:47 +0000

Decided to get back to some Debian related work: posted an ITP for the vdr epgsearch plugin. The autotimer function of vdradmin which I use extensively is reaaaally slowing down the web interface. Fortunately more recent vdradmin versions are deprecating the autotimer function and recommend the epgsearch plugin for automatic timers. So instead of just compiling the plugin for myself I thought I should better do it properly and include it in Debian. I hope to get it done during the week.

BTW happy new year to everyone who just changed years according to their calendar. For me I’m sure it’ll get an interesting ride this year.

Commuting in soccer world cup times

Christian — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 21:47:15 +0000

Late evening commuting (pre-launch time at ComBOTS) is quite
interesting during these soccer world cup times right now. Australians
accompanied by 1,5m plastic kangaroos, groups of Italians,
Spanish and Germans wildly debating and celebrating in a mixture of
English, German and Spanish, flocks of young Germans stylishly made up
with german colours for after-soccer parties, people wrapped in flags
everywhere, …. Actually the soccer influence in commuter space is far
nicer than expected and the party still goes on.