Alef Arendsen

Although our conference bag will probably not be the coolest ever, we will definitely have a great time at SpringOne in about 3 weeks. There’s lots of cool stuff to cover in sessions that will be led by some people that have all gained great respect in their area of expertise and frankly speaking, that’s more important to me than all the goodies (although a t-shirt or long-sleeve with a Spring logo on it is always nice, I’ve already had great success in bars and pubs with it, ahum ). Let me shortly touch base on some of the sessions.

Adrian Colyer – AOP in the Enterprise: If you have never seen Adrian present, please make sure to drop by at his session. Not only is Adrian a great speaker, he also has some interesting material to cover. I’m sure he’ll touch on the new features Spring 2.0 has in the area of Aspect-Oriented Programming and how Aspect-Oriented Programming will bring us closer to doing domain driven design and development.

Rod Johnson – Testing with Spring: Rod will present on testing with Spring. Of course he’ll touch on the excellent integration testing support Spring features. Everytime I host a training session, I explain about the support for tests that automatically roll back. The approach is so natural for me, that I never think about the time anymore I had to generate unique IDs for all objects I insert in a database while testing or setting up a new database schema for every test. This sure is interesting stuff.

Juergen Hoeller – JMS in a Spring Environment: Juergen will present on JMS and I’m certainly going to join this session, since I haven’t had a good look at the latest additions on the JMS front yet. Spring 2.0 features asynchronous message listeners, based on POJOs.

Gregor Hohpe – Patterns in Service-oriented Architectures. Aside from the fact that Gregor has good humor (’If this was buzzword bingo I probably would be an instant winner with this session title’) and that he knows that SOA in Dutch translates to STD, he also is very knowledgeable. I’ll definitely join his talk because I’m certain he has some interesting stuff to cover in the area of Service-oriented architectures and asynchronous stuff.

It’s that time of the year again. I was walking down the streets of Amsterdam last night and everybody was sitting outside. It’s the first hot day of the year and that’s when everybody gets out of their houses and starts drinking beer in the streets.

Java Meetup
It reminded that I still had to pick a date for the next Java Meetup. Last two editions were pretty successful, although the bar I picked the last time was kind of small and we got kicked out because of some private party that started at 10 or something. Anyway:

The next Amsterdam Java Meetup
is scheduled for June 30th
Location: to be announced
Time: 6pm

I still have to find a good location that will hold 50+ people without having to reserve anything. Please don’t hesitate to take anyone with you that’s faintly familiar with the term Java. After having a beer or two, it doesn’t matter anymore whether or not you know the difference between a public and private method anyway. No technical presentations, just a drink with some fellow Java developers. The first couple of rounds are free (yes, free as in beer), so don’t be late. Check back here later on for the location.

You can leave a comment here if you want to join, but just dropping by is okay too.

SpringOne update
In somewhat more than a month, Interface21 and BeJUG are hosting SpringOne, a conference targeted at J2EE developers with numerous big names in the industry giving interesting talks. Today we had some good news, both Google and GigaSpaces confirmed their sponsorship. Other sponsors include Chess IT, Symantec and BEA. Let’s hope they have some nice goodies to give away .

So I walked back into the office last Monday and noticed my laptop was not where it should be. Since both my laptops (the brand new one and the old one from which I was moving some old data) had been stolen last November from my car, I thought somebody was making a bad joke. Well, I was wrong: somebody apparently walked into the office while we were having lunch just in the room next to where my laptop was and it got stolen!

I had a look at some images from the security cameras in the building and it showed a guys coming out of the elevator with a big box in his hands; a box that previously has been standing in our office. So there you have it; somebody just walks into your office and grabs your laptop, it’s unbelievable.

The stupid $#*($#*(# made one slight mistake though . He lost a receipt from the Cash Converters (some kind of a pawnshop) that had all his personal on it (including registration number of his passport, his address, birthdate, et cetera). The police did some investigation and as it turned out, they know who the guy is and have already paid him a visit. Unfortunately he wasn’t home, so they are on the lookout.

It was quite a coincidence that a brand new laptop had just arrived in the morning and although it wasn’t for me, but for my colleague Bram, I kindly asked him to hand it over to me for a while and I can assure you, he wasn’t happy… And there I was, spending hours and hours re-installing everything on my laptop again. It’s an ThinkPad T60, DualCore, which is kind of nice, but to be honest, ThinkPads aren’t what they used to be since Lenovo took over from IBM. The whole thing isn’t that robust anymore and to put in extra memory you have to take the whole thing apart instead of just opening a small lid on the back. I’m still not sure, but I think they also changed the power inlet, which is one thing I always bought IBM ThinkPads for.

Well, at least it’s fast….