Alef Arendsen

Half an hour ago I felt like listening to some music for a change instead of hearing the ever-so-boring ramblings of my colleague Uri (why doesn’t Spring feature this, why doesn’t Spring feature that ). That’s when I started up Pandora again. Fortunately it had remembered my personal settings and tuned in to one of my radio stations I had previously created, called Ricardo Villalobos. Immediately it started playing Ricardo Villalobos’ Theoreme D’Archimede, a couple of other Ricardo Villalobos songs, but also songs from Pole, Bichi and Vladislav Delay.

Apparently I had tuned this radio station in such a way that it only played really inspiring minimal and deep stuff I’d like listen to something. I shared the radiostation with Inge, another colleague, through Pandora’s perfect sharing possiblities and for the tenth time, searched for five minutes if an update for my Sonos music system had already been released that would enable me to listen to Pandora at home. Unfortunately not.

Services like Pandora and products like Sonos really bring the next-generation way of being entertained closer to reality as fas as I’m concerned. Listen to music you like without having to search for days, without having to illegally download stuff after you’ve finally found something, all this for as little as $36 a year! (Or for free, if you don’t mind the ads).

By the way, another cool feature would be to have this integrated with my car’s stereo system. This would require broadband internet in my car, though .

Last June’s Amsterdam Java Meetup got cancelled because I was so stupid to schedule it on the day the Dutch soccer team was supposed to play the quarter finals of the FIFA World Championship. Well, unfortunately they didn’t get that far by the way.

I did a few phonecalls last week and arranged for a location that is a bit more spacious so without further ado:

What:This Fall’s Amsterdam Java Meetup
When: September 29, 2006, 6pm
Where: Amsterdam, De Jaren (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20)

For directions, please click on the map (somehow Google Maps doesn’t recognize the address, so I had to plot the route myself )

The first rounds are covered for, so be on time . Hope to see you all again at De Jaren.

We did by the way start thinking about not only having drinks, but also doing one technical session, right before. I’m not sure about the format yet, so if you have any ideas, please don’t hesitate to post them here as a comment.

Since they’ve been put online, once every now and then I watch a TEDTalk. Going to TED once would be great, because it seems like a great conference, but as the website says:

We’re sorry, but we’ve experienced unprecedented demand for TED2007. Main Hall Priority Passes sold out on February 14th and all but 50 of our Standard Conference Passes have also been claimed.

The other 50 passes will be handed out to people that have gone through some kind of rigorous selection process. And well, since the conference costs $4400 anyway, I think it’s better to keep on watching the TEDTalks online.

Anyway, back to what I was planning on sharing with you; I watched two TEDTalks this weekend (they were put online late last week). The first one by Nicholas Negroponte of Media Lab fame. He’s with the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative and explains everything there is to know about this project in about twenty minutes. Great to watch if you want to learn a bit or two about presenting something when there’s only so much time available. (watch the video)

Then there’s Jeff Han, a researcher at NYU, currently spending some of his time on user interfaces. What he presents at TED is truly awesome and also a great presentation to see that live demos can work. (watch the video)

I was recently having a look at the website for the 2006 version of The Spring Experience, to be held in Hollywood, Florida, I came across a session by Ben Hale I hadn’t noticed before. His session is titled ‘Spring Fundamentals & Philosophy’ and his abstract says the following:

When Rod Johnson wrote J2EE Design and Development he called J2EE “the best platform for enterprise development today”–that the problem in those days wasn’t J2EE itself but that it was “often used badly”.

At the heart of Rod’s book were techniques that showed us how to make J2EE work in practice. And delivered with that book were 30,000 lines of code that put those techniques into action. Add Juergen, Thomas, Alef, Colin, Keith, and Rob (in that order), and one hell of a passionate user community and, well, the rest they say “is history”.

I didn’t really think about all this for some time anymore, but this made me realize that our efforts aside, the community really was and still is a vital part in the success of the Spring Framework. I’m seeing more and more open source projects pop up recently that start out with a 1.0 release; a bit like the good-old (?) days when vendors with proprietary products dropped their stuff on the world after having sat in their ivory towers for ages thinking up their excellent new products.

So I was wondering; for those companies, is open source just a gimmick? Is it only to benefit from the open source wave?

Without trying to abstract a common law here, for me the success of open source (and specifically Spring in this case) could not have occurred without the excellent community, providing us with valuable feedback and input.