Alef Arendsen

The other day I was looking at my comment spam backlog and I noticed there was an increase in comment spam for car insurance. It occurred to me that there might be a link between my using a CarPlant as an example for Spring-related sessions since the beginning of this year and the amount of comment spam.

But then I thought that the examples I posted were only to be found on the Interface21 blog, not on this blog. So the question is; are spammers smart enough to find out that this blog is linked to my posts on the Interface21 blog where I’m talking about cars in my examples? Or is there another way for them to link my name to cars or something. It’s not that I frequently write about my beautiful red Ferrari and how fast it is.

The other day, I was sitting in a coffee bar with somebody discussing business delegates, session facades and other things from the past. All of a sudden it appeared to me I just figured out a good analogy for these kinds of artifacts. On a piece of paper I wrote the following text:

hello I am writing stuff!
hello I am writing stuff!

and the conversation went on as follows:

me: writing stuff twice is pretty useless isn’t it?
the other guy: well, yeah…
me: I mean, maybe it’s useful in case somebody can’t read the first bit, he might be able to read the second bit…
me: Okay let’s get back to the business delegate. What is it anyway?
the other guy: well, it’s an interface
me: And the session facade
the other guy: well, that’s an interface too
me: What do they contain?
the other guy: hmmm, the exact same methods…

The conversation ended with us making the conclusion that there there no 100% guarantee that there will never be a need for a business delegate anymore, but at least we should always apply common sense to see if these kinds of artifacts are really necessary…

A couple of weeks ago I was approached by Ahmed Hashim of the Egyptian Java Users Group to present on Spring while I was there for a client engagement. It seems JUGs are everywhere, even where you don’t expect them.

As I like to inspire people with interesting talks (at least, I hope they’re interesting) on software engineering and design best practices, I gladly accepted the invitation and used my ‘Enterprise Java Development with the Spring Triangle’ talk to try to entertain the audience. Fortunately that worked quite well as I noticed aftewards from the evals.

But that’s not what I’m writing about. I wanted to shortly highlight Ahmed Hashim’s achievements (and those of his team). On really short notice, he managed to arrange a meeting space and managed to get over 100 people to attend the meeting.

Ahmed, I had fun!

Suppose you give the keys to your house to somebody else for a week, to allow this person to use your house. When the person tries to open the door, the police comes up to him and arrests him, by saying: ‘it is not allowed to enter or use somebody else’s stuff, even if you have their consent’.

Apparently this is what happened to Nine Inch Nails, a band from the United States. In order to promote their new album, the band’s promotion team ‘leaked’ songs to the public in various ways. I love this almost guerilla marketing scheme a lot, but the RIAA doesn’t, according to the Inquirer.

I truely think this is unbelievable, although the record company probably has something to do with it as well, and I guess copyright issues are more complicated then one might think.

Anyway, on the other hand I don’t really care, as I’m not a big NiN fan anyway .