Alef Arendsen

Questa sera i olandesi hanno dato una grande schiaffone agli italiani. Okay, that’s enough Italian for now. I won’t repeat the other stuff I learnt tonight. After I asked an Italian friend of mine (by text message): ‘come stai? ’, he responded by saying ‘come con tre dita nel ….’. I think Italians will probably be able to fill in the rest of the sentence .

Anyway, for those not in the know, the Dutch soccer team beat the Italian team tonight with 3 to 0. This is a great victory, as first of all, the Italian are the ruling world champion and second, it was 30 years ago since the Dutch soccer last won from the Italian. Now, of course (as always) we keep our feet on the ground in Holland and are all saying that we still have another two matches to go before we have survived the ‘group of death’ (with France and Romania being the other two teams).

I have a few workers dropping by at my house next week (a tubista, a muratore and an elettricista). If any Italian are listening in. What should I bring to ease the pain and to convince them they should still work for me (they have do do a lot of stuff next week, such as finishing the installation of the electricity, installing hot water and so on)? Anything slightly more original than a bottle of limoncello will do. It’s in the North of Italy (Valle d’Aosta).

Update: wow, the amount of press is amazing, and not just that, the headlines are great:

• Dutch thrash aging Italians (International Herald Tribune)
• Italy humbled in Euro shocker (Melbourne Herald Sun)
• Orange crush Italy in Group of Death opener (London Free Press)
• Rampant Netherlands crush sorry Italy (CNN International)
• Italy peeled like Oranges (Goal.com)
• First blood to Dutch in Group of Death (The Herald)
• Dutch masterclass sinks Italy as France only draw (Earthtimes)

Ah, and about that off side thing, let’s quote from the source:

“If a defending player steps behind his own goal line in order to place an opponent in an offside position, the referee shall allow play to continue and caution the defender for deliberately leaving the field of play without the referee’s permission when the ball is next out of play.”

Eclipse on Leopard used to have a very nasty bug that made it to crash in certain circumstances. Now I just downloaded the main Eclipse distribution (I figured, it’s been a while, the main download SHOULD have fixed this now). And it still crashes.

Now, I’m sure it’ll be fixed in the next version, but what does it take to supply all people on Leopard with patched version (as the main download version).

Sure, I know the integration and stream builds all have the fix, but do I really have to go through all the trouble of downloading a stream integration build to get such a patch? What about people that just want to try things out and don’t know about this bug.

Of course, I could be totally wrong here and maybe there is a easily downloadable version for Leopard somewhere, but then I missed it. Let me know if you have any alternatives.

Okay, apart from Java 6 not being available on the Mac, I’m not complaining at all:

Last login: Thu Nov 15 10:06:52 on ttys000
Macintosh:~ alefarendsen$ which ant
/usr/bin/ant
Macintosh:~ alefarendsen$ which mvn
/usr/bin/mvn

I just got a new laptop and immediately installed Leopard on it. I was in such a rush that I really didn’t have time to do anything else than the bare necessities. So when I checked out some source code today and needed Ant to build it, I didn’t need to download it at all!

Thanks, Apple

And about that Java 6 thing: who’s on Java 6 anyway

In about a month, I’ll be organizing another Java Meetup in Amsterdam. This will be the seventh time this event is taking place, and so far I’ve enjoyed all of them. Reading all responses and emails I received over time, this also holds for loads of you that have joined in in the past.

I’ve already published more about this quarter’s Java Meetup, so I’m not going to be repeat any info here. Just be there!!

more info on this quarter’s Amsterdam Java Meetup on blog.interface21.com

It seems like JRoller screwed up again. At least, that’s what it looks like to me…

Cameron’s blog looks like this today:

And I also found another blog, which doesn’t even show the entry text.

Way to go! Fortunately Hani abandoned JRoller a while ago, so we can still enjoy his stuff

Next month is going to a busy one, with two conferences and lots of other internal work to do.

June 13, I’ll be speaking at the bi-annual NL-JUG event, J-Spring in Bussum. I’ll be hosting two tutorial-like sessions, together with my colleagues Arjen Poutsma and Joris Kuipers.

The week following J-Spring, we are hosting SpringOne in Antwerp. I have two sessions there. The first one is title Spring Beyond the Obvious. In this talk, Joris and I will be sharing some best practices about using Spring in complex projects.

The second will highlight ways to use AspectJ and other tools such as Structure101 to enforce architectural guidelines in your application.

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!

I’m hosting another Amsterdam Java Meetup next month. We’re doing it at the Jaren again, which is in the centre of Amsterdam. This is the sixth time we’re doing this already and so far it has always proven to be a big success.

Bring along anybody you know that has anything to do with Java, if even remotely! Again, don’t expect any talks or presentations, it’s just drinks and chit-chat.

As always, first few beers are covered for.

What: Amsterdam Java Meetup
Where: De Jaren, Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam
When: April 13, 2007 — starting at 6pm

A client of ours I visited a couple of weeks ago had successfully prototyped Spring WebFlow security. The solution was pretty elegant, although when looking at it from a configuration perspective, it wasn’t entirely perfect. I offered to take over the code and help out with refactoring it so it could be integrated into their code much in the same way as Acegi Security method interceptors work.

This morning I finally got to doing so and I ended up with a solution that is not even 500 lines of code long (including extensive JavaDoc) and integrates perfectly with existing facilities offered by Acegi. I am going to integrate the solution with the client this afternoon (if the snow doesn’t prevent me from getting to their office; it’s snowing *right now* and if in Holland there’s a tiny bit of snow, all traffic comes to a grinding halt). The following is a configuration snippet that allows you to secure a flow based on states, event and the flow identifier itself. Other than that, it has the same configuration properties as the MethodSecurityInterceptor (it’s in the same class hierarchy).

This pretty much proves the extensibility of Acegi Security again. This is the third time already I’ve integrated a new system with Acegi Security to provide security at yet another level (two other times I integrated it with other clients’ internal security systems). All three times, it didn’t take me more than 500 lines of code if I remember correctly.

In some form or another, this feature will be available in Spring WebFlow as soon as we can get it in. Keep monitoring SWF-93 if you’re interested.

Yesterday we had another pretty successful Java Meetup in Amsterdam. About 50 people joined in for beers and talks about Java. Thanks all for joining; you definitely made my day . I hope you had fun.

Amongst others I met with a former co-student of mine I hadn’t seen in 7 years or so (although we’re living in the same city and actually really close to each other). I also spoke with several people I have worked with on projects years ago and I ran into Aino Andriessen, who (already–even though the year has just started) has won the award for the gig of the year gig of the year. He just returned from the Pacific where he worked on a Continuous Integration solution in an ADF environment. Read Paul Theroux’ Happy Isles of Oceania to get an idea.

Only until after the event I found out that it was featured on upcoming.org. I’ll post a link to the upcoming.org for next time’s meeting so we can keep track of who’s coming.

Next installment will be in April. I don’t have a date yet (I have to check conference schedule, public holidays, et cetera first), but it won’t be the last Friday of the month, because I heard there’s a different (monthly) and rivaling (no, just kidding) event going on then and I don’t want to be in their way .

p.s. next time I’ll try to take some pictures and post them here.