Meetup 2010
Meetup 2010 – Interlaken, Switzerland. Probably, one of the best Meetup (or at least the same level of the 2008′s one). Location was a bit far away this time, we went to Interlaken, Switzerland and was chosen because of the exciting activity planned on Sunday: canyoing!
But canyoing wasn’t the only news in this Meetup.
We had a full day of talks and speeches about various interesting topics: profiling, mobile, agile and so on, two “Free beer” evenings, a BBQ on a boat on Saturday night. Simply amazing!
The talks sessions seemed quick, interesting and not heavy. We had also lightning speeches about funny stories happened with customers (unfortunately I cannot mention anything 
but, trust me, it was really funny!). I came home with some new ideas and new starting point for new though.
During the evening there was a free beer for every participant to Hooters, and we’ve got double hangovers. My suggestion, that came Friday when was too late was: “Next year we shouldn’t have ‘free beer’ it on Friday”.
Saturday evening we had a beautiful BBQ on a boat, we also risked to miss it because we went initially to the wrong lake (grasse risate) but we fixed the mistake by catching a train in time and go to the correct location! 
The weather was pretty good, we had a very nice view of the lake and the mountains; the sunset was amazing: a bit yellow, orange and surrounded by blue.
Sunday was the “exciting activity day”: canyoing. We walked down a torrent surrounded by high rocks and sometimes entered in small canyons. We jump in the water, climb rocks, got wet in the freezing mountain water. Simply fantastic!
Next year… canyoing level 2? or parachuting? Who knows?
Here you can find all my photos.
Gr8Conf – Copenaghen
Gr8Conf is a conference headed in Copenaghen about gr8 technologies: groovy, grails, griffon, gradle and so on. The conference is organized by Javagruppen, the Danish Java User Group.
Nothing particular to say about the conference, everything was prepared very well and the overall quality was high. Behind the scene a lot of VIP and Stars in the Groovy panorama.
I was there because interested to this technologies but in particular because the Keynote presented a success story on Groovy and the enterprise, basically Philippe Delebarre and Raffaele Cigni gave a talk about wat was done at the European Patent Office.
Summarizing, after two failing tentatives: the first using an existing proprietary product and the second with opensource ESB, the project found in Groovy a very good candidate for the success; in addition, the keys were: strong separation between businnes and development, adopting of agile methodologies (SCRUM and XP), contributed for the success.
The conference at the end went very well, it was nice to meet a lot of people interested in this cool technologies and we had also the opportunity to have 4 hours of hacking in order to contribute to one of this projects.
At the end I went home with some new ideas and new starting point, where I can start working on see you next year
Spring
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. “
– Pablo Neruda
Calculate IBAN (International Bank Account Number) in The Netherlands
In The Netherlands, the European rule to use only IBAN for all bank transfer is not applied, yet.
The problem come when you don’t have a national bank account and you need to pay a bill or someone. Usually they provide you only the account number and 90% of the cases without the possibility to ask for the IBAN.
Fortunately exist a IBAN calculator here, which provide you the automatic calculation of IBAN and BIC.
FOSDEM 2010
After long times I finally have time to publish my impressions about FOSDEM 2010.
In advance I can say it was a beautiful experience.
I arrived on Friday afternoon and I met the other fedora ambassadors for the EMEA Ambassador meeting, let me say meeting face to face is worthy more thatn 1000 characters typed on IRC. It Was a pleasure to see a lot of new faces and meet again all the veterans after long time. A lot of Greeks and a lot of people coming from The Netherlands.
On Saturday afternoon I gave a speech on Groovy. It was a really base introduction starting from a Java code. The room was completely full of people, and let me say the java room were only from people really interested to, it was far from the whole event, so every person there was more interesting. At the end the talk went pretty well. I was so nervous and I made a lot of mistakes while typed my code live, I also broke it swapping missingMethodException and methodMissing().
Anyway the good news for me is that globally groovy is a technology that still gain a lot of people, considering is not anymore the hottest one (I mean the one under the reflectors, like Scala is right now).
I didn’t follow any talk, I spent all my time talking with a lot of people in particular Fedora ambassadors, to have improve my network with them. This time my english was much better and I could contribute more with my thoughts.
I stayed almost all Sunday at Fedora booth. I left it just to have help from sspeitzer to flash it with cynogemod. We dumped it and we were close to start the flash, but I needed to backup my data before so we didn’t go further. I still trying to syncronize my calendar but seems no calendar alternative applications are available on Android (and this sucks).
The social events were really amazing, we went twice to Delirium Cafe and I can say Belgian beers are amazing! I Love them!
What it will remains impress in my mind, from this FOSDEM, it will be the friendly spirit and the coperation we had. It was impressing how we managed the booth and the organization, in particular was terrific the cooperations cross-distribution we have with other guys from Debian, Centos… I believe the decision of the FOSDEM organization to mix the distributions rooms was a good choice.
It was worthy for my coming to this event, I went home with a lot of new ideas and motivations.
And I discovered that I love Brussels!
Other photos here.
Step up or shut up
“Step up or shut up!“, created by Jeroen Van Meewen (aka Kanarip) is THE most real opensouce motto. Every person who is going to write an email of complains/flames/request/whatever, should stop writing, read it, count until 1111 and then start thinking.
Giro del ring. Don’t do it!!!
Despite my blog is fully covered of crappy nerdy technology, this article is something different. The first title for this article was Laura B “for dummies”.
Main goal of this article (whichi is only the first of the many advices you might have) is just avoid you weird episodes you might have if you travel/hang out/whatever with Laura Bull (I will use her name just to preserve her your privacy).
Here what happens in Vienna (from one of our traveler, me):
[...]
A couple of time happens also that we got trapped of the famous (in all over the world) “giro del ring” (ring’s tour) from Laura B (I don’t put the whole name to preserve her privacy, otherwise people will start asking her to have it)…
The procedure is basically simple, Laura, which is most of the time sleeping, jump up and say “let’s do the ring’s tour”, and you say “ok, but which tram should we catch”, before you finish the sentence, she’s already on the first one (which is the only one that go in the opposite or a completely wrong direction 
)…
When you realize your error…it just too late.
[...]
So rule number one: never follow her…The idea to go in a city that hasn’t a ring, is not valid. She can do it even without a Ring. Be careful.
Next lesson, sooner or later (about cruise expedition or trips)…
