Monthly Archives: February 2010

FOSDEM 2010

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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.

Giro del ring. Don’t do it!!!

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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 :D )…
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)…

Road to FOSDEM 2010

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As most of you already know (if you don’t, never mind, I will forgive you :D ), I’m going to give a lightning talk in the Free Java Dev room at FOSDEM about Groovy. The title will be “Groovy: the cool side of java” and basically it will be an hand-on speech. No slide, just code. I will start from a simple Java code and I will rewrite it in Groovy. During the demo/live I will give some basics explanation about how is groovy working and we will see the power and the value that Groovy add at the top of JVM compared with a static language like Java.

Here the code that I wrote:

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Collections;

class TestJava{
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      new DoStuffs().doIt();
   }
}

class DoStuffs{

   public void doIt(){

   List al = new ArrayList();

   System.out.println("* Initial size of"+al.getClass()+" :  " + al.size() + " with elements "+al);

   al.add("this");
   al.add("is");
   al.add("just");
   al.add("test");

   System.out.println("* Final size of"+al.getClass()+" :  " + al.size() + " with elements "+al);
   System.out.println("* Let's add some stuffs");

   al.add(2,"a");
   al.add(3,"cool");

   System.out.println("* Done "+al);
   System.out.println("");

   System.out.println("- Before ordering"+al);
   Collections.sort(al);
   System.out.println("- After ordering "+al);
   System.out.println("");

   List al2 = al.subList(2,4);

   System.out.println("- Sublisting "+al2);
   System.out.println("");

   if(al.size() > 0){
      for (int i=0; i< al.size(); i++) {
         al.set(i, al.get(i)+" \\o/ ");
      }

      System.out.println("Let's show the element in the reverse order: ");
      for (int i=al.size()-1; i>=0; i--){
         System.out.println("<"+i+"> "+al.get(i));
      }
   }

   if(al != null){
      List sub = new ArrayList();

      for (int i=0; i< al.size(); i++) {
         String el = (String) al.get(i);
         if(el.contains("t")) {
            sub.add(al.get(i));
         }
      }
      System.out.println("- After grep "+ sub);
    }
  }
}