It’s been a busy Spring for me, but luckily it has partly been caused by several great travels! This time the destinations were New York and 2x Prague.

In April me and a colleague traveled to New York for the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. What a wonderful city New York is! I had extremely high expectations before traveling across the sea and I can honestly say that they were all satisfied. From the “Admitted” stamp landed in my passport until I stepped on the plane to go home, it was all a great adventure.

Stepping off the train at Penn Station in the middle of Manhattan, is like stepping into a dozen of movies and TV series. You feel you’ve been there before, but at the same time it’s all a completely new city and you can just feel all the discoveries waiting around the corner.

We had taken a couple of days extra in addition to the days for conference preparation and we got to see most of the typical tourist sights, and got to walk our feet sore through Central Park and an endless number of kilometers through the streets and avenues of Manhattan.

On Saturday night we also got to see a comedy show at Dangerfields which was a great experience – except for when the comedians learned that we were from Norway and of course would not let that go for the whole show…!

We also got 5 days extra of forced vacation due to the ash clouds which were causing problems for the air traffic in Europe. Even though we had to get some work done during those days we also got to see a little more of the city.

New York is definitively a city I am going back to.

Then it was off to Prague. During May I have been there twice, once for pleasure and once for business. From April 30th till May 3rd me and five friends spent the weekend, but unfortunately I got sick the second we arrived and spent a major part of the weekend in my hotel bed with a fever. But the rest of the guys seemed to enjoy themselves and luckily I felt well enough to enjoy a meal and a beer or two with them during the day.

Luckily I have been to Prague before, so I did not miss a lot of sight seeing.

During my second visit, last week, I was feeling much better and got to enjoy the city in between Apache Lucene EuroCon. The conference was full of good talks and it was very inspiring. Definitively hope the conference will be coming back next year – hopefully in another great European city.

So this Spring has been great for traveling, and hopefully I manage to find the time for at least one more trip somewhere abroad before the year ends – would not mind some beach and warmth when the dark days are starting to creep up on us here up here…

A new version of iTunes Agent has just been released. The new version is a minor update bringing a couple of enhancements to prevent misconfiguration which has caused problems for some users.

I hope this new version will continue to satisfy your media synchronization needs between iTunes and your portable media players!

Download and more information is as always available over at http://ita.sourceforge.net.

Happy holidays, everyone!

I’ve found my way home to my parents for a couple of days to relax, eat great food and enjoy the holiday

I hope you will all have some good days and a good New Year’s celebration, before coming back to work in January with a few kilos extra and energy for a new exciting 2010!

Now I am just waiting for dinner and Santa to show up later!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/powi/ / CC BY 2.0

Well, not quite yet – but we’re getting there! And meanwhile, I always love to trawl through the Internet on December 1st to find all the goodies hidden in the forest of Advent calendars out there

I usually focus on the Norwegian ones, but if you’ve got tips about any international calendars, feel free to post the address in a comment. Here’s the list of calendars I’ve come across and found worthy so far

Norwegian:

• Elkøp
• Gamer.no
• Bokklubben
• Filmweb
• Komplett.no
• PS.no (special offers only)
• Spill.no
• Gjerrigknark.no
• Stormberg (special offers only)
• NSB (Norwegian National Railways) – Possibly the best at getting me in the Christmas mood so far

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam, attending a workshop for the Norwegian Java User Group, and it was a blast! What a city!

A major part of the weekend was spent working – as that was much of the purpose of the trip, but I got a couple of hours to walk around and enjoy the nice streets and canals. We also got an hour in the Madam Tussauds museum, and since I’ve never been to any of them before it was an interesting experience! Some of those wax dolls are creepily realistic…!

Friday evening we went out eating at Toro Dorado. Great atmosphere and the food was delicious. Might have been because we waited for at least an hour before we got tables (it should be noted that we were 30 people though…), but we were guided to the bar next door where we got drinks on the house while we waited. Not bad!

“It takes two to tango”, said the waiter after he had paid the €120 for drinks and we were seated. That’s what I call service

Later in the evening we went for drinks, and Aleksander and I got to meet up with Emma and Denise who we met on our Interrail trip this summer. It was great to see you girls again – even though we waited for quite a while Seems all good things came very late that evening… That’s what she said.

Wait. What?

Saturday morning we were up early to have breakfast before the workshop started at 9. We worked till 6:30 pm and although it was a long day, forcing the hangover from last night away with creative thinking, we got quite a lot done and got a good pile of ideas on the table for next year’s JavaZone conference.

In the evening we had booked a private canal dinner cruise which took us around the canals of Amsterdam while we were eating a way on a good – not delicious – buffet. It was a great way to enjoy dinner after a long day, but I must admit I had expected a little more of quality food for the rather stiff price we paid. I’d still recommend the experience, though. It’s a great way to see Amsterdam by night.

After dinner we headed for a bar, which we assimilated and took over the whole place. I heard rumors one of our members were actually behind the bar serving drinks at one moment. Got to love Norwegians abroad

Saturday night ended at a club where we danced until the early morning. Loved it!

Sunday was spent walking around a little, and Madam Tussauds as I mentioned. I would have liked to have more time for sightseeing, but it just means I have to go back another time to see the rest of the city. One of the better cities I’ve visited in Europe and it goes high on the re-visiting list.

I’ve put up the few photos I took on my Flickr account, and you should keep an eye on Aleksander’s account for uploads as well.

I’m off to Amsterdam next weekend! It won’t just be for leisure, as we’re 30+ people going for a workshop with the Norwegian Java User Group. Although a geater part of the weekend will be spent planning the future of the user group as well as the JavaZone conference, I’m hoping to get some time to visit the city.

We’ll be arriving on Friday in the evening and will be heading back home Sunday evening. Saturday will be spent working, but hopefully Sunday will bring great weather and show Amsterdam from it’s best side

The plan is also to meet up with some friends who Aleksander and I met on our trip this summer, and hoping they’ll help compress Amsterdam’s sights into a neat package of the essential

Anyways, it will be great to get away for a couple of days and see something else than the regular small town of Grimstad!

I was very happy yesterday, when an e-mail from VG Nett Fotoalbum (a Norwegian online photo service) arrived in my inbox, telling me that I had several albums quarantined and that they would be deleted if I did not take action and paid for hosting.

I had long forgotten about this, and was very happy to find that I had several albums stored on that site, which I was sure I had lost in a hard disk crash a couple of years back. Awesome!

So I paid the 90 NOK for 6 months of hosting and got all my albums out of the quarantine There were photos from a car trip I made through the eastern parts of Norway in 2004, my trip to India in 2005, my cousins wedding in 2005 and from my brothers confirmation in 2006. As well as a couple of other random pictures which I am happy to have back in my posession

This event has gotten me thinking that I really should find a proper online storage service for my photos – or perhaps a proper network backup system  is in order. However, I really don’t feel like stuffing more computer and network equipment into my apartment. But are online services reliable enough?

How do you backup your photos and other files that are precious to you? Got any good tips for me?

Photo by André Eide

Last week I attended JavaZone 2009, one of the biggest developer conference in Scandinavia. I had a great time, both learning-wise and on the social level. Nothing beats Club Zone Wednesday night

The agenda was filled with good talks this year as well, and it’s always a big puzzle to make it all fit and attend as many interesting talks as possible. I spent a couple of hours at the javaBin stand this year as well, as I am the leader of the Southern Norwegian branch of the user group. It’s a good way to meet the rest of the javaBin crew, as well as other people stopping by either for information, a cup of coffee, a discussion, or ice cream – yeah we had an ice cream bar this year. Guess who dove into that one on Thursday morning, with a sliiiiiiiiiight hang over…

BeerDuke - Providing the javaBin Heroes with free beer (An RFID modified soda vending machine)

Among the most interesting talks I attended this year was Arjen Poutsma’s talk on Spring 3.0,  Jevgeni Kabanov’s talk on class loaders as well as his Lightning Talk on JavaRebel, Erik Hatcher’s Solr talk and Jason Van Zyl’s talk on Maven 3.0, Nexus and m2eclipse. There were several more excellent talks, and I would probably cite most of the agenda listing them all, but these were the ones that resulted in something concrete that I will sit down and get my hands dirty with.

The first thing I have started looking at is JavaRebel. I got it up and running today, and it’s clear it’s going to make a lot of our development much more stream lined. I am giving a demo of it to the rest of our team on Friday, and hopefully they will find it just as useful Then it will only be a matter of convincing the boss to purchase the licenses!

We also joined a Solr and Lucene meetup at Oslo Plaza on Wednesday evening, and had three hours of very interesting talks and discussions with other’s in the search business. Hopefully we’ll manage to have a couple of more meetups over the next year

Anyways, it was a great week and it’s fun to be back at work having loads of stuff to start studying and working on

This morning I woke up to the announcement that my beloved music streaming service, Spotify, is finally available on my Android phone! What better news to start off the week?

The application is available for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android handhelds and gives you the complete catalogue right in your hand. You can also make your playlists available offline, which means they are downloaded to your phone (or iPod Touch) and enables you to play the music wherever you are. Looking forward to testing it at the gym and the bus this week. The release was actually perfecly timed with my trip to Oslo and JavaZone this week!

I’ve tested the playback and also downloaded a couple of my playlists and it’s all working perfectly so far You should be aware that the mobile version of Spotify requires you to have an active Premium subscription, but with this solid mobile application in addition to the desktop version you now have to make an effort to not have your favourite music with you anywhere. In my opinion, 99 NOK (16.5 USD) per month is hardly a painful bill to pay for that.

On Tuesday I am off to Oslo and this year’s JavaZone! It’s gonna be a blast This year there will be five of us from Integrasco attending the conference, hopefully next year we’ll be able to send all the developers and QA staff.

The agenda was just released last week and I have not had the time to sit down and figure out exactly what I want to see, but that will be the task for Monday or Tuesday evening I’ve found a couple of talks that I have to catch, especially Erik Hatcher‘s talk about Solr. But there’s a lot more space on my agenda to fill, and there does not seem to be a lack of interesting talks to fill it with this year either.

I’ll also be spending some time at the javaBin stand as I have previous years, so drop by and say hi

There’s a couple of videos on the JavaZone site which is worth checking out – very entertaining, even if you’re not a software developer!