Weekend in Amsterdam

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.

Amsterdam, baby!

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!

Long lost photos

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?

1 out of 4 are Muslims

I woke up to an article at Dagbladet.no today, which got my blood boiling. Before I continue on with my ramblings I want to make it clear that, yes, I know Dagbladet.no is an “entertainment newspaper”. Still, the article which appeared on their front page today, made me react.

The title of the article was “1 out of 4 in the world are Muslims”. The article is based on a study made by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which by the way is never linked to from the article.

Usually I don’t care about these articles, but this one got me worked up because religion is a touchy subject these days – especially the “fear” of Muslims.

The way this article is presented leaves little room for imagination when it comes to the point of view of the journalist who wrote it – and probably why the coward did not even put his or her name on the article, let alone give anyone the option to comment on it.

Via Twitter, I’ve learned that the article has come directly down the pipeline from NTB, a Norwegian news publishing agency, but in my opinion that still does not justify the publishing of the article in this format.

What strikes me the most is the use of numbers in this article. Here is an example (translated from Norwegian):

Amongst others there are more Muslims in  Germany than in Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, there are more Muslims in Russia than in Jordan and Libya combined.

One does not have to be a rocket scientist to see the flaws here, eh? The population of Germany is approximately 82 million. Lebanon: 4.2 million. How can you even seriously consider such a comparison? And it’s the same pattern with the other comparisons highlighted in the article. This alone should have been enough to discard the article, or at least publish it with a much more critical view on the study. And where does it say that 1 out of 3 in the world are Christians?

Another point which should have raised a red flag at the news desk,  is the fact that this is a study made by an organization in the country which are possibly the most Muslim opposed on this planet.

Anyways, since this got me worked up to this extent I needed to vent and I sent an e-mail to the chief editor at Dagbladet.no with a comment and expressed my concern that such lousy journalistic work could be published in big letters on the front page of one of Norways biggest news papers. Wonder if I’ll ever get an answer…

Jeg har en kommentar til artikkelen “- En av fire i verden er muslimer” (http://www.dagbladet.no/a/8477791/).

Jeg lurer på hvordan en slik artikkel har klart å slippe gjennom ansvarlig redaktør sine fingre. Artikkelen fremstår som en tekst ment for å skape fremmedfrykt og da spesielt for at muslimene er i ferd med å ta over verden. Dette er langt fra sannheten, og artikkelen viser ingenting som skulle tilsi at det er oppsiktsvekkende at 1 av 4 er muslimer. 1 av 3 er kristne! Hvor nevnes det?

Samtidig stiller jeg store spørsmålstegn ved bruk av materialet fra stuiden artikkelen er basert på (hvis nå en slik studie finnes. Trodde det var vanlig i profesjonelle kretser å referere til originalmaterialet – i dette tilfellet studien hvor tallene er hentet fra)? Det er en ensporet artikkel, sydd sammen av tall og “målinger” som man ikke trenger være rakettforsker for å forstå at er kynisk satt sammen. Sammenlikningen mellom antall muslimer i Tyskland og Libanon blir for dum når det bor over 80 millioner innbyggere i Tyskland og kun 4 i Lebanon. Hvor er den journalistiske integriteten som stiller spørsmål ved tallene bak denne studien som kommer fra en organisasjon i et land som langt fra er kjent for å ha et bedre øye til den muslimske verden.

I tillegg er det ikke publisert noe navn og epost på journalisten som har publisert artikkelen, ei heller mulighet for folk å kommentere. Alt dette gjør at det lukter svidd gris av hele artikkelen og jeg stiller meg kritisk til den journalistiske jobben som ligger bak…

Sorry for the Norwegian, I might post a translated version later

Will keep you updated!

Track 30 000: La Roux – Bulletproof

My scrobling counter on Last.fm just ticked past 30 000 this weekend, and the lucky track (among those recorded by Last.fm), was La Roux with Bulletproof. The song is one of my favourites on the self titled debut album from La Roux.

Are you on Last.fm? Make sure to add me It’s a great way to discover new music!

JavaZone 2009

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

Spotify wherever I go!

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.

Off to JavaZone this week!

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!

Checking out EVE Online

I’ve been testing EVE Online for the last couple of months, nothing heavy, but a few hours here and there. I had a go at the game a couple of years ago as well, but gave up because of the overwhelming complexity. This time I decided to give it a bigger chance and try to get through the tough first hours of tutorials.

After giving it a couple of weeks of really trying to get into the game I’ve come to really like it. The reason I decided to try it out again, was really to satisfy my urge for space MMO after looking through screens and gameplay footage of the upcoming Jumpgate Evolution. Since that game is still in closed beta and will not be out before well into 2010, I decided to find something else to cure my abstinences with

I love the freedom to explore space, seek wealth and fame through pirate hunting or resource mining and evolve your space ship! There is still a lot to the game which I have not experienced, but I feel I have gotten past the steep introduction and look forward to seeing what lays ahead in the next unexplored region of space

If any of you are playing, add me to your contact list as “Karboto” – very original.

Treasure hunting!

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the site Geocaching.com, after reading a tweet from Anders Brenna. Since I recently got a new phone with built in GPS, a HTC Hero, I started thinking this could be a cool way to use it a little more than just confirm my position whenever I am on the loo.

So this evening I invited my friend Monique out for a adventurous treasure hunt to find two caches hidden around Fjære in Grimstad. The first cache was found after just a couple of minutes, as it was only a couple of meters from where we parked, but the second cache turned out to be a real adventure! Of course it helped a lot to have a companion with unnatural need for climbing mountains and taking the steep route over instead of the long way around! So we climbed an enormous 40-50 m tall mountain and was very pleased with ourselves – until we discovered that we had just climbed the wrong hill… So much for the incredibly detailed Google Maps!

Luckily after fighting our way through the thick jungle, fighting enormous animals – also known as giant killer mosquitoes (!) –  we found a small road and followed it until we were on the correct hill, and found our second cache! Boy, were we pleased with ourselves!

I think I’ve found a new inspiration for walking in the woods, or just go out walking in general, and I doubt I’ve gone searching for my last geocache!

It’s definitively a tiring sport for an untrained geek, so I am too tired to explain Geocaching in detail now, but you’ll learn it all after checking out Geocaching.com. It’s basically modern day treasure hunting

More pictures are up on Flickr:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaran/sets/72157622143204942/