BP Summer Big Sreens

The Royal Opera House is hosting a series of operas and ballet shown on big screens all over the UK during the summer. The first one, Swan Lake, is tomorrow in Trafalgar Square and Canada Square. I have to admit I am a novice when it comes to ballets or operas. I've actually never been to one. But these events sound very interesting. And best of all it's FREE!

Dead Poets Society

The other day I was browsing the DVD section at HVM and stumbled across the Dead Poets Society. I hadn't seen that movie for a very long time. I watched it yesterday and it reminded me how excellent it is. A sort of classic. I love the atmosphere and the truthfulness of the different feelings transpiring throughout the film. It is very well directed and the performances by the young actors are inspiring. If you haven't seen it before I highly recommend that you do so, and even if you have it is still a great movie to watch again and again...

Sweet

I few months ago I went a bit - read a lot - off-budget on a dazzling Sony media centre and then an even more dazzling new TV. Today I finally managed to hook up our Sky box to it and now we can record sky programs. Sweet! Not that it was very difficult to do but I wasn't sure how, until a colleague of mine mentioned it. So I decided to give it a try and voilà! It's all working fine.

Cobertur for J2ME 1.1.0 RC1 Released

It took me a long while but at last I managed to release the first Cobertura for J2ME 1.1.0 release candidate. This version is easier to use than the previous one and provides a few new features. It also includes a Sample application which hopefully will provide a good starting point for new comers.

A free vector graphics editor: inkspace

On a lighter note than my previous post, I've started playing with an open-source vector graphics editor called inscape. I don't have much experience with such tools but I have to say I'm quite impressed with the quality of the interface it offers. I was drawn into this tool when I was looking into designing some nice icon. It seems that most professional icon designers use vector graphics as their master and then generate the fixed-size icon from it. Now I just need to find the hidden artist in me and design some shiny icon.

Thinking about the future

My girlfriend made the courageous decision to quit her job and go back to school in September. Recently she mentioned her need to prepare herself mentally for her new endeavour and what's coming after that. It makes me realise how little time I take to seriously think about the future. I could blame it on my job or London's busy life but in truth I think I'm just avoiding it. You see, a few years back I wasn't so happy with my life. It went on for some time, until a point where I made up my mind to simply be happy. I know it sounds kind of strange but basically what it meant was to try to ignore the things that could make me unhappy. And in that respect it worked quite well. To this day I still try not to think too much about certain topics and just get on with my life. Now I'm starting to realise it is just another form of "fuite en avant" (sorry, I cannot find a suitable expression in English). With this philosophy I could wake up several years from now wondering where I am and how I got there. I suppose it is important to take enough time to know what you want to do with your life, even if it means dealing with issues you let dry in the hope they will go away.

Crackberry

For the non-initiated, crackberry is the nickname for Blackberry devices. It was coined because these little devices are very addictive. At work we're about to go live on our BlackBerry support. We're just fixing the last bugs and as of Friday we, at last, will support some blackberry devices, namely the 8100, 8707 and 8800. It's been a long and chaotic road to reach this point. I'll spare you all the technical details. The important thing here is that it will be a big win for us. I'm quite exited and hope that everything will go smoothly. I just need a few more efforts and bob's you uncle!

Busy, busy, busy

Lately I've been swamped with work so I haven't had time to blog much. Among other things, I'm working on a "Google Suggest"-like feature for one of our web site. It should be quite cool once completed. To achieve this I'm using Lucene, an information-retrieval library in Java. It's a great library: simple API, yet very powerful. I've developed the core of the feature. Now I need to complete the integration to our middleware and get some nice front-end for it.