Team building event

Following the end of the financial year, most of my team went for dinner at Meza, a classy bar restaurant in the heart of Soho on Friday evening. Although I really needed to sleep, I went along and it turned out to be quite nice. I liked the atmosphere and I had some very interesting conversations with some of my colleagues. After the dinner, we headed to Madame JoJo's, a club not far from the restaurant. I am ashamed to admit that I don't have a very clear memory of this place. The combination of alcohol and lack of sleep didn't suit me well. At some point I said stop and started making my way home. It proved to take a bit longer than expected. Somehow I managed to walk back to Waterloo and there hopped into my bus. The problem was that I completely fell asleep there and didn't wake up until the driver had finished his shift and wanted to go home. I ended up somewhere I didn't know in the middle of the night. Luckily, a cab happened to pass by just at that time. So I finally got home and headed straight for my bed.

Welcome to the new generation

I am admittedly a big cinephile. I own an extensive film collection on DVD. Ever since I acquired an HD-ready TV I've been lurking on the new HD formats. Well, yesterday I stepped into the new generation. I treated myself with one of these sweet Playstation3s. Besides being able to play games, the PS3 also plays blue-ray discs. And it does a very good job at it. I watched Casino Royale and I have to say the picture is gorgeous. The colours are remarkable. It makes for a much more pleasant experience. And while I'm not watching films, I can play games. I wonder if I'll find time to sleep now.

Sleepless in London

As of recently it seems that sleepless nights have become a bit of a bad habit of mine. It's not that I have difficulties sleeping but more than 24 hours are sometimes not enough in a day. Yesterday, I worked quite late so I got home around 22:30. I had a few house keeping things to take care of. After that I decided to spend some time on the open source project I'm developing: http://www.cobertura4j2me.org. When reached the 1am barrier I knew that I either had to go to bed right now or I would stay up all night. I chose the latter. So I guess today I won't be as sharp as usual at work. The problem is that I'm supposed to go out tonight! That should be inter....zzzzzzzzzzz!

OpenID

It's something I've been talking about for a long time. But at last there's a good initiative towards universal user-centric identity space; Meet OpenID:

"OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity."

Basically, OpenID is a foundation which provides a set of specifications (not technology) for providing a unique way to identify people by a URL. I think not being vendor-specific or own by any single one company is definitely the right way to go. Also it seems to be gathering quite of lot of interest and a few open-source projects such as the Heraldy project are providing the technologies to implement this specification. I guess the main factor to the success of this initiative will be the adoption of key players in the web area.

End of financial year

Our financial year closed on 31th May. It's been a quite successful year and I have enjoyed being part of it. End of financial year also means appraisal, bonus and salary raise. I always find this period a bit strange. I welcome it with mix feelings. On the one hand, you get a chance to seat down with your manager and analyse the work you've accomplished throughout year. It's good to know what others think. On the other hand, it seems to be all about money. I mean I'm happy to get a good bonus or salary raise but it's all very material. People make a big deal out of it and I can't help but feel it isn't. That said now I have to decide what new toys I'm going to get ;)

Recruiting

I've been recruiting for the last few weeks. It proved to be a very interesting for me, very interesting indeed. However it also proved to be quite frustrating. Mainly because dealing with agents is always a pain in the **s. I spent a lot of time with them on the phone. But thankfully all this is over - for a while at least - because we made an offer to a candidate and today - err yesterday - he accepted. He came across very well during the interviews and seems like a bright person. Good stuff!

Slacking

I've been a bit of a slacker recently on this blog. I guess my girlfriend being in London for a few weeks has something to do with it :). So here's what I've been up to since my last post:

1. As I mentioned my girlfriend is in town so we spent a lot of time together. That's really nice to have her around.

2. Working, working, working, ...

3. Last night Connie and I hosted a party at my place. It was funny because we ended up being almost entirely old flatmates (either Connie's or mine). We were expecting a bit more people but of course there are always the last minute cancellations. It was good: chatted a lot, drunk too much, neighbour complained about the noise and went to bed late. In other words a good party.

4. Last weekend I went to Budapest for a friend's stag do. One of us was a native from Budapest so we had a place to stay and a guide to show us around. The trip didn't start well as the flight was delayed by 5 hours. But it wasn't so bad because we just had a few beers and started playing hacky sack in the terminal. We finally made it and got a bit of sleep. The next day we went water skiing. That was a lot of fun even if very tiring. The evening we went to the restaurant and then partying in some open-air club. It was such great fun. We made the future groom ware a bright yellow "life guard" tee-shirt and carry an inflatable shark which turned out to be a huge success on the dance floor. We went back home in the very early hours of the morning to get a bit of sleep. Sunday we went around the city (very nice by the way) and finished with a couple of hours in the spa. Once again it was just great. The flight back to London was more of the same than the flight in. I finally touched base around 5.30 on Monday morning. That was a bit tough to work but well worth it.

Eclipse Europa Release

For those of you who don't know eclipse, it's "an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle". But it is best known for it's Java IDE.
My first experience with eclipse was at university as a Java IDE. Then I had the chance to work during a coop-term on IBM Websphere Studio Device Developer. This is where I developed my first plug-in for eclipse.
A few years and plug-ins later I still like eclipe as a Java IDE but I am mostly impressed with it's ecosystem. This month will be the stage of one of the biggest release the open-source community has ever witnessed : the simultaneous release of 21 eclipse projects (including the platform itself). Very exiting!!