May, 2008

So, 12 out of 15 people showed up at Geekdinner Paal and I had a good time. I came in far too late myself, as I was stuck until 19:00 in Ghent at IBBT where I was invited for a discussion about the recruitment of international high-profile ICT candidates in Belgium. I gathered some very good insights there, I must say. Happy to know that there will be a follow up on that.

Anyway, I made it just in time for the soup, so I didn’t miss all that much after all. I was happy to see some new faces, like Rein, Frank and Ywein. Welcome! :-)

The food was good, but I’m not so happy with the restaurant though. When I was making the reservation last week, they really made a big fuss out of it. They were too busy, asked me if I couldn’t arrange it on another date, asked me to provide full menu insight on beforehand, wanted to shove up vegetarians a fish meal, etc… It turned out that, except for us, only 5 more customers were present that evening. Talking about planning and customer services… Next Geekdinner Limburg will be held somewhere else, probably just in Hasselt, as nobody really seemed to mind the distance (and apparently we can handle without the Ghent troup :-p). Kris even mentioned Ostend or Roeselare as location for a next Geekdinner! :-)

After the meal, everybody moved over to our office for the waffle dessert prepared voluntarily by Wouter. I catered for the ingredients and the location and stuff, while he did the actual cooking. I didn’t get enough eggs though, and apparently he wasn’t too happy about that. Sorry, Wouter! Anyway, I do think that making waffles for 5 or for 10 people doesn’t make that much of a difference, whereas for preparing a whole meal, the amount of people really does have an impact.

Just found out now that we didn’t take any photos. Too bad!

Thanks to all those who showed up. May I, by the way, remind you that this was the first Geekdinner to have more than one girl? ;-)

As much a fan as I am of Free/Libre Software (and mostly Free/Libre Operating Systems), I don’t consider it a good idea to have one OS ruling a market segment to such an extent as Microsoft Windows does on the desktop. Not even if it would be my favourite OS.

Anyway, an excerpt of the statistics of this blog shows how an ideal world could look like. About 25% for each of the three major and 25% for some extra players.

At least it seems that my blog readers are representing a little ideal world. ;-)

The first Open Source Expo in Karlsruhe is coming to an end. Yesterday and today, the Kongresszentrum in Karlsruhe hosted Webinale ‘08 and Open Src Expo ‘08. I understood it was the first Open Src Expo. Webinale is an established conference. You could tell the latter was (treated as) the bigger brother of the former.

I must say I found it only a mediocre success. Somehow, it reminded me of FOSDEM, but far smaller ans less professional. A handful of Open Source projects were represented at their stand and a smaller handful of people were walking around, talking and watching demo’s. I had a nice introduction to OFBiz, The Apache Open for Business Project and was very impressed by it’s functionality. In the main hall which could host over 800 people, some talks were held, generally attended by 30-like people, more interested in their laptop than the speaker (a sad trend I see coming up unfortunately, although I must plead guilty as well). I do believe Open Src Expo ‘08 has some potential though. Keep it up!

It was also nice to see some Belgians around. Machtelt and Wim from OpenBSD were there to talk about ODF and BSD Certification. The Belgian TinyOpenERP had a stand as well.

I was also contacted by Edward Wijnen of SpringSource to talk about a partnership or other collaboration with Zeropoint.IT. Sounds good. I’d love to get the world to know about our Java team which loves working with Spring 2.5!

Just came back from the first BarCamp in Lille and I had a great time. You could tell it was a French organisation, as there were abundant amounts of food… and what kind of! It started off with a buffet with different kind of cookies, fresh strawberries and cherries. Several types of drinks were made available and later on they started coming around with warm pancakes with a dressing of your choice. At the end of the day threre was a free ice cream for all attendees. And I was told I missed the cake… Who doesn’t love the French? ;-)

As far as the talks are concerned, I was a bit disappointed to find a large focus being put on Enterprise, Management, Marketing and other things you can prepend to 2.0. For the tech-savvy, there wasn’t all that much to be learnt. I guess this had to do with the organisation team (and the location) being from the ESC Lille. It was interesting nevertheless.

Again, Raphaël and I gave a presentation about MyOwnDB and again, we got some nice reactions. Getting pretty nervous by the way for our GPL release in a couple of weeks!

It was nice to see how many Belgians made their way to Lille (which is so close to Belgium that the train station has more Dutch signs than the train station in Leuven has French sings). I arrived together with Patrick and met new, interesting people like Michaël Uyttersprot and Vincent Battaglia.

Tomorrow, I’ll be present at Open Source Expo 08 in Karlsruhe. Looking forward to it!

Earlier this week, I attended the Pulse event organised by USG Innotiv. It was a very nice evening, and I liked it very much. If your not familiar with Pulse, the evening consists out of a nice dinner and 4 parallel talks (of which you get to choose one to attend) about Java, .Net, mainframe and SAP.

I always go for Java, as, out of these four, it is the only relevant topic for Zeropoint.IT. This time, an impressive personality was invited as a speaker: Alef Arendsen, a prominent Spring developer and principal consultant at SpringSource.

The session focused on the Spring 2.5 integration for working in a Java EE 5 environment. Support for components of the Java EE 5 specification were discussed, as well as things like the common annotations from JSR-250 and using JNDI. In addition to the various possibilities for integration, the 90 minute session also included an overview of the similarities and differences between the Spring component model and the EJB 3.0 specification, as well as the options available for combining them.

Very interesting, both for me personally, as for our largest development team, which is currently in the middle of a multiple man-year enterprise project in Spring 2.5.

Generally, the whole Pulse event was very well organised and very interesting. Definitely going again next time!

So, yet another Geekdinner post. The restaurant wants us to provide a menu overview on beforehand. Each menu includes a starter (soup) and a main course (meat, fish or vegetarian). No dessert, as Wouter and I will cater for a Nero-style waffle fest afterwards!

I initiated some creative Doodle usage, to find what you want.

Please make sure to mark your preference before Friday, 23rd of May. The default choice is meat. Thank you!

Important message (hmm, after only a mere 4 months of blogging, I’m already assuming people are actually reading this :-)): Geekdinner Limburg won’t be held at Paal 26, as previously stated. Earlier this week, Loes and I went for dinner at Ten Caetermere. I found it in so many ways better than Paal 26 that I promptly decided to move the whole Geekdinner thing there.

It’s only 300 metres further from our office than Paal 26 is. This means we probably can’t make it on foot from the restaurant to the office for Wouter’s great waffles, but there’s enough parking space at our office to solve that problem.

Looking forward to this!