Having fun at J-Fall 2011

This year’s Dutch Java Nerd event called J-Fall was held in Nijkerk, in a beautiful location called “Hart van Holland” . With plenty of sessions by speakers from all over the world it promised to be a great day for Java enthusiasts, at a great location for meeting friends and colleagues. I took a day off from work and it was well worth it.

Censorship: here to stay

For those of you who think that media and information are free and uncontroled, guess again. Lately I have been seeing more and more incidents of large corporations hiding information, and even telling other people to hide it for them. I think this is plain wrong, and the guys involved should have been fired or punished otherwise.

If you have information which is of interest to the public, and somebody is making you sign a paper with which he can force you to shut up, you should think twice (and then not do it). Not because of the money, not because of the information itself, but for the sheer principle. Information should not be controled in that way. By anyone. It is dangerous.

Migrate from Windows to OSX

My wife got tired of her Windows/Compaq laptop. So 2 weeks ago, she decides to go out and buy a 15″ macbook pro (an excelent choice I might add). She was a bit worried about getting used to the new machine, but decided to take the risk. After no more than 3 days, with surprisingly little help, she figured out how to do everything she did on the Windows machine, and even installed her own software.

The last thing to do was to migrate all the stuff from her old Windows machine to her new “lappie” (yes, she actually gave this one a nickname ). Although Microsoft tries hard to keep Outlook Express users locked in, I did find a tool that solved the problem completely for me.

DOCTYPE is a myth…

… and other wisdom from Joel. Finally, after weeks of slightly boring posts about travel, speeches and FogBugz, Joel has an article on his blog he was so famous for: Martian Headsets.

The article discusses the problems with the HTML spec, and numerous other problems developers are facing these days. That, and the Martians’ strange fascination for all kinds and shades of red.

At times, the article remembered me of some thoughts I have during my dayjob:

• Minimize. (also known as the KISS principle)
• Have a contract early in the process. Make it testable. Find a way to handle problems in the contract.
• Be strict and transparent. Fail early and explain.
• Using a standard and conforming to it are two different things.
• Communicate.

Although all are true to some degree, they aren’t going to solve all problems, because everybody has their own set of thoughts and rules. For every problem there is a nice, clean, simple, cheap, wrong answer.

Now go read the article, it’s much better than my writing…

What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

Philipp Lenssen from the Google Blogoscoped blog does some iterations on the Google Mail userinterface while he investigates the question “What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?“. He ends up with a userinterface which is very much like the hotmail I knew before I replaced it with my current gmail account.

Have fun reading.

p.s. Did you notice that the gmail space has increased to around 5GB lately? Google continues to amaze (frighten?) me at how much data they can store.