Life’s an ocean with too much commotion

Today I went to see Evita in the Chassé Theater in Breda with my girlfriend. It’s a musical about the life of Eva Perón, a girl that found her way from the street to the presidential suite in Argentina and died at age 33. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who also wrote musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, …

It’s the best musical I’ve ever seen! I really wanted to go because I like the music much and I find Evita’s life interesting and intriguing. It was played on a very high level, something I’ve never seen before. You could easily follow the story, enjoy the music and watch the beautiful dances and acts. The decors were sober but very stylish and there were not too many people on the stage (I find it often too overwhelming when too much people are on the stage, you can only focus on one or two people, mostly the main actors, so you have to go at least two or three times to experience all acts).

Evita was played by Brigitte Heitzer, who was chosen by the Dutch people in a live TV show “Wie wordt de nieuwe Evita”. I think Brigitte’s part did a lot to the musical, she’s a great singer and some of the songs were very difficult. She even said in an interview that she thought Lloyd was a women-hater because of his difficult songs. They had to rewrite some songs for the movie (released in 1996) because Madonna couldn’t sing them, so it says enough.

I like the Chassé Theater in Breda because there’s enough room to relax and enjoy the musical without being overwhelmed by people walking inside and outside the theater and without endlessly queuing at the bar waiting for a drink. It’s very stylish decorated and the seets are very well placed in the theater.

I don’t regret I went to see the musical and I would definitely go see it a second time!

Monday I went to Javapolis in the Metropolis Business Lounge in Antwerp. It’s a yearly event with several conferences, talks, workshops and BOF’s of projects related to Java. Personally I’m not a Java web framework lover. It’s hard to choose which framework you will need for your kind of web application, and knowing one specific framework doesn’t mean you know them all, on the contrary.

Monday morning I went to see Maurice Naftalin talking about Java Generics and Collections. Maurice also contributed in writing the O’Reilly book with the corresponding name. Although I was familiar with using generics in Java, I’ve learned some nifty tricks to have more exceptions detected at compilation time. The second part of his talk, Collections, was less interesting for me. He went pretty fast over all available collections and their performance. I’ve made a quick reference card with all available collections and for which purpose they can be used, together with their performance for every action (add/remove, select, iterate).

In the afternoon I went to see Google API’s by Dick Wall. He talked about the Google library which extends Generics and Collections. They kindly introduce closures (which is the main reason why I started to program in Ruby a year ago) by specifying filter functions in code blocks. These filter functions allow to manipulate the contents of collections, without having to know how to iterate over a collection. With the use of Generics you avoid having ClassCastExceptions in these inner filter functions. The second part of his talk was about the Google webservices. They use Atom feeds for transporting webservice contents. These Atom feeds can be controlled directly by XML or via a Google library. It’s pretty straightforward.

After the Google API’s talk, I went to see jBPM and Hudson, a continuous integration tool. jBPM gives you the ability to define workflows in Java. Every node needs some input and gives some output, based on the output you can let it direct to a next concept. The talk was given by someone who has implemented a jBPM workflow for a project, but she failed to explain the concept and how it’s all composed and executed. She just explained what it did for her project and showed some graphics which gave no meaning outside her project’s context.

Hudson was promising, because I googled it before I went to the talk. I’m looking for a continuous integration tool that can have distributions for kinds of software that needs a specific environment for getting it build. Triggering remote builds can be done via various ways. They all use SSH remote commands for executing a command or script that builds specific software on a machine. This means that the connection needs to be open while it’s building. Output of the build command is constantly send over the SSH connection. I’m looking for a client/server tool where the remote execution task is given to the client tool which executes a certain task. When the task is completed, the results (logs, artifacts, …) can be pushed to the server and can be processed and displayed. The main developer of Hudson, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, didn’t know exactly how it was done, but it was something with SSH…

Summarized, it wasn’t a thrown away day, I got a free T-shirt (apparently everyone got a XL sized T-shirt), and I learned some new things about the cores of Java.

By the way, you can see recordings of most of the talks on Parleys.

This picture has been taken in one of the countless streets of Cologne. We went there to visit the famous Christmas fairs. These fairs are spread around the city on several markets.

On one of these markets I drank a mug of Glühwein. You had to pay extra for the mug so you can take it home with you. This reminds me I still have to ask it back to the people that brought it home for me

Today I went to the Boekenbeurs in Antwerpen. It’s an annual event where you can buy books (of course) and get them signed by the author. Although there’s a lot of people walking over each other and you could probably buy a good book with the entrance fee, it’s an event I’d like to go to. It’s interesting to see which books are bought by which people and to see the actual author of these books (OK maybe not completely true, this year is probably the year where every famous actor, singer or politician wrote a book and finds it necessary to sign them at the Boekenbeurs. Natalia was one of them and 50% of all visitors was standing in the crowd for a look or a signature).Sterling Book House is a book shop in London, Brussels, .. where you can buy books written in English. I’ve bought two books at the Boekenbeurs and they are both coming from that shop:

- Douglas Coupland – The gum thief
- Haruki Murakami – Sputnik Sweetheart

The picture I took from our cupboard which is fully stored with books. It’s an encyclopedia that has suffered from oldness. I took it with my Sigma Macro lens.

Yesterday we went to an exhibition of Paul McCarthy in the S.M.A.K. museum in Ghent.We weren’t aware of the things we were about to see and after the visit we were shocked by what we’ve seen.

In the ‘Head Shop/Shop Head’ exhibition he tries to express an unambiguous image of the ‘Western way of life’. This is brought by sexual, dirty, ketchup-decorated short-films and dolls. This exhibition shows several short-movies on the walls and settings where these films were recorded in the halls of the museum. On the first floor you will see some additional constructions of murder scenes, abstract tokens, drawings and dolls.

In my humble opinion it’s sometimes hard to discover the actual meaning of these abstract creatures and films.
For instance, on the first floor you will see his famous ‘Dead H’, a sculpture made of galvanized steel in the shape of the letter “H”(uman). This represents a man with his two arms and two legs. You can’t see the part that joins the two stems (what should be the stomach of the human being). It represents the inner of people which can’t be seen from outside

You don’t have to be modern art lover to get overwhelmed by this. Therefore I would advise all people to visit the Paul McCarthy’s exhibition in the S.M.A.K. museum in Ghent.

Fireworks at Duinbergen

Originally uploaded by plexie

Two days ago I went to the International Fireworks Festival at Duinbergen. Every year an international contest is takes place where some countries can present their little fire tricks. This time it was Switzerland.

I took my pictures at a diafragma of 8-10, and with a closure time of 6-10 seconds.. I think I’ll try to take some pictures with a higher ISO value, and make my aperture smaller, some people recommend it for better shots of fireworks.

This picture is my favorite one of the Fireworks set on my Flickr account, because the fireworks look like palm trees. This is due to the heavy wind that was moving the fireworks to the left.

Anyway, it was fun, a bit cold but worth going to Duinbergen for

And yes she is now officially a master in German languages!

The event took part in the “Universitair Sportcentrum” of the K.U.Leuven in Heverlee. Normally I would find proclamations very boring, but the rector shared an interesting personal opinion about the catholic view of science, and how it should be.

The K.U.Leuven is a hot item in the news as they’re saying they can’t keep up their scientific research while still maintaining the Catholic perception. The rector thinks these two aspects go smoothly together, and it’s the university’s duty to dig thoroughly into scientific matters. The student shouldn’t get any impact of choosing a Catholic university upon a state university. This is of course not the place to discuss this, neither am I the guy to criticize this

I’m very proud of Tanja (and of course her friends) being graduated!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENO5_c_tQg]
I’ve captured a movie with my cellphone of some guys playing rugby on Werchter

It was great! I’ve been there for four days. Here are some groups I’ve heared:

Day 1

1. Bjork: not my style, but the performance was something special. A group of old fashion Chinese people were standing on the stage and playing rare instruments.
2. Muse: Yeah! Excellent mix of piano, guitar and drums..

Day 2

1. Joan as Police Woman: Never heard of her, but I was positively surprised. The mood of her music was soft and sweet, Norah-Jones stylish (in my opinion).
2. Kaiser Chiefs: Ruby Ruby Ruby.. and some other songs I liked the music but not the singer. Maybe he takes his group name too literal..
3. Bloc Party: What a successful combination: Negro singer and a white music style. His voice is something you’ve never heard before, maybe because I’ve never heard a black man singing pop (okay, except for Lionel Richie). This is the first group in this list I’m definitely buying a CD from.
4. Arctic Monkeys: Not my thing. First of all, they looked stoned on the stage and this wasn’t fit for the main stage. They’ve had one hit (which I like) and the rest is just some ordinal rock in my opinion. They also didn’t have a great performance, I even wouldn’t notice it if they were play backing.
5. Gabriel Rios: His last CD ‘Angelheads’ is something what he said to be ‘his own style without any external influence’. I like this style better then his older songs. This is also someone I’ll buy a CD from (or borrow it from my girlfriend, who bought that CD yesterday)

Day 3

1. Snow Patrol: Not really hard rock at all, but still great music. I know this group already before it had it first big hit, so I don’t have much to say, they did great.
2. Peter Gabriel: I know him from songs like ‘Salisbury Hill’ and ‘In your eyes’. He’s one of the milestones in music history so I really wanted to see him.
3. Keane: I kissed a boy, kissed a boy. I told him he was beautiful.. (or at least something like that ). I like his music, it’s something everyone could like and not get bored after hearing it twice.
4. The Chemical Brothers: I’ve expected more from them. They played their two big hits ‘Galvanize’ and ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl’ in the first five minutes of their set and that was it, no more climaxes, just trying to climb the wall which they didn’t dare to jump off..

Day 4

1. The Kooks: Happy music. Don’t expect it to be sophisticated, but amusing
2. Interpol: Classic one, but they are great.
3. Incubus: Normally not my style, but their bis songs were great (‘Are you in’, …).
4. Metallica: Cool performance
5. Faithless: My top group for this day. I don’t know how they do it, but the quality of the sound was the best I’ve heard on this Werchter edition. Very pure. I’ve say him more then four times now, I think it’s time for a new CD

At June 20, I.T. Works will organise a seminar in Hotel Sofitel Brussels Airport (Diegem). This seminar will focus on Virtualisation and how it will ease business processes and reduce TCO’s (Total cost of ownership). During this day, my colleague Kris Buytaert and me will present the open source product Xen. I will mainly focus on dynamic build environments with Xen.

More information about this seminar can be found at the website of I.T. Works.

It was my first time I took part at this event. Some colleagues of me asked to join the Newtec team and so I did. I thought it would be a good idea because I’m more or less forced to work on my condition.
Anyhow, I never ran for 20 km until then. The longest run I ever did in my training was 13km (2 rounds at the Watersportbaan plus an extra round at the Blaarmeersen in Ghent).
Also, I didn’t know until a week from the start that we’d have to run into the tunnels and the Tervurenlaan, which has a 3 percent slope for 3 kilometers!
When you first sign in to this running contest, you have to start at the last position. This actually doesn’t infect your running time, because we have a sort of RF id which has to be tightened on your shoes, and it saves time at every cross point (after 500m of the start so that the mass of people is more divided, at 10km and at the finish of course).
At the 13th kilometer I’ve had to stop because of my low sugar balance. It was probably a good idea to take some candy with me, but I forgot. I was feeling dizzy and had to drink some Gatorade, which they provided at the 13th kilometer (now isn’t that coincidence).
At the 14th kilometer I’ve resumed running until the finish. My round trip time was 2h22m31s, which isn’t bad for a first time.
Actually I finished earlier, there was a lot of people at the finish and I’ve had to wait for 5 minutes until the sensor could register my time.
I’ve bought myself a heart pulse watch, and I’m training now to take part in the 2008 edition. My aim is to finish in 2 hours!