Monday, November 20, 2006

Well done, Mr. Bond

We just got back from Casino Royale and I have to say it was very nice surprise. Despite all the rumors and specially my first feelings when I saw Daniel Craig about a year ago, he did very well and movie is far better than the previous fairy tales. Realistic script, dynamic story and a balanced action scenes are characteristics for this movie.

Bond this time starts from ground zero and is tougher, much tougher. Some actions scenes are maybe too much action for my girlfriend, but I liked them very much. There is about right number of these scenes spread through out the movie. Bond get some scratches, but nothing he cannot handle, maybe the nail was a bit much.

We've recognized a lot places from Czech Republic, Karlovy Vary, Prague and also couple of actors seemed familiar, nice distraction.

My rating? 8.2, let me say again

Well done, Mr. Bond
!

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Sun Tech Days

At first, list of Christmas wishes sounded like a great idea for a first post, but then something that makes more sense came in.

What a nice surprise when on Monday I realized there is FREE Friday this week in Czech Republic. And what a surprise to find out on Tuesday, there is Sun Tech Days happening from 15th to 16th November at Prague's Congress Center. After I missed last Java Developers conference in Prague, this became must attend to event.

This year, more than 1100 mainly technical oriented people are attending various seminars and presentations. Event was spread into two days.

Day one
Jeff Jackson during his keynote talked about importance and growing usage of Java and SUN these days. He introduced project Glassfish which is a reference implementation of J2EE 5 where many companies contributes to this opensource stack. Ubuntu will be shipping Glassfish as their J2EE server. great. Then followed by courses about Java DB, simplified persistence in J2EE5 vie EJB v3.0 which eases a life of developer a lot. For example, one can use POJO's implementing business interface as an Session bean. No home or remote interface is necessary, this is being taken care by implementing container, all possible due to Annotations (new feature in JAVA5). Great and in-depth seminar about Web Services and Java and XML was held afternoon and after that we've enjoyed great buffet. Leaving about 8pm.

Day two
First session: Future of Java and open source communities in a vision of Sun. Monday 13th October, Sun after 10 years of development of Java has announced Java and even Duke are going open source. Sun's business model was introduced. There are 5 milion Java developers around the world. Today SUN is recognized as one of the most contributors to Open Source Community, by opening many of their products like OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, NetBeans and more. Sun's business is whole platform (HW+operating systems+environment where applications run) strongly depending on creating strong communities around their products thus leveraging running cost significantly. Sun likes sharing. Sirhar Redy had nice talk about importance of software freedom, open source momentum and license issues. Then attended a J2ME session and this reminded me time of sprites on C64 and ZX80. In the afternoon I got to in-depth session about building JSF and AJAX enable web pages held by Dr. Doris Chen. Really nice talk, full of hands on examples about jMaki, Dojotoolkit, Google Web Toolkit and more. After all these events, I realized that probably the biggest show stopper for new Java Developer is the CHOICE. There are so many great technologies, platforms and toolkits that it takes a time to get used to all of them and pick the right one for your project.

Summary: two t-shirts, one Duke, met many friends from University of West Bohemia. Great two days!

More info and slides at SUN Tech Days web page:

And oh yes my wish list:
  • 7 iron golf club
  • hand glow (golf of course)
  • I'll come up with more

Some pictures: