I was hoping to attend but unfortunately couldn’t make it. Joost became
publicly available (no invites required anymore!) last Monday and I also moved to Berlin. So there was a lot going on that week. Would
have been great to meet the crowd again. Bugger. Hope you guys had fun …well, I am pretty sure you did :)
At least some of the presentations seem to be available through slideshare. Nice!
Very keen I was to see them. The John Butler Trio played on the 27th
of September at the Columbia Halle in Berlin. And I was there. The crowd was much smaller than for the usual concerts. Not even the balcony was
opened. I really liked the more intimate feeling of the smaller concert. The opener, Newton Faulkner was just fantastic. A funny guy.
Playing tap/finger style guitar like Andy Mckee does. Most amazing was his cover of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”.
I checked out his album but seems like he really is a live person. (not impressed!).
Then there was John Butler Trio. I was hoping to see them when I was in Australia. But when I was there – they were on their world tour. Bugger. So I was eager to see them – maybe a little too eager. Seems like for this style of music still Xavier Rudd is holding the bar for live performances. But don’t get me wrong – they were good! (Amazing drummer!) …but they just did not blow me away as I was expecting. Still a good concert with “Peaches and Cream” and many more songs from their highly recommend albums.
Last week I got myself a new gadget. As I am traveling quite a bit lately I bought myself a 3G modem. The Huawei E220 is what most of
the popular carrier sell here in Germany …and what fortunately seems to work quite well with OSX. I found myself the T-mobile “web’n'walk box” on ebay. (Why they
always have to re-brand these things is beyond me!) The drivers for the Huawei came on the CD. You got to install them first. Then disable the pin check on your SIM card. (I got myself a
multicard for that. That essentially means I have one card for my phone and one for the modem. Same number, same bill) Then you need to setup the modem as you would do for a bluetooth
modem. Pick the correct modem script and make sure to put the APN as the phone number(!). For my O2 account that’s “surfo2″. (See the screenshots for my settings) Another option that provides some more features is launch2net. Unfortunately with 75 EUR it is quite pricey for what it does.
At this stage I don’t have a dedicated data plan. There are a couple (real and not so real) flatrates available already. I wanted to see first whether it’s really worth paying a monthly rate. If you are also on O2 Germany make sure you switch to the time, NOT the volume based billing. That gives me a rate of about 5 EUR per hour. Otherwise you might have to declare bankruptcy after just a little bit of normal internet usage.
When the little LED on the modem turns blue you got UMTS. Speed is really OK and very usable most of the time. Problem is coverage though. I was mainly hoping to get some online time on the train route Berlin-Göttingen-Frankfurt. But for O2 the coverage still seems quite bad. Only around the big cities you got the high speed internet access and the GPRS fallback is barely useful for normal work. So frankly speaking it probably makes more sense for most people to search for the next free wireless hotspot. But at least I now have another option if there isn’t.
How do you distribute and deploy you java applications and libraries? Especially if you are using Debian/Ubuntu machines the desire to just install them like any other software with “apt-get install” comes just with that. But how do you integrate this with you build system? You could of course have the debian tools installed on the build bot and have that generate the deb. But wouldn’t it be nice to have your java build system take care of that too? Cross platform packaging is why I started jdeb. What started out as a little library with an ant task has now gotten a bit more flexible. Today I am happy to announce that with the new release of 0.3 there is also a maven plugin available. Just add this to your POM and your are good to go. When you call “mvn install” you will also find the Debian archive in the target directory.
<plugin>
<artifactId>jdeb</artifactId>
<groupId>org.vafer</groupId>
<version>0.3</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>deb</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
You can even get the appropriate changes file generated. Please see the documentation for further details and let me know if you have any questions. For the ones upgrading from 0.2 – it should be (more or less) a drop in replacement. For more details on the changes see the project website.
Maybe not exactly what you would have expected – but this show really is about wild animal sex. I am sure it will get a high search ranking anyway. Probably the closest of what you thought this post is about is probably one of these reality shows. Whatever you prefer.