the rule of (f)bore

Having just finished the book "The Rule of Four", I feel a bit betraied by the praises its has gotten since published. Not long ago I read the "Da Vinci Code" and did a search on it on the internet, to find another book which got praised like "If you loved the Da Vinci Code, you should read this".. and so I did, but to find out the two books have but the code breaking stuff, in common. Well - this is actually no problem as afcoz the two books should be somewhat different, else there is little point in reading both, but "The Rule of Four" just never really caught me, the way Da Vinci Code did. At first I just thought it was the writing style but now I think its the lengthly and boresom descriptions of past actions and references that simply just has nothing to do with the story. The plot leaves you thinking: was that really all there was to it? Well - I might read it again in a couple of year, perhaps the story will be better the second time... I digress..

Skod hold (in danish)

ja - så kom dagen hvor det danske landshold ENDNU engang beviste at de omtrend er lige så gode til fodbold, som jeg er til at kaste med lasso (og ja - jeg sucker lidt mere end gennemsnittet til at kaste med lasso).

At de 11 mand der render rundt på banen bliver så højt betalt er da over min forstand (ja - at nogle fodboldspillere overhovedet tjener så mange penge er) og at de så gang på gang kan skuffe i sådan en grad. Endnu værre at det da nok at høre kommentatorerne på TV3, flotte sig i pausen om at det danske hold da jo er helt godt, de spiller godt og er bare en "smule" uheldige... ja - hvis man kan kalde det uheldigt at være skod-dårlige til at spille sammen, så er de da nok helt USANDSYNLIGT uheldige.. og endnu en skadet eller afdanket fodboldtosse så også lige bakker kommentatorerne op, er da bare prikken over i'et.. men ok, hvis tossen ikke engang fra "sidelinien" kan se hvor galt det egentligt står til, så er det da klart der ikke sker noget fornyelse...

Ny regel til landsholdspillerne: Hver gang du skyder bolden direkte til en modstander, tager vi dkr 1000 fra din lønseddel... Ja - så gik der sq nok ikke lang tid før mange af spillerne ville stå i køen for supplerende dagpenge.

Jeg siger: ud med olsen, ind med en anden (gerne tollundmanden eller lign), bare det fornyelse..
PS: hvorfor fanden er det lige olsen venter med at skifte spillere ind til ca. 20 min EFTER vi har tabt kampen...

oh well - skod hold!

The rule of four

Having just read three books in a row written by Dan Brown, I picked up "The rule of four", written by Ian Caldwell and Dustim Thomason, in Oslo.

Dan has a somewhat "easy reading" style to his books whereas "The rule of four" is much harder for me to read.. Dunno quite know why... It may be because Ian and Dustin tend to flow between present and previous events. Now this is a style normal to many authors and is quite ok to build a character, give important information about past events relevant to the story etc., but I feel like many sections in "rule of four" are just "fillings"... well, since I havent read the book to finish just yet, I might be wrong.... fill you in later...

ohh yes - "Without Wax" :-)

Dressing down, new high fashion?

Now Im nowhere near a smart dresser. If you knew me, you'd know I dont care much aboutthe clothes I wear as long as its "comfi" and appropriate. By appropriate I mean I DO care if Im going to a meeting or otherwise "expected" to wear more formal clothing.

Anyways - having just visited Oslo, I was a tad surprised about the "new fashion" amongst the young ppl. Down-dressing. let me be honest... sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a local bum and a "normal" young man.. I, myself, do NOT like to be the judge of whats normal and whats not, but in this context I hope you get the picture. Well, maybe our parents looked at us when we were young(er), and wondered the same :-) Maybe Im just getting old (like really old...)

Back from Oslo...

Just got back from Oslo today (early this morning)... We had a really pleasant trip although the actual travelling was looong. First by ferry, 13 hours or something like that and yet another 2 hours by train.

Oslo was really great. Better/beautifuller than I expected and the weather was great though cold (about 0 degrees celcius) but the sun shined most of the time.

I have a question for "native" norwegians though... Why are there 2 red men signaling "Not to go" when crossing a road? I can't think of a reason why there should be two, one seems sufficient and theres still only one green when "to-go"! hmmmm strange...

Anyways - as I wrote, we stayed at a hotel in the center of the city and to our ahemmm surprise, apparently the city drug-addicts, homeless and drug-dealers also frequented the same area/street.. and they didnt seem to bother dealing in full daylight on the corners.. One day I found a used syringe in a window and a cup of coffee.. Seems like the addicts in Norway need a cup of joe BEFORE shooting themselves with heroin or whatever :-) Maybe they cant see straight before having the early cup of java - wouldnt wanna miss a vein, huh? :-) later!

going to Oslo today (hope its not too cold)

My family and I are going to Oslo (Norway) today. We're going to visit an old friend of ours, who's currently working in Oslo... We'll be sailing from Frederikshavn til Oslo and we've got ourselves a cabin onboard the ship. Im a tad excited as I have never been to Oslo nor Norway... well - later!!!

Java RMI (could it be better?)

Having developed quite a few systems using RMI as remoting (RPC) I often find myself thinking - is this really the best solution for RPC between two java VM's? I tend to use RMI as its amazingly simple to write an interface which extends Remote, write an implementaion which extends UnicastRemoteObject, bind it using Naming and viola, you have yourself a remote accessible object. But RMI comes with a whole bunch of obstacles, mainly when dealing with limited environments (firewalls, routers, ports etc.) and callbacks - dont even get me started on callbacks....

Anyways - I started to think about a somewhat simple RMI replacement much more similar to the CORBA ORB. The client and the server both have an ORB like service/server to which remote capable objects are bound (remote stubs are still looked up in whatever naming service). The local stub will connect to the local ORB, send request and receive responses thru this ORB like service. The ORB will connect to the ORB running on the remote VM (server). By keeping this connection open, callbacks can be handled thru this connection also. Pretty simple stuff I think, I am but to make an implementation, later!!! ;-)

Trifork P4 (profiling the AOP way)

Attended a seminar held by Trifork just a few weeks ago. To those who might not know who/what trifork is, it is a danish software company developing a J2EE compliant application server (newest version is full J2EE 1.4 spec compliant to my knowledge).

Anyways - the seminar was about their latest product. A profiler which does not use the normal JVMPI approach but rather does it the AOP way... instruments bytecode at load-time (much like many AOP frameworks does it) and weaves tiny bits of profiling code into the loaded classes (and methods and whatever) at load time, hence avoiding the dreaded JVMPI which really sloooows down your VM. (HA! - just found myself talking as Dory from Finding Nemo when she talks whale :-) )

Deployed inside the VM currently executing your code which then again is being profiled, is an Agent - a profiler agent to which clients can connect and retrieve information. Pretty neat I think.... The product also comes with a ready-to-deploy web-app capable of displaying all the profiling information given by the agent. Anyway - If you, as I, are more interested in how they've implemented this, let me just say: java.lang.instrument (even on j2sdk 1.4.x versions) and ofcoz javassist (bytecode lib) but more on this later.......

the birth...

.. of yet another blog in the blog'o'sphere. This blog will/should/could contain random thoughts, sporadic thoughts (hint hint) or simply just my personal view on matters in time. Quick info 'bout myself. Im danish, working fulltime developing systems written in java.. more to come later (yeah - right, like you really gives a rat's ass, right!) later!!