I saw The Italian Job (the recent version) with Vicki on Wednesday. I have a confession… I haven’t seen the original. So I enjoyed it. A fun film. The evening did, however have a bit of an impact on my Thursday. There is no late train back from Salisbury so I crashed there and went straight to work…. well not straight to work. A train to Romsey and then to catch the ‘Rail Link’ to Hursley. I stood around outside Romsey station for about 30 mins in the cold, wandered around a bit confused and eventually went into the statsion and asked when the next Rail Link to Winchester was? “Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t leave from here. I think it leaves from the Bus Station”. The ‘Rail Link’ leaves from the the Bus Station, so obvious!
Archive for January, 2006
Well I’m back from the W3C WS-Addressing interoperability event and Face-to-Face meeting in Vancouver. I should probably be writing up a report for someone at IBM but I’ll do this first.
I had a couple of days before the interop. event to meet up with a couple of WG members, see a bit of Vancouver. I enjoyed both… Vancouver is a beautiful city (moreso when it’s not raining, added to the list of places I’d happily live for a while.
The interop event went really well. A productive couple of days for everyone in the room with a great atmosphere and lots of green on the screen (by the end of the week we’d bettered that screen). Worked a lot with some great guys from MS and Sun and would happily do so again (didn’t work so much with the Sonic guys) but look forward to working with everyone clearing out more of those white and red blocks on the chart over the course of the next few weeks. Also much kudos to Paul, Jonathan, Hugo and Phillipe who were at least as productive as those of us working on implementations in generating and refining the tests and test framework.
The actual F2F meeting was a little scary for me… trying to represent IBM while not knowing how these meetings work nor all of the people. But Paco was on the phone from IBM which let me off the hook on the first day while I learnt a bit how to participate… so I participated a lot more on the second day.
All in all I had a good week, meeting lots of great people, having some good food and getting lots of work done… setting myself up for a busy next few weeks 
Arrived
Originally uploaded by davidillsley.
(was today)
More when I feel more like it.
As a mac user and a blogger I think I’m supposed to comment on yesterdays Keynote.
iMac Core Duo & MacBook Pro: decent looking specs, haven’t compared prices with PCs yet. Keeping the old design is a good move by Apple. Makes everyone think nothing much has changed when it has.
Lack of MacBookPro 17: I’m guessing that either Apple couldn’t develop a new 17 inch in the timeframe or that Intel couldn’t provide a higher end chip in volume than the ones in the 15 inch for a laptop.
Lack of MacBook Pro 12: I’m with everyone who reckons my diddy little laptop won’t be replaced… in fairness the PowerBook I own isn’t really a PowerBook anyway but an iBook on steroids.
iLife 06: Some interesting additions but the lack of any server side infrastructure in .Mac to add blog posts, manipulate image collections is a deal breaker for me as quite often when I want to add photos, blog etc. I’m away from my mac, possibly away from any PC type device.
iWork 06: Wow, if people pay for this upgrade they… nah, they won’t.
I had a really good day today despite travelling all the way from Dundee to Southampton.
Why? Well I saw a few cool people and resolved again to have a good 2006. I saw Vic in the morning, Alex early afternoon (somehow managed to over compensate for ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ by an hour) and finished off with Ruth.
Good times were had with all. So that mitigates missing Hogmanay a bit… but I’m still frustrated that I didn’t get to meet new people and see other people who I don’t know as well which would have happened at Hogmanay.
I spent a few hours a few weeks ago creating a mosaic of photos as a way having lots printed up in an attractive way on a big sheet. Well the GIMP plugin I found took ages to set up and get working and it wasn’t easy to know what it was doing. Yesterday I decided to try out my new Groovy skills and recreate this tool using the standard Java libraries… it took me about 2 hours to get a satisfactory output image… about 30 lines of Groovy code. I’m impressed.
This was in part because of the Java libraries that allow easy image manipulation so I could have done this in Eclipse as a Java class. So was there an advantage to using Groovy for this? Yes, I think there was. It was a task most suited to a procedural coding, iterating, and where I’m happy to exchange development time for potential runtime exceptions (how I see the true dynamic typing allowed in Groovy).
Happy New Year!
Well last night was a slight disappointment. I’d planned to go through to Edinburgh to drink with everyone there for the first time since the fringe… but I encountered a migraine half way through the day which is still lingering around 
But that’s ok. I’ll try and see them/you all in the next couple of days.
As for 2006…. It’ll be hard to top 2005, I had some really, really good times… but I’m optimistic… meeting lots of new people in Southampton is definitely on the list, as is travelling to see people, and hopefully I’ll have good times at work. I start the year not really knowing what I’ll spend the year doing which I think is good… unlikely to get boring.
