Archive for the ‘JAOO Århus 2009’ Category

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We have a winner!

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The winner

The JAOO Today team are happy to declare the TwitterBingo competition to be officially over.

At 15.43, Manuel R. Ciosici showed up at the info booth carrying a bingoplate with the id of 1541, with 16 numbers all checked off.
After a quick electronic fraud check against the twitter stream, we were able to coronate Manuel as the winner of a free ticket for JAOO Aarhus 2010.

The catch

But as in almost any case connected to Real Life™, there’s a catch. In this case, the problem was that Manuel did not want the ticket!
While at first sight, this might seem to be a serious blow to the JAOO reputation, it’s really quite the opposite:
The reason Manuel did not want the free ticket is that he has had a terrific time this year as student volunteer crew during the conference. He’s enjoyed it to a degree than rather going for free next year without doing any work, he prefer taking part in the social life of the people making JAOO tick, working hard behind the scenes while the rest of us stand around, sipping the free coffee.

So let’s congratulate Manuel with the book prize he chose instead and thank him for his work at his conference.

The sequel

But the hunt is still on: The first person to present the JAOO Today team with a fully automated TwitterBingo solution will be admitted freely to JAOO Arhus 2010. The solution must tell whether a given TwitterBingo card is a winner or not. The only human interaction allowed is taking a picture of the card, should you so desire – that is, solutions which require entry of the numbers on the card don’t count.

Your entry must be demonstrated to a member of the JAOO Today team on or before friday oct 9th. You can reach us here at the blog.

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Feeling Infernally Inferior

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

How is that you go around feeling like the king of the world, running around coding Lisp like noone else, and then you go to some random session, and the world comes crashing down over you?

Session in question: Data Parallelism with Simon Peyton-Jones, who demonstrated the obscure and academic Haskell language. However, I cannot help feel the pressure of type classes, purity, and most of all, Simon Peyton-Jones himself.

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IT-Runners ran their asses off

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

The big sports event of the JAOO conference is of course the IT-run. It was joyful to get to exercise a bit (actually a lot) after two days of sitting, eating and drinking (i.e. the typical IT-conference activities).

The route was as always two times around the center of Aarhus. The route ended with a rather steep climb which was killing me the second time. I ended up competing with a relatively old grey-haired woman with a shirt labelled Aarhus 1900 (the local running club). I just beat her at last. I don’t know if I should feel happy or depressed about this, considering the fact that she was about 20 years older than me :-)

The IT firm fight between IBM and Trifork this year was never officially determined because the local running club, which was arranging the IT run, had forgot to install an UPS and unfortunately someone tripped over the power cord, resulting in the timing equipment temporarily failing. I have been talking with the Trifork team and this year they are convinced that they won. As I understand it the IBM team regretfully agreed.

See all (or almost all) the results at the IT-Run website.

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Must See Wednesday

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Final day at JAOO, and you’re probably more or less at the point where you can’t really grasp any more information. However, before you give up and go for all the free stuff and the competitions, try out some of these sessions:

Design Stories by Kevlin Henney

Wednesday 10:15 – 11:15 in Filuren
At least just for the fun of it, you should go to one talk with Kevlin Henney every year. Which one you pick really doesn’t matter that much, just be prepared for some nice storytelling. And don’t try it all at home™.

How Cloud is working as a disruptor to shake up middleware design by Billy Newport

Wednesday 14:45 – 15:45 in Store Sal
Maybe you’ve read our interview with Billy Newport, and if you have, you might have noticed that he doesn’t quite come off as the traditional IBM dustballer. So, if you’re going to a talk about clouds, this is probably it – there might actually be some kind of substance to it. At least their grid stuff looks pretty neat.

Software Visualization 101+ by Michele Lanza

Wednesday 16:15 – 17:15 in Filuren
Michele Lanza does some pretty interesting things with code visualization – he did some demos last year on how to create city-like maps by doing static code analysis. Hopefully something will have happened since then, but for those of you who didn’t go to his talk last year, this seems like a nice talk to finish JAOO off.

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Job Title Inflation

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

At some companies, job titles are signs of status – it matters whether you’re a developer, a senior programmer, an enterprise architect, a process consultant, or whatever. It seems this phenomenon has also penetrated the conference business.

If you take a quick look at the list of speakers at JAOO 2009, you’ll probably see what I mean. Sure, there are the usual bunch of developers, CTOs, CEOs, and so on, but… what’s up with

  • Software Simplist
  • Wizard of Open Source
  • Agile Sceptic
  • Agile Troublemaker
  • Sanitation Engineer

The list goes on – shouldn’t there be some kind of system to this? I feel chaos closing in…

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The Ultimate Toilet Guide

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Although the amount of women af JAOO has increased significantly this year, the large majority of attendants are still male. It might be obvious to some, but going to the toilet is a completely different thing depending on your sex. Being a male, I assume that women has their scheme all figured out, but mens’ rooms can be a little challenging to overcome to some. Fortunately, somebody else have gone through the hassle of actually writing down how you should behave in a toilet, so read this article and learn something new.

Also, the mens’ rooms often have the concept of urinals, and this can be a source of some discomfort. If you’ve been wondering why this is, do read the Urinal Protocol Vulnerability.

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OSGi Without Hibernate?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Need a good reason not to look at OSGi? Then just consider the fact that using Hibernate (or anything that does dynamic classloading) will fail unless you provide some obscure workaround, which you’ll probably regret later on – and which will probably also block all the advantages of actually using OSGi. Does that suck? Yes.

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Stuff you can win

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

As most of you know, JAOO is all about the free stuff. A special subclass of “free” is the items which are “free, but only for the winner of competiton so-and-so”.

In the exhibition area, the booths are swamped with competitions allowing you to win some really cool stuff. JAOO Today took a tour around and is now able to show you a list of the prizes:

IBM Rational: iPod Touch 32 gb
Version2: Netbook Mini PC 730 EO
DataDirect: Navman S70 3D
Trifork: an iPhone, drawn each day
Kaazing: iPod nano, iPod shuffle, drawn at 4 pm each day
Mannaz: courses for a value of 20.000 DKK

Of course, the list might be incomplete. Feel free to comment, if you know of a competition not listed here.
If you wouldn’t rather keep it to yourself, that is…

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Gentlemen, grab your bingo cards – free JAOO 2010

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

The JAOO Today TwitterBingo™ is rolling. People are crossing off numbers, winning books and hopefully having all kinds of fun along the way.

But we at JAOO Today want more! We want lines at the info booth, we want fighting on the exhibition floor over the last bingo cards, we want winners cheering and losers crying. We want to up the ante a little bit:

On Wednesday, the first person to show up at the info booth with a winning bingo card will be admitted to JAOO Aarhus 2010 at the very favorable prize of 0,- danish kroner – zero as in “Free Ticket”.

And for the wonderful female part of the JAOO crowd, same goes for you: Grab you bingo cards (and I’ll just hope the heading isn’t illegal in some crooked way)

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Bingo Aficionado Breaks TwitterBingo Code

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

The first half of the TwitterBingo main competition has been won by the very passionate Bingo-programmer Nikolaus Gradwohl, who wrote a Ruby program to check if a bingo plate was full. Unfortunately, he had not (yet) implemented OCR to actually enter the numbers automatically, so he didn’t win the main prize. He did, however, win a nice Erlang book.

That means that the challenge is still open: The first who writes a completely automated TwitterBingo checker will win a free ticket to JAOO 2010.

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