Danny’s Blog

We always seem to have exceptional weather when we’re on vacation. “There’s never so much rain in August here,” local people tell us. Or, “Normally in this time of the year, we have 1 meter of snow, easily,” when we’ve come for winter sports. And now, when the average temperature in the South-West of France [...]

The silence that is here all the time is now over-silenced by a thick blanket of fog and a white layer of ice crystals over the fields. It doesn’t matter, because inside, there’s a fire in the fireplace, cheese is on the table and the wine is uncorked. Let the feast begin!

BEA’s Bill Roth (vp of the BEA Workshop Business Unit) hinted at JavaPolis and later in his blog and a LogicCMG blog at the possibility of WebLogic server supporting other languages than Java, like PHP or Ruby. I think this is an interesting idea. If, for instance, Ruby or Rails applications could be deployed to [...]

In Thursday’s keynote, JavaPolis founder Stephan Janssen asked whether JavaPolis should grow even bigger, and because of that, move to a bigger location. According to the official site this year over 2100 people attended the conference. I don’t think there’s a clear answer to Stephan’s question. JavaPolis had a very friendly, cosy atmosphere; I never [...]

Not being able to blog live during JavaPolis 2005 leaves me with several pages filled with scribbled notes on the various presentations. I’m glad that JavaPolis 2006 is said to feature free on-site WiFi access (you read it here first!). But even so, I’m not sure how easy it is to blog live on the [...]

Back from JavaPolis, and seeing the Rails book lying where I’ve left it last Tuesday, made me pick it up and continue reading — instead of looking into GlassFish, the new persistency API, JSF and all the other new stuff I’ve seen in Antwerpen. It’s all alpha, beta, preview releases; and even if it isn’t [...]

Lesson learned: a hotel which advertises with ‘WiFi’ as one of its rooms’ facilities may actually charge a substantial amount of money for that service; do not assume that it’s included in the room price. Not that I can’t afford 22 euros for a day of WiFi access, or that my employer wouldn’t pay it [...]

The best moment in any vacation is when you shut the office door behind you, the night before the vacation begins. You feel a free man, even if it’s only for a few days or weeks. Today I had that moment, and I’m still enjoying it now.
This year, my Christmas vacation starts off with a [...]

Like I wrote earlier, it’s frustrating to learn a new language when you don’t get to use it straight away. So I’ve come up with 10 creative ways that will get you started today with making big money (or fame) with your newly acquired Ruby skills.
1. Convince the company where you’re currently doing a Java [...]

The battle of Ruby vs. Java is breaking loose big time. You haven’t heard? Seriously? Well, I’m not going to add yet another blog entry with a summary of the whole discussion started by Martin Fowler; you’ll find an excellent summary on The Farm (but don’t stop there; you don’t want to miss, for example, [...]