The LG540 Android 1.6 powered smart phone works very well with my Lenovo X201T tablet laptop and Ubuntu 11.04 (currently in development).

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A coding dojo is a form of deliberate practice where you are concerned with improving your software development approach and language skills. The aim of the Scala coding dojo is to learn how to think in terms of the Scala language and functional programming constructs. The reward from a Scala coding dojo is in that you feel more capable with the language and you learn a little (or a lot) more each time.

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Software development tools such as JIRA, Netbeans, Eclipse, Git, Maven etc. are what most people consider when mentioning tools. In the context of this article I consider tools in the wider scope, a tool can be a process or a particular practice (TDD, pair programming) or a persons creative thinking, these are all tools that we use to help us achieve some goal.

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On Saturday 27th November the London java Community ran their our third conference in two years. The conference was a great success and was sold out, with lots of people on the wait list who didn’t manage to sign up in time.

| LJC Conference site | meetup page (feedback) |

Everyone managed to weather through the winter morning and get there in plenty of time to mingle and warm up for the day ahead.  It was good to have some time to chat about what we wanted to get from the day and there was a great buzz built up before the start of the talks.

The first talk by Martijn Verberg and Ben Evans on the future of Java was great, it is alway good to have pair presenting and these pair did a great job of entertaining and at the same time educating the crowd.  A fluffy Duke mascot was used to good effect.

I enjoyed running a test driven development workshop aimed at those with no TDD experience or just getting started. Using the information I am building up about TDD on my “tooling up” website, the attendees all said they were confident about starting TDD and so I was pleased I reached my goal.

I hope to run some Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development workshops sometime in 2011.

Whist I was running the TDD workshop, there were some very insightful discussions going on at the “Future of Java parkbench” session, with some really interesting information about the internal workings of the Java Virtual Machine.  Maybe someone who was there will do a little write up??

Other highlights for me included:

• John Smart’s talk on Hudson CI and continuous deployment
• Steve Elliot from Oracle covering the roadmap for Java 7 and 8
• Martijn Verberg’s Diabolical Developer
• Markus Kobler on avoiding technical bankruptcy
• VisionOn.tv talking about their open source project to make open media work better - they showed a few short film clips too!

Have a look at the list of sessions to get a full view on what went on.

There were some great discussions going on after the conference in the pub down the road and it was great to reflect on the great things we learn and divising some plans for LJC events in the new year.

I hope to work more with the VisionOn.tv project in 2011 as it looks very interesting and is very community oriented.

Thanks to all that came and made the day so special as well as a big thank you to all the other organisers.

@jr0cket

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| XPDay 2010 Wik | XPDay 2010 feedback page |

The 2010 XPDay in London was an amazing experience and my thanks go to the organisers and all the many people that gave great open space sessions and experience reports.

Not since the 2009 Lean & Kanban exchange at SkillsMatter have I been so engergised after an event (and I have been to quite a few great events this year). I feel I have learnt so much in these two days that it will take me all the holidays to digest (and blog about) everything. Here are some of my experiences from the event.

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I am vastly more productive when I use Ubuntu as an Operating System as it is fast and gives me all the tools I need to get things done. Unfortunately Lenovo dont support me in this requirement, shipping Windows with theiir products. So to replace the incumbant Microsoft Windows software on my Lenovo Thinkpad X201T tablet, I intend to replace the 320GB hard disk with an OCZ Vertex 2E 128Gb solid state drive (SSD). The Lenovo lets you easily swap out the hard drive (great design). This way I can simply put the original hard drive back in should I decide to sell the laptop. Here is my approach.

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When it comes to managing change then what ever practices you decide to adopt, its preferable to take an “all in” approach, in that you get as many people involved as you can. This does not mean that you have to adopt everything all at once, but helps you understand the big picture of change within your organisation.

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Although Google have decided not to continue with Google Wave as a service, Google have stated that the existing wave.google.com site and waves will still be around into 2011.

It is a real shame that this service is going away as it was great for conferences and events and lots of other collaborative working opportunities. Perhaps when more people discover the benefits of collaborative working then another service such as rich as wave will emerge. Until then its back to either basic Google docs or pastebin, both of which are good at what they do but limited compared to all the plugins that were available for Wave.

I found another alternative to wave, PyGoWave, which looks promising but their public site is running on a test server (at the time of writing). Something to try out over the holidays.

I am also interested in running my own wave server in a box, but my Internet service provider may have other ideas about that!!

Lets hope we all find rich ways to collaborate with each other in 2011.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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I’ve just received my early holidays present to myself, a new Lenovo X201T tablet laptop. Its a great piece of hardware and feels very robust and gives the feel of solid engineering which has created something will lasts a long time.

I went for the top end version, Intel i7 processor, 8Gb RAM and top end Intel wireless network card. Here are my experiences so far with the Lenovo X201T tablet latptop.

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I am really enjoying the new version of Ubuntu, 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I especially like the Unity desktop of the netbook edition.

Unfortunately my Asus netbooks (Asus Eee PC1000, Asus Eee PC 1201N) are affected by the hibernate suspend bug that affects some machine.

Good news though as there is a simple fix to this bug, documented in the Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release notes. Here are the details of the fix.

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