London is being even better than last time I was here. The weather is nicer, the hotel is a lot better,and now I know there's a brazilian restaurant at Tottenham Court Road,
near the Virgin Megastore, just in case I feel homesick. I'll register with the police tomorrow, and
hopefully all my documentation is allright. So far, ThoughtWorks is
completely different from every other job I ever had - I mean, there's
an X-Box and a foosball table at the office, for God's sakes. Having
programming taken as creative work instead of 'an office job' really
means a lot to me, and is surely going to be a great experience.
Oh,
and teletext! My God, they have teletext here! Yesterday, I pressed this curious
'text' button in my hotel room's TV remote to see what would happen, and lo and
behold, I was back in 1992. I used teletext like mad back then, cause
it was pretty much the only free online service around at the time, and
it's unsurprisingly exactly the same: the index page lists lots of
other page's numbers, you press them on the remote, wait a while, next
page loads, repeat. Simple, convenient, full of loan and holiday
package ads, and simply useless after this internet thingy exploded :)
Yesterday there was GeekNight, with an impressive quorum of... two
(ok, Nat was also there for about 5 minutes). Pretty quiet, I'd say,
but still, Adewale
and I went on discussing lots of interesting stuff about syndication
and why today's aggregators just don't scale too well (true enough; try
subscribing to 3000+ feeds like Ade did, and you'll see what an
horrible death pretty much any aggregator dies). This is interesting,
because this blogging thing has just started, and as more and more
people begin creating feeds for their stuff, there's a scalability
problem. And feeds are not just for blogs, of course: you could have a
feed with the music I've listened recently, couldn't you? Or the links
I've visited? Or the places I've been to recently, served by my mobile
phone's GPS, or...
Laslo going opensource is also great, I'll have a better look at it later on, sounds really promising.
I've just got back from GeekSpeek, by the way, where a bunch of
geeks were talking way too fast for my poor english listening skills :)
The main theme suggested by Duncan Cragg was J2EE and J2ME, but we
ended up talking about remote pair-programming tools. One of those cool
shiny new toys I found today, just minutes before lunch was this Eclipse plug-in, which looks pretty nice. I'll see if it fits the bill or not, and keep you posted.
Previous Topic
