Don’t worry, we have organized one in Jena for you.

The event will take place in our office building on the 29th floor. It’s the tallest building in the city. You can’t miss it. The doors will open at 4pm.

It’s brought to you by AGETO.

And we have picked some interesting topics for you. There will be presentations/demos of runtime technologies (Equinox, OSGi, RCP) as well as tooling (EGit, Android) and modeling (Xtext, GMF).

If you haven’t already and plan to attend, please sign up on the wiki! At the end of the event, we’ll have some frosty beverages and snacks ready for some great discussions!

Have fun!

Can’t wait to see you there! Oh and I’ll fly FRA-YYC-SFO this time because it will be SFO-YYZ-FRA on my way back with an overnight stay in downtown Toronto (Friday, March 26th). I’m really looking forward to meet old friends there.

Look:

I’m wondering now if modeling solved the problem of cloning. Anyway, I just registered today to be there and watch that happening.

A few Ctrl+R unveiled some interesting facts.

A young executive was leaving the office at 6pm when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand. “Listen,” said the CEO, “this is important, and my secretary has left. Can you make this thing work?” “Certainly,” said the young executive. She turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button. “Excellent, excellent!” said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the shredder. “I just need one copy.”

I can’t help but I do have a strong picture in my head.

Monday, July 14th @ 7pm

Cafe Stilbruch, Wagnergasse
(Google Maps)

Ralph will have a talk about the Eclipse Foundation and Open Source in general. I also invited him to get to know the TowerByte e.G. TowerByte is a consortium of 22 companies here at Jena all working together in the Jena Tower doing some crazy cool stuff with programming.

The talk will be in the 29th floor of the Jena Tower at 4pm. After that there will be time for a nice Q&A session. The Stammstisch is scheduled for 7pm at the Cafe Stilbruch.

The event is celebrated only every 25 years. I had an awesome and unforgettable weekend. The attraction this time clearly were two living elephants.

Both elephants were brought to Niederroßla in a parade on Friday from the train station in Apolda. We (our fanfare group, yes I play fanfare, timbal and piano) were sitting on a truck (well an old wagon actually) in front of the elephants on Friday. Here is a picture taken with my mobile phone. The quality is poor. Sorry about that.

More pictures (and of much better quality ) are available here taken by a very active member of the Niederroßla community. They also show the big festival procession on Sunday where our fanfare group walked right in the front (see here, here and here).

Update: Thanks to Thomas Pake which sent me the following pictures of me.

Was it worth it? Absolutely! Today, I have much more liberties when developing software. Actually, I can base the new architecture of our next generation software platform on Eclipse technology and that’s so awesome.

In January, I also delivered my first talk at a public conference ever. This was quite an interesting experience. Although I like blogging about my work and my life I’m not a guy that usually acts in the public. I’m more one of those organizing behind the scenes.

In February, one of my patches was committed into the Eclipse CVS repository and a few days later I received a bunch of Eclipse Installed stickers from Wayne.

March was probably the month with the most fun. A new city, some new stuff and a lot of great days. In fact, I’ve met a lot people I knew from newsgroups, mailing lists, chats and other activities for the first time. It was really fantastic. I can’t wait for the next EclipseCon.

There was an interesting discussion in April and it’s great to see that the discussion is still ongoing in 2007. June was the time for the first simultaneous release of ten Eclipse projects ever and in July the Eclipse Ecosystem started exploring the space.

In July I also started exploring GWT (the Google Web Toolkit) and came across an Eclipse plug-in. I started extending it in August and it’s still a nice project I look at from time to time.

In October, I attended the Eclipse Summit Europe in Esslingen. I participated in the Server-Side Eclipse Symposium but I never thought that the topic would be so well attended. It looks like everybody in interested in adopting Eclipse technology on the server. Well, I’m doing it too four our software platform.

Oh and I don’t know how but in 2006 I managed to blog at least once every single month. Cool. I leave it up to you do decide if it’s of some use for you.

So what’s next in 2007? Mhm. I’m working on some great stuff in the area of autonomous and distributed computing based on Equinox and Eclipse ECF. Then there is also my project which I recently renamed to RWT – the Remote Widget Toolkit. It started as a Google Summer of Code project. The idea is to develop only with one single toolkit for RCP and Web clients.

All this together I tend to call Eclipse REP – the Rich Enterprise Platform. Eclipse Server-Side is just the technology. Eclipse REP is the framework on top of it. Curious? Post a comment here or send me a mail if you are interested in contributing or adopting. Some of the stuff is already on SourceForge but a lot is still prototyped in a few local workspaces.

I’m having problems with their website because some genius designer decided to hard code some pixel positions an sizes into it. Well, usually things work on most desktops but on high resolution displays you are working with a different font size. This makes some websites unusable. No big deal I thought. Just take a screenshot and mail the webmaster (not Denis this time ).

So I sent a mail to webmaster@paypal.com and got a friendly response alá “Our webmaster doesn’t read his inbox. Use the support hotlines.” Mhm. I initially wrote to the webmaster because that’s how it usually work. If you really want to get things fixed, don’t call or mail a hotline, mail the webmaster.

Nevertheless, I decided to send a mail to the hotline. Or at least I tried but I had to use a funny web fronted for this. At least they got a category for website problems. Unfortunately, the web form didn’t allow me to attach screenshots. Now I got a little confused. I should mention that the first item on that form was a box with help items and the first help item was “How do I create a screenshot in Windows?”.

Mhm. So there is a form for submitting questions which includes instructions for taking screenshots but the form doesn’t allow attaching files. Nice piece of engineering. BTW, does anybody see the relation to Joel’s keynote at EclipseCon? I do.

I said to myself: “Guy, don’t give up. Just tell them your problem with the screen resolution and the website issues and offer them to send a screenshot by mail.” And I wrote my problem in that form.

Hi! I’m having a problem with your website. It seems that this problem is caused by a different font size and display resolution I’m using on my Dell notebook. It’s configured to 120dpi in the Windows Display dialog. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to attach a screenshot your help form. But I can send the screenshot by mail. This should help your website developers to identify the problem.

Just a couple of minutes later I got a response. And guess what they suggested?

In this case you need to delete your cookies and your cache, so that you are able to login to your account again.

ROTFL!

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