I finally decided to take the plunge and invest into ultra portable laptop. Will blog about my experiences later on, but so far I am insanely happy about how well this machine works. Light, fast and still quite powerful. And goes around with me almost anywhere.

It just does not feel like winter, hence we did what any sensible person would do.

Boarded a plane to Joensuu.

On the plane it was fun to see that even though Finnair does not server Bernard Massard as a sparkling wine on their planes, Flybe still does.

Joensuu did not look that much more wintery…

Things started to look different when we got to the hotel Koli.

As we had arrived to Koli before everyone else, we had some time to eat before going to the cottage.

Insanely good vendace soup, sautéed moose ( not reindeer ) and a local blueberry pastry.

Cottage was located right next to the Koli national park – in quite remote strip of road.

That only means it is much more comfortable to build an environment and experience for christmas as closest neighbors are not just few meters away.

Days at Koli followed similar pattern: outdoor life during sunny hours, then eating, sauna, playing games and finally a good night sleep. Total relaxation.

Safe to say that the sauna stove burned a huge amount of wood during the week, as we had sauna every evening.

Luckily there was no shortage of wood.

As we hiked in the nature it was surreal to be surrounded by piles of snow, but still see open lake as well as closed slalom slopes.

Even though we did not get to enjoy the fun of downhill ski-ing or cross country ski-ing – we got to enjoy beautiful landscapes and nature experiences. I also managed to take a few really nice photos about those events.

The image above is from a night time walk in almost pitch black weather. Light source in the image is ski center’s parking place’s light – as we walked from the cottage to the ski center and back.

As we hiked to different places, we quite often remembered to take some snacks with us.

Drinking hot chocolate and watching these amazing landscapes just soothes ones mind.

And every time as we got back to the cottage, it was once again more eating, sauna and evening filled with fun and games.

This christmas we had more than few really great experiences, which did not get captured on memory card that well – but will live in memories.

For example it was a rare treat to get to go to a real smoke sauna at Koli – and experience difference in heat, smell, atmosphere and in the whole sauna experience compared to a normal sauna.

Second it was great fun to walk up the Koli ski slopes while the center was closed.

We have come down the slopes so many times and just taken the lift up, so it was fun to walk up and appreciate the next time we get to ski it down even more.

And here in the last picture you cal already see the hotel in the distance.

Safe to say we were kind a sweaty after the hike up the slope. Unfortunately iPhone photos don’t have the same depth as it was in reality.

Third experience I will not forget was our trial to get back to the cottage from the hotel after we had enjoyed some hot chocolate.

We did not want to walk the slopes back down, so decided to follow ready made nature paths – which would lead us down and close to the road that takes to the cottage. Unfortunately during the winter time paths are not that easily seen and so clearly marked – which meant that we got lost by choosing a wrong path and ended up doing an additional 3,5 kilometers hike in rough terrain on a sightseeing path around Koli ravine to get back to where we started. By then the weather and visibility was getting worse so we decided not to try to find the right path, but take a car ride back to the cottage.

All and all amazing christmas vacation in insanely great scenery. We got to see beautiful flow of Tarhapuro, went to see the views from Mäkrävaara – and got to drink hot chocolate once again at Ukkokoli. Hiking in snowy scenery was much more fun than skiing down the slopes for change – but I’m already looking forward for next christmas and open slopes.

As I have written previously, I’ve been a huge fan of HBO’s series The Wire and from moment to moment it seems that most of the cast of the Wire are having a role in the series. It is interesting to see great actors performing in totally different roles. Just like in the Wire – characters in Oz are strong and have all the shades of light and dark in them. They are put into situations where moral choices are not that clear cut anymore and spectators are forced to understand why characters behave like they do and feel small amounts of empathy also for some of the worst kind of evil human beings.

The Sopranos is another HBO series which have similar characteristics. It is not about the action, but about human interactions, complexity and drama of the everyday life of characters on the wrong side of the border of legality. Somehow I haven’t yet managed to invest time and money to acquire the whole Sopranos series on DVD – and to watch it. If I were to get it as a christmas present, I would know what to do during my vacation.

The first new component or program I tested was DbSchema, which is a simple database design tool. Normally I wouldn’t like to play with a tool like this, but as part of this testing I wanted to see it. And to be honest it was actually fun to see and model the table structures visually, and finally export the sql into the project. Thought the created sql is not of the type I would manually write, it seems to work properly in different databases – so there is some use to the product to be used in projects, where you need to often refactor the database structure and use multiple database engines.

Related to this I wanted to finally properly see what is it like to use embedded databases in your own projects – either to test the persistence layer without a proper database instance in unit tests or just for the fun of it. I asked opinion from Mikael and settled to use H2 instead of Derby or HSQL. Spring’s support for embedded databases was surprisingly easy to take into use. Just few configuration lines and two files of sql – and I had an initialized database in my application at my disposal, when needed. How much better can it get?

Interesting bits and pieces don’t come in the setting up the datasource, but from different methods of using it. Spring JDBC and especially NamedJdbcTemplate has been a powerful tool in many occasions, but as we all have learned to know – writing low level crud-code is tiresome. Spring ORM support – and especially the JPA support improves things a lot, but still leaves you to write boilerplate data access layer for basic operations. Spring Data JPA changes this.

I was a little vary first, but became a sort of convert after reading through Mikael’s posting, reading through the documentation a bit – and then finally testing it in my own application. I am usually quite skeptical on frameworks that promise to much and are filled with magic, but eventually do not deliver – but do not reveal that until you have already painted yourself into the corner.

Spring Data’s JPA support was impressive – as it allows you to leave out writing boilerplate code, extend the automaticly created repository bean with your own code and eventually of course replace this proxyed code with manually written dao — if you choose to do so. As the usage model and api does not include anything extraordinary, you don’t create a forced lockin with the implementation – but rather can choose whether you write something or trust the proxy bean Spring gives. See more about that in the documentation section “1.4. Custom implementations”.

Pretty awesome.

The one thing that bores me, is the fact that setting everything up and configuring all the dependencies ready for a project usually takes a lot of time, but then again after you lay down the foundation once — you can use and reuse that numerous times. I’ll take that over frameworks where all the options have decided for you and are dead bolted so that nothing can be changed easily.

Do the setup work once, enjoyment for life.

It took some time, but my Nomo jeans are finally here and they do feel quite good.

There were few problems, before I actually got them – but that can be expected with a startup I guess.

First the jeans did not arrive within the projected delivery frame, so I went to the store to get an update on the situation. They were a week or two late at that point so not that bad. At the shop the message was that they were in the country already, so delivery should be during the next week. And during the next week I got a note on Facebook – that they were finally packing my jeans for delivery.

Then it took almost two weeks before I finally called them again to ask whether the delivery person had got stuck in traffic or if Puotila was under siege and he was unable to get through the encirclement. Apparently Puotila was not under siege, but the courier was unable to reach us at home or get through my mobile phone. I honestly was surprised as I had been – and Satu had been – at home a lot — and my phone was always on, and I did not have unanswered calls. But my jeans were at the store.

I immediately jumped to the opportunity to pick them up the very next day from Kamppi and got them.

So the verdict?

They feel good.

They look good.

They are good.

The model is tighter than what I have got used to wearing, but also has a little bit of elastan in the fabric – making jeans also stretch a little bit, when you need to move your limbs more than normally. Suffice to say that they are much more comfortable than I thought such tight jeans ever could.

And putting my money where my mouth is: will I buy again?

Even though I have been trying to wear more suit with my fancy shoes, but still quite often my uniform is the traditional jeans, sneakers, hoodie and a jacket.

So, the answer is most definitely.

I’ve been pondering for a long time updating my Canon 400D camera body, but been unable to make the decision between different Canon options.

5D Mark II has been the gold standard, but then again I’ve been considering myself so dirt poor sob that I really can’t afford such a luxury device – especially as these days the amount of photos I take with a DSLR is much smaller than I would previously have expected. I’d much rather spend the money on great wines and delicious gourmet experiences.

Canon 7D was the second pro camera body I thought about, but eventually decided that I could work also with lesser equipment as I noticed that 60D would not pale in comparison that much – especially as the price was from time to time significantly lower than the price of 7D.

Going lower – all the way down to the 600D model it became even harder to make the decision of purchasing the 60D as 600D has almost all the core features — and even though it is slower and has smaller buffer, at the core it is the same camera in terms of optics and image quality. Naturally the differences are huge in the usability and maneuverability, but for hobbyist like me who is longer looking into getting a break into the world of professional photography 600D could just as well be a rather great improvement.

So it has been a hard choice, but today it got a whole lot easier – as I got the email about the gift card. As I looked at the store’s prices, 600D was considerable cheaper than the 60D or 7D – so decision on whether to spend less than 200 euros own money, or spending more than 600 euros on top of the gift card was easier than before.

Canon 600D it is. Or will be. Unless I get regrets and want to go for the 7D.

Gosh! How can choosing the right camera body be this hard?

On friday afternoon Satu ordered me to meet her in Itäkeskus for late lunch – as we did not have anything specific to eat at home. Stated plan was to eat something and then get back home to bed to rest and to try to get better. After eating it became evident that there were other plans, and even though I tried to object – I was unable to derail the plan from unfolding.

In utter disbelief and mystery I had to follow Satu into the city. As we got to Hakaniemi I still had no clue what so ever. It took all the way to the corner of Hakaniemi market square before Satu had to confess that I was now kidnapped – and was forced to enter Hilton Helsinki Strand hotel, which was to be my prison for next few days.

As I entered the room with keycard in my hand..

I naturally noticed the view ..

As well as tools of this dungeon..

It was clear that my captivity would be an experience.

I had tried to request help via Facebook, but only got some sarcastic comments and few ‘Like’-presses.

I was able to start negotiations of my release in a candlelit bubble bath, but to no avail. I was to be bound to this luxurious weekend to the full extent.

Next morning opened to a beautiful sunrise and I immediately started to recognize stockholm syndrome symptoms in me.

After generous and healthy breakfast buffet I was taken outside and was forced to wander around the city.

I assume that the plan was to keep me in constant move, so that potential search & rescue missions would be unable to pinpoint my exact location. Even though I took photos with my iPhone and uploaded ‘em to Flickr – I wasn’t rescued in time.

We finally visited Chjoko at Liisankatu, tasting some handmade finnish chocolates — and almost stayed in for the chocolate brunch, which they serve on saturdays.

Sun was shining and Helsinki looked as beautiful as ever.

Went by the vintage store Play it again Sam, but passed on the possibility to buy expensive old school garments.

Went to see once again design sale – organized this time by Ornamo in Valkoinen sali.

Three floors were packed with people.

Some of the usual suspect were there..

And we did see some interesting things ..

But mostly things presented and on sale did not impress me much. Either it was because I was still feeling a bit sick, or that I was not in the target demographics.

But I did find something!

A funny new hat!

We walked around the city center, seeing new shops, restaurants and in general just enjoying the vibe of modern almost metropolitan city.

Can you believe it is already december in Helsinki?

And no. We did not go and try Jumpin-suits.

As we tried to find a proper place for lunch we noticed that many of the places we would have wanted to go, did not open ’till three or four o’clock. Therefore we decided to do an easy choice and head down to Stockmann’s department store and eat at F8.

Stockmann’s was packed with people doing their christmas shopping, but we managed to fight our way through.

Ceasar salaed with salmon filet is a standard dish for us. A delicious and light lunch, after which we had plenty of time to get back to the hotel to relax.

As we got back to the hotel I learned that some physical torture was in the program.

We visited small gym on the 8th floor of the Hilton Strand – and admired the view.

Gym with a view is actually nice idea, as is a pool on the roof.

Unfortunately the water felt like cold ice water. Something you could luckily heal with a healthy dose of heat in sauna.

After the sauna it was time to enjoy some refreshments and necessary liquids to replace all the sweat lost in the gym and in the sauna.

Negotiations for my release continued in the evening at König.

These photos do not do justice for the food, though the problem was restaurant’s fault. It was actually hard to see the real color of the food – as mood lights distorted colors.

As starters we took traditional buckwheat blini with whitefish roe, sour cream and red onion.

For main course I had crispy fried loin of pork with Madeira sauce and braised sauerkraut.

And Satu as my captor ordered glow-fried whitefish with hollandaise sauce with fried shrimps & rustic bread and horseradish flavored potatoes.

Delicious and insanely fulfilling.

Negotiations continued throughout the night and after lengthy discussions in a bubble bath a covenant was made. Next afternoon would end the captivity – and we would return to the peaceful serenity of Puotila.

At the morning breakfast I think I shed a tear as I realized that next morning there wouldn’t be a buffet table filled with fruits, bacon and all sorts of continental treats.

So looking back this time spent in captivity I have to say that it wasn’t that bad experience – and I survived it admirably without any major trauma, except for the fact that champagne can run out!

Tomorrow is my official birtday, 5th of December – so this was a genuine surprise.

And yes, it is true. I’ll be 27 years old. Again.

There are worse ways to start the day than with a breakfast buffet at Klaus K.

With Cityshoppari-card it is just 15 euros per person, compared to the regular price of 23 euros.

I’ve been using Sennheiser HD-201 headphones for some time and been quite satisfied with them. However as Hifistudio in Helsinki had a discount on Bose Around Ear headphones – selling them for 79 euros per pair – I decided to buy one. Or actually three, as I got one also for my girlfriend and another for my friend Mikael.

As I tested them on my iPhone on the way home – I was already impressed. This has to be the most comfortable headphones I have ever owned. They just feel so good and soft. Sound quality is also astonishing – though I am not an audiophile. I read some reviews where some music engineers complained about Bose using technology that improves the sound on lower frequencies and make it better to consumers, but bad for audio professionals.

So far I can’t complain. As I listened some songs on my iMac I honestly found new frequencies and feelings in songs that I have liked, but haven’t found the same detail and effect previously while listening with my previous Sennheiser headphones.

And the comfort …. These things just feel so good.

I absolutely love the London underground, but hated the congestion. It took multiple trains on my line before I even fit into the train – and as I had planned my schedule too tightly, I missed most parts of the first presentations. I really, really wanted to see the “WCM solutions with Drupal and Alfresco“-presentation.

Luckily I had already discussed about the subject with Richard Esplin from Alfresco already previously, so I more or less knew the 10 000 ft overview of the stuff. I felt bummed that I missed the presentation though, especially as the slides weren’t available at the time. Now that the slides are available and there is also rather good webinar about the subject, I don’t feel that bad.

See the webinar here:
http://www.frequency.com/video/canopy-webinar-september-14-2011/18366591

At the same time Gab was running interesting talk about application lifecycle management, which also was good news to developers loving Maven. Should try new Maven artefacts myself someday. Few years ago I had some problems with the WAR-artefacts and ended up putting Alfresco war into local repository on my own and then use WAR-overlay to make modifications.

Third session running in the first slot was about Alfresco iOS application design. The cool thing about the session is that they announced that the source code is opensourced, so you can go and fork it yourself!

Crafter studio

Now for the second presentation of the day I managed to select something really interesting.

Crafter studio is a website authoring solution to be used with Alfresco and Crafter Rivet-framework. As it has started as an in house framework and only recently started – as far as I know – to get more community participation, there is quite likely lot’s of work to be done to make the learning curve easier for outsiders.

Have to see for myself someday: http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/CStudio+1.7.0

In any case the demo of the Crafter Studio was impressive and got me really interested!

Slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/alfresco/rivetlogic-crafter-studio

At the same time other options would have been:

• CMIS in the real world
• What’s new in Share Extras

Advanced training had the good CMIS in the real world session – so that would have been bad choice for me. Similarly Share Extras-session seemed like something that I could check out on my own better, once back at home.

Third and fourth sessions on the second day were spent with networking and participating in Westernacher’s presentation of their transformation server.

Sessions that were other options for the third session:

• CMIS – What is coming next
• Integrating Alfresco with publishing tools
• Global federation and Search

What is next in CMIS could have been interesting, but as I am just looking my first applications where CMIS would be used – I am not in position to start yet running. I have patience to wait. Integration with publishing tools is out of my scope and current interests — even though it would have been fun to see Ixxus publishing platform in use. Similarly Global federated search session would have been really interesting – or at least the slides give me the impression that there might have been some gold nuggets said between the lines.

For fourth session options were:

• Moving from Lucene to Alfresco FTS
• Alfresco the clojure way
• Repository customization best practices

Repository customization best practices looked extremely valuable, but at the same time it looked like quite similar as last year. Alfresco the clojure way would unfortunately just confused me – as I am not familiar with Clojure, nor a big fanboy of functional languages. But Andy’s presentation on transition from Lucene query syntax to FTS would have been good to see.

However – like I said – I chose to see something else and network with people.

Transformation server

What is the big thing here. Why would anyone want a separate transformation server?

Well it turns out there are multiple good reasons:

• Quality
• Scalability
• Performance and robustness

Westernacher guys showed excellent examples from SAP, where OpenOffice did a dirt poort job compared to the quality of doing transformation on the Windows transformation server with the Office tools. Difference was like day and night.

Naturally having transformations in separate servers / tier helps in scalability, as the work is not done on the same node as everything else. That also helps in situations where there are problems in the transformations – providing robustness to the whole solution, as the server / servers do not suffer from crashing open office or Microsoft office if you happen to throw a really spicy document to be transformed.

What makes the transformation service work is not rocket science – but it is enough work to warrant the licensing fee that Alfresco take for it. The solution is sold and supported by Alfresco, Westernacher providing updates and help if there is something strange going on.

I was thoroughly impressed.

Tackling a complex user interface

Ashley Ward from Surevine did a splendid job presenting his presentation and doing live coding in front of an audience. I had met Ashley and his colleague Simon on the previous day and spent some time chitchatting in the afterparty. This was business.

It is always impressive, when someone does live coding – as so many things can go horribly wrong. Ashley managed to pull everything through just wonderfully and proved that writing your own Share components is not rocket science, but requires some discipline and effort.

Code available in Github.

Other sessions would have been:

• Forms config, customization & Extension
• Building local eGovernment portal with Alfresco and Orbeon forms

Last year I saw presentations about forms – and this year the session seemed to have lots of same information, so that was main reason for not watching that. The case study would have been quite interesting to see, especially on how to integrate Orbeon — but I assumed that the key principles would be in the slides, and was right.

I have my own experiences with Orbeon and did not like about what possibilities there were to integrate Orbeon into your own app. What the presenters did was really nice implementation by rewriting the Orbeon forms storage service api on top of Alfresco.

Apparently they will also publish the implementation in any day soon:

http://orbeon-forms-ops-users.24843.n4.nabble.com/Alfresco-Integration-td4079910.html

So all and all it was good option to see what Ashley did live, as it takes away my personal reasons of not doing Share UI work myself anymore. Come on, he did it live there. I should be able to do it myself without any audience, shouldn’t I?

Performance tuning

Last year’s Scaling your Alfresco solutions was a superb session so I had really high hopes for this talk.

However as many of the scalability issues had been already discussed during the other talks, this session was not a total mind blower, even though it was extremely professional and informative. What I especially liked was the fact that Gab started from the beginning going through defining what scalability means with ECM and from what kind options you have to choose to get the perfect solution to your needs.

Gab also did perfect job discussing how Alfresco 4.0 changes many scalability problems reiterating what where problematic things before – and how 4.0 will address those issues. Similarly Gab discussed interesting ideas for the future, including a proper benchmark test – which would be taken to be used more regularly to get better insights on how new developments and changes to the Alfresco code will affect basic performance.

Looking forward to it!

Other options at the same time would have been:

• Using enterprise content in Grails
• Customizing the Upload File dialog in Share

As I don’t really care about Grails – and I already had seen a lot Share-related presentations it was easy to see why Gab’s presentation was most interesting to me.

Building Alfresco Prototype in a Few Hours

I should have gone to see “What new is coming in Records Management“. But I wel to see this.

I mean it was interesting idea, but the as the demo worked only so and so – I really did not buy into the value proposition, or not at least at this stage. When talking about Alfresco projects with customers, we are not in a hurry to do a sucky demo in just mere hours — and if we were, I am sure that we could do it better with some own Python scripts that generate boilerplate configurations to the share.

This was a little disappointment, but then again I was also a little tired by then and looking forward to see the end of the conference and get some sleep.

Conference wrapup

The last thing for the conference was the wrapup, which included Alfresco rockstars being ready to answer community questions. Jeff Potts and others also recruited people from the community to pledge to do things for the community in coming months. Attractor for that was cool Alfresco t-shirt you could get. I pledged to organize an Alfresco meetup in Helsinki area next year – as well as do these blog postings, like any good community member should

I didn’t get a shirt, nor did I get lucky in Alfresco survey raffles – where one happy person won extremely cool noise canceling Bose headphones and another lucky person won 500 pounds of hard cash. It was just like last year, when I did not win an iPad at DevCon. It was like a christmas that never came. So close, but so far.

Last year I wanted the iPad so bad that after the conference finished, I went to Louvre Apple Store and got myself one. I was able to justify it as an essential purchase to myself as well as to my spouse. I am not sure whether same reasoning would have allowed me to spend more than 300 euros on headphones. Most likely not.

So instead I did the next best thing:

Got myself a double whopper. ( Yes, I live in a country without a Burger King )

I would have loved to mingle more with people and have a pint or two after the conference, but unfortunately was way too tired to be of any company or form any comprehendible sentences. But next year again!

Big thanks to all the organizers of the conference as well as all the people who I had the pleasure of meeting at the conference! Hopefully we will see again next year!

Some mental notes for next year

To prevent any major disappointments, check out beforehand if there are any major parties in the conference location before or after the conference – so that you can plan your trip accordingly.

My biggest regret related to this conference trip is that I did not do my homework and check out from Timeout and other sources what is happening in London. Who cares about LMFAO, top notch art galleries, west end shows or even Red, Hot, Chilipeppers performing on O2 arena — this was something more important. As it happened that on 8th of November, Steel Panther was performing in Camden and naturally the show was sold out.. and I did not have time to get a ridiculously expensive black market ticket from eBay in time.

So I had to settle to listen the latest album in Offline mode from Spotify on my iPhone and walk along the streets of London thinking that I will see them live in Helsinki next March.

If you are scratching your head and asking yourself what on earth is Steel Panther, allow me to elaborate with some multimedia.

However I must warn about immature and sexist humor, explicit language and excessive references of 1980′s glam rock and heavy metal. If you are all grown up and have already forgotten your rock’n'roll youth – do not, I repeat, do not click videos below.

‘Documentary about the band’:

Few samples:

“Death to all but metal!”

If a band gets Sarah Silverman to their video, that band must be good.