Eric D. Schabell: November 2010

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Devoxx 2010, Antwerp, Belgium - an impression

Another great week at Devoxx in Antwerp, Belgium from November 15 - 19th. I was there this year for both the University Sessions (day 1 and 2) and the Conference part which is from Wednesday to Friday.

Red Hat JBoss had a large booth, lots of core developers which you can see in the pictures. I attended some great sessions, saw a good film at the cinema that was the hosing location, talked lots of Java with the various JBoss developers, customers, partners and even with a few interesting people I happened to bump into on the conference floor.

Spent some extra time with Koen Aers and Kris Verleanen talking both jBPM5 and our jBPM Migration Tool project. Also got some pointers from our JBossTools Max Anderson to ensure we can easily integrate our project into his work. These are some really sharp and smart guys!

Enjoy the impression slideshow:

Thursday, November 11, 2010

JFall 2010 - rocking jBPM tasks with In2Flow

The Dutch Java User Group (NLJUG) held its annual JFall conference at the new location in Nijkerk on 03 November 2010. I have always been a fan of the Fall session over the Spring versions they used to hold, but since this year we had no choice with cancellation of the Spring version I was again back for more Java immersion. I was also invited to speak with Arnoud Wolfard for a session on jBPM task management interfaces based on In2Flow from the SNS Bank.

 As always JFall functions for me as one of the primary events of the year to network with everyone I know within the IT business in the Netherlands. From companies I have worked at, to people I have met through my current job, to service integrators and old mates from my university days, they are all there in force. It was even better in the new location as the sphere was more conducive to chatting in the various corners the venue provided. The stands were also spread nicely throughout the venues many halls, rooms and buildings as you can see from the on-line photo gallery.

I personally visited a few sessions, including:
  • What's new in Hibernate: a JPA 2 perspective (Emmanuel Bernard)
  • Modern Concurrency: STM, Actors & Transactors (Peter Veentjer)
  • In2Flow – solving your BPM human task problems! (of course...)
  • Activiti: the definitive BPMN 2.0 engine (Tijs Rademakers & Andy Verberne)
All were of interest and the quality of the speakers was high as one has come to expect from the NLJUG conferences.

The main attraction for me was of course our session that was given solely by Arnoud Wolfard. As you can see from the various photos, it was a large crowd that interacted throughout the entire session with questions and comments. It was very clear that jBPM is active and of great interest to the Dutch Java Users and Arnoud Wolfard discussed the lessons learned by the SNS Bank in dealing with task interaction interfaces in a structured manner for their JBoss jBPM business process implementations. He even managed to finish up the session with Q&A running it right down to the last available minute, well done Arnoud!

As a really nice bonus I participated in the Tweet wall (post a tweet via post-its on a board) contest and won a signed copy of 'Agile SW Development' which you just can't beat for finishing up your visit to JFall 2010 with a positive note. Thanks to all the organizers for another great conference and I will be back next year!

Friday, November 5, 2010

Upgrade Fedora 13 to Fedora 14 howto

A few simple steps to upgrade:

# As root you would like to have a clean start to the
# upgrade, so get an update out of the way.
#
$ yum update rpm

$ yum -y update

$ yum clean all

# Should a new kernel install/update require it,
# reboot before continuing with the rest.
#
# Then install the preupgrade package.
#
$ yum install preupgrade

# For console upgrade, use:
#
$ preupgrade-cli "Fedora 14 (Laughlin)"

# If you like gui's to upgrade, use this.
#
$ preupgrade

This is exactly the same process as I previously described with Fedora 12 to Fedora 13 upgrade.

=============== Update ===================
There was a hitch on my laptop, due to my boot partition is smaller than the Fedora 14 required 250 MB. I have been upgrading since Fedora 10 so have a 200 MB boot partition. First ensure you are using a cabled connection (no wifi) and then try this:

# run preupgrade as normal, when it complains about not enough space just 
# continue, it will install the stage2 installer after the first reboot.
# When it asks to reboot, do that. It should continue to finish the installation
# when it restarts.