Medieval Programming

As some of you know, I am most of my time in front of my PC. When not working or coding just for fun, I like gaming. One game of special Interest is Lord of the Rings online. Its much better than WoW, but I am not going to start a flame war
While the game has few player vs player content, sometimes epic battles are fought on the fields of the ettenmoors.
Here some impressions on tonights event.

Free People of Middle Earth mustering (100+ Players, not all on screen)

Orc hordes charging (number unknown, but said to be more than 150), including two trolls

Some more or less intense fighting going on (not everybodys PC could handle the load)

Awesome, eh? Perhaps we meet in middle earth?

First day of the symfony live conference is over. Many interesting talks from today and more for sure to follow tomorrow.
In our core team panel, Fabien already spilled some beans on the upcoming symfony 2 alpha release. If you missed that, I wont repeat it sorry
prepare for the big news tonight when Fabien has his “revealing 2.0″ session.

bayarsaikhan took a great picture of the core team on stage:

From Left to right:

• Bernhard Schussek, who works on Lime2 and Forms2
• Stefan Koopmanschap, who is our Community Relations Manager (the one who buys beer)
• Me, currently busy with Ticket Management and fixing the 1.x branch
• Fabien Potencier, symfony Masterbrain
• Jonathan Wage, our ORM expert developing Doctrine 2
• Dustin Whittle, working for Yahoo and keeping an eye out on the big Web/Enterprise world for symfony
• Kris Wallsmith, very busy with being Release Manager for our currently supported 1.3 and 1.4 release

Usually I rant about code from others. But this is something different. this is my code:

PdfPCell pdfPCell = table.getRow(0).getCells()[0];
List compositeElements = pdfPCell.getCompositeElements();
Paragraph p = (Paragraph) compositeElements.get(0);
Chunk c = (Chunk) p.get(0);
Jpeg jpeg = (Jpeg) (((Object[])c.getAttributes().get("IMAGE"))[0]);

Now comes my excuse for this crap. I need to parse this HTML and render it in a PDF (currently using iText):

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="1%"><img height="100" border="0" width="150" src="/pat_to.jpg" /></td>
<td>some fancy text</td>
</tr>
</table>

iText cannot automatically resize columns. So the column needs an explicit width. I don’t know the width of the table, because its not on the page, so I need the page width. I need to delve into the cell of the table which I know to contain the image. I need to know that its an Jpeg and that it had no alignment because if it had it would not be wrapped as chunk in a paragraph.
This is among the ugliest I ever wrote. But now my excuse. It is not my faul

The iText API (in 2.7.1) is not consistent at all, you have Arrays, Lists, Maps mixed and matched, keys as String, Constant (public or private constant) or no keys at all. Properties of images stored for each type in a different way. And you need to know a lot on yout parsed html structure, because iText cannot discover it. The way the HTML parser is implemented is way to basic and not extendable.

Currently thinking about switching to POI or rewriting the iTextParser….

Last night I hung out with Fabien, Jon and Kris on IRC, preparing today!
Here the results of our hackathon

• about 140 Ticktes have been closed
• Doctrine 1.2, 1.1.6 and 1.0.14 have been released
• symfony 1.2.10, 1.3.0 and 1.4.0 have been released
• A new symfony advent calendar was unveiled. Its a book that has been translated to 5 languages

We all hope you enjoy our stuff hand have productive days till Christmas.

on one of my projects we introduced scrum… ok lets be honest, we are doing “scrum … but”. But we are now able to deliver much more than before, and the effort = money spend on each feature has decreased. However we track that we talk more than before. We do standups every day, and once a week a planning session (either backlog with the PO or sprint with the SM) and we are doing retrospectives.
But somehow the higher level management is unhappy. They tell us we spend to much time on “communication”. They are very much happy with our productivity though.
Might be that they have not realized that the increased communication time is related to the increased productivity?

If you were following me on twitter, you might have noticed that i was in Antwerp Belgium, for the devoxx conference. Which is one of the best Java conferences in Europe and very affordable. As usual, it is pretty interesting that you can find out that famous gurus are normal people that you can talk to. Well they are geeks, so am I, that is why we can come along.

I learned a lot (as always), but interestingly it was mainly on three topics
* New Features of JDK 7, EE 6 and Spring 3
* New programming models like the famous map&reduce, big tables etc
* New JVM based languages: Clojure and Scala

I also attended the live recording for the javaposse.com episode, which was tremendously fun, especially because Atlassian sponsored a round of beer.
I met Kirk, who still reminds our good hours playing Guitar Hero at the meet the experts – performance, and had the pleasure to also meet Holly, who was unfortunately the only female speaker, and could introduce her also to our meet the experts concept.
I would like to have her there, because she really knows the internals of all the IBM JVMs.

I also had a length talk with Howard about Tapestry and various other stuff. because we all like open source and sharing ideas to make the world better, I talked with him about porting the web debug toolbar from symfony to Tapestry.
I think that will be an interesting experiment, also refreshing my Tapestry skills.

Great conference, lot to learn, very inspiring. Now back to daily work :-/