Living in too many places run havoc with our belongings; especially with books which my wife and I treasure so much.
We only brought the bare essential to Singapore. The rest of our belongings were left in Jakarta. We still have gazillion of boxes at my brother's basement in Westminster, Colorado. There was once that his basement was flooded from a burst pipe. We have no idea what is the status of our belonging there, especially the twenty something boxes of book. We definitely need to go there and sort out our stuffs.
At least I know some of the treasured books, like the signed copy of Object Oriented Analysis and Design by Grady Booch and Knuth's The Art of Programming, are safe in Jakarta.
Talking about book, I finally start reading Peopleware after a long time of sitting in my to-read list. I am also currently reading Living Proof by Jim Petterson. On the fiction side I am re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire series by George RR Martin. I love the series and can't wait for the next book to come out. And yes, I do read all three at th moment...just not at the exact same time :P.
What books are you reading now?
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Enjoying Singapore
As a developer I love having all the choices of technologies and tools available to me. I also enjoy the choices of lifestyle and events that are going on here in Singapore.
This week we have the Singapore Air Show 2008. Last week there was Chingay Parade, which I missed and I still don't know what it was about. F1 Grand Prix is taking place very soon.
On lifestyle, there are tons of things to do and participate in all year rounds. Musicals, operas, dances, theatres, recitals, art shows, etc. My wife and I had been to a couple of shows at the Esplanade.
Next month we are going to watch Disney on Ice show called Mickey's Amazing Journey. I was enticed to watch it because the ads was using Fantasmic's theme song. It brought back sweet memory when I watched the Fantasmic premiere at DisneyLand in 1992. That was when I first found out about Disney's Imagineer because there are a bunch of them around with their Imagineering jacket. Because I didn't know about them then, I thought the jacket was so cool and I asked one of them where I can get one. That's how I found out that Imagineering is a division of Disney, so the jacket is for employee only.
I have to say those wonderful people really live up to their title as Imagineer.
Well, enough of the trips down the memory lane. In conclusion, I am enjoying my life in Singapore right now.
This week we have the Singapore Air Show 2008. Last week there was Chingay Parade, which I missed and I still don't know what it was about. F1 Grand Prix is taking place very soon.
On lifestyle, there are tons of things to do and participate in all year rounds. Musicals, operas, dances, theatres, recitals, art shows, etc. My wife and I had been to a couple of shows at the Esplanade.
Next month we are going to watch Disney on Ice show called Mickey's Amazing Journey. I was enticed to watch it because the ads was using Fantasmic's theme song. It brought back sweet memory when I watched the Fantasmic premiere at DisneyLand in 1992. That was when I first found out about Disney's Imagineer because there are a bunch of them around with their Imagineering jacket. Because I didn't know about them then, I thought the jacket was so cool and I asked one of them where I can get one. That's how I found out that Imagineering is a division of Disney, so the jacket is for employee only.
I have to say those wonderful people really live up to their title as Imagineer.
Well, enough of the trips down the memory lane. In conclusion, I am enjoying my life in Singapore right now.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Ben Alex @ Singapore Java MeetUp
This month Singapore Java MeetUp was graciously hosted by Ivan from Standard Chartered. And as usual it was organized by Chris, despite his busy schedule and having 5 months old baby at home.
Ben Alex of SpringSource (previously Interface21) gave a talk on Spring Security 2.0 (currently Milestone 1). Which is not surprising as he is the creator of Spring Security aka Acegi. For those who do not know, Spring Security / Acegi is a security framework for Java application which provides powerful and configurable authentication and authorization functions. It makes our life as developer much easier, as security is one of the tough problems in application development. Of course by using Spring Security alone does not make our application secure, it just help us to secure it easier. It is still up to us to design and configure it properly.
Ben started with the basic introduction on authentication and authorization mechanism. Along the way he did a few demos that show a few different ways of access authorization, from URL filtering, programmatic role checking, to use of annotation on methods or class; and it all took only one or two line changes in the configuration files or source codes.
I believe the most welcome update from version 1.0 to 2.0 is the changes on how the xml configuration is done. Version 1.0 is already quite powerful and has most of the features needed for developing an application, but the configuration file is quite verbose where most of the times we need to declare every single configuration to the lowest level. With version 2.0 of Spring Security, in line with the rest of 2.x Spring portfolios, the configuration is simplified and allows convention over configuration. From the demonstration Ben showed a similarly configured application will have only 16 lines of configuration with Spring Security 2.0 and requires around 130 lines of configuration with Spring Security 1.0.
After the presentation, a bunch of us retired to Penny Black at Clarke Quay. We had a great time discussing different issues from open source licensing and business models to managing and running a company. Ben is such a fun person and very passionate about the issues that were thrown around the tables. I'm looking forward for another opportunity to hear him talk again.
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