Summer holiday

We'll spend the next two weeks in Bella Italia. Classic family vacation with camping on the Adriatic coast at Eraclea Mare. Too bad that the Euro 2008 final won't be Italy - Germany.

Trip to Heidelberg

As Heidelberg, the "romantic city" is just 50 km away and Saturday promised beautiful weather we decided to make a spontaneous trip to one of Germany's top travel destinations (just as announced on Carlos Blog last year).



As it is early travel season (or so we thought) we didn't expect a crowded city but after cruising through the streets for quite some time we were finally lucky to find an parking garage with available space. The walk through the Fußgängerzone made it clear that as least as many people were here for shopping as for sightseeing (as you can see on the picture below).



It made us also feel like being on holiday with all these tourists from all over the world asking for things like "typical German Ice-Cream" and the restaurants offering food like Weißwürste or Schweinshaxe (not exactly typical for the Kurpfalz area). The way up to the castle wasn't that baby buggy friendly but the nice view down to the city with the old bridge and the Neckar was a good compensation. I'm sure we will return soon (including a visit to the Märchenparadies for the girls) because in the evening we were just too lazy to walk up the Philosophenweg which should provide a wonderful view across the old town and the castle.



More pictures at my Picasa Web Album

Tonight at JUG-Karlsruhe: OSGi

The topic of todays meeting of the Java User Group Karlsruhe (JUG-KA) is OSGi Frameworks. It'll take place (as usual) at the Universität Karlsruhe at 19:15.
Looks like a good opportunity for me to finally have a look at OSGi so I hope I'll make it to the talk.

Off to Austria

In a few hours we'll leaving for Kühtai/Tyrol and spend the next week with skiing - there should be plenty of snow as it is known as Austria's highest ski resort.

Will be offline most of the time (don't know if there is internet access available at all ;-)

Christmas season

It's an unmistakable sign that the christmas season has started when Silke is decorating our home with candles, fairy lights, stars and all that stuff. The good thing about this season are of course the christmas cookies.


My favourite cookies are Hildabrötchen (as shown on the picture) - I even help with the "production", namely putting the sugar icing on the top.

Of course music is an important part of this season (and that's alone an safe indicator if Last Christmas and Do They Know It's Christmas? is played all over on the radio) and as big surprise to me Silke has voluntarily put my favourite christmas music, Wir warten auf’s Christkind from Die Toten Hosen into the CD player.

Apache FOP user survey

As just announced on the XML Graphics users lists, we (or rather Jeremias who has done the work) just started a user survey to get feedback on the usage of the different Java versions (especially Java 1.3).

So if you are a FOP user (or plan to use FOP) please take the time (just a few minutes) and participate in the survey

I'm curious on the results.

Back from OpenExpo

Yes, OpenExpo is already over since some days but I didn't find the time yet to blog about it.

I luckily found a small hotel near the exhibition hall so it was just a quick ride with the tram (or a 15 minute walk the other day). The booth (or rather the table, see the picture) was quickly set up on Wednesday morning except for a small problem with the power plug adapter - the one I brought with me didn't fit into those %$§!& swiss sockets (so much for the need for multiple standards). No big deal though, I just walked over to the COOP warehouse and bought one for CHF 6.95.



Overall the OpenExpo had more than 500 visitors on the two days. I did give around 20 OFBiz presentation and lot more flyers were taken. Amongst the interested parties were a publishing house (question: does OFBiz handle 3 million products?), a food retailer, a machine manufacturer and quite a few ERP consultants/service providers.
Most of the visitors actually had never heard of Apache OFBiz and someone even told me that he was looking for an Open Source Ecommerce solution for some time and didn't stumble over OFBiz (lot's of work to do for the marketing department :-).
Quite a few asked for the accounting part which is (still) rather basic and especially for a swiss payment procedure called BESR/VESR. And someone promised me (and did it already) to send a swiss chart of accounts (called KAEFER and KMU).
It was also nice to meet David Kuenzler, an OFBiz Developer from Zürich, who started a OFBiz related project called ofbizmyhome at SourceForge.

The talks were well attended - I didn't see any but they should be available somewhere as streams. On Wednesday evening the OpenMeet, a social event with OpenBeer (which was also free, free as in .. ;-) and FreeFood sponsored by Google, some lightning talks and music took place.

You want to see pictures? I only brought our old Canon A75 with me which showed the notorious E18 error most of the time and if it was working most pictures came out blurred - a few are available on Flickr. Next time I'll bring the DSLR with me for sure. More pictures are available on the OpenExpo website.

All in all, it was a really nice event. Big thanks to the organizers (Hannes Gassert, Matthias Günter, Matthias Stuermer and everybody else involved). I hope I'll be at the next OpenExpo in March in Bern.