Yesterday somebody told me a really interesting saying:

“If your only tool is hammer, it is likely that all your problems will look like nails!”

I like this a lot! Cheers

Today I had the pleasure to attend a workshop on the future of Java. Thorbiörn Fritzon, who is working as system architect for Sun Nordic talked about the new technoligies the Java platform will focus on.

The first innovation he was talking about is the brand new JavaFX Script, which is designed to be an competiting technology for rich internet applications.

The second thing is the new scripting capability of Java, which allows it basically to use any scripting language, for which the scripting engine is available.

So thank you Sun for this event and the effort that is taken to inform students, what is going on in the world of Java!

Still can’t believe it: today I went to Cafe String in Södermalm and had tea there. It appeared to happen, that I found a Nikon D50 camera right next to the sink in the bathroom when I went there.

Being the nice nice guy I am, I took the camera and gave it to the bar man – in the hope that he would give the camera to who ever it belongs to – in case this person would show up and ask for it.

Anyway, later this day I was thinking, that this was actually pretty stupid to give back a camera, which is worth about 500 Euros… however, I was treated so well by the destiny these days (I lost my room keys twice and got them back both times without any problems) that I think it was definitly the right thing to do So I hope this recharges my good-carma-account.

Here some impressions of the Kiruna trip at the end of November:

Last week some friends and I went to Tallin, in order to check out one more of the baltic cities, which are really easy to reach from Sthlm.

As the weather forecast predicted, the waves were nice and small and fortunately the ‘Near Gale Warning’ (see image) was a little bit ambitious.

Tallin itself is definitely worth a visit! Probably one of the most interesting cities around the Baltic See.

Thanks to Simon, who is living at the moment in Tallin, we got really nice impressions of the city and excellent coffee

This afternoon I am going to depart to Tallin – again with a ferry from Tallink. I am not sure if this is a good idea but I checked the wave forecast of the Finnish Institute Of Marine Research.

According to these forecast results, the weather is going to be nice and calm – nothing compared to the light gale we got into, when we travelled back from Riga a week ago.

Hej!

A week ago, some of my friends from Tyresö and I went on a boat trip to Riga. We choose to take the Tallink ferry because this is much more friendly to the environment and additionally pretty cheap. It was especially cheap, because Tallink had its ‘Crazy Weeks’. When we booked our tickets, we had no idea that this loose promise of craziness would be fulfilled.

Before we entered the ship, we saw at the check in desk a weather forecast. In there it said something about a gale warning. Since we are not used to this jargon we asked the officer behind the desk, what we should expect with having a gale. As nice as the man was, he just said something about some waves, which isn’t quite a good explanation for this phenomenon.

We had the pleasure to travel with the Regina Baltica, which is a ship with quite a bit of history – as one can read in this article. I like especially this part of the article!

The bad thing with the good consciousness regarding the climate is that the such a boat trip does not take only 1.5 hours but 16 wonderful hours. The great challenge is to spend this time, without going crazy. So one has to avoid the ‘best band in the Baltic Sea’, which is playing almost constantly in ‘the night club’. Further, one has to make sure to make a big circle around the karaoke event. If one is really curious about very individual personalities, which do not care to make a fool out of them self, one might want to have a look at this. However, this is basically the same as American Idol but without the experts comments – so not so much fun. Anyway, the most exciting thing on the MS Regina Baltica is the show dancing event. This is so strange and boring that I can’t explain this here.

So long story short moral: it is a good feeling to leave the ferry in Riga for a couple of hours.

Riga itself seems to be a beautiful city. Unfortunately we did not see to much of the city, because the weather was so bad, this means it was very windy, cold and snowing, that we stayed most of the time in cafes, churches and restaurants.

Nevertheless we had a good time at this place and returned back to the ship just in time. As we were making our plans, how to spend the time on the ferry in the most possible pleasant way the crew anounced that the departure would be delayed for approximatly 10 hours due to the bad weather conditions.

This basically meant, that a collegue and I could not make it to the presentation of our homework at the following day. So we checked if they could provide us with an internet access, which the crew could not arrange. What we did finaly was sending SMS to another student in Stockholm, asking him to tell the teacher, that we are stucked on the boat in Riga.

The evening was actually not to bad, however it makes a huge difference if the boat is moving and you know that every minute that passes by brings you closer to Sthlm or not.

In the end we left Riga 14 hours later as originally intended and passed the rest of the storm.

hej,

just got back from Kiruna… was a pretty rough night on the night train. gonna tell you more later.

Hey,

here are some pictures of the 3D world we created for the second assignment of the 3D Graphics for Game Development course.

We created this scene using the Blender Game Engine. It is really straight forward to use this software and to create easily quite impressing scenes:

So if you are interested in the secrets of creating recommend you to take a look at the Blender website.

This is the best sound track for long Tunelbana rides trough this lovely city Stockholm!

Reelin in the years – Steely Dan