Last Thursday Geertjan and I visited the JUG Switzerland in Zürich to give a presentation on NetBeans Platform:
JUGS Event 26.11.09: NetBeans Platform - das bessere Swing Application Framework.
There were around thirty people, also a couple of people from Berne and it was great to meet Florian Brunner , a Swiss NetBeans Platform Application developer who has an interesting blog (he did e.g a very interesting blog entry about using SAF session state in NB Platform) and his colleagues.
There’s a lot of interest in the NetBeans Platform in Switzerland recently.So after visiting Skyguide, Sohard and others I can’t name I hope to be in Switzerland more often. Thanks to Edwin and JUG Switzerland for the great organization of this event! One question we were asked after the presentation was, if there are any public courses planned for in Switzerland, and it seems we’ll be able to give a positive answer to that soon, so stay tuned… and if you’re at a University in Switzerland and interested in hosting the free NetBeans Platform Certified Training at your “Alma Mater”, let us know…
I’m still alive although I’m not blogging much recently. It’s just because there’s so much happening in the NetBeans Universe. Thanks a lot to everyone voting for me as a member of the NetBeans Governance Board! If you happen to be in munich, visit me in my new office (Bergmannstr. 66) for the party in December (exact date has to be decided). Just came back from Devoxx on saturday where I had a great time hanging out with Geertjan, Aaron “This is” Houston, Sven Reimers, Florian Vogler and Martin Klähn. Geertjan and my session on Lookup and OSGi was nice (here’s a picture) and I met a lot of OSGi fans. It’s not so different from the NB Module system after all (but we were there first 
). Also learned about Apache Ace. This is really cool technology, there’s never enough ways to deploy NetBeans Modules! On sunday I left for Berne (maybe you’ll hear more from NetBeans & Berne soon). Didn’t see much of the city yet, though the Airport is great. They’ve got the shortest luggage carrousel in the world. This is how the police officers look here:
On Thursday I’ll be in Zurich. Geertjan has decided spontaneously that he will join me there for a talk at the JUG Switzerland. We’ll meet on thursday and decide what we’ll show. If you’re anywhere near you should come. I’m really looking forward to be in Zurich again, good food and lot’s of nice people.
I’m moving. Initially I was sorry, because I liked my old office a lot, but since the new one is a lot bigger and in the same street, I’m quite happy now. There’s only one very annoying thing about moving and that’s my DSL provider. I’m with m-net because they have a very fine grained collection of optional features (like fixed IP address). So yesterday I called them to talk about moving my phone and DSL connection to the new location, because even though I’m moving I’m not allowed to cancel my contract. That’s already a little bit annoying, because if e.g. a couple decides to move in together, they’ll end up with two phone lines + internet connection, but OK. The really annoying thing is, that when reading the form for moving I found that the contract starts again, so in my case I’ll again be bound 24 months to this provider.
I called them again to find out if I misinterpreted the form, and the (very nice) person on the customer service told me that I was right. So I’m not allowed to cancel my contract, and I’m not allowed to keep it, I must make a new contract over the full period again. Obiously I started arguing and asked for the rationale behind that, and the guy told me that even though I was actually paying an additional fee for moving my phone number and IP address to the new location they’ve got enormous costs of hundreds of Euros for setting things up. After a while the guy on the line said “that’s the official version I have to tell customers, my personal opinion is different”. So while being sure that this is only crap, I’ll have to bite the bullet.
Update: it seems, that what they (and other providers) are doing is against German law ( Paragraf 313 BGB ):
http://www.geldundverbraucher.de/index.php?node=1593
