Breeze Capsule is coming soon. Watch this space.

Flora and I have had a wonderful holiday in Japan. We didn’t manage to blog about the experience but hopefully the pictures will give you a good idea of how much we have enjoyed the time. We have been very fortunate to be in Japan at the right time. The cherry blossom is definitely one of the sight anyone should see before you die. We travelled from the Pacific-facing Shirahama to the mountaineous Arima then back to the organised chaos of Osaka. That’s the many faces of Japan we loved to go back again and again.

Today is officially the end of the financial year and the start of my holiday. The last few months are extremely interesting and … tiring. I think I definitely deserve a long awaited holiday in my favourite holiday destination, Japan!

Flora and I will be visiting Shirahama, Wakayama, Arima and finally Osaka in the next two weeks. We will be relaxing in the hotspring resorts under the blooming cherry blossom. What a life! I hope we will be able to connect everyday to blog about our wonderful journeys!

I spent three days in Turkey last week for a customer visit. I have been very fortunate to be able to enjoy the hospitality of our local agent in Istanbul. Ali and Emre have taken very good care of myself and the team in London have definitely appreciated the authentic Turkish delight. One good thing about this trip is I managed to have a few hours exploring Istanbul unlike my last couple of trips where the only things I saw were the airports!

There was one amazing incident that has amused all of us the while we were walking along the busy shopping precinct. A turkish woman approached me and started talking to me in fluent Mandarin. She said, “Are you Chinese?”, I was startled by her fluency, “Yes, I am.”. She continued, “I’m learning Mandarin. I wonder whether you can help me?”, I replied in my not very fluent Mandarin, “Sure, how can I help you?”. She paused and said, “Do you want me to be with you tonight?”. I paused and asked, “What, can you say that again?”, then I suddenly realised she is a prostitute trying to pull me. I turned to Ali and he was puzzled, I said, “Let’s go!”. Of course, the story ends right there with all of us laughing our way to the restaurant. I guess this is the effect of globalisation!

I enjoyed the stay in Turkey… the food (kebab), the national drink (Raki), the local beer (Efes) and of course the hospitality of the Turkish people.

If you are struggling to find a visual representation of some concepts you have in mind, check out the Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods. You might find some inspirations there.

10 Slides, 20 Minutes, > 30 Pts Font. How to pitch to a VC.

Java.net has a great article on how to migrate EJB 2.x beans to EJB 3.0. EJB 3.0 is definitely an improvement over the overly complicated EJB 2.x specifications, especially the arrival of dependency injection over the potentially evil dependency lookup mechanism. Although I think it’s a little too late in comparison to the advance support of dependency injection in Spring and the uptake of the high-level APIs that builds on top of it.

Just realise the workflow book has been published. You can find the table of content here. Hey, I co-authored one of the chapter! It feels such a long time ago.

Apex is Salesforce.com new language for writing business apps on their platform? Are they mad?

I can’t help myself playing with Beryl, the 3D accelerated desktop eye candy. I can’t believe it’s so usable and infinitely customisable. Even the Mac UI is incomparable. Here’s my desktop (Ubuntu running on my Core Duo Mac Mini). Check out a demo video here.