Being a temporary workless has given me ample chance to explore London. I have a lot to say about this city. A city I have lived in for six years.

I have lived in big cities all my life. Hong Kong is great especially the food varieties offered and the great skyline (although plenty of new skyscrapers and architecture have much to be desired). London really defines what a great metropolitan and multi-cultural city is about.

Imagine you can step into the National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery (for free!) to embrace the worldwide cultural development from the early 1400 to present day. See and feel the Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Rodin all under one roof. For a bit of exotic modern art, the Tate Modern and many other galleries around London would have something for your taste or distaste. The performing art and entertainment scene is the world’s best, I challenge you to find a city with more performances each night than the West End of London.

This is what I explored today. I spent the afternoon browsing the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery. It’s great to be so stress free and abundant in time to spend wandering the floors of the great galleries. I spent an hour listening to a guest volunteer artist lecturing the floor on Monet’s water lilly pond. So great that I now see the bridge on the painting in a totally different light (literally speaking - there’s light on the right hand side of the bridge…).

Now after queueing for 20 minutes for a cup of coffee at the National Cafe… Without complaint…what a person can be like without stress and how you see the world aroumd you differently. So stop complaining about commuting in London. The daily stress travelling to work probably has nothing to do with the tube, it’s all because of the stressful work that lies ahead of you.

Sitting in the cafe writing this blog is probably all I wanted to do right now. I have a good night ahead of me… Meeting Olly and Jeremy at the Queen’s Arms for some civilised drinking…

Before the age of the machines and long distance communication, human culture is localised and fragmented. Disparate communities had very limited mean of cross talking. It gave rise to folk music, tradition and regional accents. The situation was transformed by better vehicles for cultural transportation. Automobiles, telecommunication and terresteral broadcasting brought the world together. This has created a massively synchronised community. We synchronise with the rest of the world with the hits, the recognised and the top of the chart. The advent of the internet has once again gave the globalised culture a breath of fresh air. Massive number of online communities have spun up to serve all wards of ideas recognised by fews. It provides them with an equal platform to share, cultivate and more importantly acquire new believers. The world is no longer a follower of big hits and enterprises, the ‘long tail‘ of cultural diversification will carry on expanding.

What a great analogy - Starbucks do not use two-phase commit.

• Rule 1: Don’t do it (if you are a novice)
• Rule 2: Don’t do it yet (if the design is sound)
• Rule 3: It’s easier to optimise a working program than to make an optimised program work

I’m currently reading Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters (Thanks Jeffrey for this birthday present!). It’s a wonderful collection of Paul Graham’s essays on his view on programmers and their impacts on the society.

I’ve bumped into this web site. It’s a collaborative effort to edit Lawrence Lessig’s classic CODE : and other laws of cyberspace to be republished in December this year. His writing on intellectual property and law on the internet is truly inspiring. If you haven’t read his work yet read the articles on his website.

Found this interesting project called junit-objects for testing state changes of objects rather than the results of method calls.

Documentation is still thin. A question I have is whether there’s any need to test the internal states (members) of an object? Should the externally observable behaviour be the only thing that matters. Anyway, junit-objects
has some interesting ideas for writing assertions using OGNL to test expected state transition.

For people interested in ‘agile’ development or wanting to share your experience with others in the developer community, please participate in this year’s XP Day held in London on the 27th & 28th November, 06. More information can be found here.

Here’s a picture taken in my leaving do. Some of the LeSC gang, Olly and Rob.

Here’s another picture of me in my old office. I miss having my own office and the Mac Book Pro so much!

The newly formed Advanced Message Queuing Protocol working group has published v0.8 of the specification. JPMorgan is the main proponent of the effort along with several messaging system vendors and financial institutes. More news can be found here.

Look forward to play with the implementations when they become available.

The Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance have merged to become the Open Grid Forum. Although I no longer actively take part in the Global Grid Forum, I wish the new organisation all the success to become the meeting place for Grid vendors and users in order to push forward the open standardisation process.