JUDCon 2011: London

I had the chance, thanks to work, to attend JUDCon 2011 with Matt in London last week. It was a great conference overall, well organised, talks on relevant subjects, held at a great venue, even the complimentary wifi worked well!

The most interesting subjects for me were:

BoxGrinder - A tool for automating the creation of virtual appliances from installing the operating system to downloading and configuring 3rd party software like Apache HTTD.
JBoss Forge – An extensible CLI tool to incrementally add framework support to Java EE projects.
Arquillian – An extensible enterprise test platform that takes your test to the container. It also integrates with Selenium (otherwise known as Arquillian Drone).
JBoss AS7 – The JBoss Application Server completely rewritten from AS6, based on JBoss Modules (OSGi).

Best talk of the conference had to go to the last one we saw from Andrew Lee Rubinger who gave a great overview of JBoss AS7, specifically the re-write, Arquillian and rapid enterprise programming.

Hopefully JUDCon will come back to the UK again next year.

NFL International Series – London 2008 photos

Bit late with this post seeing as we’ve just entered 2009 and the regular NFL season is now over but I thought I’d post it anyway! Here are my photos from the NFL International Series 2008 game between the San Diego Chargers & New Orleans Saints at Wembley, my first ever life NFL game.

I was very happy with the result of the game (in case you didn’t watch it the Saints won!) it was a great game to watch overall, plenty of high powered offense on show although it was a shame Reggie Bush couldn’t make the game due to injury. The atmosphere at the game was excellent, I was bit worried about this but I was proved wrong in the end. The view from our seats was better than I expected too, I wasn’t too sure whether we’d be able to follow the game but we could make everything out very well. It’s a completely different experience as you get to see how every part of the play develops rather than just following what the TV cameras choose. Having said that I still watched the game again when I got home in case I missed anything!

Apart from it being my first ever live NFL game It was also my first time to Wembley, although it took bloody ages to build it is a fantastic venue! Roll on 2009 and the Patriots v Buccaneers!

NFL International Series – London 2008

I missed out on tickets for the NFL game in London last year between the Giants & Dolphins but not this year!! I received my e-mail with the ticket PIN code in and rang around to see who wanted to go. On Thursday morning I purchased 4 tickets to this year’s NFL game between the Saints & Chargers.

I went for the £55 seats as I couldn’t justify paying £100 for seats that meant we couldn’t see what was going on in the game. We’re in Level 5 at Wembley but should be able to see more of the game from there. My bro, Dave & Jay will be coming along, just need to sort out hotel & travel arrangements now.

Oh and I’ll be cheering for the Saints in the game, I’m really a 49ers fan but as a true Brit I’ll be cheering on the underdogs going on last season.