CQRS Workshop in London
Time has finally come and I set off for a journey to London to attend the workshop about Domain Events, Event Sourcing and applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) taught by the famous Greg Young. I had been looking forward to it very much.
The workshop took place from July 9th till July 11th, but due to the distance I had to dedicate two more days just for traveling. The journey went very smoothly, just Czech Railways did not surprise and one quarter of the way had to be done by bus because of track maintenance or something. So the final chain of means of transport was just
Bus → Train → Bus → Bus → Plane → Bus
and there I was 
. I found the hotel without any problems and checked
in. Without anything to do for the evening, I decided to take a short walk.
Seven kilometres and almost three hours later (including a dinner at
McDonald's and a pint of ale just before I had reached the hotel) I was back
and being exhausted dropped to bed. I needed to rest, the next three days were
supposed to be packed with new information.
The Big Ben
Day 1
To get to the workshop, I had to take a half of the Circle Line (like 30 minutes ride). It seemed inefficient at first, but when I asked, how to do it better, people told me I made the right choice, because there were no changes and the trains were not so packed. I could even sit down!
The workshop itself was pretty intensive. The pace and amount of information
received was unlike any other lecture I had ever attended. I wish any of the
lectures at the university looked like that, maybe I would be sleeping on desks
all the time . While going back to the hotel I could not stop my
mind from constantly crunching and evaluating the new knowledge. To keep myself
busy in other ways, I did some shopping and tried another kind of ale, which
made me go to sleep quite early.
Day 2
To go to the place where the workshop took place was very adventurous. At first, I waited for a Cicle Line for over ten minutes and no train arrived. I said to myself that it did not matter and I would take a Victoria Line and change at King's Cross, it even seemed faster. However, they closed the King's Cross station just when I arrived there. It was really a „shortcut“ then, because I had to make two more changes to end up where I wanted to be in the first place (but half hour later).
The course was even more intensive than on the first day, my head was totally
full after that . All I did on the way to the hotel, except trying
other kinds of English ales, was to think about all the questions that had
popped in my head. I also thought about going running, but I had to reconsider
it because of heavy raining. I was really glad I have bought an umbrella .
Lecture room at Skills Matter training centre
Day 3
The last day of the workshop was the day when all bits of pieces should fit together and bring revelation: „Aaah, this is how it is done!“ I must say, it happened to some extent. Lots of issues I had been solving started to seem clear to me, but also lots of new questions appeared. Many of them were promptly answered by Greg, but I think time will show (I mean the near future), whether I comprehended the topics enough or not.
In the evening I also attended the Greg's talk about Test Driven Design (TDD) and half of the session of Scala Users Group, both of which were very interesting.
The journey home was smooth, I had a lot of time between changes I did not have to hurry. I shortened the waiting by reading Crime and Punishment and was looking forward to the next day when I would go to work and try to apply all the knowledge I accumulated for the past couple of days.
I got published!
It was not so long time ago when I had to create and defend my diploma thesis, I still remember the immense struggle that I had to endure while writing it. I am definitely not the type of person that can write novels just by taking the pen or opening the text editor. My writing speed could be measured in „days per page“ or so. However, in the end everything was all right, I defended it and successfully finished the university.
Much to my surprise, I received an e-mail through the supervisor of my thesis that LAP Publishing is interested in possibly publishing it. I contacted them and send them the manuscript. After several e-mails and polishing the final version for the print, I sent it awaiting the result.
Today I checked and the book is already available to buy. It is amazing, I am very happy now. Feel free to get a copy, if you are interested in the subject.
New HDR experiments
I made some attempts to make HDR tone-mapped photos. Comparing to the last one i made, these photos are composed out of three separate shots (-2 EV, 0 EV, +2 EV).
Neris river close to the Šilo street (larger version)
Postprocessing has been done with Luminance HDR. For the first picture I used Mantiuk and Fattal filters combined in Gimp, for the second one I used just Mantiuk.
Neris river in Verkiai Regional Park (larger version)
Lihuanian Energy and Technology Museum
During the week me and Alina used sunny weather and walked to the city centre to visit the Lithuanian Energy and Technology Museum. We saw many interesting things, old cars, motorcycles, parts of various power plants and a documentary about construction and decomission of the Ignalina nuclear power plant.
Some of the cars in the museum
The exposition also contained lots of gadgets and physical experiments you could try on your own. It was very similar to Universum in Bremen that we had visited visited last year. Although it was significantly smaller, the fun level was the same.
Experiments with HDR pictures
During the trip to Lysá hora i took a nice picture it and decided to try to tone-map an HDR picture from a single RAW. The intention was to try effects to make it look more artistic. Together with my roommate Pavel we produced the following result:
Lysá hora
You can also download the larger version, if you like it. It has a size of wallpaper for a wide-screen display, so it should fit your desktop quite ok.
Site is up again
My blog is up and running again . The place, where I hosted it, had some problems
with the server, so I had to move it somewhere else for a while. Sorry for the
inconvenience.
Open Source Days 2008
At the beginning of the semester I joined the FKO organization, that takes care of running the network infrastructure in the dormitories. Since most of the people working there are volunteers, the FKO organizes some events for them. So I had a great opportunity to attend the conference Open Source Days 2008, which took place on Friday and Saturday in the Copenhagen University.
I attended many interesting and (at least for me 
) inspiring lectures. I also talked to some of the
presenting people about their lectures and products to get more information.
I have to say that I really liked it and I am glad that I could
be there.
On Friday afternoon I wanted to walk a little around Copenhagen, but since it was raining and I was tired, I rather headed directly to the train station and headed to visit my friends to Roskilde.