SCEA : "Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE" certification

These days most of my spare time is spent on studying for the SCEA. It is motivating but really time consuming, I have planned to read around 10 books.It is a good idea to have a goal, to create a self-motivation. Tomorrow, I will go to Sun Microsystems to have a J2EE training ...

Speed Networking : a new concept to know people

I have been to a "Speed Networking" session recently. It is something similar to "speed dating", making many people meet others on a rotation-based scheme. There are 7 groups of 7 people, and in each group, each person present herself or himself during 1 minute. After that, the people rotate based on a mathematical formula, and at the end everybody has met all others.

To be able to do such a rotation, the number of the people should be equal to (p * p), where p is a prime number. So the constraint is to have either 25, 49, 121 or 169 persons. It seems that 49 is a good value, resulting in groups of 7 persons. (In reality, however, it is not so strict as that, the aims in to meet people and not to follow a number theory problem!)

Book Review : UML Distilled by M. Fowler

Recently I have finished reading UML Distilled by M. Fowler. Despite its small size, it contains a wealth of useful information inside. Moreover, it's not limited to UML, but to methodology and other stuff.

Reading it is highly recommended!