I will be giving a talk on concurrency on Wednesday the 9th of January. It will be in the fabulous PeopleGroup building in central Copenhagen. So if you’re around (and understand Danish), there are still seats left.
More info

This is usually not a place for politics and local stuff. But I will make an exception.
If you’re in Denmark, you should support Nørrebro Bryghus by buying their excellent beer. They are in a conflict with 3F which, in my opinion, belongs in a different century. Read about the case here.

Talented programmers have the ability to redefine problems - in more general terms and in particular, in simpler terms. There is always a better and more generic solution which is almost always more interesting to create and possibly a good investment as well. Making a piece of software more generic is tempting to programmers. But it isn’t free.

Read my text about the genericity scale on The Vertical Slice.

In September, BestBrains is arranging a second workshop on Lean Software Development with Mary and Tom Poppendieck. I attended the workshop in April and I highly recommend it to anybody with any interest in processes and management in general and software development in particular. If you like the agile methodologies, you will find that Lean has a lot of similarities - take a look at this article.

Version 1.1 of Discreet Reminder is out. The new version features conditional reminders that will only trigger if a given application is active. This means that you can make reminders that nag you every 20 minutes you have been surfing or playing a game or anything else that you probably shouldn’t be spending your time doing..

mitkbh.dk is a Danish web2.0 site about Copenhagen. While there is a fair share of sites reviewing Copenhagen places and events, I think this one could excel to become one of the better. So if you live in Copenhagen, go do your web2.0 duty and write about your favourite places!

Concurrency is going to be part of most developers’ lives in the future. C++ and languages like it are poorly suited for concurrency as it is today. Semaphores are common and well-known, but using them correctly is difficult. If you want to prepare for concurrency, you could start the transition by becoming familiar with immutability, persistent data structures and active objects.
I have written an article on the subject. It’s hosted at Gamasutra (free login required) here.

Mushi has finally released his new album Unfairytales. I have been listening to Trivial Decay for weeks now on MySpace, so it’s good to finally be able to get it on my stereo It’s a great album man, congrats on the release!

Oh, and in other music news, check out Analogik too, very unusual combinations but great music.

Simon Baker has a nice entry defending pair programming. If you are among the many who find agile methodologies appealing, except for this one quite controversial quirk, you should read it.
I agree with most of his conclusions. Pair programming is not for everyone, but rather than being a matter of introversion versus extroversion, it depends on people being willing to let go of their ego and their need to hide mistakes until they have been fixed. Exposing the way you work is something that some simply refuse. Perhaps they were brought up with lots of praise..

I had been looking for a tool that could remind me to do reality checks repeatedly throughout the day. Also, I wanted it to remind me to look away from the monitor every now and then, to save my eyes. I tried Workrave which is actually really neat, but I found it to be too obtrusive. Also, I use the clock in Yahoo Widgets to remind me to do back exercises which I do once a day, but I wouldn’t want that to pop once every hour or so either. Searching del.icio.us, I found a vast number of reminder tools, but most of them were web2.0 things (this one: remember the milk is quite cool) which didn’t suit my needs.

So I made one myself, and I have been quite happy with it. Try it out.