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!

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.

My brother Jakob has written a blog entry called 10 Steps to become a magician. If you are into magic or just want to show off at social events, you might consider reading it. He definitely scores a lot of points with it at parties and family get together’s.

The Dude: I dropped off the money exactly as per… look, man, I’ve got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I… this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it’s not just, it might not be just such a simple… uh, you know?

The Big Lebowski: What in God’s holy name are you blathering about?

The Dude: I’ll tell you what I’m blathering about… I’ve got information man! New shit has come to light! And shit… man, she kidnapped herself. Well sure, man. Look at it… a young trophy wife, in the parlance of our times, you know, and she, uh, uh, owes money all over town, including to known pornographers, and that’s cool… that’s, that’s cool, I’m, I’m saying, she needs money, man. And of course they’re going to say that they didn’t get it, because… she wants more, man! She’s got to feed the monkey, I mean uh… hasn’t that ever occurred to you, man? Sir?

Such magnificent dialogue. The Big Lebowski which I rewatched this weekend is definitely one of my favourite movies.

The Business Plan is a pain that entrepreneurs have to suffer, at least if they want to raise venture capital or other kinds of funding. To geeks, writing a business oriented document sounds just about as exciting as room temperature Jolt with no gas. Oh man! Budgets, risk assessments and silly attempts at future prediction that everybody knows are not going to hold anyway. Oh well, as we need funding if we’re going to make AAA games, we have been writing our business plan with all of those things in it. And for a while, I found it quite frustrating that whenever we spoke with someone with business savvy, they would tell us that we had to describe the problem that our product solves, the demand that it meets. How does it enable? That’s great, but how did we fit in there? The biggest problem a video game can be said to solve is boredom. Obviously, people are making money from video games already, as with movies, music, theme parks and what not, so perhaps the guideline should be extended to this: a company should either enable or entertain. Seems reasonable to me. So instead of focusing on solving a problem, we have now shifted towards how we are going to ensure quality. Quality meaning fun - entertainment.

Recently, it occurred to me that there is actually a third thing a company can do - it can protect. And this is an interesting area because, it seems, the upper boundary to required safety is vague and liquid. I bet Microsoft would be able to release Vista as nothing but a number of security updates. Essentially, protection is of no direct value to the user. In fact, in the best of cases, protection merely causes the user no additional inconveniences such as keys and codes or the loss of processing power. When people are scared, they will pay for protection with their money and by tolerating inconveniencies.
The problem here is obvious: a company that sells protection has an interest in scaring the population. Currently, the story about bump keying is traveling across Europe. It was recently described on national Danish television and the Danish lock smiths have since sold enormous amounts of bump-safe locks. I am not accusing the lock smiths of having spun this campaign but it demonstrates the concept perfectly. As does the strategies of the US Republican Party that seems to be heading for a crash in the mid term elections today.