I have for a year now been playing around with puppet on and off but have never done anything serious. Instead I have dabbled a bit here and there in small example projects so I am a real puppet beginner. Since it was getting time to re-install my mail server I figured it was an excellent thing to use as a real project.

Packt sent me an e-copy of “Developing Web Applications with Oracle ADF Essentials” by Sten E. Vesterli asking me to review it. The book is a pretty good and probably rather unique book which covers the Open Source version of the **Oracle**   **ADF library**. This does not mean the book is only for “open source” ADF since everything you can do in this book you can also do with regular ADF instead it means it covers using Adf with non-standard technology such as GlassFish, Mysql and so on and so forth.

The best PACKT book ever?

Now don’t get excited!

This is not saying much; most PACKT books are so bad I want to gauge my eyes out with a fork!

And indeed this book is no exception it has many flaws and I honestly think is a bad book which suffers from lack of editing and peer review.

But is is *a very very smart book* and the author has managed to pull something rather difficult off in very nice way. I think with some editing this would have made a truly amazing book.

As always Netways arranged for the yearly Open Source Monitoring Conference in Nürenburg.  As always I was suckered into coming.

I had originally planned not to come but alas since my planned vacation was postponed I decided on going. This is a short review of the sessions I attended and my impressions of the conference as a whole.

Spent three days this week at JFokus so I thought I’d share my views a bit. To be honest the conference was a bit on the lighter side and I think in hindsight I did a really botched job selecting sessions. I managed to pick both some very amazing sessions as well as a lot of introductions, sales pitches or things I already knew.