skizz.biz

Went out to see R+J last week with some friends. It’s an ‘updated’ version of Romeo and Juliet. In this case updated means it is set in a boy’s school and performed by 4 boys at night while the rest of the school is asleep.

Apart from this context, the play is almost untouched, although of course the ‘boys’ take all the roles in the play. This is not so jarring as it might seem — although maybe that is just me — I have seen many cross-cast and small ensemble productions over the years.

I really like this approach — theatre is about suspension of disbelief, and without challenging the audience to suspend we may as well be watching TV.

This production used a minimal set — just two chairs, a small chest and a red cloth. The direction is hugely athletic, appropriate for characters going through their adolescence. The characters leap and wrestle their way through the text.

The conceit that they are adolescent boys adds an interesting layer to the play. When Romeo and Juliet have their first love scene, the others make fun of them — cat calling and teasing the boys for their affection. But R+J call their bluff — the affection that was awkward seems to become natural and real — and the others can no longer make fun of it. By the end of the play we beleive and feel for their love.

I won’t summarise the whole play — we all know the story — suffice it to say that it is a worthy and interesting version of the play.

I just wonder what the Eton boys in the audience thought about it.

My housemate is a set designer for television — he has worked on such shows as Stars in their Eyes, Blind Date and the all time classic Supermarket Sweep. He also does a lot of one-off shows and premieres.

Recently he did the UK’s National Television Awards — a viewer-voted awards show. For us australians it is similar in style (and substance) to the logies.

So when he offered me a free ticket I jumped at the chance. It was held at the Albert Hall, and broadcast live over ITV. Shaun’s family were here for it and staying at our place, which was packed full of people for a couple of days before. We all met at 6:30 on the night and went straight to the barr for a couple of stiff drinks.

The show itself was quite strange — because of course being Australian I didn’t know any of the so-called celebrities :-) It was quite bizarre seeing the 12 year old girls racing down to the front to try for autographs of what appeared to me to be random people whose main distinction was the fact that they were extraordinarily badly dressed.

I did recognise a couple of people — Graham Norton, Ant & Dec (who won most of the awards for comedy for about the millionth year running), the guy who hosts “Who wants to be a millionare”, Ozzy’s daughter, who was there to give and award — but mostly they could have been anyone.

There was a surprise was at the end though. The presenter for the show was Trevor McDonald and he was given a special lifetime achievement award. As a newcaster and journalist, they chose a politician to give the award — namely Prime Minister Blair. Now one of Shaun’s friends, who I was sitting next to at the time, is an academic studying politics. I was feeling uncomfortable being caught clapping while Blair was on stage given the current situation. Shaun’s friend was much more pro-active though - as the audience quietened he called out at the top of his voice “Stop the war”.

Five minutes later, when he turned on his mobile phone he got an SMS from a friend who had been watching the show — “Was that you?”. So I guess a small point was made.

I had another conversation about EJBs last night and the colleague I was talking to recommended Bitter EJB as a book that takes away a lot of the pain of EJB.

I still don’t think we need them though :-)

Damian Murphy was a colleague of mine in Australia, before I came over to old blighty for a change of scenery. On his blog he talks about performance problems caused by the fact that “too much time was spent moudling stuff into design patterns and ‘best practices’”.

It brought to mind a conversation I was having with someone the other day, about the limitations and immaturity of .NET. I said that one of the major problems I have come up against is the lack of a ‘common knowledge’ among developers about which particuar cups of kool aid are worth drinking.

In the java community there is a shared understanding among serious developers that however many glossy pamphlets come across our desks selling the latest greatest app server, we will fight tooth and nail to avoid writing an EJB. We may host our webapp in weblogic if the company has shelled out for a site licence. But EJBs suck — they are slow, a barrier to refactoring, and complete overkill for most applications. Unless you really really really need clustered app servers (ie you are amazon.com) you don’t need EJBs.

Similarly with JSP — the first thing a good development team does is choose a good testable abstraction layer (like webwork or, if you must, struts) to isolate their code from the pain of JSP. MVC in web apps is about making the presentation layer as thin as it can possibly be so there is as little pain as possible.

So in java world we know which ‘best practices’ are just propaganda for app server vendors, and do what will actually make our jobs (delivering maintainable working software) easier.

In .NET world we don’t know which ‘best practices’ to ignore yet. One I do think is wrong is the data-driven code generated strongly typed dataset. That’s for another entry though.

Of course the sad thing is that even though I avoid them like the plague, I still need EJBs on the CV. Because marketing is not reality.

Just ggot back (well last night actually) from the codehaus HausParty in Amsterdam.

My first time in Amsterdam (which is a very very cool city) and first time meeting most of the HausMates. Several of us stayed in the Crown hotel just by the red light district, and about 5 minutes walk from the Haus.

We spent the Saturday coding — or rather talking about coding. James Strachan gave a talk about Groovy — his and Bob’s very cool ruby like java scripting language — which was followed by much discussion about emerging implementation details.

James and I spent some time chatting about persistence in Groovy and came up with what I think will be a killer implementation. I plan to get on with that this week - hopefully in time for GeekNight
on Wednesday.
Joe and I also paired on a dynamic mock implementation for Groovy — which turned out to be about 6 lines of code. Nice.

Although quite a bit of time was spent coding we also got out on the town — on Saturday heading off to see Boom Chicago which is an english language improv style theatre restaurant run by a bunch of americans who liked Amsterdam so much they decided to stay — very cool fun, similar to the feel of a festival fringe for those of you who know what I mean.

After a very late night partying (involving plenty of Champagne) we ended up back at the hotel at 3am, and Joe and I spent most of Sunday walking around the town at random — always one of the best ways to see a place. We managed to find a very cool cheese shop and I now have a fridge full of it.

Caught the flight back on Sunday night and now its back to the .NET grinstone for me. Maybe we should port Groovy to .NET…