craven.fr

That is the current tagline on the website of our Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It is a good one. It cuts to the heart of what makes Oxford so special, as the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and one whose reputation and pedigree are unmatched in producing brilliant minds, great leaders, prominent authors—even saints. In fact, the exact age of the university is unknown, so that the school might have legitimately said "Educating Leaders for 1000 Years", but to their credit, they prefered to stick to what can be factually documented.

One of the things that most struck me, however, when I visited the Saïd Business School was its great modernity. Actually, no: the word "modern" does not do the school justice—rather, it exudes the confidence and success that make you immediately feel that you are someplace cutting edge. UK MP David Marquand has described the School as the "future of Oxford University", and once I visited the place I could easily see how one could arrive at such a conclusion. Since the MBA programme at Oxford is comparitively young, the push to build a world-class business school shows Oxford, not at rest on its prestige and past achievements, but actively deploying its wealth, energy, and expertise into establishing itself as a preeminent world leader in business education. Seeing such forces mustered is an exciting thing.

I had a lot of concrete reasons to choose Oxford for my MBA, and I could catalogue the list of them here, but I think it would make for boring reading. Instead, I hope that what I have said captures something of what the atmosphere and energy is like at Saïd Business School, which in itself says a great deal.

I spent the day in Paris on Tuesday attending the Microsoft TechDays, an odd conference for a Java developer and Linux bigot like myself, but also an interesting opportunity to see how the other side lives. (And, for the record, I'm not really biased against C#—I simply refuse to pay license fees simply to learn to use a technology, especially when there are better alternatives out there for free, and so I don't use it.)

The conference also featured a session on Java and .NET interoperability through Web Services, which is something I am currently dealing with on a day-to-day basis, so that was useful to see. I also attended sessions on Microsoft AJAX (for a different perspective than my usual DWR and Ajax4jsf worlds), software as services, and a good session on creating web services with domain-specific languages.

On the whole I thought that the conference, despite being bigger and more diverse than Sun's TechDays which I attended last summer, was noticeably lighter on hard technical information. Still, I am glad I went as it is always worthwhile to take a moment to step outside of one's usual technological bubble to get a taste of some different perspectives.

I've been humming this great little podsafe song all day by Jonathan Coulton, availible here. Between the lyrics to this song and the movie Office Space, you get a pretty good idea of what my job is like :-)

—Actually, although some of those jokes do ring true, I have a tremendously fun job and I don't consider myself a 'code monkey', which to me connotes more of an ad-hoc VBA or PHP programmer than an élite Java EE guru such as myself ;-)

At least that's what Money magazine says in it's list of the Top 10 Best Jobs. And I am inclined to agree, although like any job some parts are more fun than others. Still, I'm not surprised that I love my job, since it was my hobby long before I ever thought I'd end up doing it professionally. (And, as this site and DietTracker show, it still is my hobby too!)

What is surprising to me is that anyone else would rank it #1 (excluding other software engineers of course)—geek culture is not always understood by the masses. Besides, this is after all the exact job parodied in Office Space, the song Code Monkey, and Dilbert's field of electronics engineering is nearly the same thing. But at the end of the day I get to play with expensive computers all day, finding creative ways to solve problems, and producing something that makes life easier for people. All in a day's work :-)

I was sceptical on reading this article that I saw on Digg today, but there are some really useful tips in there, and some of the 'bad habits' it cited are things I have been all too guilty of in my eight years' experience of working on UNIX systems. So if you use UNIX on a regular basis, I really do recommend it.

Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency and break away from bad usage patterns in the process. This article takes you step-by-step through several good, but too often neglected, techniques for command-line operations. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them.

So my Fortune 500 issue finally arrived last week. I was surprised at how many French companies there were near the top of the list (especially given how few days a year one works here), and especially surprised to see the last two clients I've worked at on the list (both of them in the 100-150 range). Although I guess it makes sense that they would be--since those who know my technology preferences know that I measure how cool a computer is by how closely it resembles a washing machine, and I have shaped my skills accordingly:

Java EE, DB2, and Unix skills are probably not the kind of stuff smaller businesses would have as much of a use for. So I guess I should be glad that France is well-represented when it comes to big companies.