Paul Grenyer

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin...

by Alistair Reynolds (978-0575076914) Alistair Reynolds is still by far my favourite author and he never fails to amaze and surprise me. I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again, but nothing else he's written, for me, gets anywhere near as good as his Revelation Space series. I'm sure it's just the lack of scope of a stand alone novel compared to a series. I enjoyed Century Rain, but I don't think I'll read it again. The ending was rather cliché and I think I'd rather have seen the bad guys win for a change, although it wasn't clear to me when they were trying to wipe out the ALS, I probably missed it somewhere. This book is a lot easier to follow than the Revelation Space novels. In a few books time I'll be reading House of Suns. Hopefully this will live up to Revelation Space.

Type: case study Duration: 90 min Speaker name: Paul Grenyer Speaker biography Paul has been programming in one form or another for over 20 years. After several years using C++ and a brief period using C#, Paul is now happy somewhere he hoped he'd never be, programming in Java. After time in industries such as marking machinery, direct mail, mobile phones, investment banking and Internet TV, Paul is currently working for an exciting new company based in Norwich where he heads up an ever growing team of senior and highly skilled people. He has been an ACCU member since 2001, a regular publications contributor, including the now well established Desert Island Books column, creator of the mentored developers and a committee member for most of that time. When he's not programming and family life allows, Paul thoroughly enjoys science fiction, heavy metal and cycling. Description Recently Java enterprise web application programming has been leaning towards a more classical J2EE...