[Soccer] Dynamo Dresden vs. Kickers Offenbach

Probably no one will be interested, but here are the news anyway: Together with two friends I went to a Soccer game of our local team Dynamo Dresden. They played against Kickers Offenbach in the German Second League and won 4 - 1.

After last weekend's lame cup game in Leipzig, yesterday Dynamo managed to use their chances at least in some cases. They dominated the game most of the time. Offenbach had some good minutes in the late second half, but never got really dangerous. Of course there also was a good bunch of luck with this win - early in the first half Offenbach lost a player because of repeated fouls. However, I do not think the game had ended the other way round under other circumstances.

Player of the game? Ansgar Brinkmann. This guy is quite old for a midfielder, but even now you can still see some of his genius on the field. Due to his age, he isn't that fast - most of the time you will see him running behind someone of the opponent's team. But this guy is hot and doesn't give up, therefore he will get maybe 3 or 4 great moments in a game, where he can use his technical supremacy to rule the world. :) One example from yesterday: Dynamo pressed upon Offenbach's goal for some minutes, playing from the left wing to the right and back again and again. No real danger for the goal occured. Then maniac Ansgar took the ball on the right side and started running across the field alone. Reaching the left side he passed the ball over to Christian Fröhlich, who then flanked to central Marco Vorbeck - goal.

Another impression: 17.684 people in the stadium, about 500 were from Offenbach. As we were right near to their fan block, I got an impression about what real fans are. These guys had been driving 500 kilometers, probably took one day off-work for this. And even though their team was desperately losing, they kept on singing and supporting all over the game as if they were on the winning road. Very great experience to see this. - This is however no criticism for the Dresden fans - we were also supporting our team, but we were 17.000 and it is quite clear that the home team always gets the support it needs. From the visiting teams' fans I already saw some very boring stuff. In the end of last season we played against RW Oberhausen and LR Ahlen here in Dresden - these teams had about 10 fans each and these could not bring any support to their teams.

My friends and me yesterday visited the E block, although we normally attend L block in the Rudolf-Harbig-Stadion. The reason behind that was that in many games Dynamo scores in the second half, when they are playing onto the curve containing block E and we just wanted to be near to the goal. You can imagine our surprise, when we are not in L for the first time and after one minute of playing, there is a goal on the other side of the field... On the other hand it was nice to see the fan curve from the other side for the first time. It is quite impressing to see the guys jump, sing and clap their hands allover the game. Too bad, we were not in there. Anyway: block E is too silent for us - we will be in L next time again.

[Java Adventures] Remote Method Invokation

I've been learning Java RMI today. I currently do not yet know whether I like it or whether I should better hate it.

It has some nice features, sure:

• Work with a remote object,
  
• Do not care for setting up a connection to the remote server - this is done by RMI for you, and
  
• Do not care for the way parameters are sent around - your remote objects can have every data type you want, as long as this type is serializable. Marshalling (packing the parameters into nitty little TCP packets) and unmarshalling (the same vice versa) is performed internally by the magics of Java reflection.

All of the above features make your distributed application become clear and easy - your client simply looks up a remote object and then works on it as if it was a local one.

So why should one hate it? - Well, it is the above mentioned magic. Magic makes development easy, but it hides problems from the user. In many cases one will probably build a cleaner and maybe even faster solution by transferring data manually over a TCP socket connection.

Furthermore, I had some bad minutes searching for subtle exceptions thrown by my RMI application - took me some interesting command line arguments to get the JVM to do what I needed. This is not that bad - solutions are available from Google within seconds, but this is what makes learning RMI probably not that easy for beginners.

All in all: have a look at his grown-up technology and enjoy its ease. But keep in mind that sometimes it is just as breaking a butterfly on the wheel.

I found the following tutorials helpful today:

• Introduction to Java RMI
• How to create an RMI system

Entity

So this is going to be a weblog - as usual it starts with a test posting which is actually totally senseless...