Now as I am currently in the UK, I had noticed that they were going to play at Wembley Arena. A friend kindly helped me to book a ticket…and there I was

The show started at 6.15 PM. As I was afraid of arriving too late and having to queue for a long time, I arrived at Wembley Arena at 3.15 PM At first glance it looks really impressive. A nice mild weather completed this. Had a beer and watched the sky, curious and relaxed, waiting for the show.

At 17.30 we all entered the Arena. My first impression was that it was kind of small and somehow not up to the expectations.

Here is a detailed summary of the gig.

The setlist was full, Unexpect and Bigelf completing it.
At exactly 6.15 PM, Unexpect started their heavy performance. I wasn’t impressed at all. Seems they’re promoting some sort of Gothic metal. Nice piano intermezzos accompanied by cymbals, but otherwise nothing impressive. Too heavy, not at all melodic (except those piano parts). I even felt sort of mercy for them, they seemed somehow desperate to impress. I endured this patiently, knowing that the gods would follow
At around 6.40 Bigelf started their part. While undoubtedly more melodic that Unexpect, they didn’t impress me either. However, this is a band that you can listen too.
A break followed…and then…OMG! Opeth started with Windowpane. Impressive, as always. Now this song is very good anyways, but they did a wonderful performance out of it. Once the song finished, Mikael greeted us and said they were going to “sing a song that is a masterpiece”. We all laughed. Then they played something really heavy – The Lotus Eater. Again then some remarks from Mikael. He seemed a little arrogant to me, but ….um… the band performed really well, so I got over it easily. Then a surprise: they played ‘Harlequin Forest’, a grim, heavy song, one of my favorites. At this point the crowd exploded. Me included. Again, wonderful live performance from Opeth. 5 stars. Especially Martin Axenrot (drums):). A side note: the drumming kit seemed more professional that those used by the other two bands. Sound was really good. After this song Mikael did some other arrogant, even sexist remarks and then they played ‘Deliverance’. Now imagine that the entire Arena exploded. The song was played just perfectly. They even did a solo introduction to it, by playing the first part only with guitars, without the drums. I almost didn’t recognize the song when they played the intro.
Opeth ended their show with ‘Hex Omega’ which is a very sensitive, beautiful song by itself. Warm rounds of applauses for the band.
A longer break followed while DreamTheater were preparing the scene and doing rehearsals. The rehearsal was behind a curtain but you could hear it very well. Jordan Rudess was intensively playing the piano. At some point Petrucci did ‘As I am’ with acoustic guitar and a woman voice did the lyrics. Sounded very well, but I didn’t understand why they did it. Their performance began at around 9PM after a long break. Impressive from the start. Of course, it started with ‘A Nightmare to Remember’ as they did for the whole 2009 tour. Curtain was up while Jordan Rudess played the piano introduction. And it fell down when the riffs and drums started. Unlike the other bands, DreamTheater also had three medium sized screens displaying each of the band members alternatively. At first glance, the drumming kit was really …BIG. Mike Portnoy always had this obsession of drum monsters. It came up at Wembley as well:). The screens were also displaying contrived videos supposedly complementing the lyrics.
After ‘A Nightmare to Remember’ they got back to their roots: 2 songs from ‘Awake’. ‘The Mirror’ and ‘Lie’. These 2 are meant to be played as a single, as we all know, and that’s how DT played them yesterday night too. Impressive guitar riffs and solos from John Petrucci.
Then they played ‘Prophets of war’ displaying the most suggestive lyrics at the chorus on the three screens: Time to change, Fight the fear, Find the truth, Time for change. Of course we all sang with the band. Then they played ‘The Dance of Eternity’. Jordan Rudess was at some points playing the keyboard as if it had been a guitar. He did it well, though
At this point Michael did a drum solo. He also invited the three other drummers (from Unexpect, Bigelf and Opeth) to play along with him. A powerful, yet short drum demonstration, which he called ‘Percussive Nation 2009′.
Then they played ‘Wither’ from ‘Black Clouds and Silver Linings’. Not my favorite song, but they did it well. ‘Take the Time’ and ‘The Count of Tuscany’ completed the show. For ‘Take the Time’, Michael Portnoy also sang the first verse. Ambitious guy, isn’t he?

Overall Opeth and DreamTheater did it great, as expected. I even wished they were the only two bands on the set list: they could have played more songs this way.

What would you do in her shoes? Would you forgive the one who hurt you 31 years ago? A tough question. Maybe she HAS to forgive him because of some sort of amends she may have had of him? I don’t know. But looks like a special case, anyways. It is not common, to say the least. The typical pattern is that you ‘demand justice’.

Now what seems difficult to understand is the answers of some French (and American) celebrities. You’d think that if you’re a Great Artist you can escape Justice. Right, Mr Polanski is in indeed a Great Artist, no doubt. And he suffered enough, as German Bild newspaper puts it. At the core of this lies a simple question: can we justify our ‘bad deeds’ with our pain? I can’t provide a straight answer now.

A great book on a great product, for free.
Check this Maven book.

I was kind of afraid of Maven, coming of the Ant world After reading chapter 3 I’m not afraid anymore.

Here is an illustrative example. It happened to me few weeks ago. It took me about an hour to solve the mystery.

I was developing a simple web application using JSF. The application server was JBOSS 5. I created the project in the Eclipse IDE (version 3.x Ganymede). I provided a simple ANT script to package and deploy the application. There were no issues during development. Now, when I deployed it, JBOSS wouldn’t start it. It was complaining something like ‘invalid deployment descriptor’. Not so intuitive, eh? Reading the error message, I thought there was something wrong with my web.xml. And I spent about an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with it. And you guessed right: the deployment descriptor was correct. The problem was the path to it. MS Windows folder names are case-sensitive. The folder name should have been WEB-INF. See? Web-Inf is NOT WEB-INF. Changing the folder name immediately fixed the problem. I discovered that my ANT script was hardcoding the folder name to Web-Inf when packaging.

I should probably blame:

Number 2 is harder to take, eh?