Recent Posts

RSS Feeds

J1: Tuesday Notes

Posted on June 29, 2005 by Bill Dudney

Sorry I did not make it to the keynote yesterday, instead I had an interview with the fine folks at Enerjy. They are doing some cool stuff with regards to process that will be good for managers. Also the code analyzer has gotten much better since last year.

I also spent some time in the Parasoft Booth. Funiest thing there was that the CEO (Adam Kolawa) claims to have invented unit testing in one of thier marketing fluffies. I'll have to let Kent Beck know about that :-). I also spent some time in the Agitar booth. Man that is cool stuff! While you are on their site make sure to check out the Open Quality stuff, its amazing the reports you can get on the health of your code.

The rest of the day I spent doing some Eclipse DJ stuff. I got to interview Mike M again from the Eclipse Foundation about the 3.1 release. I asked him to swim across the atlantic on the 1M'th download but he was not buying :-) I also got to go to a luncheon at the W with the Eclipse Foundation and some of its sponsors. Very nice place, the content of the meeting was dissapointing to me. I expected it to be a partner board (people extending the platform) talking about the cool stuf they are going to do to make Eclipse do more stuff. Ah well can't have everything, the food was fantastic!

I had a great time in the Apache booth. Lots of the MyFaces people were there, that was great fun to meet so many of them face to face.

The coolest thing I've seen so far is the ICESoft Faces components that do AJAX. I've just finished downloading and I'll be trying them out with MyFaces. I'll be posting about my progress shortly.

The energy level is up this year too. I've seen lots of excited people again. Instead of looking for jobs people are keen on talking about thier jobs. Good sign :-)

Overall a good 2nd day.

Permalink     No Comments

J1: Monday Keynote & Show Notes

Posted on June 28, 2005 by Bill Dudney

Here are my notes for the J1 Keynote on Monday. I liked hearing Jonathan talk about community but I still don't get how they are going to make money. As an opensource user and producer I love to hear what Sun is saying with the Share message, but as a share holder I'm not sure that it will drive the stock price out of the 3's. Anyway I digress.

Energy level seems high and I've enjoyeed my time on the floor. I made it to a total of zero sessions yesterday because of all the stuff I did for EDJ but I had fun anyway. I went to LuLu's last night with some friends and it was fantastic as usual and the conversation was great fun. I used to work with these guys at InLine Software back in the day and it was great to hang out with them again.

Anyway on to the notes from the keynote:

The power of an idea whose time has come – cool video with a talking head and lots of idea type stuff, flying around in space, through developer stuff etc.

John Gage – talking community and meeting everyone, you’ve got to meet people, Microsoft is at J1 this year presenting 8 sessions. Everyone needs to be a Brazilian, i.e. not shy and meeting people. Get our and meet people. Had all the programmers stand up, then all the money people stand up, programmers, there is your money, go meet. Everyone laughed.

Jonathan Schwartz – thanks for 10 years of great stuff. Meeting with EBay 500K people make a living off selling stuff on EBay. That is about the same # of people who are employed in San Francisco.

Technology Has Social Utility, Too.

Thomas Edison – patented light bulb to try to keep anyone else in from making light bulbs, the first client server lock-in. Then tried to scare everyone with that wanted AC by killing farm animals, first FUD in industry.

A mortician invented first automated switch. The person on the switchboard was the sweetie of the other mortician. He invented the switch to put her out of a job so she would not direct all calls to the first mortician.

What is the social impact of the network. We are all connected, MIT just open sourced their engineering curriculum. Social Services in Brazil allows the CDC of Brazil to stay out in front of disease.

The information age is history – last generation thinking and we are entering the participation age. Participation drives economic and social progress and participation is blurring boundaries. Showing a blog that preempted CNN with coverage of the Tsunami. This blog was the place where people went to find out where there friends were.

Wikis vs. Traditional Publishing – individuals are taking charge of maintaining and creating the content. Is Google media or technology? Changes the face of everything we experience in the world (interesting assertion, not sure I buy that). Inviting up someone iDRC and the Blu-Ray Disk. Holds up 50GB on a single disk. Blu-Ray is using Java as the inveracity is controlled via Java. This is a tremendous opportunity for Java developers. Based on the J2ME same standard in digital video tv world. The cell phone is also hugely successful, Digital AV World is the next big thing for Java developers on small devices. Digital TV World and the Packaged Media World will combine around the Blu-Ray world.

Compatibility, Community, Volume, Value – the opportunity is in the volume, volume always wins. Takeshi Natsuno  i-mode in Asia, Java enabled cell phones. Mobile Wallet service, Java is proven and secured, everyone is using it. 6 billion of the 10 billion in revenue is enabled by java technology.

IBM is part of Java in a big way… VP of IBM Software is in via video talking about Java and IBM portfolio of applications.

Java = Participation

F.O.S.S. – Free and Open Source Software – free is the best price and the best way to reach most of the people.

Community

    OpenOffice.org

    NetBeans

Apache

OpenSolaris

    …

There is a social utility to free software. Sun is working with govts of the world to eliminate the digital devide. A state govt in India is in the software distribution business now, working with Sun they localized the FOSS software for the people in that state.

At dinner with Doc, his pager went off and he looked into a browser at a little girl’s heart arrhythmia, called her mom and said she would be fine, just bring her in the morning. The doc was able to see the girls heart rate over the web, through a browser. Very very cool!

Java server side is open today

VP of software is on stage now. More devices are using Java than PC’s. Java sharing success world wide.

What they have heard…

    Compatibility Matters, Community, Creativity and Productivity, performance, and remember that community matters!

Do for integration what J2ee did for app development. Introducing Java Business Integration. Defines the SOA Application, Provides Extensibility on Standards, Shortens the Software Development Cycle, Allows you to do what you do best. This spec will change the way business works with Java and doing development and integration. Companies that were going to build on it, JBoss and Oracle were there but IBM and BEA were not.

Opensourcing the app server

    App Server

    CDDL

    Integrated with NetBeans IDE

    Incorporates Java EE 5

    Compatibility is protected

    Java System ESB – cool

    Integrated with NetBeans IDE

    Incorporates JBI – cool!

    Compatibility is protected

NetBeans, is the foundation of JavaStudio Creator, Java Studio Enterprise, Sun Studio

Studio – on NB 4.1, lots of new components, AJAX components looks veery very cool, can download it today

Studio for Enterprise – a SOA gui builder, looks cool, 6 weeks to 2 days, thousands of lines of code generated. Have to make sure that its good code. XML schema to java class mappings. Able to integrate with the Open Java ESB to legacy non Java systems.

David Yach, VP of Engineering from Research In Motion. Connecting wireless environments to back end is still hard but RiM has build some cool stuff to make it easier. Showing a Yahoo search thing for getting at Itialian restaurants, gets the list, clicks a make reservation button and it will add it to the calendar. With WZDL will build a sample GUI and he can deploy it to his blackberry, he did. Made an application in 5 minutes and deployed it to his Blackberry and it found the same list of restaurants. Cool stuff.

DTrace is now around for Java – Adam Leventhal. Make the Java space more observable. Showing a demo with a simple app that he wants to drive better performance with.  DTrace shows you what is happening from Java all the way down to the kernel. Bring your performance increase from your app. If they can’t get better performance out of your app they will give you an iPod.

IBM’s apps are moving to Solaris 10 on Sparc and x86.

29.95 / month for 3 year deal you get this really cool Sun Ultra 20 Workstation with lots of memory, lots of disk, all the tools (creator, studio and enterprise c++ etc).

T-Shirt hurling contest. Machine is on its way out of the murk. 3 guys and Gosling on stage

Permalink     No Comments

NetBeans Day - collaboration tools open sourced!

Posted on June 26, 2005 by Bill Dudney

If you were watching last year the NetBeans based sun IDE had some very cool looking collaboration stuff in it, the NetBeans people just open sourced it today at the NetBeans Day. That is very cool. I just looked at their site and did not see the stuff yet but apparently everything has been open soruced including the server so you can set up your own, perhaps that would be another fun use of my Mac Mini that is powering this site :-)

The rest of my notes follow

NetBeans people play better music J Classic stuff straight from my demographic. Anyway I digress. I’m sitting in the NetBeans day @ the Argent in SF waiting for the keynote. I was not one of the first 300 people here because my plane was delayed by 25 minutes because of the fog. Anyway There is a silly loop of gosling, duke and two women I don’t recognize (looks like anime people) bouncing around on the screen (lousy shot captured with my cell here). Kind of silly but the music is good.

 

Looks like the machine driving the display is a Linux box running the 3d desktop (looking glass). Basically the doc is a flat plate with the apps sitting on it. Kind of like the Mac docs but not  as refined looking.

 

Another thing I’ve not noticed is as many power books here as I saw at EclipseCon back in Feb. Ah well you can’t get everything J

 

Kind of weird being the Eclipse Developer Journal guy at a NetBeans thing but I guess it can’t hurt to see what the other open source IDE is touting in their next version.

 

Funny bouncing Gosling is gone, must be about time for the keynote to start…

 

Looking Glass

The Looking glass guy is here can’t pronounce his name or spell it but I’ll look it up later. Rick Ross is kicking off the thing though from JavaLobby.

 

There are lots of folks here. 700 to 800 people from the rough chair count I did. There are 4 sections with about 10 chairs each row, 20 rows.

 

LookingGlass guy is up on state now, talking about looking glass and NetBeans. The dancing Gossling is a looking glass app. They are showing a bunch of apps running in LookingGlass. They started it from NetBeans, kind of cool.

 

Bunch of cool stuff with 3d environment. Hard to say if its really more productive but they are not saying that its really a productivity enhancement thing just yet. Instead it’s a place to experiment. Since its open source building apps on it should be cool and relatively easy.

 

Rick Ross – great guy.  170,000 members, JRoller – 8000 bloggers, 40,000 members on the myjavaserver.com.

 

3 things not to discuss in polite company, religion, politics, sex and oh yeah, Java IDE’s.

 

Intense competitive space, several companies. Competition has worked out well for us.

 

  • NetBeans team is energized
  • Software has improved radically
  • Developer interest is strong
    • Look around the room, it’s Sunday afternoon

 

NetBeans has endured

 

NetBeans IS community – NetBeans community takes feedback seriously and takes action

 

Distrust pundits – they don’t get new comers, carrying baggage from previous experiences

 

The Java developers of 5 years from now probably have not ever programmed in java today. Will we even be doing java in 5 years?

 

NetBeans has team stuff, mobile developers, empowers next-gen frameworks. Matisse could be the breakout.

 

  • Give relentless feedback to the community
  • Expect greatness, help build it
  • Connect with the community

 

Next up is Jonathan Schwartz – demo of developer collaboration service share.java.net, coupled with the collab software in NB 4.1. Very cool looking. Todd Fast is collaborating with a buddy, they are looking at a file together. Very cool stuff, colab file sharing, dev chat, including voice (very cool). Very nice indeed. TS-7302 (coding across comments) going to show a new collab-let. Was built as part of JavaStudio now open sourced.

 

The Sun ‘s’ stands for ‘share’ – share creates the broadest community possible so it lifts all boats.

Why would os community would welcome Sun?

Why would the Braziliian govt would welcome Sun?

Why would the large financial customers join Sun?

 

JS asserts that Developers join things.

 

Digital divide is what Sun is all about.

 

Share is the key of Sun, its what the core of Sun is all about. Grow the broadest market possible, with that rising tide everyone will be raised.

 

Sun’s job is to make us want to choose their products, not try to force us into their product with some sort of proprietary hook.

Permalink     No Comments

Files Back...

Posted on June 24, 2005 by Bill Dudney

I had forgot to put the files back on line when I moved my blog to the mac mini. I've gotten them all uploaded again so old blog enteries like this one are back in shape.

Permalink     No Comments

Pramatic Series Comes Through Again - Pragmatic VC with Subversion

Posted on June 22, 2005 by Bill Dudney

I've not had a chance to get my review up on Amazon yet, but I was just refering to the book again 5 minutes ago and I have to say that it is very good. Everything I've needed thus far (comming from CVS) I've been able to look up in the book and find an answer.

I can't recomment the book enough!

Permalink     No Comments

Nerdvana

Posted on June 21, 2005 by Bill Dudney

One of the things I've really missed (and more so my oldest son) is the ability to work with Lego Mindstorms with a kid friendly environemnt. The RoboLab program worked in clasic but was bugy and a pain to get just so. The programming env worked ok but getting a program uploaded to the RCX was always a pain. Well they finally updated to work with OSX. Rock and roll! Andrew (oldest son) is now reading the programming manual (instead of sleeping). Next up is to make him do the same thing in Java that he is doing with the RoboLab stuff.

If you are not familiar with it LeJos is the way to go for doing java, the Eclipse plugin works well too. Its been a while sence they have had a release but it works like a champ.

Permalink     No Comments

MacMini - online and serving pages :-)

Posted on June 09, 2005 by Bill Dudney

Well my mac mini is finally online with macminicolo! Very cool stuff. I now have lots of space, processor and bandwidth to play with so I'll try to get some more bandwidth consuming content on here ASAP.

Update: Yes this page is served through my macmini @ macminicolo.net. Their support has been great and I highly recommend them. On the mail front I'm using the stuff packaged with OSX Server (Tiger).

Permalink     2 Comments

What I did on summer vacation...

Posted on June 05, 2005 by Bill Dudney

While we were in DC (for 6 weeks, yikes) we managed to do tons of very cool stuff. One really cool thing was going to Jamestown. The really amazing thing was that of the 100+ people that came over 51 were on the one boat you see in the pictures here. Of the 51 people 19 were crew leaving 32 people in the really small space on the 2nd deck (below the main deck, the picture titled 'inside one of the ships'). According to the guy that you see in that picture (one of the period actors) these people were rarely allowed on the main deck. 32 people, no flushing toilets (chamber pots they had to pitch through the windows) and you can imagine what the 4 months were like and how happy that must have been to hit Virgina.

Anyway it was a great time!

Permalink     No Comments

Mac Mini - off to macminicolo.net

Posted on June 04, 2005 by Bill Dudney

Well I finally finished configuring the mac mini. Man what a pain. Apache 2.0.54 had a bug (I think only on OSX 10.4.1) that kept Subversion from working. My blog worked fine but SVN choked. So I dug around and found that the issue was in pushing out more than a few KB Apache was failing. Not sure why that caused SVN to choke but in any event after about 4 hrs of poking around and building older versions I finally decided to try out the trunk of the Apache code base (2.0.55-dev) and it worked. After a bit more searching I posted this thread which lead me to this link to the bug report.

I love open source, even when it doesn't work you can usually find an answer from someone in the community in a matter of hrs.

In other news on the macmini, look for random outages while I figure out how to get my DNS switched

On the Tiger Server front, I choose Server because of the open source stuff included (Apache 2, Mail stuff, SpamAssasin, etc) and the admin tools that sit over that stuff. I figure its worth the extra $370 to have all that stuff out of the box instead of having to build it all. Over all it probably saved me 10 hrs plus so it was worth it. Your milage will likely varry but I already know more about admin than I ever wanted to so I am happy to use a 'stupid' gui tool :-)

Permalink     No Comments

Main | Next month (Jun 2005) »