Moving my blog....

My blog is now at http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/

Submit your JavaOne abstracts!

I case you hadn't noticed :-) despite the recent transition, JavaOne is indeed happening. The call for papers went out a while ago, and it's it's about to close, so submit your proposal today!. It promises to be a giant year with JavaOne being just a few blocks from Oracle OpenWorld. That few blocks should provide a gap of sanity (opportunity?) between the Geeks and the BizTypes. San Francisco wil

Life@Oracle is starting busy...

The "on the Java road" part of my job@Oracle is starting with a busy time: *I'll be starting off at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. I'll be doing a keynote and a panel. EE 6 will be front and center. With luck, the Demo Gods will smile ;~) *Then I'll be at Tech Days in Hyderabad, India. Tasty food, sunshine, and enthusiastic developers are a great combination. *After a week back

Plaid

I've been watching the Olympics and seeing a lot of American athletes in their trendy plaid shirts. It keeps reminding me of a grad school story... When I was a grad student at CMU, the students union brought in the science fiction author Harlan Ellison to give a talk one evening. He was arriving the evening before, so the CS department convinced him to come over to visit during the day. A bun

Surfing, in real life

If you're online right now (Saturday) check out the Mavericks giant wave surfing contest. Mavericks is a wild surfing spot on the coast side of the San Francisco peninsula. I go walking there with my family pretty regularly. I'm not nuts enough to surf. The ustream folks really have the technology nailed.

OK, it's time to look forward...

Enough of being maudlin, it's time to look forward to being a unified company: Sun + Oracle = Snorcle ? Where else would Duke need a snorcle, but in an aquarium visiting a glassfish? You'll find all the images here. Thanks to Rich Green for open sourcing Duke.

So long, old friend...

(get a mug)

This Modern Age is Weirdly Cool

Having spent most of my life turning science fiction into reality, I'm incredibly amused by the recent _Blessing of the Plow_ service performed in London. Another step in the journey: The congregation at St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London raised their mobiles and iPods above their heads and Canon Parrott raised his voice to the heavens to address the Lord God of all Creation. “May our ton

My new favorite source of t-shirts

The designer(s) at HeadlineShirts commit regular acts of pure genius. I've been addicted to t-shirts for years. I particularly like ones that make satirical statements. These are all cranked to eleven. Update: for those who don't get the _say "Tweet" again_ design, you'll just have to watch Pulp Fiction.

Looking forward to a little Peace on Earth....

Hello, Brazil!

This week I'm in Sao Paulo, Brazil for Tech Days. If you're in the neighborhood, come join us. We've got lots of great speakers who will be covering a wide range of topics. High on the exciting list are the joint FCS releases of GlassFish V3 and NetBeans 6.8 (probably on the 10th, depending on how the Release Gods smile). These are both hot after the approval of the EE 6 ballot. The spec is do

Moules Frites @ Devoxx

I'm back in lovely Antwerp for Devoxx. The purgatory we're in over the situation with Oracle has it's pluses and minuses. On the plus side, I don't have to do a keynote.... Steve Harris from Oracle get's that job. I will be doing a talk, but I'll be concentrating on the store we're in the process of launching. The hard part is that the only questions that anyone will be asking are the ones that ne

Java Store Beta: payment and a new client

Put an accountant, a lawyer, an MBA and a software engineer together into a room... Sounds like the lead-in to a bad joke, but it's the exercise that the Java Store team has been living through for the past several months. At the PayPal conference today Eric Klein did an announcement and demo of the next phase in the Java Store's development. We've been working with PayPal on this for some time,

The Network Is

_Yet Another Happy Birthday Intertubes!!_ Today marks 40 years of the internet, although there's some debate as to the actual date. I consider myself a latecomer: I didn't get my first real internet email address until 1977, C410JG40@CMUA. I was "jag" on various Unix systems before then, but it wasn't until 1977 that the ARPAnet and email really took over my life. I soon realized that the only rea

JavaCard 3 hits the streets!

The JavaCard team have been cranking away. Development on the 3.0 version is finally (almost) finished, and it's pretty amazing. Java Card 3 is available in two Editions. Classic Edition This is the same as Java Card 2 with some enhancements/bug fixes. It is almost 10 years young and is the most popular platform for the SIM and ID markets. Connected Edition This is _the_ next generation

Map browser on kenai

I ripped the little demo map browser component out of my Oracle OpenWorld slides and moved it to kenai as a new project called OSMBrowser. Not very polished, more of a starting point for someone motivated to play :-) Thanks to the crew at the Open Street Map project for a nice database and tile server. A Thing of Beauty. Update: I fixed the busted .jnlp file, so it can be run.

My slides from Oracle Openworld

Several folks have asked for copies of my slides from Oracle Openworld. Unfortunately, there's no printable form of them, since I did them as a JavaFX app. You'll find them at http://fxslideshowtest.kenai.com which will launch the app (with all it's rather large images) via JNLP. If you're curious about the sources, they're on kenai. The code is pretty ugly: I just slapped it together. I'm not pro

Heading to Oracle OpenWorld

Next week should be real interesting: I'm spending a big chunk of it at Oracle's OpenWorld conference. I'll be helping out Scott at his keynote. As usual, I expect Scott to be fun :-). I'm doing a talk the next day down the road at the Hilton where Oracle is holding their Develop conference. Sun is leading a number of sessions on enterprise topics. I'm going to try to stretch people's minds about

OMG - Alan Turing gets an apology!

It's decades late, but a lovely gesture none-the-less: Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain has formally apologized for the treatment of Alan Turing. It's hard to overstate his impact on the latter half of the 20th century, and the discipline of computer science in particular. Think of what your life would have been like without him: a longer and more devastating second world war; and the d

NFS on Snow Leopard

I don't know what it is about Apple and NFS, but they keep moving things around. The new UI to NFS mounting is much nicer than it was before, but it's now in a totally different place: the Disk Utility. But if you use a lot of NFS file systems, it's a pain to have to mount them one by one: ignoring the UI and using the /net automount filesystem is far more convenient. Just use the file name /net/_

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: JVM LANGUAGE SUMMIT, September 2009

[cross-posted from the JVM summit mailing list] This is a reminder for the 2009 JVM Language Summit to be held at Sun's Santa Clara campus on September 16-18, 2009. Registration is now open for speaker submissions (presentations and workshops) and general attendance. More information is available at http://jvmlangsummit.com. The JVM Language Summit is an open technical collaboration among lang

Fun with Duke

It's been a really weird summer, mostly in a good way. Easily the weirdest summer of my professional career. A lot of stuff has been going on, much of which would make good blog material, but none of it can be blogged about. The Oracle transition can't happen fast enough. I have spent some time on a silly but fun project: moving the Duke artwork from duke.dev.java.net to kenai.com/projects/duk

Jazoon!

I'll be spending next week in Zurich atJazoon'09. They've got a great lineup of technical sessions to pump your head full of all the latest everything. The lineup of speakers is pretty impressive. PS. Several folks have asked why I disappeared from JavaOne so quickly after my Toy Show keynote: my youngest daughter's school was holding a talent show at noon, and I had to be there. Work is not a

JavaOne 2009: another amazing experience.

This was another amazing JavaOne. It was also the weirdest: between the Oracle situation, the global meltdown, and the financial situation, it was very different. Early on, we were really concerned (==nearly paniced) that no one would show up. Almost every company that usually sends a crowd of people to JavaOne had travel restrictions that meant that few could attend. From what we had seen from ot

JavaOne begins!

JavaOne is finally beginning! Getting ready for this one has been an incredible amount of work for everyone involved. The lineup of sessions is superb. I had a \*really\* hard time picking the Duke's choice winners (they all deserved to win). The engineering teams have been doing grand acts of heroism to get a pile of software releases ready. The demos have come together beautifully. Some ar

The Developer Cloud: Netbeans 6.7 + Kenai

One of the many interesting things we've been working on lately is the _Developer Cloud_. There are two major components to it. One is the cloud infrastructure itself: Kenai a much-more-than-a-forge collection of developer facilities that allows you to assemble project areas from a selection of services that range from several SCM systems, bug management systems, wikis and forums. There's a lot mo

JavaOne free pass and travel contest

Can't afford a JavaOne pass or travel expenses? We're running a contest to help get you there.

Java Me SDK 3.0 launched!

The mobile group has just released a lovely new version of what used to be called the "wireless toolkit", but is now the Java ME SDK. It includes integration with third-party emulators and Windows Mobile devices; on-device deployment and on-device debugging; CLDC/MIDP, CDC/FP/PBP/AGUI, and BD-J (blue-ray); the new CLDC HotSpot Virtual Machine; an optimized MSA 1.1 stack with extensions; profiling

Java for FIRST Robotics Competition

I spent the end of last week in Atlanta at the finals for the FIRST Robotics Competition. This is a competition where high school students build robots that perform some task. This year's task looked an awful lot like building a robotic basketball player. I was there partly because it's just a cool event; but mostly because we were announcing (along with the folks from FIRST and from the Robotics

Sign up for JavaOne!

The Java crew at Sun is once again totally into getting ready for this year's JavaOne conference. The papers submitted were awesome: they'll make for a great lineup of technical sessions. EE6 will be a major feature of the enterprise track, as will RESTful techniques. Swing and JavaFX will be all over the place. The device world continues to get more interesting: among many other cool devices, t