Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Friday February 27, 2009

Project Coin Now Live

The Project Coin OpenJDK page and mailing list are now live. The call for proposal period will run until March 30, 2009. Let the proposing begin!

Friday February 13, 2009

FOSDEM 2009: OpenJDK 6 and Project Coin

I was pleased to attend and speak at my first FOSDEM conference this year. The classroom setting of the Free Java Developer Room was certainly different than the cavernous session halls of JavaOne! My talks were on OpenJDK 6 and Project Coin:

• OpenJDK 6: Where are we now? Where are we going?

• Project Coin: Small Language Changes for JDK 7

Mark spoke on modularity and overall plans for JDK 7 and Alex spoke on progress towards a universal VM.

Another enjoyable aspect of FOSDEM for me was meeting in person a number of people I'd corresponded with over email who had contributed to OpenJDK 6, including Karl Helgason of Gervill fame and Andrew Haley and other IcedTea engineers from Red Hat.

Monday February 09, 2009

OpenJDK 6: Mercurial Repositories Available

As announced by Kelly, after a successful trial the final read/write Mercurial repositories for OpenJDK 6 are now available. Thanks to Kelly for putting in the extra effort to create change sets approximating history information of the pre-Mercurial phase of OpenJDK 6! The build tags correspond to the state of the source code shipped with the indicated build.

Martin has already made a series of external-to-Sun pushes and I'm looking forward to more people contributing to the code base going forward.

The Three R's of Airplane Maintenance

Complementing the three grade school R's of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, I've heard it said there are three R's of Windows system administration, retry, reboot, and reinstall. When flying recently, I experienced the Windows R's being applied to airplane maintenance too. After everyone had boarded the plane, the pilot announced there was a problem with the navigation system and they were trying repeatedly to clear the problem. After that didn't work, the pilot came back on to say the maintenance crew was going to power down the entire plane so it could be restarted; even the emergency lighting blinked off for several minutes. Finally, with the fault still showing after the plane booted back up, the airline reinstalled us passengers on a spare plane and we were on our way with just a two hour delay.