Wednesday August 13, 2008

I'm spending this week in LA at SIGGRAPH. It's really great to be at a conference where I can concentrate on learning. Lots of interesting papers and folks doing cool experimental stuff. One group that I ran into, OnLatte, had whacked together the mechanical bits of a flatbed scanner, an old inkjet printer and some bits of electronics to come up with a wild printer that makes images by jetting caramel syrup onto the foam on top of a latte.

Tuesday was "Pixar Night" at the animation festival. In a really classy move, John Lasseter started by not showing something by Pixar: instead he showed the phenominal The Man Who Planted Trees, an animation by Frédéric Back of the story written by Jean Giono. It really shook me when I first saw it years ago: this was a beautiful print on a giant screen with a great sound system at the Nokia theatre. Nothing digital in this one: hand drawn, frame by frame, by one incredible artist. After the screening, Lasseter brought Back up to the stage,to a standing ovation, and the two of them talked about the film for a while. Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday July 31, 2008

The preview release of JavaFX is now available, along with libraries, samples, documentation and some early tools. If you like to make pretty things fly around on the screen, this is a pretty tasty piece of work. It really shows what Swing and Java2D can do. A pile of folks have been working hard on it for quite a while and have done a lovely job. Try it out and let us know what you think.

One of the cooler tricks is the approach to integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. These two popular tools have proprietary (deep dark secret) file formats, so importing them is problematic, but they do have extensive SDKs. So rather than building import filters into NetBeans we built export filters for the Adobe tools that generate JavaFX code (!) from the illustrations. It's then a clean process in NetBeans to add behavior to them.

Enjoy! Permalink Comments [11]

Friday July 25, 2008

It's been all over the web this morning that Randy Pausch's battle with pancreatic cancer has finally come to it's inevitable conclusion. We overlapped at CMU as grad students, and his work on Alice has been hugely important in teaching, for which I am very thankful. There's a lot that could be said... he gave the world a beautiful example of dying eloquently. Randy, you will be missed. Permalink

Thursday July 10, 2008

Peter Dibble has just published the second edition of his Real-Time Java Platform Programming book. It isn't just about the realtime APIs: it covers a lot of the theory behind realtime programming (warning: contains Actual Math), along with a lot of examples. It's got a good mixture of pragmatics and theory and does a good job of de-mystifying many of the scarier aspects of realtime. Permalink Comments [1]

Monday June 16, 2008

I installed Solaris 2008.05 on my laptop a short while ago. Being my usual goofy self I was playing around as root in places I shouldn't have been and managed to really mess things up and render my machine totally unbootable. It was nosediving within a small fraction of a second after booting... I only had one kernel image, and that file had been overwritten :-( Ending up in an infinite reboot loop. In past days, with either Linux or Solaris, I'd have reinstalled the system, possibly preceded by ripping the disk out and plugging it into another machine so that I could rescue any important files. But since 2008.05 uses ZFS for everything - even the root filesystem, all I had to do was boot the 2008.05 LiveCD, zfs rollback the root filesystem, and like magic all my screwing around was undone. Permalink Comments [2]

Sunday June 01, 2008

I just installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 from the OpenSolaris.com site. It's pretty sweet. They've had the installer nailed for quite a while, the big thing in this release (for me, anyway) is that it installs ZFS on the root device, and sets the system up to boot from ZFS. No more disk partioning! One big happy pool-o-pages! No more UFS!

(but I'm *still* waiting for power management) Permalink Comments [4]

Thursday May 22, 2008

I spent the afternoon at the Computer History Museum at an event celebrating the 70th birthday of Ivan Sutherland. He's famous for a whole lot of things, the earliest being Sketchpad, a man-machine graphical communication system that he built in 1962. In a lot of computing fields, and particularly in graphics, if you read any paper and follow the bibliography links back, you're almost certain to find something written by Ivan or one of his students. Bob Sproull MC'd the event and Alan Kay (one of Ivan's student's) gave a long talk. The list of people that showed up to honor Ivan was amazing. A couple who's names you might know were Henri Gouraud and John Warnock.

When I was working on my PhD thesis, I noticed that all the papers I was reading had backpointers eventually to Sketchpad. When I finally read Ivan's thesis, I was totally blown away. I ended up with Ivan on my thesis committee and I think of my thesis as a macro-expansion of about half a page from Sketchpad.

You really should read his thesis. It will blow you away. Among many other things, it can be fairly said that Ivan invented Object Oriented Programming.

For another life-altering experience, you should read one of his few non-technical papers, Technology and Courage. Besides being an outstanding researcher, he's also started a couple of companies and is a venture capitalist: his advice on courage is mandatory reading. Permalink

Friday May 09, 2008

My keynote this morning went off flawlessly. You can watch it on UStream. I'd like to thank everyone who contributed: The demos were all incredibly inspirational. I was in awe of every one of them. The main hall at Moscone was packed. The production crew was totally perfect, despite all the re-arranging of the plan. And the Sun crew were their usual wonderful selves.

My keynote is easy. Everybody else doing talks at JavaOne has to figure out what to say. I poke around the community and grab stuff. There's so much cool stuff being done that the hardest part of putting the toy show together is picking. I just have to stand back in awe and ask a few inane questions.

Controlling the most complex instrument ever made by mankind.... (the Large Hadron Collider) Surfing a constellation of satellites around mars and mining their data... A pen as a computing platform... The realtime stuff becoming mainstream.... Instrumenting the world... Another generation of smart cards... And smart cars... Massive graphical acceleration on a cell phone... Killer massively multiplayer games... Great web infrastructure tools for creating and introspecting... "the network is the computer" Hah! => "the network is the world"

But the best part was helping to give John Gage his well deserved lifetime achievement award.

Now it's time for a beach and a beer. Permalink Comments [7]

I don't know how some people manage to blog so much. Yesterday was another huge blur. A big chunk was rehearsing for my keynote this morning. It's kinda easy for me because it's mostly demos, and they're all wickedly cool. We added a new one late last night because some folks got something to work that was pretty magnificent. Drives the stage crew mad. But it all works out in the end.

See you there! Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday May 08, 2008

Yesterday was totally packed. Absolutely no rest for the wicked :-) Lots of great interactions with all sorts of folks, some in organized meetings, but most just random chats in the hallways. I love the energy that is everywhere.

I helped take a group of University and High School students on a tour through the pavilion. For all the appeal of "virtual reality", it was the "real reality" stuff that grabbed them most: the realtime control demo, Tommy, and the blu-ray/streaming media got lots of questions.

I spent an hour with the Dutch JUG. It was great during the opening on Tuesday morning when John Gage made a comment about the Brazilians being uninhibited extroverts, and how the rest of the audience should be honorary Brazilians... About 80 members of the Dutch jug lept up with a huge banner and let out a roar that put the Brazilians to shame. There's definitely some national competition brewing here.

I ended the formal part of my day with a short walk-on during the AMD keynote. I got to spend some time talking about how amazing the HotSpot optimizer has become and what a good job it does of exploiting the special features of CPUs. I ended my bit with a tongue-in-cheek one-liner that was roughly "now we're going after Fortran". When I got off the stage, Denis Caromel from INRIA came up to me and said "you're already done": he had just finished some extensive benchmarking of Java for HPC and his results were impressive. Thanks!

This was followed by an extensive pub-crawl :-( Now I'm off to rehearsals for my keynote tomorrow. The Toy Show is going to be very cool.

Lame joke: when you're standing outside a theatre as a showing of Iron Man is letting out, how do you tell who the real geeks are? They're the ones lusting after Tony Stark's workshop. Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday May 07, 2008

First things first, a couple of things to check out:

• Track down the real-time demo in the pavilion (the one with all the colored balls shooting around) and see if you've run the lottery :-) The prize is dinner with me and Greg Bollella on Thursday.
• The Gemalto folks are running a coding contest: you write a control algorithm for a tank that drives around a field filled with other tanks. Whoever dies last wins. The interesting catch is that the code you write has to run on a smart card...

What a rush yesterday was. I had promised myself that I'd blog a couple of times during the day, but there was no way that was going to work...

The day started off with a bang shooting t-shirts into the audience with John Gage and Chris Melissinos. It's remarkable how good a job the big 3-person slingshot does. Totally low tech, but very physical and theatrical. We did a cooperative opening of the show. I mostly talked about how the show was instrumented using motes from Sentilla. If you have a "maker" itch to scratch, they're selling cool developer kit.

If you're looking for another cool toy to spend money on, check out the LiveScribe pen. When I first heard about it (a JVM in a pen? WTF?) it seemed like an odd thing to do, but when you go through some of their usage scenarios, it's totally brilliant.

My keynote isn't until Friday, so I got to just sit and watch Rich Green's keynote. Lots of nice demos, but the sphere of interactive media streams had me in awe. Between the efforts of the JavaFX, graphics and Hotspot teams, it got amazing performance. Having the keynote end with Neil Young being a geek for 15 minutes was pretty damned cool. He's a fan of blu-ray and is in the midst of a big project using it.

The bulk of the day was press interviews, videotaping and time with customers. They'd describe problems they're having and I'd get this surreal deja vu feeling "But we fixed that in JDKn"... "*sob* we're stuck in JDKm(<n)" *sigh*

The work day ended up with the Dukes Choice award ceremony. Once again, it was really hard to choose the winners. There is so much great stuff being done by the community. If you come to my keynote on Friday, several of them will be doing demos.

The day was closed with a traditional pub crawl...

The design for this years t-shirt came out rather well:

(with apologies to Edward Hopper.) Permalink Comments [4]

Monday May 05, 2008

On Friday, Tommy came to visit Sun's offices in Menlo Park, and then did some driving around Sun's campus on Saturday. It's a new generation DARPA Urban Grand Challenge car that uses Solaris and realtime Java. He and his parents will be at JavaOne.

Spent the weekend doing last minute prep. The most fun part was re-engineering a t-shirt slingshot - yes, there will be a tshirt shoot Tuesday morning at the beginning of the opening keynote while the walk-in music is playing. The t-shirt design turned out especially well this year.

Today will mostly be taken up by CommunityOne, NetBeans Day, some customer visits and rehearsals...

I'm really looking forward to my keynote on Friday. There's a fantastic lineup of outrageously cool toys to play with. Permalink Comments [2]

Wednesday April 30, 2008

We've had some really nice presents the last couple of days:

Thanks to the folks at Apple for shipping 64 bit Intel support for Java SE 6. We really appreciate the work that they've done to make this happen.

And thanks to the folks at Red Hat and Ubuntu for announcing the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.

JavaOne is going to be fun! Permalink Comments [16]

Monday April 14, 2008

Today we got to put out one of the most weirdly cool press releases that we've done in quite a while. It was nice to see some blogosphere pickup from Tim O'Brien. Projects like this have quite a rigorous evaluation process to get to the start of deployment. One of the fun things about the realtime version of Java is that it gets us involved in all sorts of fascinating systems. It's not real engineering until megawatts are involved. :-) Today's customer visit involved folks in the gigawatt range...

JavaOne coolness is getting over the top. A fair number of hotels are already sold out. For the past several years we've been back on a track of annual serious escalation. Choosing demos, judging awards, figuring out what goes into the keynotes and sessions is real tough. There are a bunch more sessions this year (we found some more space to book). The t-shirt launching contest isn't happening: one of the big reasons is that everything else is squeezed so tight that something had to give. :-( Permalink Comments [1]

Friday April 04, 2008

A few days ago Kohsuke Kawaguchi posted a really cool blog entry titled a “Deep dive into assembly code from Java”. It's a pile of fascinating (if gory) assembly code with commentary. Some things to notice:

• Really aggressive inlining
• Even storage allocation & initialization gets inlined - new T() really is as efficient as C's alloca() (and it beats the pants off malloc())
• Careful management of cache prefetching
• Deep understanding of variablity between the flavors of x86 machines
• Loop unrolling with warmup/cooldown
• "theorum proving away" of array index checks (and many other things)
• much cleverness with locks

I've had several run-ins in recent months with crusty C (and a few Fortran) programmers who say "you must be faking your benchmarks!". Nope. The HotSpot crew has done a truly great piece of work. Permalink Comments [8]