Friday May 09, 2008

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 [0]

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 [1]

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...

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 [3]

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 [1]

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

Wednesday April 02, 2008

It's been a huge effort, but JDK 6u10 has finally hit beta. This is a major milestone for us. We've even debated renaming 6u10 to JDK 7 - but it has no API changes and is totally focused on deployment and desktop integration, including coping with the-Joy-that-is-Vista. Congratulations to everyone involved. I saw some demos of parts of it yesterday (mostly applet stuff), and it was real sweet. Take it out for a spin. Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday April 01, 2008

Especially on April 1^st. These inflatable dolphins showed up mysteriously this morning :-) all over Sun's Santa Clara campus. Permalink Comments [2]

Sunday March 30, 2008

On slashdot, the question was just asked What Are Must-Sees For Open Day At the LHC? I had the good fortune to get to visit CERN at the end of November last year and I got shown around. It is truly awe-inspiring. I put a pile of my pictures up on the web. None of them have any captions, but they're pretty cool anyways. Most of the pictures are either in the chamber with the Atlas experiment, or in the tunnel itself. For my money, those are the two big must-sees.

I was invited by some of the Java geeks who worked there. A lot of software at CERN is done in Java. One of the folks from CERN is going to be showing off some of their toys during my keynote session on the last day of JavaOne - yet another reason to come. JavaOne is stacking up to be great this year: all the early registration numbers show we're going to have another healthy increase over last year. Everyone's into advanced sleep deprivation, getting ready. Permalink Comments [3]

Monday March 17, 2008

NetBeans 6.1 is out, along with a contest. There's a lot to like about it, but my personal favorite is the MySQL support. It couldn't have come at a better time: just a couple of days ago I started a big-ish project using MySQL, and the new NB features have really helped. And if you haven't tried the Visual Web Designer yet, take it out for a spin.

Friday March 14, 2008

If you've ever wanted to improve your understanding of conflict in the Middle East (or anywhere, really), there's a cool reality-based game called PeaceMaker that you should try. They've got some interesting videos on YouTube. Even though it's a Java game, it's only available for Windows and OS X - they use QuickTime for Java. (we're trying to get our cross-platform media story together, but it's tough... [codecs are easy, we've got piles of them: it's all about patent royalties on free software :-( ]) Permalink Comments [1]

Sunday March 02, 2008

The TechDays traveling circus is in Sydney this week. Lucky me! I get to tag along. This is such a great town. If you're in Sydney and looking for a geek fest, come join in. Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday January 31, 2008

There has been a lot of chatter about the closures proposal penned by Neal Gafter. And, in particular, whether or not I support it. I absolutely do. My "Feel of Java" talk of many years ago got rather infamously twisted at JavaPolis a couple of months ago. Java feels alive, not stuck in some chisel marks on stone tablets. Closures were left out of Java initially more because of time pressures than anything else. Closures, as a concept, are tried and true - well past the days of being PhD topics. The arguments are in the details, not the broad concepts. In the early days of Java the lack of closures was pretty painful, and so inner classes were born: an uncomfortable compromise that attempted to avoid a number of hard issues. But as is normal in so many design issues, the simplifications didn't really solve any problems, they just moved them. We should have gone all the way back then. Some have criticized the current proposal as being too complex. If you read through all of what Neal has written, you'll see that there are two sources of this perception: the spec is really detailed and explores all kinds of corner cases that never get touched on in most programming manuals; and the proposal is a collection of features that at first blush seem separate, but in fact are deeply inter-related and push each other into existence. Permalink Comments [52]

Tuesday January 29, 2008

We've been gearing up for JavaOne08 for a while now. Advance registration has finally opened. Inside the Java organization it hasn't risen to "madness" yet, but by April everyone will be working 200% on it. The lineup of papers and technical sessions is looking great. Lots of deep SE, EE, FX and mobility sessions. While not many in the JavaOne crowd do realtime, the realtime group's demos tend to be the best crowd pleasers (if only because they have the greatest chance to maim). They've got a plan this year that won't have the same capacity to maim as last years, but if Greg can get so many stepper motors and sensors to sync, it'll be mesmerizing.

There's a nice discount for early registration. Come join the fun! Permalink Comments [2]