Sunday December 21, 2008

This has certainly been a year that no one will forget. Between wars, global economic meltdown and an amazing election in America, all the stuff that goes on in the computer industry pales to insignificance - although the stuff we all build had a role to play. The internet has certainly changed the process of elections forever.

Nonetheless, it's been a great year in the Java universe: JavaFX 1.0 launched; NetBeans 6.5; Glassfish V3; JDK6u10/11; MSA; OpenJDK&jdk7... OpenSolaris 2008.11, OpenStorage, OpenSSO, VirtualBox, OpenOffice 3, MySQL 5.1... Software at Sun has really been cranking out great stuff. Permalink Comments [5]

Friday December 19, 2008

Between family and job I end up always being pretty busy. I like playing video games, but getting a block of time long enough to put into any of the Big Games is pretty much impossible. So I'm always looking for games that you can play quickly and get a thrill-buzz in just a few minutes. After about a billion rounds, the attraction of Solitaire has worn pretty thin. Lately I've been playing Titan Attacks from the folks at PuppyGames. It's got a great kickback-in-a-bar-with-a-beer arcade feel to it. Thanks Cas!

PS. If you try it out, and you like it, consider paying for it: that'll help more great new games happen. Permalink Comments [4]

Thursday December 04, 2008

After a lot of hard work, JavaFX 1.0 is finally out and available for download and play! I've been having a huge amount of fun with it over the past few months. Every marketoid and blogger at Sun is going nuts with it. They tend to emphasis using it for building Rich Internet Applications - RIA has been one of the big industry buzzwords over the past year. But I've been building regular desktop apps with it, and it's great. It's been really easy to build beautiful Solaris/Linux desktop tools (sorry, the Solaris/Linux release of JavaFX isn't ready yet, but you can suffer through using OS X or even Windows). If you're even slightly handy with Photoshop, you just sketch your UI with it, export to JavaFX, then write your own script bits to add behavior. With luck, a Gimp exporter will happen, although that'll probably have to be a community effort.

Take it out for a spin. I'm sure you'll have as much fun with it as I have. Permalink Comments [10]

Saturday November 29, 2008

I'm spending this coming week at Tech Days in Tokyo from Tuesday through Thursday. If you're anywhere near Tokyo, come join us. We'll be showing off all the latest and greatest stuff: JDK 6u10, NetBeans 6.5, Glassfish V3, JavaFX, Solaris, and a whole lot more. Three days densely packed with all kinds of geek training.

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Wednesday November 12, 2008

At JavaOne 2007, Neil Young gave an impassioned talk about why BluRay matters to artists. He ended the talk with a few comments about a project he was starting to take a classic Detroit monster (a 1959 Lincoln Continental) and turn it into an X-Prize capable hybrid electric car. There was more than a little scepticism in the audience, but he did it, and he calls it the LincVolt. And he brought it to Sun in Menlo Park to show it off. Piles of realtime Java code under the hood. Permalink Comments [6]

Sunday November 09, 2008

Just in case you hadn't noticed, in the waves of election-mania, Sun has been cranking out a pile of great software releases recently:

• JDK 6u10 with all of it's desktop deployment and performance goodies shipped.
• MySQL has a release candidate for 5.1!!
• Glassfish V3 has a tasty supported prelude release available.
• The NetBeans crew has put out NetBeans 6.5RC with enhanced support for RESTful services, C/C++, a pile of scripting languages, and a whole lot more.
• OpenSolaris is really close to the FCS of the 2008.11 release. I've been running the release candidates, and it's looking great.
• And the JavaFX team is getting real close....

And if you haven't yet been totally overwhelmed by Obama-mania articles, you might enjoy the one by Desmond Tutu. Permalink Comments [11]

Tuesday November 04, 2008

(Except for California, where the passing of Proposition 8 shows that bigotry is alive and well, and that the Mormon Church in Utah has a long reach... Damn) Permalink Comments [21]

Monday November 03, 2008

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Monday October 06, 2008

At home I use ZFS+NFS on a Solaris box to make a file server that provides disk space to all the other machines at home, which are mostly MACs. I use NFS to access the files instead of AFS because it's so much faster. A friend and I were talking about this over the weekend and he was surprised: OS X is notoriously tricky to configure to use NFS. They have a nonstandard way to manage automount maps and, unusual for Apple: no easy-to-use front end. So lots of folks stay away from using NFS on OSX. It turns out that there's a trick that not many folks know about that makes it easy: (almost) no configuration required. The default NFS configuration contains a default automount map based on hostnames: /net/hostname/filepath. The tricky bit is that the finder suppresses the "/net" directory so you can only see it from the Unix shell. From the shell on OS X, /net references work with no effort:

ls /net/10.0.0.123/tank/photos

Lists all the files in /tank/photos on the host with IP address 10.0.0.123 (if you're feeling adventurous, you can associate a name with the address by appropriate configuration of the naming environment, but that can be a pain, so I often just use naked static addresses). To make this work with finder in OS X, just do this from the shell:

sudo ln -s /net/10.0.0.123 /tank

Then "tank" will show up on the root filesystem, and "photos" will be visible within it. The only configuration I do is this one symlink, then all the filesystems on the server appear. Easy. Permalink Comments [6]

Tuesday September 16, 2008

I'll be in Germany this week, mostly at a conference in Nürnberg. The list of speakers looks pretty impressive. If you're in the area, come join in. Permalink Comments [3]

Tuesday September 02, 2008

At the last JavaOne I did a walk-on talk during the AMD keynote where I talked about how incredible HotSpot's performance had become - beating the best C compilers. I ended my talk with a joking comment that "the next target is Fortran". Afterwards, Denis Caromel of Inria came up to me and said "you're already there". He and some colleges had been working on some comparisons between Java and Fortran for HPC. Their final report Current State of Java for HPC has been made available as a Tech Report and makes pretty interesting reading. There are a lot of HPC micro benchmarks in it which look great. Thanks! Permalink Comments [3]

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 [1]

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]