I've been following some tweets from folks watching the NHL and NBA games this evening and I'm getting mixed results.  At times it is loading, but at others I'm getting a message

Twitter is over capacity.

and others the servers are just timing out.  I wouldn't think the load would be especially high on a Saturday night.  What is going to happen when there is presumably a burst of traffic next week at JavaOne?

It should come as no surprise that JavaOne 2009 is approaching, and not only approaching but right around the corner next week!  This year I'm more involved than ever in our Software Infrastructure group's planning for it, so I thought I'd share a bit to pique folks interest.

The activities officially get started with the third annual CommunityOne West on Monday June 1st.  Why "West" you might ask?  That's because there was a CommunityOne East this year in New York where Sun made announcements about its Cloud and more.  Basic access to CommunityOne is free (you can't beat that!) with access to "Deep Dives" or a package including JavaOne access available.  And Pavilion passes for JavaOne are also free this year plus early bird registration has been extended through the start of the show.

JavaOne itself gets started Tuesday June 2nd with the Sun General Session.  This should be a jam packed session with great stuff from Jonathan and perhaps some surprises.  The other keynotes from Sun and the other sponsors are always fantastic as well but I have a special interest in Bob Brewin's technical keynote on Tuesday afternoon as I'm working with him and the technical experts on it.

There are a host of technical sessions, BOFs, and Sun along with all of the co-sponsors and exhibitors will be in the pavilion.  And the pavilion actually opens early this year, during CommunityOne so you'll have more time to explore.  A full searchable content calendar is available here, but I've also created my own agenda of key/interesting sessions on Google calendar.  Now, there is a bit of a slant towards server side technologies and architectures like SOA, REST, Identity Services, GlassFish, etc., but you may still find it interesting and/or useful.

See you there!

Track and field for 2009 has already gotten off to a great start with good collegiate action and some fantastic times in Doha last week by the pros, but the pros start to run for real for the first time later today in Los Angeles at the adidas Track Classic.  And conference championships are this weekend with the Pac-10's in Eugene.

Letsrun.com has a great preview of the adidas meet so take a good look at it and be ready to watch or record it at 5pm PDT today on ESPN2.  Look for Bernard Lagat, Jeremy Wariner, Allyson Felix, Jordan Hasay, Shalane Flanagan, LaShawn Merritt, Xavier Carter, Jenn Stuczysnki, and more!

But to take a quick look back at the Doha meet:

• In the 1500 there were two in the 3:30's
• In the 800 there were three in the 1:43's
• The 3000 had a sub-7:30
• The 3000 steeplechase had a sub-8:00

All are fantastic times for this early in the season, but the Steeple is #7 person all-time and fastest every before June.

There are quite a few more events coming soon too.  Check out my calendar, but look for NCAA Regionals in 2 weeks as well as the Reebok Grand Prix, Pre-Classic in 3 weeks, and NCAA's in a month.

When I bought my iPhone around Christmas last year, I fully intended to play around with developing applications for it, but hadn't even downloaded the SDK ... until this past weekend.

So I downloaded and installed the SDK and was able to build a sample app and run it in the simulator, but now I wanted to get it on my phone to run it there.  This is where I started to learn more things than I had thought I'd wanted or needed to learn.

While I have the required Intel based Mac and am running OS X 10.5 (paid to upgrade it from 10.4), and I have an iPhone, it turns out that Apple hasn't made enough money off me yet and insist that I pay $99 to join the iPhone Developer Program to be able to put an app I develop onto a phone I already own.  Now, I'm just looking to play around with the SDK and apps on the phone and am not ready to start selling an app on the App Store to recoup my $99, so I go about researching what other options there are but in the process learn more about what would happen after I would pay my $99 if I chose to go that route, and this is where it gets more scary.

I found this record of Michael Ash's experience with going through the whole process and learn of delays and complications and other issues that all in all make the whole process sound somewhat less than what I'm looking for.  If I had an app I was ready to sell I'd probably have the incentive to wade through the whole process and figure out how to make it all work.  But for someone just wanting to try things out, Apple has put a pretty big barrier to entry in place.  And from many of the comments to Michael's experience, he isn't alone.  It boggles my mind how Apple can get away with this, but it appears there are enough developers who will endure what they have to do.

But since I'm not, at least yet, I continue looking, and as I've written about jailbreaking before, I look into what that provides for.  I discover that one can simply copy an app built with the SDK to a jailbroken iPhone, but you have to do self/pseudo signing of the app and there is a tool to do this on the iPhone, "ldid", but when I try to use it I'm getting the following error:

 util/ldid.cpp(418): _assert(0:arch != NULL)

So this isn't fully working for me yet, but I'm still working on it.

Last, it appears that if you sell your wares on the App Store and folks return your app, Apple will be taking money out of your pocket!  You'd think that the 30% they take from the sales would cover their costs, but alas, I guess not.

But the bottom line is that it would seem that for many (most?) folks, getting access to developing apps on the iPhone and ultimately getting them in the App Store may be a myth.  What are your thoughts or experiences?  And does anyone know how to get past the error above?