Castellers

Oracle OpenWorld gave us a bit of a window into (some of?) Oracle's customers and into their style. I just noticed they have a master index of all their current Ads; check out the Master Page, and these categories: Middleware, Applications and Sun.

As noticeable samples, check the 4 below.

One of Scott's phrases is Kick Butt and Have Fun. I just finished listening to Scott and Larry (and John and James) at the Sunday Keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, and it is clear that Larry subscribes to "Kick Butt" - he fired a lot of shots at IBM, like Scott used to do... A sample of Larry's style is the Exadata Challenge. The recordings of the keynote seem to be posted within a day of the event; for example, this morning's keynote is already available. To find them, go to the OpenWorld Live site, wait for the channel to start playing, then go to the menu and select from there. Ah, and there is an updated version of the "Oracle on Sun" TPC-C benchmark result, see Oracle's Ad site and read the full details in Brian's post.

A, not as quick as intended, post with my whereabouts and some highlights for next week:

Unconference -
Sunday afternoon, 1pm-7pm I'll be participating in our Unconference, where Alexis plays MC. The Unconference is a very low key event and should be a lot of fun; register and join us... then we transfer to The Thirsty Bear for food, drinks and conversation from 7pm till 10pm.

CommunityOne -
Monday is the beginning of CommunityOne and I'll be there the whole day. The keynote is by Dave and John on Cloud and OpenSolaris; don't miss it as it will include several announcements, including the formal launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Monday is also my only formal presentation this year (yeah! that means I get to enjoy the rest of the show): I will be talking about Sun's GlassFish Portfolio in S307894 (10:50am, Hall E 135 ). I chose to make the presentation a mix of Community status and Product overview because I think that synergy is what drives GlassFish. I will cover the adoption indicators for GlassFish and show evidence of its growth; I then talk about the projects and products in Sun GlassFish Portfolio explaining the value of moving from user to customer. I then do a very quick pass over the status of all the different projects. I will also include a couple of pre-announcements and clues of events later in the week.

The rest of Monday is full of sessions, many of them about OpenSolaris and Cloud. Two sessions I'm personally interested are Guido's S307145 on Python 3000 retrospective and Frank's S307160 Jython and Django. The day ends with the OpenSolaris party, which is the main party this year.

JavaOne -
JavaOne is as always, very busy and very good, and GlassFish, family and friends is very well represented. Below I'll just highlight a handful of events; for additional links, check Arun's series of short videoblogs (great idea although I am not there because we could not align our schedules), and his list of sessions plus my Additional Links.

Each day has its own keynote and all of them seem worth attending; not just for what they say but how they say it, specially after the oracle announcement. Of course, Tuesday morning's Sun keynote is a must attend, with Jonathan and "a special guest or two", so get there early. The afternoon technical keynote with Bob includes several demos from our team, so don't miss those either! The rest of the Tuesday is full of sessions and BOFs; as usual it is very hard to choose which ones to attend, so I'll just highlight Jerome's TS-4923, with an great technical overview of GFv3.

Wednesday starts with the Ericsson's keynote in the morning; Ericsson is our main partner with SailFin and we share the same vision of converged SIP/HTTP applications. The afternoon keynote is Eric on JavaFX and its a good time to see how that story looks like now. My highlights are for Kohsuke's TS-5301 (Hudson in the Cloud and the Swarm) and BOF-5105 (Hudson Community), Jacob and Vivek's TS-4921 (Scripting on GlassFish). Wednesday also has a Roberto and Bill's BOF-4483 on JavaEE 6, and a Java EE 6 sneak peek event - drop by the GlassFish pod to get an invite.

Thursday has the (first ever!) keynote by Microsoft on Software + Services: The Next Application Platform, and the afternoon is by IBM on Extreme Transaction Processing and Elasticity. My GF highlight for that day would be the BOF-1721 (meet the GF team), we will all be there - and I believe there will be handouts there.

Friday has James' traditional toy show; always very entertaining (for geeks!). And Ludo lucks out with one of the last but certainly not least! sessions TS-5055 (Eclipse and GlassFish).

Hope to see many of you next week!

Barcelona FC did it again... and now they are Triple Champions. It's not just great players, but they are playing incredibly well as a team. Today there are articles about the win all over the web but my favorite picture is this one, by Nick Potts/PA (via Associated Press, seen at NYT). I think it captures very well the team spirit and the personality of Pep Guardiola. Big smiles all over; a sense of a job well done. Go Pep! ... and the same goes for our own GlassFish Team; very proud of being in the same team with all of you!

Last week there was a big change in the Sys-Con's Readers Choice positions; so this weekend I am doing a snapshot (like I did on August 31st) in case I later want to refer to it. Below are the top vote getters for each category as of 2:50pm PT, Sun, Dec 14th, 2008.

All GlassFish and Friends projects are on the first position except for Hudson (behind IBM's Rational Functional Tester) and OpenSSO (behind IBM's DataPower Security Gateway). If you have opinions, you can make your vote count.

I have very fond memories of learning to program in Prolog, having learned it from Philippe Roussel while he was visiting Universidad Simon Bolivar. Prolog is a logic language and it was a good mind-strecher after the traditional algorithmic languages.

That's why the series by Hulles showing how to write a Prolog Module for NetBeans 6.1 made me smile (thanks for the tip Charles). Check it out, from Part 0: About the Project to Part 8: Creating an NBM.

So, a toast to Prolog, Philippe, Jorge, all the other USB folks... and to NetBeans! :-)

The NY Times Magazine sometimes has very interesting articles. This week it included The Music Man, a piece on Rick Rubin, a very influential music producer that was named co-head of Columbia Records earlier this year. The music industry is in trouble and Rubin's charter is to rejuvenate it. Some excerpts from the article... Reporting on some focus groups with some college students ... a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that it might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth On priorites... The most important thing we have to do now is to get the art right...

On the challenges facing the music industry and Columbia...

... we will have the best record company in the industry, but ... we might have the best dinosaur.... until the paradigm shifts, it's going to be a declining business...

Other bits from the article worth mentioning: he started a "word of mouth" department, is a fan of The Beatles (like everybody else?), and I learned about Paul Potts ([YouTube], [WebSite]).

Overall, an article worth reading. Some of the comments about the music industry remind me a bit about the software industry (but there are a number of key differences), and some of the visionary in Rick reminds me of Jonathan :-)

I mostly blog at The Aquarium but that format is only useful for short entries. Every now and then I want / need to write longer pieces, so I'm resurrecting this blog for those cases. Now I only need to find the time to do the writing!