The "no fluff, just stuff" conference has been around for a while, but until now it's always been in the US. The first European event is happening August 29th-31st, here in London; more details can be found here. I'll be presenting on JavaFX and in keeping with the theme of the conference I'll be digging into the syntax of JavaFX script as well as the libraries and tools for developing applications.

If you're interested let me know and I can provide a promotion code that will get you £100 off the registration fee. Hopefully see you there.

Yesterday we held an event at the Customer Briefing Centre in our London City office. This was extremely well attended, to the point that we were probably on the verge of breaking fire regulations. A hundred and ten people in a room that really should have held a maximum of ninety and I was very grateful that the rather temperamental air conditioning decided to work. There seemed to be a lot of interest in both Java FX Script and Real Time Java. Now that the real time JVM is available running on top of Solaris (rather than the bespoke systems that were used originally) I'll definitely be digging into this with the idea of using it in some kind of interesting demo, possibly also involving the Sun SPOTs. Sadly, the demo gods were not looking favourably on us yesterday as my Minority Report Sun SPOT demo decided not to work. I think Matt had a harder time than me given that he needed to reboot his laptop during his presentation and did his best to fill the void whilst the screen was blank.

In the afternoon I went over to Imperial College to attend their Inaugral Workshop at the Centre for Pervasive Sensing. This was very interesting, as I'd not attended a proper University lecture in a long, long time. Some of the work went rather over my head, but I did find a lot of what was presented fascinating, especially the work on power scavenging for small wireless sensor devices using all types of movement, including someone just walking around or moving their arms. Maybe it's time to start thinking about going back to university.

That's a great analogy for just how useful British Airways customer service and baggage tracing is.

The good news is I finally got my bag back! I got home from Malta on Saturday morning and checked, once again, the baggage tracing web site. "Tracing continues, please check back later". A few more futile calls to their telephone number and I just accepted that I'd have to continue my wait.

At 11.15 that evening I was tucked up in bed when the phone rang. I just got to it when it stopped ringing. Back to bed. Two minutes later, the phone rings again. Again, I get to it just as it stops ringing. Whatever. In the morning I get up and find a card has been put through the door telling me that BA tried to deliver my bag last night and getting no response have left it with a neighbour. Of course, at 11.15 they couldn't find many people awake so it's half way down the road.

Like I say, as useful as a trapdoor in a rowing boat. BA say they'll deliver baggage until ten at night. Well, 11.15 is definitely after ten pm. If the delivery monkey bothered to ring my phone twice, why didn't he try ringing the doorbell? To make things even more ridiculous, I checked the web site and it's still saying "tracing continues, please check back later".

Still, according to the BBC news I'm not alone in having to wait for my luggage. The fact that BA needed volunteers to help with the backlog of luggage speaks volumes for their organisational skills.

The first Sun Java Developers conference in Malta last week was a huge success. In fact, so much so, that I would say that it was the world's largest Java conference, ever. Obviously the fact that we had 305 people attend means that in absolute terms JavaOne, JavaChina and the recent Indian TechDays still hold the record for number. However, think of it a different way. According to the last census (about 18 month ago) the population of Malta is 404,079. That means that one in every 1,325 people in the population turned up for this event. Extrapolate this to the UK (based on the number from the Office for National Statistics) and you'd have an audience of just under 45 and a half thousand people. I think that we'll definitely be doing more events in Malta.

I had the 'pleasure' of flying out of Terminal 4 at Heathrow on Wednesday last week and I was really, really glad I was flying Air Malta. Terminal 4 was complete and utter chaos with, at a rough guess, over a thousand people queuing up outside the terminal, since a number of incoming BA flights had had to be canceled the previous day due to the security alert and evacuation. Frankly, had I been flying BA I'd have just gone back home again. As it was I was able to get into the terminal with only minimal hassle. Getting through security was actually quicker than normal since there were less passengers flying that morning.

Thankfully I don't have any travel planned until September which means I can relax a bit.

"...just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?" Lyrics from Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. The words are very apt for my morning, although I wish the title were. British Airways customer service is not going up in my estimation at the moment. I did finally manage to speak to someone at their baggage tracing centre yesterday, who confirmed the details they already had and informed me that one bag had been located. I'm now waiting to see if, and when this will be delivered. Since the other bag is still shown as "Tracing in progress" I have been trying to call again today and all I get is the message saying we're so busy we can't even put you in a queue to wait for a representative. I tried phoning their dedicated customer service line and got the same result.

I'm leaving for Malta tomorrow where we'll be running our first Developer Day there. If you're in Malta and in the IT business please come along as we've lots of interesting things to talk about. Sadly I won't be doing as many demos as I'd planned unless there's some kind of divine intervention and BA manage to find and return my bag today, since that has all my Sun SPOTs in it.

British Airways are really not "The World's Favorite Airline" at the moment (a phrase they felt was accurate since more people flew with them, rather than people actually liking them). We returned from Barcelona on Saturday and whilst we made it, our bags did not. I like to think I'm an understanding person; I know from time to time these things happen and if you fly enough sooner or later a bag goes astray. However, according to the Sunday Times magazine I read recently BA looses more bags than any other large European airline. Even that would be bearable if they had something resembling customer service to deal with these problems. Here's what BA do for you:

Having discovered our bags didn't make it to Heathrow queue up at the baggage information desk. Wait. Wait. Wait some more (there were a lot of people from all manner of destinations who didn't have their bags). The poor people from Vancouver had been waiting two hours for their bags, which were coming out four at a time with ten minute breaks between them. Fill in a customs declaration and give the details of what type of bags had gone missing. Receive a baggage file reference number.

Go home and check on the internet to see what is happening with our bags through the optimistically named 'Baggage Tracer Service'. Until recently that was simply reporting 'Tracing continues. Please check back later'. Since this morning the load on the system has obviously exceeded its capacity and now it either times out or, if you're lucky enough to get the form, the results are an internal server error.

Attempt repeatedly to phone the Tracing Lost Baggage line. Most of the time this gives you a recorded message that BA are experiencing "extremely high call volume, please call back later", i.e. you can't even get in a queue. If you do manage to sneak in you can hold for thirty minutes without talking to anyone, presumably with the idea that attrition through frustration will lower the call load.

This would seem to me to be a text book example of how not to keep your customers happy and get repeat business. Certainly given the way I've been treated by BA over the last six months I'll be trying to use any other airline wherever possible (with the possible exception of Aeroflot, who are even worse if you can believe it).

The Barcelona metro system caught me out yesterday on my way back to the hotel. Getting from the hotel to the venue for The Server Side Java Symposium was easy, just buy a one price (very cheap) ticket and go straight there with no changes. What caused me problems was the barrier to get into the metro on the way back. I put my ticket in, the machine read it, and spat it back out. The arrows illuminated to show acceptance, but the barrier wouldn't move. I was confused. The ticket was valid and had been accepted. Why couldn't I get through? Thankfully a very nice Spanish lady set me straight by pointing out that the ticket reader was on the left of the barrier, not the right, so I was trying to go through the wrong barrier. Duh! According to the article on Wikipedia 8-15% of the general population are left handed so why put the ticket reader on the left? Of course you could argue that people will be holding bags, etc in the right hand so the left side makes sense. What really doesn't make sense to me is why it's not consistent. If it was always on the right or always on the left that would be sensible, but apparently randomly choosing a side is bound to cause problems.

We're only a few days away from an almost complete ban on smoking in public places in the UK., which suits me fine as I'm not a smoker. Although much of Europe is still very tolerant of smoking, places like aircraft and metros are most definitely smoke-free due to safety, rather than health reasons. I was on the metro in Barcelona this morning when I saw a sign that showed the fines for travelling without a ticket and smoking. For not having a ticket the fine is €40, which seems reasonable to discourage people from fare dodging. For smoking? €30.05. Thirty Euros and five cents? Who thought it would make sense to add that extra five cents? I'm guessing that if people do get fined on the spot most of the time the fine is a nice round thirty Euros.

It really does amaze me that there are times when a decision gets made like this and nobody realises how ridiculous it is. No doubt it was a committee that made the decision.

I arrived at Zurich airport this morning and, being in some sort of satellite terminal, needed to take a monorail type train to the main arrival hall. This was really quite sureal. During the 45 second trip rather than playing something bland and unnoticeable (like Kenny G) we were treated to tinkling cow bells, birds chirping and cows mooing.

I wonder what they'll play when I get to Barcelona tomorrow...

I was in Dusseldorf on Monday evening to talk at an event called Mobile Monday. This was an evening event with short presentations from various company's (Nokia, Vodafone, Siemens, etc) and then discussion over a few beers about what was happening in this market. I talked about what Sun are doing for the future of mobile Java explaining the Mobile Services Architecture, MIDP 3.0 and Java FX Mobile (as just announced at JavaOne). There was some lively discussion afterwards, especially around what impact the iPhone might have and competing technologies like scripting languages. All good fun.

It's been a while since I've been to Germany so I wasn't quite ready for the taxi ride from the airport. I got into my Mercedes E class taxi (yep, that's just a normal run-of-the-mill taxi, not a limo) and off we go. Watching the speedo hit 160kmph I remembered that the good old autobahn has lots of sections where there's no speed limit. Apparently the recommendation of 130kmph doesn't hold much sway with taxi drivers.

Next week I'm off to Zurich for Jazoon where I'm doing a Sun SPOT presentation on Monday afternoon and then Tuesday evening it's off to Barcelona for The Server Side Java Symposium. I'll be doing the Sun keynote demos along with Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart. I'm really looking forward to going to Barcelona, as it's been a long time since I was last there and there's my all time favorite tapas bars, Txapella. I'm just wondering how many times I can go there in the three days we'll be there.

I've been lucky enough to stay in a hotel where I've looked out of the window and seen the Eiffel Tower. I've also stayed in a hotel with a view of the Chrysler Building, and another with a view of a Roman Palace. Last week my hotel had a view of all of these at the same time! In addition I could see the castle of Camelot and a host of other large hotels. Las Vegas really is a unique place and I really can't make up my mind whether I like it or not. I guess the big attractions, other than the ability to "visit" places like Paris, ancient Rome, Lake Como all in a few steps, is the gambling and the shows. I'm definitely not a successful gambler and left Vegas about $80 poorer than I arrived. Since I almost never seemed to be ahead in terms of the money I put into the machine (tables are way, way too expensive for me), it just seemed like I was paying money for the privilege of pressing a few buttons (something I get paid for when I'm in the office). I did go to a show and saw the Cirque de Soleil production at the Bellagio of "O". I'd wanted to see this since last time I was in Vegas when it was very new and impossible to get tickets for. Tickets were still in short supply and appeared to be outrageously expensive. The show was good, but having seen Cirque de Soleil something like six times now in different shows it wasn't what I'd call outstanding. Cirque de Soleil does seem to be incredibly popular, as witnessed by the fact that there are four different productions on the Las Vegas strip at the moment. I also had dinner at Tao's in the Venetian (where I was staying). Apparently one of the hottest nightspots in Vegas at the moment (the queue on Friday night would seem to reflect this). Frankly I thought the food was nothing to write home about, although the prices certainly were.

Ah well, back to the reality of Technology Evangelism again.

I'm in Las Vegas this week at the Server Side Java Symposium. Having a software coference in Vegas has the obvious attractions, although I've never found gambling to be terribly appealing since I never seem to win. I'm guessing there's around 550-600 people at the event, all of whom seme to be hard-core enterprise application people. I did part of the Sun keynote yesterday demonstrating some cool technologies around the good old (sorry, new) Sun SPOTs.

Getting to Las Vegas was actually one of the worst travel experiences I've had in a long time.

I was on the direct Virgin flight from London Gatwick to Las Vegas. Security was the usual nightmare (I'd forgotten that a lot of charter flights leave from Gatwick making this seriously hard work), but I'd arrived in plenty of time to account for this. The flight was scheduled to leave at 10.45. At 10.30 the waiting area at the gate was absolutely packed (the flight was full with nearly 400 people on it), but nobody had been allowed on the plane. I was waiting outside when an an annoucement was made that the next update regarding departure would be made at 11. Apparently there was some technical problem with the plane. Back to the departure lounge. At 11 I was told the next update would be at 12 (obviously a recursive update algorithm). At 12 I was told a change of plane was required and departure would be 1530. Inconvenient, but still not too bad I thought. Refreshment vouchers were provided and the Priority Pass lounge provided power, comfy seats and free drinks to get some work done. At 3pm the departure time changed to 1630 due to air traffic control delaying the transfer of our new plane from Heathrow. Finally just before 4pm the call was made to go back to the gate. Up to this point everything appeared to have been done to resolve an unavoidable problem. However, this is where things really went wrong.

I joined the lengthy queue of people at the gate and waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually after about 20 minutes of no movement an announcement was made that, in order to board, a new passenger manifest was required to check everyone off. This would be arriving shortly. After another 5 minutes we were told the manifest was being printed. Sadly all they had was a dot matrix printer so after another 10 minutes we were told they'd only printed out up to the letter H. People with names starting A through H could board, the rest would... wait. Chaos ensued as the A through Hs made their way to the front around the lesser I through Zs. After another interminable wait the queue cleared; each passenger had to be checked on the list to see if their seat number had changed due to the different configuration, plus searches, etc, etc. No announcement was made that the rest of us could board but eventually we all did. I'd been lucky enough to get an exit row seat and was told that should still be available as I boarded. I did think this was a rather odd way to put it, since I was going to my seat; ould I find someone already there? What would happen if I did? I took my thankfully vacant seat and was just settling in when someone from Virgin came up to me and said I was in the wrong seat. I showed her my boarding pass, pointed to the seat number and said that I was pretty certain I was in the right seat. "No, this is free seating and I need these seats for a group of people". My response, since I was pretty fed up by now, was, "Well, if this is free seating then surely I'm free to sit here". As you'd expect this didn't win me any points and I was told I was being moved. Would I still get a window seat as requested or would I be in the middle of a row? I was told I had a very nice aisle seat and was lead across the plane, all the way to the back of the plane, back across to the same side I'd been on and then all the way back up the plane to be put in the row right behind where I'd been sitting! I thanked the nice lady from Virgin for my tour of the back of the plane which got chuckles from my fellow passengers and a particularly withering look from the attendant. I really, really had to bite my toungue not to tell her what I really thought. It wasn't over yet though; 60 people had been voluntarily bumped off the plane due to there being less seats and, despite the excrutiating (and it would seem pointless) seat check, the crew couldn't make the list match the number of passengers. All 60 bumped passenger names were read out asking if anyone on the list was present to make themselves known. The flight finally left at 1840, just under eight hours late. In all my travels the only airline to produce a longer delay was Aeroflot. I was simply stunned by the incompetent handling of this situation. After all, it's not like this is a situation that's never happened before and it's not like the ground staff didn't have time to organise the necessary paperwork in advance. I look forward to hearing what Virgin's customer services department have to say about this based in the lengthy essay I wrote on the complaint form during the flight.

Viva Las Vegas!

It's been an incredibly busy few weeks and not getting any less so at least until after Java One. Lot's of very cool and interesting stuff to work on plus, of course, a variety of Tech Days. I was in India a few weeks ago for what was the biggest developer event there ever (and that's saying something). Over 4,000 developers for day one at the venue in Hyderabad and nearly 3,000 more at satellite locations. Very, very busy, millions of questions, but hugely rewarding.

This week it's the Tech Days in London, which for me means I get to sleep at home rather than spending yet more time in a hotel. There's still time to register; there's a NetBeans and Solaris day tomorrow and then two days of packed technical sessions and hands on labs Wednesday and Thursday. We even have James Gosling doing the keynote on day one. What more could you want?

Hopefully I'll see you there.

Software patents are a particularly contentious issue with many large companies being vehemently opposed to the idea, whilst others are spending a lot of time and effort to patent everything they can think of.

Last week there was considerable discussion about a patent that Microsoft applied for. This patent was for an "object test bench", which was included in the Visual Studio product. Unfortunately, this idea had been used previously in the excellent BlueJ project which provides a simplified IDE for teaching new students the ideas of OO programming using Java. You can read the full story here.

Thankfully, according to Dan Fernandez, who is Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio Express, Microsoft will be withdrawing their application.

It's great to see that sometimes plain common sense can prevail.

A couple of things recently have brought home to me the importance of identity, or more specifically proof of identity.

Before Christmas I flew to Scotland for a JavaUK event at the Sun facility in Linlithgow. I arrived at the airport, used an automated check-in machine, passed through security and boarded the plane. At no point was I ever asked to prove my identity. I didn't even need to use a credit card to get my boarding pass, just the e-ticket reference number was enough. Whilst I realise that this was an internal UK flight, it still seems somewhat ludicrous to me with the hightened security to prevent terrorist attacks that I was not required to prove who I was.

The second thing was more serious. Over the Christmas break I received a letter from my credit card company saying they were concerned that some transactions made with my card were fraudulent. It turns out that somewhere my card was skimmed, meaning that my credit card identity was stolen. Here in the UK we've switched to chip-and-pin in an attempt to eliminate this possibility. The idea is that, rather than using a signature, which is written on the card and therefore relatively easy to copy, the PIN is stored in a chip on the card which cannot be retrieved unless using secure technology. Whoever skimmed my credit card realised this and used it in the States where it seems anyone can use a credit card with almost no checks on proof of identity (many, many times I've used a credit card in the US and been given the card back before I've signed the receipt). What impressed me most about this was how quickly the credit card company brought this to my attention. After only two transactions, something must have been flagged as a further three transactions were rejected. The software used to analyse spending patterns must be very sofisticated, as I don't have a 'normal' pattern (recent months would should legitimate transactions in at least nine different countries).

Biometrics should be the answer to this, although at one office where I worked they were installing finger print sensors for door access one of my colleagues raised the question of, "Do they still work if the thumb is no longer attached to the hand?"