Day 2 of JavaOne.

I managed to attend all the sessions possible yesterday and they were pretty good. I started with the session on Tigers, Mustangs and Dolphins, which I was most relieved to find was not just a repeat of Graham Hamilton's general session presentation. There was a lot more detail of the features being considered for Mustang and Dolphin, and an explantion of the new release schedule. Next up was the great Programming Puzzlers session with Josh Bloch and Neil Gafter. This is the 4th time I've been to this session and I find it a somewhat masochist experience. I consider myself to be a pretty fair programmer, but the puzzles they come up with really tax your mind trying to work out what would happen and, more importantly, why. Essentially you need your mind to have a complete copy of the Java Language Spec (the JVM spec would also be useful) and to work exactly like a compiler. No easy feat, and I won't reveal how many of the puzzles I got right (since it's rather embarassing). After this it was Files from Mars which covered how Java was used in the Mars Rover project (sadly, Java did not make it into the Rover that went to Mars. That's still a proof of concept). Lastly, I went to a session on 3D visualisation, but I was beginning to get geek overload and didn't make it to the end of the session.

After that it was time for more of the other side of JavaOne: partying. We had a team dinner and then ended up at Jillian's at the Sun Develeoper Connection party until they threw us out at the outrageously early time of 11.30 (felt just like being back in the UK where pubs close at 11pm).

This morning was Scott's general session address. Very, very poor organisation for this. The schedule said 8am start, so lot's of people turned up and ended up queuing like the day before. It's fair enough that there are a lot of people to get into the venue and that takes time. What is not acceptable is the fact that they didn't even appear to start letting people in until 8.30am. The organisers need to do a way better job than this; it gives Sun and JavaOne a bad reputation for this. It also meant that Scott's address went over time and actually over-ran the start of the first technical sessions. I didn't see all of Scott's address as I had to go and do some admin work for my presentation tomorrow.

Let's hope the timekeeping gets better.

Day one of JavaOne. I figured I'd arrive a bit early to get settled before the start of the first plenary session (apparently, we're not supposed to refer to it as a keynote). The queue went all the way from Moscone back to the Metreon centre and then round the corner back towards third street. I figured since the queue was back to my hotel (the Marriott) there was no point in leaving until the queue started moving.

As you'd expect the session started late. Jonathan Schwartz brought on a bunch of people to talk about different Java things, the best of which to me, was the fact that the Blu-Ray disc group were using Java for the user interface part of their system. This basically means that every Blu-Ray DVD system that ships will have a JVM in it. There were some other announcements like project glassfish, which is the open source (under the CDDL) version of Sun's App server. What impact this has remains to be seen. The other significant thing is that we've finally decided to tidy up the Java naming, which means no more 2. Instead of Java 2 Standard Edition we now have Java SE, and with the Mustang release we'll drop the .0, so it'll be Java SE 6.

Graham Hamilton revealed some interesting things that might go into Mustang and Dolphin. I'm hoping the session this afternoon will provide more detail.

I managed to get to the NetBeans day; even though I was only 45 minutes late, all I missed was some of the registration and the free lunch. The highlight of this event was the demonstration of the Matisse project for simplifying GUI development. Having written a number of GUI applications I know how difficult it is to do layout and get it to look right and to get it to look right when the window gets resized and so on. Matisse provides a GUI editor where you drag and drop components into the builder window, apply constraints graphically and let the tool do all the hard work. Seriously, seriously cool. The demo showed the creation of an MP3 player which looked a lot like iTunes, all done in the space of about 5 minutes. It also included some really neat 3D CD selection which was all written in Java2D. The project is being made available on java.net under the project name Joplin (you'll need a java.net login to access this).

I had hoped to attend the usual pre-JavaOne fireside chat, but my hopes were dashed due to being a Speaker. The fireside chat is only open to Alumni, which presumably means people who've been to JavaOne before. Despite this being my 4th JavaOne I was politely refused admission by the security people for not having a badge that said Alumni. "That's because I'm a speaker, they don't have badges that say, Alumni Speaker, it wouldn't fit on the badge". This still didn't work and even consulting with the registration people couldn't resolve this in my favour. Apparently, Sun has changed the rules relating to the people who fall into the intersection of staff and alumni and speakers. I have to say I'm disappointed by this.

One of the things I love most about JavaOne is the networking; not of the ethernet and TCP/IP variety, but seeing people you haven't seen in a while, catching up and usually having a beer. Even before the conference has started I've been bumping into people I know on the streets around Moscone.

As would be expected the day before JavaOne life is rather busy at the moment and I find myself, once again, sitting in a hotel room, surrounded by bits of computer, trying to get my demo finished (and working) for my session next week. (Shameless plug: TS-8601, Java Technology and Smart-Dust: Building Intelligent Sensor Networks, 2.45pm Wednesday, 29th June). I've been working with the people from Sun Labs, many of whom I got to meet for the first time on Friday, and I think this should be fun.

I'm going to try to get to the NetBeans day, but I have to drive to San Francisco and, as it's the SF Pride weekend, I imagine traffic is likely to be quite heavy. I actually went out for dinner in San Francisco last night as the local anarchists in Palo Alto had scheduled a riot on University Avenue for 6pm and I didn't want to get caught up in that. This struck me as rather odd, as I sat in StarBucks yesterday morning having my triple grande latte breakfast and reading the paper. The time of the demonstration had been announced in advance: organised anarchists. Isn't that an oxymoron?

More tomorrow from the 10th anniversary Java celebrations.

Oh dear.

I went to see the latest (and thankfully last) Star Wars film yesterday. What a serious disappointment; two and a half hours of some of the most serious wooden acting and terrible dialogue I've seen recently. Ewan McGregor is a great actor in my opinion and has some great credits to his name. This is most definitely not one of them. About the only time where he showed any ability was when he kicked General Grievous (where do they get these names?) and hurt himself. No matter how much CGI they put in it really didn't make this anything like a good film. When compared to the first Star Wars film they really are galaxies apart.

However, on Sunday we went to see U2 at Twickenham stadium. This was an excellent event; not maybe the best concert I've ever been to, but seriously good and seriously loud. When we first arrived the second warm-up act were playing (Athlete, I think). I thought they were rubbish, but this may have something to do with the sound quality which was shocking - just a whole lot of crashing guitar sound and barely audible singing. When U2 started playing I was a bit concerned that the sound quality wasn't much better, but by the end of the concert when they played Vertigo for the second time (not sure they really needed to do that given the number of great songs they could have played) I was actually hoping they'd turn the volume up. Thankfully my hearing had returned to normal by lunchtime on Monday. There was one other real "highlight" to this event. Obviously, no cans or glass bottles were allowed inside the stadium, but there were plastic bottles of beer on sale. Some moron standing in front of us decided it would be funny to throw a half full bottle of beer as far as he could into the crowd. Yeah, like that's really funny when it hits you on the head. The security guys spotted the bottle, but not the thrower and by the time they looked where he was, he'd moved out of the way. He returned later to continue drinking with his friends. Then, when U2 played One everyone got out there cigarette lighters (or switched on the light on their mobile phone - this really is taking technology too far). Mr moron decided that he'd set light to a piece of cardboard and wave that around. Needless to say, this instantly attracted the attention of two security men who told him to put it out. He might have got away with it if he'd been apologetic, but no, he had to start giving them attitude. The effect of which was six very large security men piled on top of him and 'escorted' him from the venue allowing him to hear the remaining 40 minutes of the concert from the car park.

Tomorrow I leave for the US ready for JavaOne next week. I have a session on Wednesday afternoon on Java and Smart-Dust (Room 104, 2.45pm) Please come along as this should be a fun session with some interesting demos I've spent the last couple of weeks working on.

The problem with travelling so much is it takes up so much time. The other problem is that network access is very limited (non-existent on planes unless you're flying on some Lufthansa or Emirates routes), expensive in airports and prohibitively expensive in hotels ($25 per day for 512kb access, I pay less than that a month for 2Mb broadband!) Add to this the fact that they want me to work when I get somewhere and the net effect is it's been waaay too long since my last blog entry.

So what have I been up to I hear everyone ask (or at least the ten or so people who'll read my blog).

In May I reached a fairly big milestone in life: my 40th birthday. Given that the average life expectancy in the UK for a man is 78 this would mean I'm now officially past the half way mark and therefore it's all downhill from here. Of course, a lot of people say life begins at 40, although I suspect that that is spread by people who've past 40 and want to convince those under 40 they're not past it. Anyway, I spent my birthday in Tuscanny, courtesy of my girlfriend Elaine who organised for us to stay at a villa which also ran a cooking school. Very relaxed, great food, great wine and I finally know how to make gnochi. We also spent the weekend in Florence and went up the leaning tower of Pisa before returning home.

The next day I left for Bangalore in India where we had the last TechDay event of this financial year. It had been a while since I'd been to India and the enthusiasm of developers there hasn't diminished one bit. 2200 people turned up and it was a packed and enjoyable two days. I did one presentation on Solaris 10, focusing on DTrace and zones. The presentation was an hour long and I spent another hour aftewrwards answering a lot of in-depth technical questions, many of which really stretched my knowledge. The travel was pretty brutal as there is no direct flight from Heathrow to Bangalore. I ended up going via Chennai (or Madras as it used to be known). This wasn't too bad on the way out, but on the way back my evening flight that was supposed to leave Bangalore at 9.30pm didn't leave until 11.45pm. I'd booked a hotel in Chennai since the connecting flight didn't leave until 8am the following morning. This is the last time I trust a website that says, "conveniently located for the airport", as this one was a 40 minute drive (even at 1am). Needless to say I only ended up in the hotel for about 5 hours. The funniest thing about the delay in Bangalore was that this happened to be the day of the FA cup final in the UK. Due to the time difference the game was on while I was in the airport. All the monitors that were used to display the flight departures got changed to show the football, so you had to guess when your flight might be leaving. There we were, in the middle of the penalties, Arsenal ahead by one, two more to shoot. What do they do? Switch to adverts!! Talk about an unnatural break.

Having survived India and eaten a lot of great Indian food it was off to Russia for developer events in Moscow and St Petersburg. Great turnout in both cities, I think we had over 500 people in Moscow and about 300 in St Petersburg. Again, very keen developers with lots of great questions. When we were in St Petersburg we went out with some of the people from the Sun office who took us to a local micro-brewery. Very easy to drink too much beer here. I turned up at the airport to get my flight home and the man checking passports spent a lot of time looking at my passport and checking the four Russian visas in my passport very carefully. Eventually he looked at me and said, "Your visa has expired". When I had submitted my visa application I'd put the right dates on it and submitted all the appropriate paperwork. The Russian embassy, in their infinite wisdom, had ignored the dates on the form and the paperwork for St Petersburg and simply issued the visa based on the Moscow part of the trip. Stupid me hadn't though to check that, so the visa had expired two days earlier. No problem in the newly capitalist post-Soviet era. For the princely (and frankly outrageous) sum of ninety US dollars (various currencies and credit cards accepted) I could get my two day extension. Faced with a choice of paying up or spending time in a gulag, I paid up.

After that we had a few events in the UK talking to financial institutions about latest Java technologies. Thankfully the travel for that was using London public transport, which can actually be quite good so long as you don't want to travel at peak times.

This week and next I'm preparing for JavaOne. More on that later.