It's Saturday morning and I've made it to Santiago in Chile. The last couple of weeks have been spent in New Zealand and Australia for the Sun Developer days. Once again, the enthusiasm of the developers knows no bounds and we had a very enjoyable set of events in Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne. Having presented on performance tuning, the future of Java, Sun's open source strategy, Solaris 10 and Java and DTrace my voice completely packed up on Thursday afternoon and I now sound like Russell Crowe. I'm hoping that a couple of days rest will see it's full recovery since I have a packed week in Brazil for the TechDays and Solaris day.

I have to say I really like Sydney, it's one of only a handful of places I could really see myself moving to (others include Vancouver and Calgary). Staying around Circular Quay is a bit like staying in Times Square in New York or Leicester Square in London, you're right in the heart of all the action. Aside from all the presenting we still found time to relax; the trip to Doyles for dinner was a particular treat. Getting a water taxi there and back and watching the sunset over the Sydney skyline reminded me, once again, why I enjoy my job so much.

The other thing that this trip has done is give me some real quality, recreational coding time. I've done some more work on project DAVE and have now integrated the Java DTrace provider so I can trace methods in running Java applications and annotate the graphs with timing data and number of method calls. Really quite revealling to find out what happens when you make a method call to one of the standard libraries. I've got loads more ideas for how to extend this. Having demonstrated DAVE to some of the audiences in Australia and New Zealand I really need to figure out, when I get back, how to release this for general consumption.

The flight from Auckland to Santiago yesterday was far less interesting than I thought it might be. I'd been warned that going over Antarctica (actually we skirted round the edge) could be pretty rough due to the winds there. The flight was ten and a quarter hours; I slept for seven of them so if it was rough, I didn't notice. LAN Chilie impressed me as an airline, plenty of legroom, good reclining seats and video on demand. It's the little things in life.

The weirdest thing about yesterday was arriving in Chile before I'd left Auckland. Not time travel, but an artifact of crossing the international date line. The best bit of that was getting in early enough to go to my favorite restaurant in Santiago, Donde Augusto for the world's best crab pie.

Today it's back to the airport once again to cross the Andes to arrive in Rio. I'm wondering just how many visits to a Churascaria I can pack into six days.