I spent last week in Antwerp at the great Javapolis conference. It's really quite amazing to see the size and quality of this conference when you think that it's all organised by people who don't do this as their day-job, they do it in their 'spare' time. Congratulations and thanks to Stefan and all the other organisers of this event.

I did some demos during the Sun keynote along with my colleague Angela Caicedo. We used the Sun SPOTs to show some cool uses of Java with things like Angela's dataglove controlled 3D sudoku game and good old Looking Glass and my SPOT powered tag playing robots. Thankfully my demo worked without any hitches, which considering I was still tuning the code until the small hours of the morning the night before I left, I was was very happy about.

I also helped out with some hands on labs, so didn't get to attend as many sessions as I'd hoped. One that I did enjoy was Neil Gafter's talk on continuations. You can watch this yourself here. This is stirring up quite a lot of discussion amongst a number of Java people. I need to think about this a bit more, but I certainly like the principal of the idea.

Antwerp is a noce place except for one major flaw: the one way traffic system. I decided to drive to Antwerp using the Eurotunnel so also had to drive when in Antwerp. Basically the one way system seems to make it almost impossible to get to certain places. On the second day I left for the conference venue and decided to take what I thought would be the most direct route (having failed to do this on day one). I carefully looked at the map and planned exactly which way to go. Sadly the one thing the map really needed was missing, i.e. which roads go in which direction. I drove for 20 minutes (the conference centre was only ten minutes drive from the hotel) until I found myself going past the hotel again!

Oh well, it's almost the end of the year so time to start thinking about turkey, stuffing and Christmas pud.