TEERA 2.0: Vancouver Sun

Today's the last day of the pavilion. So I spent most of the morning checking out some cool toys.

Start with the biggest toy, Sun's Project Blackbox!

 I took a tour inside the black box. The thing that I found most impressive is the articulate design of cooling system - each rack is separated with a water-cooled heat displacer. The servers are also racked sideways. The air can then circulate clockwise inside the box. HEPA filters incoming air and a dehumidifier extracts moisture from the air. Absolutely insane!

Perrone Robotics - Remote control helicopter, created for airborne surveys and terrain mapping. It has laser radar unit to scan terrain to resolution as detail as half an inch. It runs Java RTS (Real-Time System) on Solaris 10 on a Intel single-board computer. The data is aligned with GPS and pitch/yaw/roll data.

Controlled and programmed via remote device, this robot can sing and dance.  It also runs Java. 

This robotic arms can draw picture (simulated on the desktop hosting application) very precisely and astonishing speed.

Well..enough pictures of robots! This is me and Martin. In the tank is is his submarine, SONIA AUV. Martin will be on the stage with James Gosling tomorrow for Duke Choice award.

Greg Murray, JMaki's head chef. I was in his session on mashup application building strategies and blueprints. A new cool thing I learned from this session - how to do cross-site Ajax call with Server proxy pattern.

Another well known figure, Tor Norbye. He's delivering presentation on JRuby plug-in he develops for Netbeans IDE.

Here comes an interesting part, the JavaOne party in the evening.


Time to get heavy metal

There's a boxing ring here, but most of the fights are on the ring side tables. We, developers, don't like violence!

XBox 360 booth is really popular, quite a long line up there.

 
I really don't know what this thing called, if you do, please let me know. *Update: it's a Segway

 Here comes the main theme of the event - The Battle Bots!

WWF style cage in the middle of dining hall, on the big screen is the next round fighter
 

This area is supposed to be the "locker room" for fighters. hmm....and what's R2D2 doing here?

These Battle Bots look dumb on TV but actually pretty fun. I enjoyed it a lot.

After a tied match, the announcers decide to let the "Grinder Girl" decides who's the winner.

The (beautiful) Grinder Girl made quite an entrance!

And....argggggggh!! She started 'grinding' herself! Explicit violence, parental advisory is advised.

Before I left the party to the session on "Web 3.0 - semantic web" (the buzz word lives on), I spotted Rich Green and Simon Phipps battling on the stage.