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Thursday January 17, 2008

Where is Tom?

Now breaking a long hiatus in blogging is my announcement that I will be leaving Sun. I have a new opportunity which will challenge me to grow in new directions and I intend to seize the chance.

I have really enjoyed working with everyone on our new OpenJDK Community. OpenJDK is a huge project and we've made great progress since announcing the plan to open source Java. Of course there is more to do, but that's completely understandable when one changes the engines on a 6 million line-of-code airplane -- in flight.

I'll still be here for a little while and I am nevertheless planning to attend FOSDEM 2008 and will continue the to help organize the Free Java Meeting.

Where am I? You can always find me from my personal web page tom.marble.name which has pointers to wherever I'm blogging, etc.

And since F/LOSS will continue to be an important element of my professional (and personal) life I will still be "here" in the Free world. So it's not au revoir, it's à bientôt!

Posted by tmarble ( Jan 17 2008, 03:29:16 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [16]

Friday February 09, 2007

Chocolat Belge

One of the fringe benefits I'm looking forward to as part of my my upcoming trip is finding some Belgian Chocolate. When I lived in France one of my favorite shops was Jeff de Bruges but I'm amazed to find they don't actually have any stores in Belgium??

My friends (Belges) Frederic and Colette have recommended Marcolini (39 Place du Grand Sablon) and Neuhaus (Neuhaus Sablon, Rue Lebeau 77, 1000 Brussels). This website is a great example of why I really dislike Flash. I cannot link to the address(es) and, after a few minutes, the site makes Firefox crash

A mystery, however, is that not even David Delabasse can tell me if Musée du Cacao et du Chocolat is worth a visit (or is just a tourist trap). Have you been there?

So what's the big deal anyway? The europeans have this concept of chocolate praliné which is simply outstanding (if you nave never tried this just think of Nutella, only much better). More importantly the quality of the chocolat noir is amazing. For some strange reason americans don't seem to have a taste for this (at least it's very hard to find comparable quality chocolate here in the USA).

If you have any recommendations please let me know! I'm sure that between the moules frites, the biere and le chocolat we will be in a fantastic mood to find diplomatic solutions that harmonize how Java works on all distros!

Posted by tmarble ( Feb 09 2007, 07:14:12 AM CST ) Permalink Comments [4]

Saturday February 03, 2007

Black Belt Candidate

Today I succeeded in passing my red, three stripe belt test and so now I am a Black Belt Candidate. Even thought the test was exhausting it was fun! I had a move in "one step sparring" which involved a take down which the judges appreciated. The board break was a combination two board axe kick followed by breaking two boards by ridge-hand strike.

Now begins an intense six month period of training for the Black Belt test. In addition to having memorized the definition of Tae Kwon Do, the school roles, the school code, the school tenets and a small vocabulary in Korean I now must learn a ninth form as I prepare to demonstrate all of the eight previous forms. Of course I should be able to reproduce any of the previous eight levels of "one step" sparring as well as participate in my second sparring tournament and write an essay.

The August test always takes place outside in a local park. Imagine a humid Minnesota summer day in the hot sun... (a little tricky at the moment as it's -25'C). I can't wait!

Posted by tmarble ( Feb 03 2007, 06:29:13 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [4]