Friday April 24, 2009

A lot of stuff is happening these days, so here are some quickies... is this what people use Twitter for?

• My brother is visiting me these days. He's in town for the MySQL conference, where he presented his work on memcached. He's also a huge fan of Solaris, so I'm now running OpenSolaris on my desktop machine. It's fun to see how user friendly the (always powerful) operating system has gotten. And his blog entries like this and this take me back to my first job at Sun - working on the Solaris debugger UI. Good memories.


• Yesterday was "Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day", so I brought my kids down to the Santa Clara campus. They had a great time. After "working" in an office while I was on my laptop, we walked around the campus, they met my boss, and I'm sure the highlight for them was having lunch in the Sun cafeteria - which even had a special kids menu for the day. In our walk through some of the buildings we came across a pool table where they got to try pool for the first time.


• I had the honor of being interviewed on the PlanetCast a week or two ago. That's the third episode of the podcast, but do yourself a favor and listen to the first two - with John Rose on the DaVinci Machine Project, and James Gosling on Java and JavaFX. I've had to drive down to the Valley almost every day the last couple of weeks for meetings, so the timing of my discovery of the PlanetCast couldn't have been better!


• My friend Carl Quinn just got his Tesla - an all electric super sporty car. He's waited two years or so since he ordered it and they're just now coming off the assembly line. When we got together for a podcast recording session Wednesday night he brought the car, and took each of us for a spin around the block. Wow! It felt like like getting a ride in a fighter jet - but while the acceleration force was amazing, unlike a jet the all electric motor is unbelievably silent. I can't wait for cars like these to get to mass market! There are some pictures of our rides on Jackie's blog, and Joe has a lot more pictures and even some video.


• The Ruby support in NetBeans 6.7 is coming along nicely. Erno just announced that preliminary Ruby 1.9 support is in the builds now. More details on that in his blog entry. And in another blog entry he's describing work he and Martin did recently to improve the type inference support in NetBeans. Here's some Ruby 1.9 goodness:
  
  


• Finally, we're using JIRA as the issue tracker for the JavaFX project, so I've been using Cubeon for NetBeans a lot recently to handle querying and updating issues from within the IDE. I don't have Eclipse envy, but I'm impressed by their Mylyn project which looks both nice and useful, so I definitely welcome task oriented flow into NetBeans as well. In addition to connecting to repositories like Bugzilla, JIRA and Trac, Cubeon adds some basic support for tasks (e.g. when you "activate" one task, all breakpoints you set in the debugger get grouped and associated with this task and so on), so I'll be playing more with that. I'm using a daily snapshot rather than the most recent published version, and I'm pretty happy with it. I'll probably have more to say about this in another blog entry as I get more experience with it.