Georgia Pok Guy

I wonder if the honeysuckle is still in bloom ’round Atlanta?

After suffering for the past few days and finally deciding to determine what I actually have, it appears that I picked up the flu out west.  At first I thought it was a cold, but that is more due to my ignorance of flu symptoms.  Now I’ve missed the past two days of work.  Hopefully I’ll be well enough tomorrow to go back in.  I mean, I’ve had this thing since last Thursday, so it should be running its course soon.  The flu can be rather frustrating, because I have had moments where I thought I was getting better, only to have my fever flair up a while later.  Needless to say, it blows being sick.  Especially when there is no one to take care of you.  Here’s to the flu!

I think you could reuse this 1900 McKinley campaign poster in the 2008 presidential election!  Whoever wants it, just photoshop your head over McKinley’s, and you’re good to go!  Just hope people ignore the sailboats and lack of non-whites. 

Somewhat surprisingly, I attended some of the best sessions on Friday, the final day of the conference. There was hardly a soul plying the halls of the Moscone Center, but this worked out well since that meant the sessions were relatively open. I still had to wait quite some time for a computer to check my e-mail, but what are ya gonna do?

The first session I attended was on Java Globalization, which discussed a number of ways to tune one’s program so that it can more easily be released in a foreign country. The topics covered included unicode, effective searching and sorting for foreign languages, case conversion (which can be tricky in some languages), time zones, character encoding (since the OS might not use unicode), and handling currencies. It was a very interesting presentation, and given the increasing interconnectivity of the planet, the topic is quite important from a developer’s standpoint.

The next session I attended presented the Scala programming language, which combines aspects of Object-Oriented and Functional languages. It is interoperable with Java, and can even be compiled into Java bytecode, which is quite nice. You can check out more at scala-lang.org. I might look into it.

My final session was Java Puzzlers. This presented a number of code segments that look correct, but eccentricities in Java mean that the code ends up acting in an unexpected way. After each code segment was presented, the hosts would poll the audience on what they thought the outcome would be (multiple choice, since anything else would take too long). Needless to say, I got all of them wrong. I but I learned some cool things in the process. For instance, with generic Collection objects, you can only add objects of type E, but you can remove objects of any type. Which can cause quite the snafu, if you aren’t careful. It was a really fun session, and the hosts engaged the audience really well. Definitely a great way to end the conference.

Overall, JavaOne was a really good conference. It was extraordinarily well organized. It had some top-notch presenters, who very effectively showcased new Java technologies. The conference also had some so-so sessions, but I’m sure someone ultimately found them useful. Also, Sun encouraged all attendees to rate the sessions on a number of metrics, which I’m sure they aggregate and pour over to improve next year’s conference. I do hope I can go again sometime.

Things are not boding so well here. I think I may have a low level illness. My head sure hurts, and without the aid of alcohol. Someone remind me to pick up some Advil tomorrow on my way out. There truly are few things worse than getting sick far from home.

My physical discomfort aside, the sessions I attended today were hit-and-miss. The first one discussed being productive developing Swing code. This translated into meaning using the Template Pattern, using GUI builders, and using an architecture that allows you to use any GUI builder. Developing Swing code for me has always been a tedious and and disappointing experience. It doesn’t take long for the code to degenerate into something wholly unmanageable. Part of this is the vagaries of inexperience, but also because no one ever taught me how to do it right in the first place. So it was an interesting topic, and I learned a few worthwhile things.

The next session covered NASA’s World Wind. It was a good deal of eye candy, but nothing practical. And, how ironic, the guy was a contractor?

Next came my insanely long lunch, where I hopped on the F Line, which runs on Market, all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf so that I could go to the In-n-Out Burger there. I do enjoy that fine dining establishment, and I would say it is one of my creature comforts. All seems right with the world when I have an In-n-Out burger in my hands. After eating, I stopped a whiles at the northern terminus of Market, there by Embarcadero. I sat in a nice park and read for some time. The sun was really bright, but the weather was nice, so it was an enjoyable way to pass an hour or so.

Upon returning to the Moscone Center, I went to the RubyTooling session, but this proved quite boring, so I tried the one on Blu-ray technology. This also fell flat, so I just surfed the web and went to the bookstore, picking up a book on JavaServer Faces.

I finished off the day at a session on IPTV. This also proved not so great. I was hoping for more technical aspects of the project, but instead we were submitted to a high level overview. My only notes on the session were: “MHP & OCAP built on top of GEM.” Nothing of substance, really.

And then for dinner I had Naan-n-Curry. I feel that the one on 9th & Irving is better than the one on Van Ness, the latter being where I ate tonight. Still, who can say no to Chicken Tikka Masala and a mango lassi? Oh, curse this illness! It’s starting to sour my appreciation for San Francisco and all her glory.

Addendum: Also, I got my picture taken with Duke today.  I’ll need to find a scanner, since they gave me a Polaroid of it…

I really need to start writing these entries earlier in the day.  Curse having fun with my brother!

Today I attended a good number of sessions dealing with web technologies, in particular AJAX.  AJAX seems like a promising little technology.  Unfortunately, the one session I went to that was devoted to AJAX did not cover much, and I was left as much in the dark afterwards as I was beforehand.  I didn’t see the potential really until I attended the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) session later in the day.  There I got to see what AJAX could do in conjunction with Java technology via GWT.  You can produce some really slick web apps using GWT, and the Google team has taken great pains to include lots of Java functionality, such as Javadocs and compile-time errors.  They also really emphasized that the goal of GWT was to create advanced web apps that had the same feel as standard HTML pages for the sake of end-user continuity.  For example, the back button would return you to the previous page without any fuss.  It is definitely something to explore, and I could see using it in the future.  I also attended a session on JSF, AJAX, and Portlets.  The three seem like another promising framework to create web apps, however, the demo given didn’t exactly work, so I didn’t get to see the true potential for the three.

I also attended a session for the upcoming book Effective Java Reloaded.  The central theme was making your Java code as generic as possible.  I learned a few interesting things, like what a Bounded Wildcard is (Collection) and how to do dynamic class casting.  Might be something to pick up when it is published later this year.

Some of the other sessions I attended were pretty much worthless, so the less said about them the better.  JavaOne has some fantastic sessions alongside some really blah ones.  But, really, you can’t win them all.  And for some it turned out the subject was not as interesting as I thought it would be.

The conference was a madhouse today, with some session lines snaking outside the Moscone Center.  Also, they need to expand the male bathrooms, since they are above capacity this week.  The weather was a lot colder today, but I still ate my lunch (lasagna) outside.  Tomorrow I’m thinking about catching the MUNI up to the Fisherman’s Wharf area so I can hit up the In-n-Out Burger.  Good stuff…

I started today off at the keynote presentation.  It was an interesting affair, with giant high definition monitors displaying the speaker(s), which was appreciated since they were about a mile away from me.  The Moscone Center has some huge rooms.  There was a good deal of pomp and fanfare; it reminded me of Apple, only without the spark that Jobs brings to it.  Still, I got to see James Gosling, which was cool.  And when I say I got to see him, I mean from very far away.  He looked to be around an inch tall from where I was sitting.  He was the guy with the beard and the long hair.

A number of really cool things were announced during the keynote speech:

• Java is now fully open source
• A real-time API was released, which looked really cool
• Java FX, which is a new scripting language that enables rapid development, particularly for web applications

I also found out a few other nifty things, such that Blu-ray uses Java with great effect to create more interactive interfaces.  I also liked the central message of the speech, that Java technology can be used as a force to bring about positive change in the world.  It was a message that resonated with me, and got me thinking that a difference can be made without joining the Peace Corp. 

After the keynote speech I attended 3 sessions.  The first covered Groovy, which looks really cool.  It seems to be Java’s answer to Python.  Definitely something to look into.  The other two sessions where about web algorithms and the simplification of Java JRE deployment.  I did learn something new from each.  However, a number of the topics in the web algorithms session I had learned in college, and the deployment session turned out to be pretty “meh” since it doesn’t really concern me.

Overall, a good day.  I learned quite a good deal.  The vendors’ area was a madhouse, but I managed to score some swag.  If I’m brave I’ll venture into there tomorrow as well.  And maybe get my picture taken with Duke…

The weather continues to be beautiful here.  And I managed to have some damn good Chinese food tonight.  Tune in tomorrow for more.

OK, so I just spent the entire day in a session on Struts and JavaServer Faces, and I still don’t understand the benefits and detractions of either, and where best to use them.  I gathered that since JSFs are an API there are lots of different implementations of it, which is always good (choice is always good).  Struts are easier though, or something.  I really didn’t catch a lot of it.  What it came down to is, the session would have made a great week long class, where we plumbed the depths of both topics.  But, given that my Java/Web development is limited to JSPs, I was kinda lost.  Oh well.  It piqued my interest, nonetheless, so I’ll probably be looking into JSFs for future web development.

Having said all that, Sun knows how to throw a conference!  Everyone gets a swanky backpack with even a slot in the back so you can snake your earphones to your mp3 player of choice in the bag.  Admit it, it’s an iPod.  We all know.  The complimentary breakfast was nice, mostly in that I don’t have to get breakfast before arriving.  And the lunch was damn good.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that the weather was beautiful out here in San Francisco today, and I ate lunch outside with a nice breeze cooling me off.  Oh, and the free alcohol at the end of the sessions was another big plus (gotta love Anchor Steam).  Overall, it’s a well executed affair.  There are people everywhere to tell you where to go and make sure things run smoothly.

Also, I know I’ve said this before, but I love this city.  Walking down Market St. at 7:45 this morning was an interesting experience, sparsely populated by early bird businessmen and religious doomsayers with their sandwich boards lambasting Americans for their Babylonian excesses.  San Francisco is so alive, I just love it.  The energy is just phenomenal.  I really need to move into a city, rather than languish in the damned suburbs…

What the pfargtl?

Yahoola!  I’m off to SF again tomorrow, this time to attend a conference (JavaOne, if you must know).  I have to get up sooooo early in the morning.  But, it’s worth it.  If I get to spend the whole weekend in San Francisco having fun before the conference, I can stand to lose a little sleep…