Skip to main content

JavaZone 2008 and GeekCruise

So, JavaZone is done. I did my presentation, tada (please view full screen to get rid of the chippy graphics):




I got good feedback. In short: The slides are funny and original, my presentation moves were allright (good voice, good gestures, movement around the stage), the content was pretty good and interesting. The talk was at an introductory level, and I feel I hit the audience pretty well. Will be very interesting to see the video, as well as getting the feedback.

I was also in the JavaZone arranging committee. You might've seen me scurrying around, commanding the guys in the orange T-shirts (they were the volunteers). It was alot of work, but it was alot of fun as well. Tomorrow evening we're throwing a party in their honour at the University, so if you're in the neighborhood, give me a ping and drop by.

But anyways, I didn't get too see many talks. Only one (excluding my own), to be honest, although I'm sure I could've squeezed into a couple of more. But you crowd could've gone a bit easier on the headsets! Jeez, it's called overflow because they're for when the rooms flow over.

  1. If the room is full, go to another talk
  2. If you can't find any place, get an overflow headset
  3. Don't sit or walk around with a headset all day, you ¤%&/(
We only had like 450 headsets, which should be plenty thinking the rooms fit over 1700 people. So people, no sitting around. It's a conference. If you want to look at video, stay at home and look on youtube, or Parleys.com, or TED or something.

Well, enough ranting. On friday we had a Objectware-VIP presentation from Sun, more specifically from Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine on GlassFish. It looks as sexy as ever, v2 and v3 for its respective uses. I figured my next little fiddling will be trying to replace our JettyLauncher with a GlassFishV3Launcher, but I doubt I'll be able to convince my customer into converting from WebSphere to GlassFish V2 just yet.

Geek Cruise
Saturday morning I was looking forward to a nice weekend of doing nothing else than relaxing, and I was lying in my bed when somebody called and dragged me along to the infamous GeekCruise! I had previously turned down the available slot because I hadn't had time to prepare myself (because of JavaZone), but Anders Norås backed out, so I had no excuse anymore. Thanks Anders :)

We were only 16 participants, among them some pretty respected people like, Rickard Öberg, Johannes Brodwall and Totto. Some new to me, but obviously very bright people: Emil Eifrem, Michael Hunger and Jon-Anders Teigen. A big part of the group were Objectware people, but hey, we paid for the stuff! And I'd better mention Kaare Nilsen since he saved my ass on saturday evening. Your site is not responding, btw, Kaare.



Alot of the discussions and content have been documented in our community wiki, but the real value I think was the insight some of us gained, and the input some others got to their respectful projects. Communicating all the knowledge that flowed on that cruise.. well, it's pretty hard to do in written form (and maybe that's exactly why such events are a *good thing*). And most importantly, I got some new friends.

Comments

  1. Anonymous25/9/08 01:13

    It was actually pretty fun to volunteer for you.

    I hope you'll shape up for tomorrow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous25/9/08 21:45

    hey, I listened to your talk but didn't recognize you as I was too lazy to be in the room but using the headphone instead! JavaZone was very nice. See you next year I hope!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o