"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." - Niels Bohr
I've been playing with Google Notebook for a while and have used it for creating internal notes for various projects. Here is my first public notebook on Mac File Transfer Utilities. It's far from complete but I thought this would be a good use of Notebook. Not sure how much Notebook is going to replace either del.icio.us bookmarking or Google Reader sharing but it does have some useful use cases
Labels: tools
When I was a kid growing up in South Jersey one of the big things to do on a Friday or Saturday night was to go to the Drive-In theater. This was rare family ritual that turned into a regular event as my friends and I all reached the age where we could drive ourselves. It was not the best place setting to watch a "serious" film, the sound usually sucked, the image quality was usually bad at the beginning of the night, and we'd spend most of our times goofing on friends or trying to romance a date. Dusk to dawn shows of low budget zombie, horror, or kung-fu films were my favorite and have even inspired a few contemporary filmmakers as well. Only the die-hards made it out awake, we used to laugh our butts off watching the drive-in attendants come out and wake up the other cars of sleeping teens. Sadly, there isn't a drive-in left in NJ but I get to get an occasional fix when vacationing in Cape Cod. The Wellfleet Drive-In is where I introduced my kids to the ritual of outdoor cinema.
Recently, I've come up with another way to satisfy my habit. Now that we have a nice new deck on the back of the house, I've been able to rig a temporary outdoor theater of my own. The construction is simple. I hang a white sheet between the posts on my back porch (which forms about 8x5 screen), connect my MacBook Pro to a NEC DLP projector from work and a set of Altec computer speakers. Presto! Instant backyard drive-in. We've done this a few times and it's wonderful enjoying a movie sitting out back on our comfy deck furniture, sipping cold drinks, laughing with the kids. Tonight's triple feature will probably consist of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Nacho Libre, and Across the Universe. Maybe we'll swap that last one for a good Kung Fu movie if the ladies call it an early night. If you have the means, give it a a try. Like dining, watching films alfresco is a whole other experience.
Looks like Sun is promoting the Identity Management Roadshow on their identity buzz blog. I'm on the dance card and will be speaking about customer deployment experiences. Stop by if you are interested and say hello.
Found this message from the JavaOne conference team in my Inbox this morning.
A conference like this is an epidemiologists worst nightmare. Nothing like having thousands of potentially infected patients all about to board planes in a few hours.
The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.
Please see the attached notification from the Department of Public Health.
For further information, as well as Frequently Asked Questions related to the Norovirus, please visit the San Francisco Department of Public Health website athttp://sfcdcp.org/norovirus.cfm
Labels: javaone
I attended two talks on Groovy Builders yesterday that clearly illustrated this power feature of the Groovy language.
The basics on builders was covered in a late night BOF "Cooking Your Own Groovy Builder: A Step Forward into Domain-Specific Languages" given by Andres Almiray and Ixchel Ruiz. They reviewed builders for Swing, Java2D and the generic ObjectGraphBuilder which help to take a significant amount of toil out of working with Swing, Java2D, or creating generic object graphs for testing. Builders are also used for creating HTML or XML documents using syntax like:
html { head { title "My HTML Document" } body { h1 "Hello World p "Isn't this nice?"} }
That's a useful way to express structure using a syntax that is essentially added to the language by implementing a Builder. Builders are not limited to just generating code or data. In "Groovy on a Cloud: Testing Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE Platform) Applications on Amazon EC2", Chris Richardson showed how he created a domain specific language, using Builders, which can be used to provision Amazon EC2 instances by describing them in the DSL. The technique is described in a blog post. Really impressive stuff.
I'm really happy to see a big interest in Groovy and Grails this year at JavaOne. Last night I attended Guillaume Laforge's "Grails in Depth" talk and today I sat in on Scott Davis', "Groovy, the Red Pill: Metaprogramming--How to Blow the Mind of Developers on the Java™ Platform" session. Each of these sessions were packed so hopefully that means the already large community around these technologies will continue to grow.
I've been using Groovy and Grails for a long time now and have developed several production programs as well as a reporting application linked to Basecamp. I love the language and this web development framework. It is an interesting contrast to JRuby and Jython in that there seems to be much less cognitive context switching when using Groovy. One can write Java (quite literally) in Groovy and slowly make the migration of programming style to a more Groovy sensibility when you are ready. Not the case if you are using JRuby or Jython. Not that there is anything wrong with these languages, I use Python almost daily, but shifting to a dynamic language from Java has to be easier if you decide to start with Groovy.
It's a great time to get involved in dynamic languages on the Java platform. There is so much choice and power available.
Thomas Kurian Oracle's SVP for Server Software, to talk about Oracle's efforts related to Java. In his intro he warmly welcomes the BEA team to the Oracle family.
Oracle sees developers wanting standards based toolset and single integrated design time tool. Their view obviously is that JDeveloper is the realization of these goals. The JDeveloper demo is mildly compelling. They take an existing web application that tracks sales and update a boring table display with a dynamic chart. It's all wsywig/drag and drop. They really have some nice tooling for JSF. The graph can be rendered using different technologies depending on the actual destination. The default is Flash but for a mobile device like the iPhone the graph would be delivered as PNG or JPEG which was demonstrated. The funny thing about the demo is you have to decide that this change actually makes the application better not just sexier. Oracle is giving away a plugin pack for Eclipse developers to give them a lot of the JDeveloper experience demonstrated in Eclipse. Not much detail about where to get it, nor how much functionality of JDeveloper is represented in the plugin set, but it is completely free.
Kurian also demonstrated integrating forums, discussion groups, and document repositories into their web portal application that pulls in other information regarding the orders processed in the app above. It then allows drilling down to forum posts about the order, to documents, and social network data to allow you to communicate with anyone related to the order. This communication can happen via IM or VOIP all integrated to the portal environment. Again kind of neat and it makes for a great demo. The technology to do this is pretty simple.
Some of the underlying technology is Oracles SCA SOA infrastructure. It is quite buzzword compliant and the demo shows how you can drill down from the running application, to an individual order being processed to see where in the workflow the order is stuck. The workfow is built using a graphical tool. However this is Oracle's tools not BEA Aqualogic. BEA's tools (formerly Fuego) are in my opinion simpler to use but at this point they are not integrated. No surprise since the merger is so new. It will mean an interesting state of flux for both BEA and Oracle customers in the mean time. Part of the demo integrated Aqualogic via a web services interface.
A surprise for me is Kurian's demo of Oracle's grid computing products. They are showing is BEA technology to run JRocket on a Hypervisor eliminating the OS altogether. This is certainly some of the more interesting WLS technology. They are showing some Oracle technologies, App Server and Coherence Data Grid, as well as WLS server running on top of a virtualized JRocket JVM grid. They also demoed the management console for the grid which was web based, allowed for dynamically starting/stopping nodes, and full monitoring of performance in the Grid. The console also plugs directly into the JRocket JVM which would allow you to tune garbage collection, etc. However they also have the ability to use a real-time version of JRocket to make GCs more deterministic. They demoed the ability to change GC on the fly in JRocket. Pretty sweet but I wonder what all of this would cost a customer? My guess is that it's not cheap. It's also difficult to see how most customers would have the technical wherewithal to actually perform this level of tuning. Still it is really cool technology.
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