The Story So Far (JavaOne 2011)

Published on October 4, 2011 in Life. 0 Comments Tags: .

Monday 1130

Just getting started today; watched the technical keynote this morning, which had a couple moments of ‘if I can only survive for a year or two, these pain points will go away’ delight.

Of particular note were a couple features in JEE7 and Java 8. Project Jigsaw appears to be an initiative to supercede the godawful implicit classloader with a versioned module system that will play nice with OSGi and potentially support Maven as a repository; in short, making it so that we can deal fairly in PaaS environments and stop needing to fight with application library dependencies so much.

In JEE7 they discussed that they’re extending a dependency annotation mechanism such that we can stop having to build our own dependency mapping tools; along with JDK8′s module system, libraries, data-sources, and messaging components and connectors will all become explicit dependencies, and they’re already demonstrating in Glassfish how that will tie directly into a private or public cloud environment to allow elastic provisioning. Very, very cool depending on your environment.

The odd mention of some of the audio libraries in JavaFX 2.0 (which looks very, very cool, overall) sparked a reminder to me to look into forcing one of our stubborn, hand-hacked in house audio serving apps into using JavaFX.

The hotel I’m staying in is 3 blocks uphill from the main venue. Very convenient for me to drift back to home base in the odd moment, but my calves are already informing me that I don’t exercise enough and should get on some kind of regimen that includes walking uphill.

Eating out all the time could become very expensive; I had tasty but light mexican for about 150% what it should have cost for that meal last night; decided that Chipotle for lunch would be a good balance. I don’t get dinner till late tonight; will have to see if I can find my way to Moscone for some event down there.

Ran into Pat briefly; I think he lost me shortly after; we were talking, then I took a corner and he looked back for a while and wandered off.

Skipped my first session to eat lunch instead; the line into the room was 100 people long, and I’m not sure why I even picked that particular session. Also rescheduled a bit now that I know what Project Jigsaw is. Great stuff, if it works.
The “Cool Parts” JEE session was a reaffirmation that I need to get a serious grip on JEE6, because I’m coming from the admin side, where it’s always been easier to read the deployment descriptors to get an idea of how an app hangs together. Faces and CDI rob me of a lot of my contextual familiarity, so I need to understand how to read all that stuff, so that my developers can’t blame me unjustly when their stuff breaks.

Jigsaw continues to intrigue. I look forward to seeing how they deal with edge cases, given their desire to make things as reliable as possible. I’m vaguely worried about module dependency versioning and minor revisions, but I’m sure it’ll be sorted later. Mostly, I’m worried about what we’ll do _until_ then, since it won’t be adopted into enterprise products till at _least_ 2014 or 2015, I expect. (augh, looking that far into the future is weird).

The OSGi session I went to was a limp demonstration of netbeans wizards. Fuuu.

Tuesday 1400

Strategy keynote told me a few things about timelines that gave me a sad – particularly the (reasonable but frustrating) scheduling of JDK8 to Summer 2013 (which means 2014 for full support). Other than that, a couple minor interesting bits that’re up on Twitter.

Virtualization session was nice – VMWare, even. Got some tips on tuning which seem relevant, as well as some reminders on how not to run Java (which I’m breaking, semiintentionally, during this growth phase at work). I’ll be following up on some of these at work.

JavaFX session was a waste of time – a 30 minute session in a 60 minute block that I duplicated, better, with 15 minutes on the JavaFX Website. Still interested in JavaFX; just need to convince the individuals of the project in question that their systems need to
be IAVA’d anyway, so the dependencies are already met. I’ll harass them about this once their old boss is retired – I managed to piss him off last time I talked to him by telling him the truth; I think he’s done listening to folks.

Checked out of the Project Coin session a little early too – it was nothing I hadn’t seen before both in the keynote and in the Java.net coin docs. Fuck yeah, diamond operator, and try-with-resources is sanity saving.

iPaddin’ it.

Published on May 18, 2011 in Life. 0 Comments

So last year I spent a while being very grouchy about Steve Jobs’ vigorously defended walled garden, put my money where my mouth was, and got an Android phone. The Droid X has served me relatively passably, with a couple significant problems: It sucks batteries, and the UI experience is startlingly uneven, particularly in core areas like, say, _being a phone_.  (the contact list app in particular pisses me off – sluggish and difficult to navigate compared to the iPhone).

I’ve also been watching the unfolding Android tablet rollout and been… terribly unimpressed. It feels like Google’s throwing software out on the breeze and hoping it takes root. The end result is a platform with poor adoption and branding, with the same problems as the phone version of the OS, so far as I can tell.

With that in mind, I bought an iPad 2 this weekend. Just getting started owning it; I’ve pitched about $40 into the app store to round out my toys, mostly on games, but a couple basics for me  like an RSS app tied to Google Reader, and am SSH client.

So here’s my first impressions:

To hell with flying cars: this thing’s future cool. With the level of usage I put into it, I’m getting 2 or three days out of it; they’r not lying about the 10 hours of active use average. Netflix’d the first episode of the recent Dr Who series, and yeah, that chewed up a little under 10%, but games and websurfing generally are easily forgiven.

The UI is responsive and simple – the lack of settings and options menus in standard locations still annoys me, but I’ll take it if it means that I don’t have to deal with stutter-stepping application behaviors allatime.

There’s an insanely simple thing that also makes it ‘just right’ – the cover. Instead of having a clunky slipcase, I’m using the apple-standard cover, which is very, very thin and flips into a convenient stand. For bonus awesome, if you flip the cover off, the slate wakes up immediately. Very intuitive.

I miss widgets a bit, and the modal notification mechanism is really primitive. I’d love to see those improved.

Being able to use a hard switch to lock and unlock orientation is pretty much perfect UI for me.

the Twitter client in particular blows my mind. The interface is very much like turning or shuffling pages – a visual stack mechanism that works perfectly for me. MobileRSS uses the same scheme.

No official Facebook client. Very odd. Halfway decent third party apps out there, but it could use the real deal.

The profusion of front ends to news organizations is occasionally disconcerting, and the UIs vary a little much. Bloomberg’s is gorgeous; if only I wanted to read more Bloomberg articles. NPR’s still seems to want to play random audio clips too often. No idea why. Ars Technica’s always starts with an ‘updating’ splash screen, which just seems clunky. What if I don’t have a ‘net connection?

the iPod client… Well, good and bad. The biggest issue I have is that I don’t adhere to the death of the album idea.  I often want to go troll through a genre, find an album, and play it, and a number of the categories’ UI elements discourage that particular method. Clunky here and there. Lots of experimentation. I hope they clean that up someday. It plays music, though, which again, Android? not so good at. Lots of crap music clients, lots of inconsistent playback.

There’s first impressions. Mostly positive.  Enjoying it, to be sure; here’s hoping it continues to please!

Holiday List 2010

Published on November 9, 2010 in Life. 0 Comments

Well, here it is coming up on the Holidays in 2010. This year has already given us so much, it’s hard to ask for more.  That said? I’m a terrible, material person and more than capable of mentioning a few sparklies that have caught my eye. Here’s a sampling.

  • Fantasy Flight Games’ Mansions of Madness – oh deary me. A new FFG game, using the House on the Hill mechanic and an FFG quantity of tokens. muwahahaha!
  • Fantasy Flight Games’ DungeonQuest - Has been recommended as well.
  • Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror Miniatures - this falls under complete fancy – I can’t quite justify buying all 48 of these things, other than _they’re gorgeous_. waaaant. Only available through direct order, too. :p
  • WOTC’s Gamma World – I at least want to see what madness they’re up to here.
  • WOTC’s Monster Vault – and  for those odd moments when I run 4e, critter tokens galore!
  • WOTC’s Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms – love these little 4e expansions, too.
  • Luke Crane’s World Burner – Still curious what this guy is thinking – his system has so many great ideas so unfortunately tied to an implementation I can’t use…
  • Octavia Butler: Lilith’s Brood – Bought my first copy of this series about a decade ago and have read a hole in it. Time to get a newer copy.
  • Inception – Mmmm, Inception. Was my birthday present to myself  this year to see it in the theater.
  • Iron Man 2 – Well, of course. Haven’t given up on this little scheme of Marvel’s yet.
  • Chuck, Season 2 and 3 – Becky got a bit ahead of me on this one. We should catch up together.
  • Stargate, Boxed. – Somewhere after Becky got up here, her _entire_ Stargate DVD set went AWOL. We’ve never seen it again. It’d be nice to have it on hand; we enjoy its particular brand of cheese.
  • Music – Non-DRM’d, solid music of any reasonable sort. I’m still deeply attached to some previous and well-thought-out musical gifts.
  • Spices - Penzey’s has been supplying us with tasty spices for a while, and in some places we’re starting to run short.
  • Cataclysm - May as well announce my weakness now; yeah, my sabbatical from WoW will probably end sometime early next year. Having someone else buy me my next hit is villainous, though…

The Dream Library is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache