Roo's View » Annoucements

It’s a boy!

Roo — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:47:20 +0000

On April 26th our second child arrived. We knew through the miracle of modern science that we’d be having a boy, so it would have been a bigger surprise if it was a girl. Of course, the ultrasound doesn’t tell you what you child will look like (dark skinned or fair, brown eyes or blue) – furthermore you’ve got no idea what their personality will be like.

So far things with the baby (Mark) have been good. Many of our visitors have commented how much he looks like me. People said the same of our daughter early on, but today my Mom was over with some pictures of me as a child and there was a strong similarity – I wonder if it will stick.

Jenn (mommy) also is doing well. The birth of a child is an amazing event, having been there for both of our children it’s an experience I will never forget (and I’m certain many fathers feel the same way). Remember that Sunday is Mother’s Day – do something nice for your mom, she deserves it.

Joining the club

Roo — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:08:39 +0000

My good friend Ken Walker, his wife Kelly and their family have had a rough time of it lately. Kelly has been fighting Breast Cancer and is now going through Chemotherapy. One of the side effects she has experienced is hair loss, and Ken decided to join her by shaving his head.

Today at work John asked if I liked my hair, and suggested it was possibly time for a haircut. John stopped on the way home for a number one, all round. I took the DIY haircut route, but the results are similar.

A haircut won’t help stop cancer, but I hope to raise a little awareness by talking about Kelly’s fight to everyone who notices the haircut. Maybe you’ll read this blog posting and decide to give something to Breast Cancer Action.

Retrospective

Roo — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:01:28 +0000

I’ve decided to start including work related items in my blog here. Please view the About page to see the standard disclaimer. A fair number of the things I do at work can’t be discussed in public until they arrive somewhere in product form, by then they usually feel like old news to me and often information has been leaked via other channels. Thus, some of the work related posts might seem a little boring to those “in the know” but I hope to help people put 3+4 together by linking to various bits of information, or simply provide a “straight from the developers” viewpoint. I guess we’ll see how it goes, requests and feedback are welcome.

Recently Rick DeNatale posted a nice personal history of Smalltalk, I’m quite proud to have been part of building several of the products he mentions. The OTI VM team started out building Smalltalk, but moved on to Java by first doing VisualAge for Java, followed by J9 for embedded. Currently we still actively develop J9 which is primarily used as the core of the IBM JDK, but we still do embedded work as well as a Real-Time Java offering.

My day so far..

Roo — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:38:16 +0000

My birthday started off pretty nice – waking up next to Jenn who whispered a “Happy Birthday” to me. Soon after our daughter Alison came by and wished me Happy Birthday, and then explained in great detail as she is apt to do that she would sing the whole song later.

Many IM‘s while at work with well wishes (thanks everyone). Ken was busy sending me charts and data for a conference call I was on. Then he said: “Have you seen this? Scary” and attached a presentation called “urgent funding issue”. It contained one slide:

While part of me think that turning 38 makes me old, another (possibly wiser?) part thinks I’m just starting to get to the good stuff. Of course, 38 in hex is only 0×26 – so creative use of another base might be the solution here.

Hello World!

Roo — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:23:42 +0000

In the past my web presence has been very focused on specific areas:

This will be my first attempt to have a more general web log. I expect to do a fair bit of Home Theater stuff here, as well as bore people to death about my home network and other technical goop. Let’s see how it goes.