Roo's View

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 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.

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

• List – A Simple Database (PalmOS program)
• Ampro CRT / Home Theater

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.