Month: May 2009

JavaOne

JavaOne will be held next week (June 2-5th) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the same location where Google I/O was held this past week – and the week after JavaOne has Apple’s WWDC in the same location.

I won’t be attending this year, but my friend and colleague Trent Gray-Donald will be there presenting a session titled “Under the Hood: Inside a High-Performance JVM™ Machine” on Friday June 5th, 10:50am – 11:50am.  While you won’t find him on the Rock Star Wall of Fame, he was did earn that title back in 2007 – his sessions are usually well attended so if you want to see him in action go early for a good seat.  This year his presentation discloses more details about the IBM JVM technology than have been previously made available, expect to see assembly code snippets on screen during the presentation along with lots of technical detail.  His presentation should be a reasonably good primer in what it takes to be a “state of the art” JVM in today’s competitive market – and it will be presented by someone who has hands on experience creating the technology.

If you can’t make it in person, JavaOne has a pretty good track record of making past sessions available online. Of course you can also follow along on Twitter, and there appear to be two hashtags (#JavaOne and #JavaOneConf) being used to help track tweets.

As for what to expect from JavaOne this year, I’ll shy away from trying to make any firm predictions – but it has been announced there will be more details on the Java App Store.  The Oracle/Sun deal will certainly be one of the topics that can’t be avoided.  Java7 should get some sort of announcement along with some benchmarking fun I’m sure.  One camp to keep an eye on is the Microsoft keynote – the 1st time they’ve done one for JavaOne.  Last, but not least – IBM is a general session cosponsor thus Craig Hayman will be giving a talk as well (Thursday, June 4th, 5:30 – 6:15 p.m), one I’d recommend people attend if they can.

Mounting a Wheelbarrow Wheel

We left our wheelbarrow out in a corner of the backyard all winter.  In the spring the tire had completely deflated, and as it is a tubeless tire (similar to car tires) it had come off the rim as well.  Simply sticking an airpump on the valve did nothing as the tire no longer touched the rim in a number of places letting all of the air out.

One solution img_1396would have been to simply buy a new tire.  I thought that being like a car tire, I could probably take it by a local garage and have them do it for me.  However, I had a nagging feeling there was some way to DIY so I finally got to searching for a solution.

It was very easy to find some good advice on the net (this is as you know, not always true).  So the value of this post is probably limited, but I learned something today so I thought I’d share.

Tools you need: rope, air pump, long screwdriver or sturdy stick, soapy water.

  1. Use the soapy water (1/2 water, 1/2 dish soap) to coat the beads of the tire (both sides) and the rim where it will mate up.
  2. Tie the rope snugly around the circumference of the tire.
  3. Stick the screwdriver through the rope and twist, causing the rope to tighten.  This should help you get the bead onto the rim on both sides [in my case, it was not quite there – but close enough to seal the gaps]
  4. Pump the tire.  This should cause the bead to set onto the rim.  Slowly release the twist while you pump.

That’s it – easy to fix with stuff you should be able to find around the workshop.

Tweet

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I decided to sign up with twitter.  Aside from Linked-In, I’ve avoided mostly all of the social networking sites (fads?) thus far.  Who knows, maybe I’ll break down and get a Facebook page soon.

Living in North America, and (oh my, I”m actually going to say it..) especially people of my generation don’t tend to use text messages (SMS).  There are a few friends at work and I who do text each other, but I generally use less than a handful a month.   I’d like to change that, and I think twitter may be the catalyst.

There are lots of way to use twitter, but at the moment I see it as a way to get that hallway conversation feeling across the wire.  I’ll likely use it to give mood updates, vent my frustrations and as a place to put my half baked thoughts that I don’t feel are worth a blog posting.  You might laugh, but I tend to spend about an hour or more on each of these blog entries – I’ll probably spend about 30seconds thinking about a tweet.

While a large part of my waking day I’m in front of a computer, there are times when all I have with me is my phone – a Nokia 5310.  Sure I have internet on my phone, but without a data plan it gets expensive fast ($13 for 460kb last month).  SMS is a natural fit for twitter’s short updates, too bad the Canadian cell providers aren’t twitter friendly. [edit: see comment below, seems that Canadians can twitter vis SMS as of very recently.  This makes my plan in the next paragraph basically just a neat idea, I’ll likely not do it.]

My plan is to build my own SMS gateway to twitter.  I can use SMS to send an email and there is a way to send a text message via the web to my phone, so I’ve got a two way conduit.  Now I just need a daemon to sit on my server and respond to events.. more on this once I figure out exactly what I’ll do.

Of course, twitter is a lonely place with no friends.  It turns out many of my friends are already out there on twitter (ok, so I’m a late adopter).  What did surprise me was that I started to follow some friends, and then suddenly I had followers!?  Well it turns out [obvious] that by default you get email when someone friends you, so two way connections shouldn’t be a surprise.  What was a little odd was that a few friends found me without me friending them, within hours.  Neat, I feel popular.

Now in terms of a client – there is always the web, but I wanted to play around with some of the twitter specific apps.  On Windows I installed Twitterlicious which has some quirks, but seems to do the job – I may later try twhirl.  On Ubuntu I’ve tried and failed so far to use gTwitter but will persist.  The neatest client I’ve tried so far is DSTwitter, turning my Nintendo DS into a twitter client.

So how do you use twitter?