Very incomplete notes from the XML Security using Apache session. The slides cover things better than my notes do but I thought I should save what I wrote down anyway. I gave up taking notes half way through once I realized I wasn’t really adding anything to the slides that should be available online anyway.

Ingredients A few thousand Java developers (at 8:30am no less) 1 Security Guard A selective entry policy to a keynote speech Steps 1. Gather the Java developers at the widest available entrance and pack them in nice and tight. 2. Using the security guard, try to stop them from going through the entrance. 3. Attempt to extract the conference alumni from the crowd and allow them to go through first. I have no idea whether or not the security guard eventually let us through – se disappeared from view and I haven’t seen her again. It’s quite possible she was trampled.

There’s this thing in business called competition. I know it can be annoying when it happens to you for the first time, but it’s the way it’s meant to be there. When someone enters your particular market segment with a competing product it’s not called “copying” it’s called “competition” or possible “free trade”. Browsers didn’t exist once and now those nasty opensource developers went and copied the idea and have put the original company out of business. And those damn JEdit folks blatently ripping off NotePad which itself was just a rip off of TextEdit which was just a rip off of MacWrite.

Notes from the session on Swing and Threads. Unchecked etc.

Notes from the Scott McNealy Keynote. May have errors etc…

Notes from the “Using NetBeans for Rich Desktop Clients” session. *Very* little content in this session, most disappointing.

Notes on the java desktop track overview session. Warning: completely unchecked, full of typos and may not make sense. Will review eventually.

Had the keynote by Jonathan Swartz (spelling is wrong, deal with it :P) this morning. Very marketing oriented but interesting none-the-less. He predicts that the car industry will be the next place Java technology really takes off (mobile phones being the current boom) and he’s quite probably right but I think it will take a long time for those features to filter down into the general populace rather than just being in BMW’s. Some interesting stuff in the followups as well on Java 1.5 or as it’s now to be called Java 5.0. Firstly obviously the numbering change is interesting and long overdue. It’s good to have Java use a more standard numbering scheme. It has just occurred to me however that it will break a lot of code (including some of ours) which looks for Java 1.4 and above. Code that checks for it like: javaVersion.startsWith(“1.4”) is stuffed but so is code that parses each number and then only checks that the second digit is greater than 3 (which is the trap we fall into from time to time). Oh well, serves people right for writing sloppy code. I think I’m finally interested in using Java 5.0 now too. Not sure why exactly, but seeing some of the code examples using the new features just seems to clean up code a lot. There was other interesting stuff too but I need to head off to another session.

Got some first pictures of the San Francisco trip to show off. More images in the full version…

“On one occasion, Ms. (Lisa) Foster (Thompson’s court reporter for 15 years), saw Judge Thompson holding his penis up and shaving underneath it with a disposable razor while on the bench,” the petition reads. Say no more, say no more! Via Reuters Oddly Enough.

Well I’ve spent the past four hours sorting through the sessions for JavaOne and picking out the things I’d like to attend. I’m beginning to think I should have just stayed on the Australian timezone as I have BOF sessions until 11:30pm or midnight every night. That’s before I factor in trying to catch up with Apache people and other groups at informal events. There are a few events in my schedule that I’ll probably wind up missing depending on how interesting the discussions I happen to be in at the time are and how much time I want to spend just wandering around the various pods. I expect that I’ll wind up wanting to spend quite a lot of time out of sessions but at this stage I haven’t scheduled for that as I figure it’s easier to just do it on the fly depending on what’s happening. If you want to see what my current plan is, here’s the vcs file. Of course it’s almost a guarantee that at least something in there will change. It’s all very desktop, xml and performance related with just a dash of eclipse and netbeans stuff as we may be creating a new product based on one of those in the future.

I’m currently sitting in the StarBucks just down the road from my hotel happily surfing the web with T-Mobile. Pretty cool. Shame my hotel didn’t wind up having internet but I think I prefer taking a walk down the road and sitting in starbucks that sitting in my little hotel room all the time anyway. Most of today was spent touring around San Francisco, I seem to have brought good weather over from Australia as it was a perfect day – clear blue skys, sunny and no fog. Got a good view of the Golden Gate bridge, the city and Alcatraz then spent some time down at Pier 93. Enjoyed clam chowder in sourdough bread bowl for dinner. That was quite nice though I don’t typically like seafood.