What the hell is a kiss and ride? I’ve heard of park and rides where you can drive a short distance from home then park and catch a train the rest of the way but a kiss and ride? I guess it’s a drop off point where you get your husband/wife (or in San Francisco your boyfriend) to drive you a short distance from home and then you catch the train and they drive home again. Still wouldn’t it be easier to call it a drop off point? Is it really that inconceivable that someone might be dropped off by someone they don’t want to kiss? Anyway, I’ve got to go find a good looking girl to give me a lift to the train station tomorrow…..

(I wrote this Thursday night but didn’t have net access on the train to post it) I finally managed to catch up with a number of Apache people tonight at the Thirsty Bear (rest assured the bear is not quite as thirsty after our beer drinking efforts). Afterwards we picked up the two new IBM servers that have been sitting at Collab.Net and deposited them into the cage at the colo facility. Since I’m not a server guy at all this is one of very few times I’ve been in a server room and the first chance I’ve had to see the Apache server setup (there’s now another colo in Europe somewhere I believe). It’s pretty small and simple but seems to do the job quite well which is what really matters. Apparently the Technorati servers are in the same colo and they look a heck of a lot more impressive with a few racks full of servers and cables going everywhere. Either way it was great to finally meet a few Apache developers and put some faces to names. My description of myself as “the tall redhead” seemed to be effective as people walked straight in the door and introduced themselves to me. Sometimes it pays to stand out a bit I guess.

Chris DeBona argues that the incompatibilities between Linux distributions don’t matter because the majority of people use RedHat or SUSE so that’s all people bother supporting. Of particular note is the quote:

In the windows world, people don’t feel the need to support every version of windows, either. In the Java world we do try to support everything. We want everything to be compatible, we raise the bar so that code should run everywhere. Sure it doesn’t always work out but that’s the aim and it’s simply not good enough to lower the standards for compatibility to what the linux distributions have – it’s not even good enough to lower standards for compatibility to what Windows offers. So Chris, you obviously need to spend a lot more time in the Java community rather than the Linux community to grasp this argument.

This morning after James Gosling’s keynote, was a panel discussion on the future of Java centering around whether or not it should be opensourced. Mostly the discussion was just a whole bunch of useless hand-waving with IBM saying we want it opensourced, Sun saying we want it to be compatible, Laurance Lessig saying don’t stuff with the open source licenses there are other legal means to ensure compatibility (he never mentioned what any of them were) and the users saying “we don’t give a damn either way”. The one stand out in the argument would have to be our very own Brian Behlendorf who pointed out that the key thing is more about allowing open source implementations of the standards rather than whether Sun’s implementation is opensource itself. He stressed a few times that this did require being able to make available implementations that weren’t yet 100% compliant but *not* claim that they are compliant (essentially you don’t do a 1.0 release until it’s compatible but you can have nightly builds and/or CVS available). I may be slightly twisting what he was saying there but that’s what I took away from it and it’s got to be pretty close to what he meant. So good work Brian!

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.