Annotated Questions · OSCON has traditionally featured bundles of short fifteen-minute keynotes. I gave one entitled “Programming-Language Questions” and loved the compressed intensity of the format. Unfortunately, my slides were irretrievably lost in the post-speech disk crash (yes, I usually drop ’em on a USB stick, this time I didn’t). There’s video online at blip.tv, but the quality is pretty basic, and I suspect that the on-screen URIs and code samples not useful. Here are all the missing pieces, should you want to watch it (only 15 minutes, remember); plus a little extra commentary ...[3 comments]
Solzhenitsyn · Aleksander Isayevich was for me the most influential living writer. Influential on me I mean, not on literature or the world ...[5 comments]
Wet Botanicals · July was an excellent month, almost all sunshine. My flower-photo mojo had pretty well run dry, but then out walking after a shower, there were all these droplet-laden blossoms and there I was shooting away ...[1 comment]
JVM Languages Summit · This is a big deal, I think. The Summit happens Sep. 24-26 at Sun Santa Clara. Our internal heavyweights will be there; JRuby, Jython, Da Vinci Machine, Gosling. Granted, this likely should have happened years ago; but still, I think excitement will be thick in the air.
Working As Intended · This is a simple story of an online purchase that went well despite a problem. The fact that this is sufficiently rare to make me want to write about it is sad, but that’s how it is ...[4 comments]
On Screwdrivers · Screwdrivers are important. Really; you just can’t do anything without them. And it turns out that lots are lots better than just a few. This is about that. Illustrated ...[33 comments]
Happy Backyard Story · We bought our house in 1997 and were expecting our first child in mid-1999. This caused us to launch a pretty major Home Improvement project, which was painful but successful; herewith a small photo-essay ...[1 comment]
Sun Web Server Open-Sourced · [This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog]. We’re open-sourcing Sun’s own Web server (formally the “Sun Java System Web Server”), using (and here’s a surprise) the BSD license; I don’t know if we’ve gone BSD before ...[2 comments]
Sun + Joyent + Facebook · [This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog]. The news is that we’re partnering with Joyent to offer one year’s free hosting for Facebook apps. I don’t really understand the Facebook-app ecosystem, but anything that reduces the barrier to entry has to be good, right?
OpenSSO and Enterprisey Open Source · [This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog]. A couple of years ago, Sun’s software group launched the OpenSSO project, the open-source version of our big comprehensive suite of identity-management tools. Now, that project is a supported Sun product: OpenSSO Express. I don’t understand the software deeply enough to say anything authoritative about it, but the pricing-and-support model is interesting ...[1 comment]
Sun Web Stack · [This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog]. The Sun Web Stack, shipping later this year, is an agglomeration of Web stuff (“Formerly known as CoolStack, also known as LAMP/SAMP”), and a fully-supported Sun product on both Solaris and GNU/Linux. Read on for details and discussion; this raises some interesting issues ...[8 comments]
Nine Pictures of OSCON · Herewith some illustrated take-aways from OSCON 2008; I enjoyed it (and, I think, benefited from it) as much as any conference in recent years ...[1 comment]
Score One for Apple · What happened was, my Black Mac frapped out last December and I had to rebuild it from scratch, with no help from Apple. The new disk I’d put in only lasted seven months; it died about ten minutes after I got off the stage at OSCON (I bow in the direction of blind good luck) ...[14 comments]
No Secret Software! · For my money, Christine Peterson offered the most important message I heard at OSCON. Way back when, she invented the term “Open Source” and, if we get behind it, which we should, the No Secret Software! rallying cry could be as big or bigger ...[11 comments]
On Keyboards · There’s a design flaw in Apple’s current lineup of Mac keyboards; easily fixed though. Obviously, someone like me has a long history and an intense relationship with keyboards ...[53 comments]
SPotD: Shoes · There’s nothing wrong with kids having some weeks of flat time in summer with an empty schedule; they’ll look back on those days fondly. There’s also nothing wrong with the odd soccer or basketball camp. I rather enjoy dropping the boy off at these and watching the other parents, who appear, pre-9-AM on a weekday, in a remarkable variety of apparel and presentations. I caught one of my recent faves for this summer day’s photo ...[1 comment]
SPotD: Curtainshadows · We spend a lot of time on our back porch this time of year. Unfortunately, the beautiful plum tree that kept the setting sun from boiling our eyeballs died, and until the replacement gets big enough, we’ve been hoisting bedsheets on the west end of the porch roof at suppertime. Which can make for some interesting shadowplay, as in the Summer Picture for today ...
SPotD: Fireworks · Today’s summer picture is of some of the fireworks after the ball game featured yesterday. They weren’t big-league, but it isn’t a big-league park, so you get to sit pretty close to them ...[2 comments]
SPotD: Ball Game · On July first, we celebrated Canada and my son’s birthday by going to the ball game and fireworks. It was a warm, warm evening. The Summer Photo for Today is an outfielder and a scoreboard ...[1 comment]
