ongoing

OSCON and Marca · I’ve got a gig at OSCON 2008 doing a mini-keynote, fifteen minutes entitled Language Inflection Point. This was in my mind when I stumbled across Marca’s Public speaking versus blogging. I think he’s really wrong ...

FotD: May 15 Trillium · I’ve written about them before, how the flowers start out the purest and most delicate white imaginable and then fade into purple decrepitude. Wikipedia suggests this is Trillium ovatum ...

FotD: May 14 Icelandic · I’ve run a few pictures of these over the years, repeatedly mislabeling them as California poppies, and each time been corrected by better-educated readers; it’s an Iceland poppy ... [2 comments]

FotD: May 13 Flaming Spring Green · Last year, it started a month earlier; a couple of weekend days around the town and my computer is bulging with spring-flower shots. So, with apologies to those who come here for technology, we’ll be in Flower of the Day mode for the next little while. Today’s Flaming Spring Green is a tulip, about my favorite of this year’s crop ...

Propeller · Being a picture of one, with some other things ... [4 comments]

Java in 2008 · I’m glad I went to JavaOne. I want to go again. In order of increasing importance: The Java language is looking stale. The Java platform is looking interesting. And the Java community, well, it’s something special ... [2 comments]

WF2: The Benchmark · A bunch of people have requested the Wide Finder 2 sample data. Meanwhile, over at the wiki, there’s a decent discussion going on of what benchmark we should run ... [4 comments]

RESTful JavaOne · I only managed to take in a few talks here and there, but the ones I did catch sure had some first-rate REST preaching. To the extent that there’s a surprising trend at this year’s J1, I’d say it’s REST-is-in, “Big Web Services” (see below) are out ... [6 comments]

Blogging@Sun · Almost exactly four years ago we launched blogs.sun.com. It’s been a trip, almost all upside, remarkably problem free. There’s a bit of new news, both inbound and outbound ... [2 comments]

Wet, with Forget-me-nots · Tulips, I mean. Our front yard is riot of tulips all shouting “Look at me!” It rained and I thought “wet tulips, mmmm”, and by coincidence three of them had forget-me-nots somewhere in the frame ... [3 comments]

JavaOne Day One · Whatever your feelings about Java, the opening of the JavaOne conference is really an outstandingly great event. I’m not sure if, in any given year, it’s the single biggest gathering of software developers, but it’s remarkably huge. I have some pictures to suggest the flavor of being there, and some specifics on the Neil Young segment ... [4 comments]

Whatever One · I spent most of Monday at CommunityOne, and it makes me wonder about the future of JavaOne ... [1 comment]

Video Pain · We’ve had a HD videocam since 2006, and have been building up a backlog of unprocessed video, since the stuff is so huge and slow to process. This is one of the reasons I recently bought a Mac Pro. Things are better, but the story doesn’t have a happy ending yet ... [8 comments]

Changing Your Address · I’m tired of typing my postal address into Web sites. Furthermore, it’s stupid, wasteful, and a little worrying that so many of them out there have stored copies of it. Wouldn’t it be better just to give them the address of my address? ... [22 comments]

Ruby 1.9 I18n and Mashup Testing · A couple of points on that PDML + Twitter mashup. First, yet another homily saying “Please unit test”. Second, some commenters wanted to see the code even though it’s trivial, and I found a reason to agree ... [1 comment]

Rock & Roll Dishes · The dishwasher’s on the fritz, scheduled for a fix Tuesday. So our eight-year-old’s duties have expanded from table-clearing to include dish-drying. He whines, but doesn’t get much sympathy. This evening, I put on R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction, turned way up, to help. What a great record that is, even after all these years. I explained to the boy that rock & roll is very helpful for getting dishes done. He was doubtful, but bopping a bit on Can’t Get There From Here. [5 comments]

Look Sideways · There was this little flurry of excitement when one of the Silly-Valley TechWhatever news aggregators asserted that Twitter was dropping the use of Rails. It seems not to be true. This is yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution ... [6 comments]

PDML + Twitter · I made a Twitter feed called @PDML. The letters stand for Pentax-Discuss Mailing List, which I read with pleasure; a high-volume, rowdy, enjoyable gaggle of camera geeks. One of the things they do is post nice pictures, which are identified with a subject line starting “PESO:” for Picture Every So Often (and sometimes “GESO:”, G for Gallery). @PDML has those posts’ first hyperlink and as much of their content as can be stuffed into 140 bytes. It’s a nice low-volume Twitter feed, less than five pix a day on average. I believe this is what the cool kids call a “Mashup”. A very slow one, but still ... [17 comments]

Wide Finder 2 · Last fall, I ran the Wide Finder Project. The results were interesting, but incomplete; it was a real shoestring operation. I think this line of work is interesting, so I’m restarting it. I’ve got a new computer and a new dataset, and anyone who’s interested can play ... [14 comments]

Warm OSS Glow · I see that NetBeans 6.1 is out. It’s a nice enough release (MySQL improvements, surprise surprise), but here’s what touched me. I don’t know how many other OSS projects do this, but I got an email this morning from qa@netbeans.org: “We'd like to inform you that the following issues you reported have been addressed in the new version” and listing four bugs I’d filed. What a nice touch. [3 comments]