JavaOne, day 1.75

I had intended to do a pile of blogging during day 1 of JavaOne, but things got way too crazy. Then I wandered through parties and bars until the last bar I was in threw everyone out at 3am. JavaOne hasn't been this packed and frantic since the top of the dotcom insanity. The opening keynote went through a pile of important topics, including all of the new stuff in JavaEE 5, and the "Project Tango" interoperability work that we're doing with Microsoft. The coolest looking demo was Aerith, an app built to showcase all of the neat new things you can do in Swing and OpenGL, along with integrating several web services.

Despite my panics over the infrastructure of the slot car race programming challenge, it's running nicely and has a continuous crowd of people around it. No one has broken the 25 second barrier yet, and most folks end up sending their cars off into space. In the pre-runs we did at Sun in the weeks before JavaOne, some folks were getting down to around 23 seconds. You have to be quite tricky. The prototype app just adjusts the voltage in simple ways when the car passes over a sensor. But you need to be making changes between sensors and doing odd acceleration profiles -- like high acceleration followed by momemtary hard braking; or graduated acceleration going through curves. Loads of fun.

The JSR209 phone from SavaJe sold out almost instantly, they're hoping to get more in.

*sigh* I have to head off to the next meeting...

May 17, 2006