What a day...

First things first, a couple of things to check out:

• Track down the real-time demo in the pavilion (the one with all the colored balls shooting around) and see if you've run the lottery :-) The prize is dinner with me and Greg Bollella on Thursday.
• The Gemalto folks are running a coding contest: you write a control algorithm for a tank that drives around a field filled with other tanks. Whoever dies last wins. The interesting catch is that the code you write has to run on a smart card...

What a rush yesterday was. I had promised myself that I'd blog a couple of times during the day, but there was no way that was going to work...

The day started off with a bang shooting t-shirts into the audience with John Gage and Chris Melissinos. It's remarkable how good a job the big 3-person slingshot does. Totally low tech, but very physical and theatrical. We did a cooperative opening of the show. I mostly talked about how the show was instrumented using motes from Sentilla. If you have a "maker" itch to scratch, they're selling cool developer kit.

If you're looking for another cool toy to spend money on, check out the LiveScribe pen. When I first heard about it (a JVM in a pen? WTF?) it seemed like an odd thing to do, but when you go through some of their usage scenarios, it's totally brilliant.

My keynote isn't until Friday, so I got to just sit and watch Rich Green's keynote. Lots of nice demos, but the sphere of interactive media streams had me in awe. Between the efforts of the JavaFX, graphics and Hotspot teams, it got amazing performance. Having the keynote end with Neil Young being a geek for 15 minutes was pretty damned cool. He's a fan of blu-ray and is in the midst of a big project using it.

The bulk of the day was press interviews, videotaping and time with customers. They'd describe problems they're having and I'd get this surreal deja vu feeling "But we fixed that in JDKn"... "*sob* we're stuck in JDKm(<n)" *sigh*

The work day ended up with the Dukes Choice award ceremony. Once again, it was really hard to choose the winners. There is so much great stuff being done by the community. If you come to my keynote on Friday, several of them will be doing demos.

The day was closed with a traditional pub crawl...

The design for this years t-shirt came out rather well:

(with apologies to Edward Hopper.)

May 7, 2008