Duncan reports that I gently and kindly harangued him at MacHack about ant. I'm not so sure I was all that gentle, but I hope I was kind. It's interesting that after we talked, he said "You've got ant's killer weakness there." But what he quoted was not what I expected. His quote was:
The problem with Ant is that it violates something we learned with Unix. Tasks aren't composable.
But what...
I'm getting ready to give my keynote at MacHack. At midnight. That's the kind of conference this is -- the opening keynote is at midnight. I am assured that these folks will hang around for the talk, and that at previous conferences they have stayed for hours. I do not intend to take hours -- who has that much useful to say at midnight? Not me, for sure.
The conference is based on actual...
Last night was JiniFest, which was a blast. JiniFest is what the
Jini community does at JavaOne to have folks show what they're
doing with Jini. Some are community projects led by interested
geeks and others are commercial products. So while the Java
community folks are doing boring (if important) process stuff, the
Jini folks are having a party.
Jini is generally the best kept secret of Java...
Okay, James breaks the spell, as always: Someone who isn't a major
Sun partner gets up on the stage....
Three someones.
But don't do this to us next time. So much stuff up front put
James really late. And James is the most interesting.
I'm watchin people drift out, and the hall is getting to be emptier,
but that's because this has been going as a single session for 2.5
hours so far, and...
I will never understand why marketing people haven't
learned how to talk to geeks after the decades since computer
conferences have been going on. Scripted pseudo-conversations,
for example, really don't work -- they're just inane. The fact
that they're pre-scripted makes them inane. There's just
no way around it. It's not like the two Sun engineers showing off
Rave were making this demo up...
Okay, they found a funny engineer. How likely was that?
The announcement of HP's agreement to put Java on all their Windows
boxes is both cool and nearly predictable. Disk space is free,
after all. Someone was going to decide that the "value add" of
putting Java in the box was worth the small incremental cost.
(By the way, didn't Jonathan Schwartz say Dell make it so all
their boxes "can"...
How many guest speakers from how many big companies do we get? A
lot of what's been exciting in the past were talks from companies
we've never heard of doing things we've never thought of. This
year, at least today, we've been treated to speakers (yes, sometimes
fun) only from Sun's major corporate partners. Can we at least
spread this out a bit?
Yet the message is fun. It's great that Sun...
This is getting ridiculous, although in a vaguely amusing way.
Instead of merely reserving seats at the keynote for the alumni,
today they hold the new folks behind ropes until the alums have
found their way to their seats. So we few, we chosen few, walk
past these "serfs" on the way into the keynote.
I mean, really. What message does that send? If watching it from
the cheap seats was...
Try to check everything out. Sleep is optional. This is JavaOne, after all.
No, really, try it. I admit that, since the first JavaOne, the meeting has become less of a whirlwind, more predictable, more, er, mature shall we say. But it started with all the dot-com liftoff energy, and this means that "mature" is a relative thing. When you're starting from London, being in Amsterdam is on your...
