"at least 8000 people were in the general session audience and he expected nearly 10,000 to 15,000 people in the halls throughout the next few days."
If you were lucky enough to be at the first Java Day that Sun sponsored in NY city more than 10 year ago, the tumbling duke was probably the first demo you saw.
Your browser is completely ignoring the <APPLET> tag!Not long after that, I attended the first JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.
It had the air of large rock concert.... Like Live 8, if you will. The air did not emanate from hype, but from an excitement about the potential of the language. I'm not talking about spinning logo's or tumbling Dukes. For those of us that were struggling with cross platform development, Java was an incredible leap forward and free to boot. Yes Java was loaded with warts. But it was a workable solution to a real problem. Stay tuned this week as I post my notes from this weeks JavaOne Conference.
Your browser is completely ignoring the <APPLET> tag!Not long after that, I attended the first JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.
It had the air of large rock concert.... Like Live 8, if you will. The air did not emanate from hype, but from an excitement about the potential of the language. I'm not talking about spinning logo's or tumbling Dukes. For those of us that were struggling with cross platform development, Java was an incredible leap forward and free to boot. Yes Java was loaded with warts. But it was a workable solution to a real problem. Stay tuned this week as I post my notes from this weeks JavaOne Conference.
The artima.com site has a great set of interviews with Eric Gamma. The one focusing on "Flexibility and Reuse" is particularly insiteful. I recently took over an application project that had floundered. One of the issues was the completeness and complexity of a custom framework they were building as part of the project.Eric rightfully points out the draw back to the framework approach:
When we started exploring frameworks years ago, we had big hopes for them. We thought the way to create software was to build high-level, domain-specific frameworks, and then you just customize them and reuse all the design that is codified into them. That was the reuse nirvana. Since then, I've gotten a little more realistic, because I have learned that it's hard to create highly reusable frameworks. They become complex, hard to learn, and even harder to maintain. I was on both the framework consumer and the framework producer side, and it can be hard from either perspective....patterns offer reuse in a way that is less risky than frameworks. Building a framework is high risk and a significant investment. Patterns allow you to reuse design ideas and concepts independent of concrete code.The first thing I did was scrap the framework and rework the architecture with the team using well worn patterns where appropriate. This has definitely helped us to improve the situation and get back on track for delivery of the product.
The ACM magazine "Queue" has an interesting article on Alan Kay called... You guessed it! "A Conversation with Alan Kay"
Hmm... will have to think of something meaningful to post here
Hmm... will have to think of something meaningful to post here
I've been asked many times where the handle "cryptochaos" came from.Well I needed and AOL Instant Messanger ID... I was attempting to register for an AIM ID. Everyone knows the frustration of finding that someone else not only has your name, but is using it! Even worse, there are several scoundrels out there using my name. I've found that every meaningful combination of my name seemed to have been taken. I absolutely refused to refer to myself using any of the suggestions (think "paulmaurer851" or some other such nonsense) so I decided to pick a handle instead.But what handle to use?The hunt began by typing some short handles based on some of my interests like "musicman", "player", "guitarman", "teleman", "strat", "javaman"... Yes I know, in retrospect, all kinda goofy. Well maybe even then they were goofy, but someone else had out goofed me because they were all taken.I decided to look at my book shelf for inspiration. There was a great book on the history or cryptography sitting in front of me by David Kahn called "The Codebreakers". Hmm... Let me try some cool variation on that theme. Crypto? Krypto? (yes I know it's the name of Superman's dog) I tried quite few more variations that either time or perhaps embarrassment have erased from my memory. All were taken.On to the next book..."The Fuzzy Future" by Bart Kosko. Nope, not interested in a fuzzy themed handle. Skip that one.Next book again... "Chaos: making a New Science by James Cleick. Yes! I've been meaning to read that some day. Variations on Chaos would be cool. Alas all were taken.You could say desperation set in...I've become tired with this game. I've lost track of the fact that I just wanted an AIM ID so I could chat with friends and coworkers. OK, I'm just going to jam two of my failed attempts together so I can get on with it. So I typed "cryptochaos" into the AIM registration box, pressed enter and waited... and waited... and waited... Timed out! What the? Damn! My modem disconnected! I'm going to finish this tomorrow!And that's what I did.
Well, I'm diving in and trying out this blog thing. I've had my own (personal) site for some time but thought I would take the leap into the blogsphere. I haven't given this much thought... figure it will eventually evolve into something useful or just fade away. Let's see where this takes me;)Note: Any blog entries prior to this are posts from my old website.
Read this New York Times article to find out: "To the Liberal Arts, He Adds Computer Science"
