The 2008 JBoss World conference has been announced as happening in Orlando during February 13-15. That's Valentine's Day. Bring your sweetie south, and thaw out with some hot Java in the sun.
Want to be a superstar and get a free pass to the conference? Of course you do!
Just submit a presentation. If you're selected, you get a conference badge, some free meals, and the glory of the community.
You know you want to.
As a child, a friend of mine (my Attorney) and I were in the local paper for building a sprawling Lego city across my rumpus room.
This morning, my son continued the legacy, by winning a bring-your-own-Lego(tm) Transformer(tm)-construction competition.
The Asheville Citizen-Times wrote it up nicely.
HENDERSONVILLE – For Noah McWhirter, building Lego figures just comes natural. “I just build things with my wild imagination,†the 10-year-old Vance Elementary School fourth-grader said. “I don’t even think about them. I just make them.â€
Of course, I think part of the winning strategy was bringing The Intimidator Professional-Grade Toolbox, when most kids had some flimsy Tupperware or burlap sack. Bonus points for packing it to the gills with 1970s-era Lego(tm), inherited from dear ol' dad.
Went out for a Venti(tm) dirty chai tea latte, and decided to scope out the Cingular/AT store that will be carrying iPhones tomorrow. Asheville is not a very large town, so we don't expect many phones to come in.
But these two guys will definitely get one.
The lucky First Guy In Line is Greg Mayer from Charlotte Street Computers here in town.
I'll take them some sausage, egg and cheese biscuits in the morning, unless the coyotes have already eaten these guys in the night.
I got back from my first ever JavaOne, and I'd have to say it was a success.
First the obligatory "look how cool I am" section...
Drank too much with Hani of the BileBlog. Congratulated Cameron John Purdy at the Tangosol party. Finally met Phil Dodds and Brett Porter, from DevZuz. Dan Diephouse and Paul R. Brown ("Yes, we're the XFire guys") had candy at their booth. Jason Hunter handed me an invite to the Google party, where I finally met Crazy Bob Lee (one of the damn nicest people ever). There I chatted with Ola Bini who is a man who makes me feel short. Re-met Jon Tirsen after a 3-year hiatus (the first hausparty in Amsterdam). Paul Hammant expounded on Mingle and other things over bowls of curry. Chatted with Matt Quail and Pete Moore of Cenqua a bit while absconding with Google t-shirts. Chatted with Matthew Porter of Contegix, the hosting providers of the Codehaus. Stood around (in my JBoss shirt) in front of the IBM booth chatting with Lauren Cooney. Met Guillaume LaForge and Graeme Rocher finally. Put some faces with the Exadel guys I'd worked with during the opensourcing of their products. Greg Wilkins reminded me the Codehaus SSL cert was expired (fixed now). Geert Bevin was as enthusiastic as ever at the TerraCotta booth. Ran into Jeremy Boynes in the lobby of the W on my way out of town. Jason van Zyl wandered the streets of San Francisco with me in search of a 7-11 and an ATM. Alex Vasseur dropped by the JBoss party to discuss event stream processing. James Strachan and Rob Davis were everywhere, of course.
Did some podcast recording with Tom Baeyens, Emmanuel Bernard, Bill Burke and Gavin King. Chatted with Thomas Diesler, Michael Yuan, Matt Quinlan, and Sacha Labourey. Enjoyed dinner with James Cobb, Mark Newton and Bela Ban. Damon Sicore, my predecessor, dropped by the JBoss party. Met innumerable coworkers whos names all fail me during my stints in or near the JBoss booth.
The fabulous Cindy Scheneck, Rebecca Goldstein and Chantal Yang arranged the booth, the party, the printing of the t-shirts and everything else that made it all awesome. Mad props to that trio, Burr Sutter, and the gaggle of sales-engineers who did an awesome job with the attendees.
With the large investment announced by Interface21, a lot of side-line analysis of business models was happening. Exactly where is the sweet spot of professional opensource? Is it training? Certifying a stack that you control? Supporting a stack that you don't? Purely professional services?
At the booth, technical demos seemed well received. A large screen and a good sound-system were definitely a wise investment. Every demo drew a large crowd around the booth. A lucky few got to see Gavin debug a demo live on stage. Seam is definitely hot this year.
Luckier still are those who "received" a "free" copy of Michael Yuan's book about Seam. Did I mention Seam is apparently hot?
We all need to realize that parties can occur on nights other than Wednesday. Luckily the JBoss->Eclipse->Google triathlon worked out, but many parties were concurrently scheduled.
I heard a lot of positive feedback from people I met about liking what we're doing at JBoss.org. They like the new look and layout. When it's common for people to throw around criticism and negativity, it's really nice to hear kind words. Sure, we've still got a long way to go, I'll readily admit, but I think we're doing a-okay.
In general, conferences like these are somewhat educational, definition inspirational, and help cement human-to-human relationships. While we all might be competitors, we're not enemies. In the world of opensource, we share the same community, so we all might as well get along and order another round of beers. Conferences demonstrate these cross-cutting commonalities that crosses P statements.
The fantastically French Guillaume LaForge pinged me about the Groovy Meetup on Monday, in San Francisco.
It's limited registration, so you best being heading over to the sign-up page.
I assume they'll regale us with stories of that crappy hand-rolled parser that one of the founders insisted upon.
What a loon.
JavaOne is next week. Would you believe this is the first JavaOne I'll ever have attended?
Some of my colleagues have put together a page detailing JBoss's participation at the conference.
Speakers from JBoss include Gavin King and Emmanuel Bernard, Michael Yuan, Tom Baeyens and many others.
I'll be hanging out at Booth #1418 along with James and Mark from my team. We'll also be wandering the halls talking to anyone who looks like they need some opensource Java love.
Wednesday night, there's going to be a party at the Metreon. You'll need to go register.
Just got back from Vegas, where I participated on a panel about opensource and business at TheServerSide Java Symposium. It involved five of us from businesses that were related to opensource in some form. It did not include Geir Magnusson, who apparently had better things to do.
Questions that Joe Ottinger and the audience threw at us ran the gamut from business strategy to licensing minutia. On the topic of how each contributes back to the community, JBoss, Interface21, and Liferay obviously employ developers, while SpikeSource primarily upstreams improvements, since they are basically just expert community members.
I think an audience member brought up the idea of the company "holding documentation hostage" for paying customers. Most everyone agreed that ultimately it depends on what you view your business as. If a company holds its docs hostage, someone else will ultimately create some competing docs. It might be the community. It could be a book publisher, who is an expert in creating fantastic docs and holding them hostage until you pay the cover price. That's how O'Reilly, APress, Manning and other companies participate in opensource.
One audience question involved how to define success in an opensource company. Once again, we all seemed to violently agree that success is defined just as for any other company. Profit! It's a dirty but true secret. Companies try to make profits. Opensource is just a method of software development, not a complete business model.
The issue of trademarks did arise. I'm not going to poke the bear here, but company counsel has replied on some of the other blogs out there.
On a different note, I finally got to meet Hani Suleiman, Ross Mason and Mike Cannon-Brookes in person. I ran into Dan Diephouse, Dion Almaer, Jonas Bon and Geert Bevin again.
Only lost $90 on the slots between me and my wife.
Thanks to my buddy Ben Walding, I'm now unofficially participating in the month of Movember, apparently to help raise awareness of men's health issues.
Of course, I cheated by simply trimming down an existing beard, instead of growing a mo' from scratch. I passed through an awkward Fu Manchu stage before arriving at the French-inspired 'stache.
Brian Topping had the foresight to bring his digital SLR and document the Oof Uncamp gathering last Tuesday evening. Attendees included some current and ex-ThoughtWorkers (Paul Hammant, Kurt Schrader), some guy from Ning (Brian McCallister), a cow-orker (Pete Royal) and a VP of something-or-another at Yahoo! (Sam Pullara). Plus our intrepid photo-historian, Brian Topping. Random partners and friends-of-friends were inbibing with us. Click the photo for even more photos.
Conversation ranged from why everything Yahoo! touches is so ugly to ranting about how freaking cold it was that night. By the time it was all over, Sam was talking about some ideas that involve fleeing the country, never to return. My reputation as Mr Perma-Beta was re-affirmed, and apparently is to blame for Radar's perma-stealth mode.
Yes, it's all my fault. I also cause cancer.
We befriended and inducted Cephus and Mongo as honorary hausmates. We doubt either of them own a computer, but they were nice guys, and the Codehaus Foundation needs some muscle on staff, in case we have some enforcing that needs doing.
Remember kids, any gathering of 3-or-more hausmates is an event. Or an un-event. 2.0.
Don't forget, kids, that Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up. Mark your calendarrrr, September the 19th. Yes, pirates are getting old. The meme is passing. Come on, Disney is working on their third freaking pirate movie already, so we know pirates are jumping the shark.
Some may claim that Chuck Norris is the next pirate-alike meme. I, for one, do not accept this conjecture. Chuck is merely a waypoint on the route to ninjas.
Ninjas are the next pirates. Ninjas are where it's at. Ninjas are hip. In fact, December 3rd is the Day of the Ninja. I suggest wearing ninja garb all day, particularly if you're flying or conducting business at government buildings. Everyone will get a good laugh.