Josh On Design

Sunday is over and I need to get some sleep, as JavaOne starts for real tomorrow, but I wanted to blog down my thoughts (can blog be a verb now?) before I head off to the land of Nod.

I had a great time today, even if it was only half a day. I was up too late last night and slept in. Then I had to pack up my clothing, clean out my bag, and get ready to live on my cousin's couch for the next week. By the time I actually got to San Francisco, parked, and made it to the Argent hotel, I had missed the registration. Lots of cool people to meet, though. Speaking of which, if you are at JavaOne be sure to do everything you can to meet new people. I'm a pretty shy person by nature but I'm doing everything I can to be outgoing at the convention. It only comes around once a year so I want to make it worth it.

Okay, on with the Sunday. So I started at the Netbeans day and it was hugely packed. Many other people have blogged about it so I won't repeat what they've said. I'll just say that 4.1 is really great and Matisse rocks. I'm a GUI person who loves to tweak my interfaces endlessly. I care about pixel details so I always build my GUIs by hand. I don't trust GUI builders. This is a GUI builder that I will use. It's that good! Of course it could be better.. Perhaps an XML output mode.. Maybe move a few pixels around..... (next thing you know I've wasted a weekend redesigning the gradient editor).

A quick apology to Romain Guy, our intern for the summer. I'm sorry I missed your demo. I had to rush out to an extra meeting and then work with Chris on our presentation. I hear it went well and I can't wait to see it shown off during Gosling's demo on Thursday. Congratulations on a job well done!

After Netbeans Day, I headed over to Moscone to register, sign up as a a speaker, play with my gift: a nifty new laser pointer, and start lugging around extra bag #1. Chris Adamson (my co-author on Swing Hacks) and I sat down to work on our presentation, demos, et al. The ubiquitous wi-fi at Moscone is really nice. I have to say I'm getting spoiled living around wi-fi now. I don't think I've ever plugged in a physical ethernet port since I got my new laptop. It's really nice to have it everywhere inside such a large facility. They've done a top notch job. (It's also nice to be able to explore the place on a Sunday without all of the crowds.)

A quick aside about the JavaOne wi-fi. They don't block port 25 so you shouldn't have trouble sending mail. However, the web goes through a proxy. This isn't normally a problem, but it will choke Subversion when you are going over HTTP because it strips some headers. (CVS using pserver works fine, though). The solution is to use https, but Mac OS X's default Subversion client doesn't support it. For that cross section of you using Subversion on an Apple laptop and who are also at JavaOne and need to check out code (okay, that's like 3 of you), you need to download the new svn client here. Be sure to put /usr/local/bin/ at the beginning of your path and you should be all set

So, after more work on the talk we headed over to the Thirsty Bear for an O'Reilly get together. I met a lot of cool people and drank of couple of good beers. They only serve beers from their own brewery, and I'm a fan of Guinness, so I had their stout. Pretty good. Not as good as a Guinness but not bad for some American lads. I plan to have one of their ciders when I come back. Speaking of which, I will be a the Thirsty Bear for the Java.net Blogger's social Monday night at 6. Come on by and we'll chat.

Well that's pretty much it for Sunday. I headed home to get some sleep before I head back into the city for the first keynote in the morning. See you tomorrow!

-Josh : sleepy