13 Apr 2006
Well, the much anticipated (to me at least) Google Calendar went live today.
My first impression, Wow!
As expected it has a dead simple user interface and I was able to import my exported calendars (from Outlook) with no problems. It schedules daily tasks with a simple click-drag, and multi-day/repeatable events are a simple property change away. It’s got integration with Google Maps, although none of my imported events actually have address information in them.
Enough said, you should check it out.
11 Apr 2006
I’ve wanted to go to JavaOne for a number of years now but the opportunity has never presented itself.
It looks like that’s going to change this year as somehow I’ve convinced my employer that it’d be in both of our best interests to send me.
I’ve transitioning into more of a technical lead role (I work for a startup so we all wear plenty of hats) so I’m looking forward to the conference and think it’ll be a pretty good experience. I went to NFJS last year when it was in Seattle and had a pretty good time. I think it’s a great conference as well and I’ll most likely be attending it again this year.
Having never been to a JavaOne before, is there anything to look out for? It looks like they’ve put a new system in place to pre-register for session’s. That takes some of the fun out of last minute decisions, but I suppose its a step in the right direction of ensuring that everyone gets a spot in the sessions of their choice.
I haven’t had a good look through the session catalog yet, but I definitely plan on attending anything given by Romain Guy, JGoodies Karsten and the JBoss/Hibernate/Spring guys.
I’ve also never been to San Francisco so I’ll probably take a couple days before the conference to do a bit of exploring.
11 Apr 2006
So it’s been ~3 weeks since I switched my primary development environment from Ubuntu to Windows.
I wasn’t sure how it would turn out (been a Linux user for the better part of the past 12 years), but I’ve actually been quite happy. All my tools (Eclipse, JRockit, ant, svn, etc.) worked pretty much out of the box. I do have cygwin installed and my terminal of choice is rxvt, so I haven’t completely abandoned the relative comfort of Unix.
My initial reason for switching to Windows had to do primarily with performance. Sun’s jdk on Windows was substantially faster than the equivalent on Linux. I don’t have concrete runtime numbers but JBoss was starting up in 1/3 the time. That did serve as a bit of a catalyst to make the necessary changes to the codebase so that we could run with JRockit (we use xstream for xml [de]serialization and it has a problem with some jre’s and private final variables). JRockit on Linux did bring the JBoss startup time down, but java on windows still feels faster even if it really isn’t.
I did run into a rather annoying problem today tho. I needed to do some packet sniffing on my localhost but it turns out that the Windows tcp/ip stack doesn’t have a true loopback (ala Linux) and Ethereal wasn’t able to pick anything up. A minor inconvience but one nonetheless.
I will return to Linux development (at some point), but it’s been nice to be able to come home, fire up some rxvt’s and do a bit of development. Much easier than having to dual-boot everytime I want to look over some code. I haven’t really looked into it, but perhaps there might be a virtualization alternative using VMware or perhaps even coLinux.
My development machine is a Dell Latitude 2ghz centrino with 2gigs of ram. It’s been able to handle most everything I’ve thrown at it and there weren’t many problems in terms of unsupported hardware in either Linux or Windows. Next on the upgrade path is a dual-core 
Must Haves for Windows Development
- Cygwin (and rxvt)
- EditPlus
- Ethereal
- Psi (Jabber client)
- and the usuals (Eclipse/IntelliJ, JRockit, ant, Apache)