Last night for dinner here in São Paulo, instead of a Churrascaria, Bruno suggested a pizza place he really likes. As he described it, I sorta didn't get the appeal, but as a good guest, I was up for whatever our host was proposing. Quite honestly, Bruno never gets it wrong, so I trust that there was something about the place that his description didn't relay. He said :

• It's in the middle of nowhere
• they don't have plates
• The don't have knives and forks either
• There's no table service
• You get your own drinks
• It's really expensive
• It only has valet parking

It turned out that he was right about every point, and it really was great.

He wasn't kidding about the "middle of nowhere" part. São Paulo is a massive city, and we actually drove outside of it. I was expecting a "Welcome To Argentina" sign at any moment. We turned off the main street (which really was a residential street with speedbumps) and went down a sidestreet with woods on one side and small houses on the other, up into more brush and woods, and there it was "A Tam da Pizza". After giving the car to the valet (!), we went into a large-ish building of 3 adjacent levels, like steps - the place was built on a hill - with standard tables and chairs. No place settings, but just a basket of napkins. No table service - you go down to the lowest level where two wood-fired ovens were in full swing, with one guy moving pizza in and out, and two people making. You literally told the pizza makers what you wanted, and then went and found yourself a drink. Really - bottles of liquor out on a table, a rack of wine bottles, and refrigerators of soda, water and beer (and chilled wines). You just took what you wanted, and wrote it down on a piece of paper you got from the pizza makers.

The menu was very simple. Each page was just a closeup of 1/2 a pizza, and a little poem about what was in it. (I have to take Bruno's word on it... the poem was in Portuguese). Gorgeous. The pizza eventually arrive - ok, so there is some table service - they bring you the pizza. Everyone just grabs a slice - the dough is thin and firm, and there's no need for plates or cutlery. It was phenomenal. We had two vegetarians with us, so were getting both veggie pizzas and meat. (How can a vegetarian actually get past immigration in this country? I don't think that there's a word for "vegetarian" here... "salad... it's what food eats...") All the pizzas were great - even the final "dessert pizza", which was banana, cinnamon and sugar baked until everything carmelized, and then drizzled with a touch of rum. Simply fantastic.

Today was the "Marathon 4 Java" event, part of the Sou+Java event here in Brazil. The idea was to send speakers to a number of universities to give talks, and then have a Java coding competition, where teams of 4 work on a problem, each member of the team working on the code for 15 minutes, serially.

We setup a speakers team here in Sao Paulo, with Flavio Bergamaschi, Tom Tromey and myself joined by a local student. The problem was fairly straightforward - to simulate an LED display, with a scaling factor, so with the input of "2 12" you would print

     --
  |    |
  |    |
     --
  | |   
  | |
     --

where the first "2" was the number of bars per "side". There were some other requirements, such as being able to handle error input, etc. Adding to the fun, you had to do the project in NetBeans, as they are sponsoring the event. I've actually never used NetBeans, spending my time in IDEA or Eclipse, but I figured that couldn't be too bad.

Our algorithm was simple - we had a set of arrays for the rasters representing which bars were "lit" for each numeral. Some loops and viola, or so we thought. The student went first, with the assignment to do the input handling, getting that out of the way. I was second, and I was going to type in the matrix of data, frame out the code, and writing the algorithms. Tom went third, to finish whatever I didn't get done, and then Flavio fourth to test and clean up the code.

I was afraid of NetBeans - being under time pressure in a new development environment was worrisome, but as it turned out, it wasn't a problem compared to the fact that the keyboards were localized! Lots of things were in different places! Couple that with NetBeans' auto completion and templating, and things got weird real quick. Needless to say, I didn't get as much done in my 15 minutes as I wished. While Tom was doing his 15 minutes of suffering with the keyboard, I banged it out using Eclipse on my laptop, and the algorithm worked just fine. Flavio went last to fix the remaining bugs. We didn't quite get there, but we'll see how we stack up against the others.

I don't know what the lesson is. Clearly "one guy on Eclipse is faster than 4 on NetBeans" is funny, but not fair. Maybe "slight modifications to working environment is tremendously disruptive, and gets in the way of even just executing on a known plan of action". I'm glad we got to work out the algorithm ahead of time - having to do creative thought with virtually every keystroke requiring a mental try/catch/finally would have been hopeless.

Choo choo! The train keeps rolling.

Today, Intel made a contribution to the Apache Harmony project. You can read the contribution announcement here.

This is a class library contribution focused on Java security. The highlights, as noted in the contribution announcement :

• Java Security Architecture (public API)
• Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA)
• Java Cryptography Extension (JCE)
• Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE)
• Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL)
• Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS)
• GSS-API (JGSS)
• ASN.1 support framework and documentation for it.

This is just as exciting as the IBM announcement, as it means more code, more people more ideas and better community. We now have the legal framework done (oh, I hope, I hope, I hope...) and can move on to this new phase of the project, actual work. :)

Last Monday, I started my new job with Intel. With only 90,000 people, it's almost a startup ;)

It's an opportunity that I couldn't resist, and I'll continue to work on Apache Harmony, Apache Geronimo as well as new projects, both open source and commercial. It's a great chance to straddle two worlds I know and love.

So far, it's been great - although it's like drinking from a fire hose.... they waste no time...

I'm in Brazil again for Sou+Java Conference. I really love to visit here. The people are great, the weather is great, the beef is great...

... on my new powerbook really is a lot less terrible than iPhoto 4.

This supports my "one guy" theory of Apple OS X apps. This is my 5th or 6th "modern" Mac (OS X) and I've been watching the key desktop apps improve. Mail was terrible and then magically became better in one of the upgrades. Calendar? I'd fling the Mac across the room because Calendar was so irritatingly weird. Then one version *poof*, it was fixed. Mac OS X UI? 10.4 it became much faster, like someone who knew about threads lent a hand. Now iPhoto has become almost usable.

My theory? Apple has one guy (or gal) that really knows his or her stuff - and can only work on one thing at a time...

Next : Apple, please put that person in iChat. It needs to understand multiple protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, Jabber, Google-thingy) and please, please please add a tabbed interface. I use Adium because of these deficiencies and miss the video chat...

"Is this the end of web frameworks as we know it?" - James Strachan

I think so. We're going to still want app creation frameworks, and it will be interesting to see how current MVC approaches translate over to the browser-side nature of AJAX. I've never built anything w/ AJAX. Maybe it's time to try.

I had to get a new Macintosh Powerbook (more on why later). I have 17", one that's a rev back from current. Because of the amount of travel I do, I decided to go with the 15". Same reso as the old 17", and 1.5lb lighter. You can also get them from the Apple store (no waiting) with the 7200 RPM drive in it. Woo hoo.

So far, the coolest thing was the setup. Turn the machine on. See it say "welcome" in 45 different languages. Take the old 17", bring it up in Target Disk mode (it doesn't boot the OS - it just turns into a firewire drive). Plug it in, and wait 5 hours. When done, the 15" is *exactly* the same config w/ user data as the old 17". Very, very cool. I'm up and running with no environment change.

I updated the powerbook to 10.4.3. My Treo stopped synchronizing.

Solution : http://macintouch.com/tiger34.html

(I just wanted to get another link pointing to to the solution for anyone else that is faced with the same panic and terror I felt... :)

I have to do more work in windows these days, and I want a usable command prompt. How hard can this be? I want a shell where I can do such bleeding edge things like use my mouse to cut and paste.

I do have cygwin installed, but that's still not like... my mac...

When IBM offered a contribution to the Apache Harmony project, I had lots of concerns about how the GNU Classpath community would react, and I'll admit I've been pleasantly surprised.

They are interested in the technology, have been generally positive so far about a discussion about the alternative VM/Classlibrary interface that the contribution contains, and while it puzzles some that people would want to do more classlibrary work when they have a lot, they seem to understand that people volunteer for all sorts of reasons, and it's a good thing to get out of the way of a determined volunteer.

Most importantly, it enabled us to re-kindle our collaboration discussions. It was one of the first things that Mark brought up when we were talking, which I thought was great. Now, this code contribution doesn't in any way change the hurdles that we have, but it gives us a sound technical base onto which we can continue, and as long as there's conversation, there's hope. I look forward to it continuing.

I've been accused of wanting another VM/classlibrary interface for political reasons, and this contribution now gives us a chance to put that personally-unpleasant theory to rest - there are technical issues that are important here (before, we couldn't really have a good discussion because w/o the code, it was really hard...) so even if people want to discount my legal concerns, I think we have a path to open technical debate and comparison.

What's interesting is that we can actually do real-world test - if we can get this new VM/classlibrary interface supported by GNU Classpath - even provisionally - then the IBM VM can be used to test how well it works, how it performs, and interestingly, how well it ports (as that's another objective of the project...)

So the train continues to pick up steam...

Today, IBM (fd - I'm an IBM employee...) made a contribution to the Apache Harmony project. You can read the contribution announcement here.

The highlights :

• A VM/classlibrary interface that has been production tested and a good candidate for standardization
• A core set of the Java class library (java.lang, java.util, java.io, java.net, et al) that is enough to run Ant or the Eclipse compiler - our goal here is to get a self-hosting compiler....
• Native code support for Win32 and Linux
• IBM also made available their VM under an evaluation license to help people evaluate and test the code contribution. The VM isn't a contribution to the project, and can only be downloaded from IBM.

Next steps for the project include evaluation of the codebase, accepting (I assume) the codebase, and then work on getting our current VMs to support the VM/classlib interface, working to get Kaffe to support the interface so there is a free VM available to use with this, and working with GNU Classpath to support this alternative VM/classlib interface so that GNU Classpath can be run on the IBM VM if they wish...

I think this is really exciting. As I said in a note to the list, I think of Harmony as a big freight train. It's hard to get moving, but when you do, even a little velocity means you have a big momentum.

I can't be described as the biggest Maven fan in the world. I use it when a project I'm working with uses it, but my first instinct is to reach for Ant. I don't know why, really - Maven was founded by a friend of mine, Jason Van Zyl, and I like to support things done by my friends. I guess that it came down to never having had to dive in deeply, and my impression of Maven 1.x was that the documentation was more in the spirit of oral tradition than anything else. So I never quite knew how to get things done confidently. It was always more of a empirical exercise, trying this, trying that.

Now there's Maven 2.0, and it appears that the oral tradition has been replaced with a really nice set of docs. It's been argued that open source projects don't do a good job of documentation, and while that may be true on average, that's clearly not the case here. Kudos to the Maven project for doing such a nice job. Learning Maven 2 is something near the top of my to-do list, and these docs are going to help.

As a mac user, I have a hard time using Eclipse because it's so ssssllllloooooowwwww on the Mac, so I generally stick to using IDEA. But as an IBM employee, I need to carry around a ThinkPad to get to Notes and such, and I have eclipse on that and it just simply rocks.

So it's funny how tooling can change behavior. I find that I'm doing more and more on Eclipse on the ThinkPad. At this point, all of the projects I'm involved in use SVN, and the Eclipse SVN integration is good. (Sadly, it's broken on the mac). And the ThinkPad is - I hate to admit it - so much faster than my PowerBook G4. And it's not even a fast ThinkPad, but the standard-issue-to-developer-employee-at-IBM-ThinkPad-after-you-complain-one-iteration model, the T42p.

Now, if Eclipse would just do mail...

This complements what I said yesterday about being offline as well...

I've been trying to get motivated to blog again, so I'm just going to start and see if I can keep going.

I'm here at OSBC in at the Marriott Boston Newton, which isn't in Boston or Newton but in Auburndale according to Mapquest.

I just saw a demo of Zimbra by Scott Dietzen. I have to admit it's quite an amazing demo, and it seems real - I played with it online. Go play with it. Very cool.

I used to use the original web interface to Microsoft Exchange, which was guaranteed to either result in tears of self-pity or fits of uncontrollable rage. I thus can appreciate a good web interface to mail, calendaring, etc. However, I still have the problem with offline work - I spend lots of time on planes, for example, and I do an awful lot of email catchup on said planes. It's the same problems I have with wiki's for documentation. Put aside the fact that it's not a documentation tool, I can't work offline. Maybe we'll get there w/ SVNWiki.