Every now and then I'm reminded how cyclical life is. The carbon cycle, the Krebs cycle, the Carnot cycle, the business cycle, technology cycles ("Cloud computing! It's the new SOA!")...

Every morning, I take the subway from GCT to 23rd St in Manhattan, which is near the NY Police Academy. Over the last year and a half that I've been working again in NYC, I've noticed the young men and women police cadets as they too ride the same subway, exiting at 23rd St. If you pay attention, you can see gentle change. First, the are just in their uniforms, maybe with their "New York Police Academy" duffel bags. Over time they eventually get a nightstick (or whatever they call them these days.. maybe a RMASIRCD ? "Rigid Mass for Alleged Suspect Influence via Rapid Contact Deceleration") which is neatly attached to the side of their NYPDA duffel with velcro straps clearly designed for such purpose. Very unthreatening. Then come the patrol pads, large, leather covered pads that they are required to carry in their right back pocket, which seems specifically tailored for this purpose.

After the pads come "the book", this *massive* binder which I can only assume is the penal code applicable to street policing. It's huge. Dragging these around, you'd think they were Marine recruits undergoing some sadistic boot-camp routine at Parris Island. Obvious jokes about "throwing the book at 'em" come to mind... Then comes the "utility belt" - gunless of course - that gets attached to the duffel bag strap. And so forth.

A few weeks ago, the cadets disappeared. Budget cuts? Shipped off to Iraq under some "It's not a draft.. really... they willingly sign their stop-loss orders..."-type Pentagon program? Some silly DHS drill harassing the aged and infirm at airport security checkpoints? Graduation? :)

This morning, coming down the stairs to the downtown subway platform, I noticed suits. Now, at 6:30am, there aren't a lot of suits riding the 6 downtown from GCT, just a lot of construction workers, software engineers, and other blue-collar types, so the density of suits were noticeable. And as I looked I noticed that they were somewhat I'll fitting and wrinkled - like that suit you had in high school that fit for the wedding you had to go to in your Junior year, but didn't work so well in your Senior year. And everyone had a duffel bag, but all different. And I caught them eyeing each other, but without real recognition. Well dressed terrorists, pretending to not know each other?

I stood next to one on the subway, and asked him :

"Excuse me..."
"Sir?"

"Sir?"? This is NYC. Who responds with "Sir?" in a NYC subway other than tourists? Did I run into a missionary group? Maybe the terrorist theory has some merit...

"Well, I couldn't help noticing the suits..."
"Yes sir"
"And it can't be a coincidence that a multi-cultural group of young people in somewhat ill-fitting and uncomfortable looking suits, each with a random duffel bag of similar size and contents - judging from the shape - happen to converge on the downtown 6 platform at 6:30 in the morning by sheer coincidence."
"No sir...."

This was the new academy class. They hadn't been issued their uniforms, and clearly they hadn't been instructed to dress to blend in. I spent a few more minutes talking to the young man - what his hopes are (working with the Transit Authority), if he's afraid ("Well, NYC is better than it used to be...") and how to cope with the danger ("You just have to always be aware"... "Isn't that tiring?" ... "I guess it will be..."). I couldn't imagine doing what he's doing.

I didn't get his name, and I doubt he'll ever read this. (I mean, even my friends don't read this...) But either way, to that young man and the rest like him on that train and trains to follow - thanks. You're brave and we're glad you're here. I'm sure you'll make a fine officer and I wish you the very best in your new career.

And yes, I'll be watching for the bag, the pad, the stick the belt and the book. And once again, I'll make the "throw the book at 'em" joke. And I suspect I'll hear a very polite "Yes sir."

I'm on the way back from FOO. Other than the 3.5 hour delay for my redeye, it was as always a perfect weekend. Perfect weather and a perfect event. It was great to see old friends and make new ones and get a glimpse of what truly interesting and talented people are doing. I always go away humbled from these.

(We managed to tie the standing FOO Werewolf record. End of sat was 6:15am. Never trust Jane after 5am.... Imagine you find yourself in a world separated by time and space from your own, where you are a humble villager, seer-less, healer-less, werewolf-less... gets confusing awfully fast....)

...takes 8 hours 30 minutes to get from Boston to New York?

1. A horse
2. A very fast catamaran
3. Amtrak regional service with 2 breakdowns
4. A MD-88 when operated by Delta Shuttle

It takes a confident man to fly an Elmo.

(Taken w/ Elmo tethered to one hand, iPhone in the other)

CT law says that kids must be in booster seats. Why are school buses exempt? The claim is that they are safest way kids travel. Maybe I'll sell our air-bag equipped, anti-lock brake equipped cars and get a truck frame, bolt on some bench seats, rivet some sheet metal on it, and paint it yellow.

At J1, at the general session. No clue yet what the theme for the year is, despite Rich Green being halfway into his pitch. Currently watching an AMZN Kindle demo. Maybe they'll throw a few from the stage.

Nice evening last night. Dinner w/ Simon and Danese in North Beach. Found out that SF natives store their car keys in the trunk keyhole when at dinner. That wouldn't work in NYC. Hard to imagine why they bother locking them in the first place. Saw friends at OpenSolaris launch party (part 1) at Jillian's and then evening of debauchery w/ friends at HoS courtesy of RedMonk. Thanks guys, and apologies again for my tardiness, James.

I dropped my laptop. Twice. It was after a weeklong trip to Brasil and Argentina. 6 airplanes, a zillion bus and cab trips, 2 train trips, 1 talk at FISL, interview 5 companies for offshoring/staff augmentation. I was tired.

After the first drop, 10% of the screen was broken - the left side. Got another and was going to do a transfer when I got home. On the way home, it fell out of my bag again. Now over 50% of the screen didn't work.

Solution? Carbon Copy Cloner. Attached the two laptops together w/ a FireWire 800 cable, held option on startup to let me boot off the drive in my broken laptop, used CCC to clone the old drive to the new laptop.

4 hours later, had a complete clone, and got back to work. Perfect. Recommended.

Was in Sao Paulo yesterday talking to software companies about finding an outsourcing / "staff augmentation" relationship, and one CTO, when discussing the opportunities for her company's software internationally, said "Fortunately, Angola just got through a civil war..."

She didn't quite mean it that way...

I had a few free minutes and was using the session builder to put together a schedule for JavaOne. Seems to work much better this year for some reasons. Anyway, it's clear that Sun and Azul settled their lawsuit - there are lots of Azul presenters on cool subjects, and good to see proliferation of non-Java language talks.

I did the export of the schedule to .ics and imported to iCal. Worked like a charm. Only problem is that it only was my sessions, and not the general ones, like the general sessions, pavilion hours, lunch, coffee breaks, and after hours activities. Silly.

Currently down in Brasil for FISL (it's over) and some business-related work in Sao Paulo. FISL was a great time - the talk went well, and it was nice to see people I know down here, as well as some of my friends from Sun. I won't name names. They all were very kind, open and welcoming, including me in their social activities, and I got to know many of them better. Really a smart and talented bunch. Thanks. I really do appreciate it.

I also got to spend time with Ean Schuessler and his brother Eric, who also was here. When Bruno told me "Hey, Ean has a brother! He's bigger and crazier than Ean is!" I knew that things were going to be more interesting than usual. It was great meeting Eric. These two guys are insanely talented, and inspired at a level that is indescribable.

I have two photo's to share. The first comes from a restaurant we went to sat night, one that specialized in filet mignon, where "specialized" refers to the various ways they cook it. Start with "Chicken-Fried" :

Yes, there's a piece of steak in there - and not a bad one. (Forget the bed of pasta it's one...) That was followed by "filet mignon parmesian", then w/ garlic, then we a yellow-ish cheese, then a white-ish cheese, then madiera, and then something else I forgot. All good, but odd :)

Here's another pic from the gym at my current hotel - it's SP in the evening, clouds and rain :

Poor T-Mobile. They lost the wifi franchise in Starbucks.

They modified the login page, at least here in Manhattan, to explain. In doing so, they modified it so that it doesn't work in Firefox on a mac - the login form doesn't render. I actually had to boot Safari.

I probably won't miss you.

"yah, we had to go grocery shopping... the closest usable supermarket was in belgium"

I'm was at 36,000ft above the atlantic going west. We're just passing Iceland. I had rented the latest Pirates of the Carribean via iTunes before I left on this latest UK jaunt, and after a few rather intense few days, was very excited sit back, chill and watch it in a Steve-Jobs-Approved way, of course. Which is fine - I just want to watch the movie. After all - this was trip #3 to the UK this month, and I'd seen everything that AA was showing on the plane that I had a vague interest in. But, much to my dismay... I can't watch it. Why? Some clown at Apple decided that one has to be connected to the internet to watch a movie that you paid for and downloaded. (Yeah, for Joost you need to be connected even though we cache, because we *are* a streaming service...) I assume said clown wanted to prevent the 0.0025% of all mac users that use virtualization from doing VM snapshots and watching the movie over again or something. I'm actually a big fan of copyright and other IP rights (and ironically think that Hillary Rosen and the RIAA did more harm to copyright owners than anyone realizes - single-handedly, she created a generation of people that simply don't respect IP), but at that moment, I *completely* understood at least one aspect of what drives the anti-DRM crowd (and there are others, such as DRM not respecting copyright expiration and fair use). It's only a matter of time before some 17-year-old breaks Apple's DRM, probably out of frustration like mine. I hope that isn't what it takes for me to watch movies I rent.

I'm convinced I never want to get into an A380, but I could probably handle it if I could fly in the suite, and didn't have to wait for my 500 other friends on the plane to exit first...

(thx to http://www.upgradetravelbetter.com/)

... when you look up and are shocked to see you are only just entering Irish airspace...

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And that's the 4-star part of the hotel. Guy may or may not come and fix it tomorrow. I'm in the Holiday for the night...

I'm back in Leiden for a few days (where most of Joost engineering is...) and staying at the Tulip Inn. It's the supposedly "3 star" brand of the "Golden Tulip" chain, where they award the Golden Tulip 4 stars. (Clearly european hotels have fallen victim to "star inflation"). In Leiden, there is both a Golden Tulip, and a Tulip Inn. They are the same building. They have only one lobby, one restaurant, one desk. After you check in, you go left into the rooms that are the Tulip Inn, and straight to the rooms that are Golden Tulip.

I called down this morning and asked for coffee. "Sir, we don't have room service in the Tulip Inn". I asked if they have it in the Golden Tulip. "Oh, yes sir". So I asked why they couldn't simply go left rather than straight when delivering the coffee. "Sir, we don't have room service in the Tulip Inn. That's the difference between a 3 and 4 star...."

It seems like room service is a cost center or somerhing. I wonder if they know they can charge for it?

Off to one of my favorite conferences, JavaOne. Could be an interesting week...

Or not.

trying to keep track

As a frequent flyer, I find this pretty funny. I especially liked the dig at JetBlue.

A week ago I attended FOSDEM for the first time. It's a fun conference. Held a university in Brussels "You want it to be Paris, but it isn't" Belgium, it attracts lots of people from all over. A large number appeared to be students, and I always love to experience that energy, drive and hope for the future that I find in students. Hopefully some rubbed off on me, to counter my "old guy" jadedness. Also, I got to spend time with good friends in the FLOSS community, including some of my favorite people from Sun. I felt like an adopted Sun employee sometimes, they were so gracious in letting me hang out with them.

There's lots of coverage about what was said in lots of blogs, but I think what was most interesting was what wasn't said, which boil down to two words - "Harmony" and "OSGi". I was there focused on open source java, so attended mainly the OpenJDK/GNUClasspath track. I had asked to participate months ago to give an update on Apache Harmony, but wasn't allowed a timeslot by the organizers. That's cool - it's their track, and I guess there wasn't time. But, it would have been nice to give an update on our progress - I think we have the most complete open source Java class library, and our VM is nothing to sneeze at - solid JIT, good GC, and performance that seems to be getting darn close to Sun's Java SE 5. We still have lots of work to do, but we're not yet 2 years old, and we've come so far, so fast. We do have a minor license incompatibility problem with the GPL-ed Java projects, but the FSF has realized the error of their ways, and is fixing it ;) As for what was presented, I thought it a nice overview of a variety of projects, and nice to put faces on names that I only know from IRC, email and blogs.

What was really odd was in the 2 hour discussion on packaging and deployment, not one person uttered "OSGi". I can't figure out why other than some NIH problem - it's a proven, mature spec currently in v4, with tons of deployments out there, from everything from cars to enterprise app servers with multiple open source implementations. Even Eclipse is built on it. I heard a bit about JSR-277, a still-in-progess JSR with no implementations.

The packaging story for the linux distros will be interesting. The core problem is that OpenJDK won't be releasing binaries, so if the distros want to include "Java" rather than "software we built from the source that goes into Java" (SWBFTSTGIJ), they'll need to get a TCK from Sun and certify that their build passes. (That's a interesting little minefield for everyone involved - more on this later). Even if Sun was releasing binaries in OpenJDK, the distros still have their own needs, such as layout, libraries, etc, so again, to do Java vs SWBFTSTGIJ, they need the TCK. I imagine that RedHat's customers want Java - they are now selling a full stack solution ("100% Open Source!") - and won't be happy with SWBFTSTGIJ.

Anyway, despite my minor disappointment re Harmony, it was a good conference for me. It was nice to get the general "free software" perspective on the world in general, and I'm eager to see how the drama of OpenJDK plays out in my little corner of the world. My real learning experience is getting a better understanding of the perspective of the linux packagers in the case of redistributing Java. They aren't concerned with the same things that us java implementors worry about - they really just want a clean way of distributing the software. They don't really care about our religious beliefs regarding compatibility, and I understand better how the JCP hoops we ask people to jump through may be a big problem. I look forward to see how this plays out, because I think that it's important we do everything we can to ensure that distros ship Java, and not SWBFTSTGIJ.

This trip is finally over :) I'm here in PDX waiting for them to wind up the rubber bands on the MD-80. Since you can't fly to anywhere from PDX, I have to go through ORD, but I'm not worried, because they never are affected by weather, especially in the winter.

I've been a week - Brussels, San Francisco, Portland and Stevenson WA (ish). 6 different airports, 5 different hotels. 3 train stations. 4 different in-room wireless providers. 2 airlines. 1 car rental company and a tram.

Now I can go home. I may have a whole week there :)

Intel Linux event. Beautiful place, the Columbia River, in a wet, mossy damp sort of way :)

FOSDEM was fun. Managed to make it to SFO in one piece for the JCP F2F meeting. Was lucky and got to experience the new business cabin for AA. My vote? Go back to the old way. There was more room per person...

FOSDEM. Get to see all my Sun friends, and open/free Java friends. I'm looking forward to it.

One outsmarted a pistol-weilding hijacker yesterday, and in 1998, the pilot of another hijacked Air Mauritania plane overpowered his hijacker.

(Kill me now...)

http://crankyflier.blogspot.com/2007/01/ana-goes-upscale.html

(OSGi Enterprise WG kick-off...)

I'm not sure what's weirder, that this press release from China Southern Airlines has a title that starts with "BOFFO! BOFFO! BOFFO!", or that they felt the need to assure the general public that they were able to operate safely in 2006.

I've been trying to buy Skype credit. It keeps rejecting my MC, and doesn't take Amex. I don't carry a pile of credit cards with me. I wonder why - they don't tell you why it's rejected, just that it is. I realize that by not telling, maybe it's more secure, but still - it seems to be a fairly mickey-mouse operation.

So I tried moneybookers, the suggested alternate payment source. They don't like my mastercard either.

So I called mastercard. They never saw any attempted transactions. Could it be because I'm traveling and in Argentina, and they see the request coming from there? But wouldn't it make sense for a US-based traveler to... want to use skype when traveling?

(The power in Baghdad is more stable than the internet access in this hotel...)

(Going to keep track of where I go this year)