LarsWestergren's Journal: Java One report - Day 0: Open Community Day

First Open Solaris session was very good. Heavily oriented towards sysadmin topics - DTrace, Zones, ZFS etc. Very neat, but not too relevant for my everyday use as a Java developer. I went up afterwards asking about drivers for graphics cards, wireless etc. They claimed wireless and nVidia drivers are on par with Linux, and ATI on the way. Cool kilt on the speaker.

Nexenta and DTrace sessions were not as good. Open Solaris/Nexenta talk was a bit too basic, felt like a sales pitch. The speaker spent a little too much time explaining basic (first year) "race conditions in c threads" theory when he was showing compiler and debugging tools. I would have liked to see more about how the features compete.
  DTrace session - one guy was constantly typing code on screen, the speaker was sometimes referring to what he was writing, sometimes not. That was distracting as you didn't know if you should try to follow the code or not, also distracting was the banter from the fellow team members on first row since many of us (sitting behind them) couldn't hear what they said, only what the speaker replied. Nevertheless, awesome technology. It was actually Sun engineers who quickly solved Twitter's awful Ruby on Rails performance using DTrace.

Netbeans 6 and Matisse sessions were excellent. Extremely impressive how far the platform has evolved the last couple of years. I'm really looking forward to Beans Bindings now. Some of the Czhech speakers have adorable accents, they sound like Dr Nick from the Simpsons. :)

The virtual flying dukes contest was more difficult than I expected. My avatar is finally going in the correct direction, but 50-100% too far for some reason. Maybe I just suck as a programmer.