The Devoxx mystery and performance anxiety

The Java blog space is full of stories from Devoxx. Actually I had never heard of this conference although I already hang around in the Java camp for a couple of years.
So I went looking into the schedule and found indeed a lot of high quality topics and speakers. How on earth is it possible that I've missed such a top notch conference all these years ?
The mystery was solved when I learned that the conference was called Javapolis before and I had completely missed the naming dispute with Sun (it seems I'm living under a rock).
Back when it was still called Javapolis I watched one of Joshua Bloch's excellent talks (video on the net was young in these days ;-)
Tom White reports that Joshua Bloch provided his favourite talk at Devoxx this year about "Performance anxiety". To accept performance as empirical science and giving up hope on performance predictability is tough for all us computer scientists. I think I should buy access to the video archive of Devoxx.

Quote of the month by Peter Hutterer

Peter Hutterer of X input fame in a post on X input grabs:

"If you think all this is confusing, look at the code that implements this :)
Also note that this post skips on a number of details and contains some amount of handwaving and sticking fingers in your ears and going "lalalala"."

Quote of the month by Jon Corbet

From my favourite Linux online publication lwn.net a great quote by editor Jon Corbet in “The end of the road for the Nexus One”. This will get a classic.

“Your editor will confess that he still feels a certain childlike joy at the prospect of reflashing an expensive device that he depends on, possibly bricking it, then painfully restoring all of the settings and discovering all of the new bugs which have been added. It’s the sort of adrenaline experience that others, perhaps, seek through horror movies, bungee jumping, investing in equities, or PHP programming.”

Inspiring TED talk on corruption

Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International, talks about the long way of exposing the damage corruption is bringing to our world. An inspiring aura of true and utter sincerity flows through his talk.

Other's N900 gagdet fun

N900 as retro gaming box.

Bambini soccer in the hood

It's always quite fun to watch the Bambini soccer cups of our youngest son. Most of the teams are swirling around the ball like bees ;-)

But there are usually one or two exceptional teams which have grasped the concept of passing the ball and using the space. Quite fun to watch.

My first post from the N900

Let's see if I can finally arrive in the modern times of the mobile web. Kind of hard to type on such a tiny keyboard but definitly fun.

I'm just trying to travel from Hamburg to Karlsruhe which is a major challenge in these days of snow weather everywhere in Germany. Two hours delay and counting. But a nice slowdown in a too busy work schedule ;-)