I finally heard back on my 3 proposals to JavaOne, and two were accepted! Not bad I’d say. So it looks like I’m once again off to sprinkle the magical pixie dust of JRuby goodness amongst several presentations by my fellow JRubyists. The JRuby ship is sailing pretty strong this year so I’m fairly hopeful in seeing a good turnout at the JRuby Birds of a Feather session, and hopefully also at the Monkeybars talk. Could this be the point where Monkeybars breaks out beyond Ruby users? I guess we’ll find out in May.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Yes we all know the saying, those who ignore history.. yada, yada. However, it’s another thing to be in the middle of one of these “we’re repeating history, and not for the first time” events. I would direct your attention to the Panic of 1837, a precursor to the more well known Great Depression of 1929. Both had similar causes to today’s American woes, namely overspeculation and overextension of credit. The panic of 1837 even included a real estate boom. Based on this cycle, I guess 90 years from now will be a pretty good time to start short selling everything in sight.
Several months ago a survey was started to find out what people are using for GUI development and what they’re looking for from the various toolkits. Well the results have been published and you can look them over for yourself. Apparently JRuby/Swing aren’t exactly taking over the GUI development landscape, although I’d like to see the results from just developers pursuing commercial applications as I believe many of the GUI toolkits (such as Shoes) simply are not usable for this use case.
Saw The Lion King at ASU Gammage last night. I’m a pretty big theater fan for anyone who knows me, especially musicals.
Four things.
- This is the same old tired Lion King story you remember from the movie. Same Disney obsession with monarchies and the perfect societies they usher in. Same silly gazelle bowing down to the lion who will eventually eat them.
- This version actually showed the lions hunting (and killing) the gazelle. Props to whoever inserted that scene.
- Costume design and set design still has space to be insanely innovative and stunning. I saw some of this at the Tony’s last year and sort of knew what to expect but it’s entirely different in person. Wow.
- Never underestimate the emotional impact of a big-ass drum and the lights going out at the same time. The end of the opening number with the drum had much of the visceral emotion I thought made the end of Act 1 of Wicked the best bit of theatrical theater I have ever seen.
Emerging from my primordial 2003-era Internet hipness I’ve finally jumped onto the podcasting ship (woot, I’m in 2006 now!). The podcast, named “Damage on the Stack” is for a game I play called Magic: The Gathering (sort of a mix between poker and chess) and is hosted by the fine folks at the MTG Cast network.
