The BileBlog

There’s something particularly endearing about standing in the lepers line at a particular session at JavaOne this year. The lepers line, in case you weren’t aware, is for the poor sods who showed up to a session thinking they had registered, when they in fact hadn’t. You stick you card on the cute little reader, and it flashes an angry accusatory red, insisting you have not registered. The nearest usher will then calmly but surely place you in the lepers line, where you get to shuffle about uncomfortabely and look like the dumb bastard who couldn’t figure out how to register, or was too lazy to do so.

Having been one of those rejects twice, I’d argue that the members of the line form a kind of silent (and often not so silent) bond. Sure, we don’t know how to navigate one of the most poorly written webapps for selecting and scheduling sessions, but by god, we’ll give it our best shot.

Pitifully, I managed to attend just one session yesterday (not including my own), so there’s not much to report on that front. However, this JavaOne is, perplexingly….vibrant? There’s a certain energy that seems to have been lacking recently. I’ve noticed more than one person comment on the quality of the talks and topics, and how much fewer of them seem to be pointless fluffy Sun penis wagglage marketing poop.

Of course, the real highlight is all the drinking, socialising, and awkward moments when you find out you’ve just accidentally run into Bill Berk and he still hasn’t developed any social graces.

The linux distribution license thing announced yesterday is worthy of note; it’s always thrilling to see another nail hammered into Apache Harmony’s coffin. Why all the members of that project don’t just crawl into Stallman’s beard and die is a mystery as yet unsolved.

Ex-TSS Floyd also launched his new ‘it has nothing to do with tss nor is it competition and I’m not bitter honest honest’ site, infoQ. It’ll be at least interesting to see how the content evolves, given that some of the editors (well, one of) can barely string together a coherent sentence, and has the mental acumen of a small pebble.

Tonight there’s the Geronimo party, where I hope to point and laungh at the fact that these monkeys still seem utterly incapable of doing more than running around very quickly in tight little circles. To reward this rage and anger, they’re going to give me free food and beer. Aint JavaOne grand!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.