madbean

So considering the last two days, I began today with much trepidation. But luckily the day in the booth went very well (our monitors turned up earlier this morning). Okay, it went well until Pete spilt beer over one of our keyboards; but that was at the end of the day, so I don’t count that as a total disaster.

But after spending all morning setting up the booth and all day in the booth leaves little time for seeing any of the technical sessions. Conor and I are planning to catch one tomorrow.

We managed to crash the Tangosol party tonight, where Brendan took this happy snap of Pete (our html monkey) telling Ed Burns (JSF spec lead) how much the web sucks.

48 hours after the last aborted attempt at reaching JavaOne, we are in SF and have our conference passes.

But oh no, it could not be that simple. We get to our hotel by about 4pm, and we need to have the booth ready by 11am tomorrow. And UA lost our fucking Apple Cinema Displays somewhere between LAX and SFO. You have to be fucking kidding me!

But our Guardian Angle saved us, and lent us two monitors. I really don’t know what we would do without her!

With trepedation we await tomorrow: JavaOne Day One.

The plan was to fly out from Sydney to San Francisco today. The plane was fueled, the travelers boarded. The aircraft taxied out to the runway, takeoff speed was reached, and the front wheel may have even left the tarmac.

Then some bloody bird flew straight into engine two, the pilots hit the breaks, and we came to a halt just before tasting the salty brine in Botany Bay.

Fucking wildlife!

Oh well, we can try again tomorrow.

I’m off to San Francisco this weekend, we be at JavaOne again this year. Remember to come say “hi”, especially if you want a peek at Crucible.

Unlike last year, we won’t be in the t-shirt hurling competition. Which is a shame considering that the Myth Buster boys will be doing some commentary this year. Last year we managed to bust the myth that LED sensors are a good mix with flash photography.

At least the weather next week in SF is forecast to be warmer than here. The forecast is for about 20 Celsius; with flurries of geeks and extended periods of nerding-it-up.

Slightly more worrying than the previous moment, here is another quiet moment of project-size zen.

    [javac] Compiling 666 source files to /home/matt/work/crucible/trunk/output/classes

Posted to the in-case-you-have-this-problem-too department.

About 6 months ago, Flash stopped playing sound for me. This was terrible: I watch a lot of Flash animations! This aggravated me to such an extent that I went so far as to re-install OSX (which I needed to do anyway, after a semi-botched upgrade to Tiger).

Today, the same thing happened again. Argh! However, this time, I was able to enter in the correct combination of keywords on Apple Support’s search page, and found this article:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300832

1) Open Audio MIDI Setup (/Applications/Utilities/), then check the Audio Output setting.

2) Change the Audio Output setting to 44100.0 Hz.

3) Quit Audio MIDI Setup.

It solved my problem! Not sure which Application was the culprit that change that setting to begin with (GarageBand? OS X upgrade?), but I don’t care, its fixed!

Update: also mentioned here.

spud:  On Spring: http://crazybob.org/2006/01/i-dont-get-spring.html
conor: java development is so faddish
spud:  as opposed to... ruby? 
conor: ruby is a java fad

If they manage to get this hyper-space propulsion idea going, it would be like… like… as if millions of sci-fi fans suddenly cried out in joy and then smugly smiled.

Link (via Slashdot, digg)

Okay, this would be the greatest thing ever: every TV manufacturer in the world agrees to put the buttons on the top of the TV, where little fingers can’t reach them.

Although I haven’t tied Peter’s suggestion yet: Just turn your tv upside down and swap the connections on the tube.

Some questions just cannot go unanswered. http://www.cenqua.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1877.