seanwillson.com

james has a c4 flickr stream available for people that are interested in still views of a conference. not exactly exciting but at least you get to see rentzsch and his crisp clean ties. yes, i think he was the only person in a tie.

the c4 presentations are very lessig and takahashi like. minimal, mostly text, simple, and directly to the point.

here’s a good example of a lessig style presentation. no, it’s not a c4 presentation but it shows the style.

[world hello]

i’m attending the c4 conference this weekend. it’s a conference in chicago where a bunch of mac related indie folks are getting together to network and geek out. i’m excited to meet some like minded people with the same geek tendencies within the indie industry. as you may (or may not) know i’m an aspiring indie developer so it’s my cup of tea.

the official, just of the presses, meaning of c4 is “code culture community conspiracy”

i’ll be posting random tidbits throughout the conference if time permits. anyhow … back to the conference.

i know i’m behind the curve a bit on favelets but i realized this past week all of the web work i was doing and i could have been doing a few of the things a lot easier. so i went about reorganizing my bookmarks, creating some tools, searching online for favelets to ease my web development. here are the ones i came up with. i don’t claim to have written any of these (except fixing the post to movable type to get it to work in safari). in case you don’t know what a favelet is, it’s a bit of javascript code that you can put in your bookmarks to perform some action in your web browser. for example you can select a word in a webpage and then just click the favelet and have it open a new web browser window to dictionary.com to define the word. anyhow, here are the ones that i’m found useful:

• search
  • define acronymn
  • dictionary lookup
  • google current site
  • lookup php function
  • search ebay
  • search google
  • search google groups
  • search google images
  • search imdb
  • search php.net
  • thesaurus lookup
• search with prompt
  • define acronymn
  • dictionary lookup
  • google current site
  • lookup php function
  • search ebay
  • search google
  • search google groups
  • search google images
  • search imdb
  • search php.net
  • thesaurus lookup
• tools
  • check link on webpage
  • check website uptime
  • disable stylesheets
  • resize browser 640×480 vga
  • resize browser 800 x max screen height
  • resize browser 800 x 600 svga
  • resize browser 1024 x max screen height
  • resize browser 1024 x 768 xga
  • show image sizes
  • show alt info
  • tidy html
  • validate html
  • validate html in new window
  • validate typed url
  • validate typed url in new window
  • validate css
  • view http headers
  • display webhost info
  • babelfish - japanese to english
  • babelfish - french to english
  • babelfish - gernam to english
  • babelfish - spanish to english
  • babelfish - italian to english
• movable type
  • make selected text a movable type posting — this was copied from the one that comes with movabletype to get it to work in safari. you need to change the beginning of the url in that favelet to point at your movable type installation.

just drag any of these links to your tool bar and click to use. if you have any other cool ones let me know about them, i’m always looking for cool new tools.

well the second day was better than the first. the sessions had a bit more meat, not much, a bit. it seems like every conference that i attend is more marketing than practical information that is usable by most developers. even with the different development or “black diamond” tracks you still get 90% marketing 10% meat. here are a few sessions and tidbits that i found interesting.

• java server faces (jsf) — think a mature version of struts. had we had this framework when i was working on the web stuff at parlano then 60% of the code would have been useless. sometimes something good does come out of sun, this is one of the specifications and products to watch.
• representations state transfer (rest) — just that, a session to rest in … ZZZzzzzz
• macos x and java — sales pitch (though a good one) that i’ve heard before. some interesting things to note: in the 1.3.1 jdk that apple released, it was written in carbon and for the 1842 classes that sun wrote apple had to write 900 classes to integrate it into the operating system. for the 1.4.1 jdk released from apple, sun wrote 2991classes (can we say code bloat) but since apple wrote it in cocoa they only had to write 300 classes to integrate it. they also hinted at being able to embedd apple core audio and safari in java applications now. any apple heads able to confirm this? sounds cool to me. they then had a demo of a java collaboration application from marratech that was pretty slick. it supposedly allowed you to enable word, excel, pdf, etc in a conferencing application that was 100% java. it runs on windows, linux, solaris, and os x. they supposedly are using the apple core audio libraries as well. they admitted that the audio on from the mac’s was far superiour to that on the other platforms using java. anyhow, i found this interesting because we had grand ideas like these with mindalign as well. oh the dreams … anyhow, the demo was cool and slicker than i though it was going to be.
• jax-rpc — they key from this talk is to look at jsr 196. seems they are adding a pluggable security / authentication api into the application servers officially instead of the hacks you have to do now.
• ejb 2.1 & 3.0 architecture — there are some cool things coming in these releases (2.1 will be a part of j2ee 1.4 in q4 and 3.0 is entering request stage now so think q4 2004). 2.1 is termed the web services release enabling you to easily expose your ejb’s as web services. they are also adding a timer service for those time based business events and call backs that you need to be persisted and transactional. they are also adding pluggable messaging providers for message driven beans, that and message destination linking. should facilitate the cleaning up of a lot of hacked code. finally, they let everyone know that the theme of the 3.0 ejb spec as well as the j2ee 1.5 spec is “ease of development”. basically they are going to try and step back and clean up a lot of the useless coding burdons they put on developers and try to make their lives easier. this includes intelligent defaulting, metadata (jsr 175), utility and factory classes, and cleaning up deployment descriptors. they succinctly described this as “deployment descriptors must die”.

there are a few remaining good sesions today and then some good bof’s. as i said earlier today was a decent day. tomorrow is chalk full of sessions from 8:30am- 6:00pm with no keynote to sleep through. well i’ve been monopolizing this sun long enough i guess. i’m sitting on the expo floor typing this between sessions. till tomorrow then …

my laptop isn’t cooperating with the wireless networks here at java one or in my hotel. for some reason i’m able to get a signal but i’ve been unable to get an ip address or connect with it. as a result i won’t updating my site as often as i’d like. i hate windows nt, i have to reboot every time i change any networking configuration and since i takes about 10 minutes to boot into nt it’s rather painful trying to get the wireless working.

today at java one has been rather slow so far. it’s more of an pavillion day designed to get everyone in, registered, and walking around to see the vendors. the sesssions don’t start until 2:15 today. i attended a few of the intra day “visionary” sessions but those were way to high level for me. there are a number of good sessions lined up for this afternoon all the way till late late tonight. we’ll see how long i last and if the late night birds of a feather (bof) are worth attending. i’ll post later tonight or tomorrow with more meat.

i was rather disappointed with the discounted devices this year. they normally have a nice discount for conference attendees at java one on a gadget. each year it’s something different like a palm or a zaurus. this year it’s one of two nokia phones that i’ve read nothing but bad reviews about. specifically the nokia 6800 and the 3650. the circular dial on the 3650 is impossible to use and the interface is way to camera focused and unresponsive. all of the default menus are related to the camera with the tiny buttons bringing up the menus that you actually care about. also when i push a button there is a noticable lag/delay before it performs the selected function. it’s actually a laberous task using this phone. not worth the discount of $200 off the already high $499 sticker price. i bet they’re giving these phones away in 6 months. the 6800 is equally as cumbersome and the keyboard, while a cool idea, actually detracts from the looks of the phone. it’s way too thick in my opinion and the keys don’t feel comfortable positioned on the sides of the screen. my hands don’t natually flow over the small qwerty keyboard like they do on a computer. to top it all off neither of the phones has bluetooth or any other wireless support. too many negatives for that price tag. oh well, maybe next time …

i’m leaving tomorrow morning for java one san francisco. i’ll be out there all week attending the conference with my fellow java geeks. i may or may not have a wireless connection at the conference. if i do i’ll post my thoughts about the conference and other useless bits. if i don’t, well then don’t expect anything to appear here till next sunday. i wish amy were coming but she starts school this week. alone in california, what is a geek to do?