Dave Landers

It has been a great week - I’ve now got a lot of things to dig into more. There were things I learned directly from the sessions, and other stuff that I picked up outside the sessions themselves.

I need to try out Virtual Box to host Linux on my Mac.

I want to look at World Community Grid and maybe contribute to something useful rather than my iPhoto screensaver.

I wish I could find an excuse to build an iPhone application - there were several good iPhone development sessions this week. Looks like fun.

I have this proxy application that I wrote and have re-written several times to investigate various technologies. I have a MINA version, and so was interested in the MINA talk this week. After that talk, I think I will now have to re-write it again to wire up the MINA filters and handlers using Spring.

I need to play more with JMX to understand how to use it for configuring and monitoring. Maybe I’ll do this as part of that same MINA/Spring update.

Simon Phipps, talking about standards, asserted that standards should be about Substitutability not Interoperability. That is, if we concentrate on building a standard that lets us Substitute one thing for another we will have a more useful standard than when we focus on interop. I’m going to have to think about that one.

And on Monday morning, I plan to clear the whiteboard and grab the slides and my notes from Subbu’s REST talks - because I have a RESTful service API to build.

What a great week. I am educated, informed, inspired, reconnected … and tired.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit

The full, detailed, daily schedule for Colorado Software Summit has just been posted.

If you are not familiar with the conference, you should take a look. One look at the full schedule and you will see that (like every year), they’ve got some world-class developers talking about some hot topics - REST, JavaScript, JSF, Linux, iPhone and Andriod development, scalability, Spring, and lots more.

In fact, this might just be the first conference to feature iPhone development since Apple has only this week lifted their NDA.

You should also note that, unlike a lot of other conferences, this one features every session three (3) times each. That’s quite a load on the speakers (I speak here from personal experience), but is a boon for attendees (again, personal experience). While there is much more content here than you can hope to take in during the week, the 3-times-each deal makes it pretty certain that you’ll be able to get to your top 10 or 15 sessions.

Some other things that make this conference different and better than the rest:

• When you check in, you will get a CD with every single slide for every single session. So you can plan your schedule based on more than just the abstracts.
• After you get home, you’ll receive a CD containing every single slide (again - since many speakers tweak things at the last minute), plus any example source code used in the sessions.
• Every speaker is presenting two topics, so if you like one session, you might want to attend their other one.
• This conference is a real community. You will (if you so choose) be able to hang out, eat lunch, etc. with the speakers (and many other smart developers). Networking, in-depth conversations, and lots of joking around are an integral part of Software Summit. If you don’t leave having made a couple of new friends, you haven’t done it right.
• The food is absolutely fabulous.
• The venue in the heart of Colorado’s Rocky mountains (at a major ski resort) is spectacular.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, iPhone, java, mac, softwaresummit

I just got a new MacBook Pro yesterday. I “needed” a new machine because my old one is a Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) and wouldn’t run the Java 6 preview. And my son “needed” my old MacBook Pro for college. Yea, that’s it.

Anyway, I turned on the new machine this morning, and selected the Restore from Time Machine option. It chugged away for an hour or whatever, but by about 9:30 AM I was sitting in front of a near replica of the other machine. Pretty cool.

I did have to install XCode and Dashcode again.

And I had to re-acquaint my bluetooth phone with the new Mac. And re-authorize my iTunes music.

And for some reason, I had to reset my USB drive as the Time Machine volume (and it choose a new backup database folder, so it’s going to start over with a full backup).

Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, mac

As I reported earlier, I had a severe problem with Time Machine on my MacBook Pro. As I experimented with it, I realized it was probably related to another problem I have been living with ever since I got the machine.

The previous problem occurred when I was running a build or other long, CPU-intensive operation. Sometimes, the machine would just reboot suddenly. And it was always when I was away. I had no luck with any of the usual fixes suggested by Apple or found on the web. I had figured out that it was probably related to the screen saver coming on, but it was impossible to reproduce this for anyone.

But something about Time Machine allowed me to reproduce this more repeatably: lots of CPU, generating lots of heat, coupled with intense graphics == reboot.

The folks at the FlatIrons Apple Store were really great, especially given the madhouse produced by the holidays. I described both problems and they just decided to replace the logic board. They ordered the part, and I was without my machine for only a day-and-a-half. It seems like this has done the trick. Hurray!

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, reboot

Yesterday, I decided it was time to move on. I deleted my bootable Tiger backup and turned on Time Machine. I like the fact that it promises to do hourly/daily/weekly incremental backups, and the Time Machine application, while heavy on the cheese, is a pretty nice way to access backup recovery.

But backups aren’t backups unless you test that you can recover files (and you know how to do it without having to mess around when the time comes). So today, with a day’s worth of backup history, I decided to play with Time Machine.

I flipped back and forth thru time-cheese, and after a few seconds the world disappeared. Oh wait, it was just my MacBook Pro rebooting. Bong. Apple. Spin wheel. Login.

Nothing in any of the logs (there wasn’t time) - just a hard, fast, shutdown.

So, I did what any self-respecting software engineer would do. I tried it again. Same result. I have now hard-rebooted my machine like 10 times via Time Machine (I don’t recommend it).

If recovering a file risks a hard shutdown, and I can’t resolve this - I will just have to go back to rsync.

Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, mac, reboot, time machine