Like every year, I offer a quick script for packrats who want to download the slides for all the talks. Of course, you can just wait for them to become available online after the conference, but then you'd not be a true packrat. Here goes:
curl -d ilc=230-1 -d ilg=English -d is=y http://www28.cplan.com/cc230/sessions_catalog.jsp > index.html
mkdir cb_export
for f in `grep -o "/[^/]*.pdf" index.html` ; do curl -u contentbuilder:doc789 -o cb_export/$f http://www35.cplan.com/cb_export/$f ; done
This script improves upon last years—point your browser to index.html, and you get a page with all the talk names and links to the local PDFs. For extra credit, figure out how to add the paperclip.
Hooray--no keynotes today. (They were there, but I wasn't.) My day started out with a "Second Life" session with David Geary. It was weird but kind of fun. Here are the slides, and here are David (in the middle of the podium) and myself (to the right).
I went to a lab in which I built a "JavaFX client-server application with Jersey and REST based web services" in 100 minutes, which is pretty good given that I have never used either Java FX or JAX-RS.
JAX-RS is definitely very nice--thanks eduardo for pushing me to check it out. Java FX was better than I thought. Of course, they gave us a pre-made component with the nifty effects (a pie chart with animated slices). I noted that Java FX now has a bunch of pre-made effects, like "glow" and "distant light". That kept the code clean and manageable.
The lab stuck to the easy part--reading data from the server. I would have liked to have an enhancement where cli king on a slice modifies the data on the server, but the course author said that was pushing the 100 minute limit.
I like to run hands-on labs in my own classes to make sure that my students get a good amount of practice and have someone there when they need help. It's always a big hassle, with students' hardware and software configurations failing in exciting ways. Well, the lab attendees--who looked like professionals--didn't have a better track record than my students, keeping four Sun people scurrying from one machine to the next.
Kito Mann gave a nice talk on writing composite components with JSF 2.0. This feature is definitely a crowd pleaser. Also check out Jim Driscoll's slides.
Cliff Click and Brian Goetz's talk "Not Your Father's Von Neumann Machine" gave a crash course on modern hardware. I thought I know nothing about hardware--whenever the hardware courses come up during faculty meetings, I lose my customary loquacity for fear of embarrassment. Cliff and Brian talked about instruction pipelining, parallelism, speculative execution, and branch prediction. Hey, I knew that. Multicore memory caches. I knew that. And that was pretty much it. Ok, I learned something new about chip-level multithreading, but the idea is pretty simple. I guess I'll speak up at the next faculty meeting and ask why my students seem to be stuck with the von Neumann architecture. Check out the slides when they become available--they are very clear.
Finally, I went to Phillip Haller's and Frank Sommers' talk on Scala actors, which didn't have a huge audience but a very long Q&A period. Here is what I learned.
!? operator is nicknamed the FTW operator. (Chuckles
from the caffeinated part of the audience.)Overall, it was a pretty satisfying day at the conference, but it doesn't make for a thrilling blog. Did I miss something exciting? If so, please comment!