Friday, March 09, 2007

Sun Tech Days 2007: Day #2

(Yawn) Day #2 was long, and I found most sessions to be repetitive. The only highlight was Matt Thompson's keynote ("Open Source 2.0") in the morning, and the lucky draws. Oracle's keynote was poorly presented, and full of technical problems.

Some points worth mentioning:
All in all, the Sun Tech Days was worth it. Here's to a greater conference in 2008!

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

Sun Tech Days 2007: Day #1

Day #1 was long! 4 cups of Java, and several sessions of the "real Java" across 3 tracks. Overall, a bunch of good sessions, excellent food and cool freebies. According to Sun's Country Manager (Gan Boon San), this year's conference was attended by about 1,500 delegates (Malaysia Boleh!)

The Technical Demo was well orchestrated. 6 evangelists on stage, each giving a 5-minute demo of something cool. Chuk made sure everyone was timed, and Angela Caicedo rocked the day with her knowledge of robotics and some GUI tech right out of the Minority Report (bravo!)

Quick note: The NetBeans Extreme session (TD6001) was too long (read: Extreme) at 2 hours, most of which was a repeat of the stuff covered the day before. However, it did reinforce how the NetBeans Mobility Pack makes development for mobile devices a rapid process -- awesome!

Here are some photos from Day #1, held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (KLCC).

A much bigger name tag:


James Gosling giving his keynote:


Mr. Gosling was emphasising the point that Java is free from virus attacks:


Toilet break. Wait a minute -- do you "wash" or "flush"?


VMware (yawn!):


Coffee break:


The weather outside was lovely:


And then, we have the Twin Towers (shot of the day?):


Lots of Dukes in sight:


Oracle's "Spin & Win" was a big hit among the freeloaders:


The event organiser did a great job with the registration process -- queues were cut down with the smart segmentation of registration lines based on the delegates company name:


Some leftovers from tea (great food served all throughout):


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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

What a NetBeans Day!

It was good overall, and very well organised. The 3 speakers did a great job -- kudos to the evangelist team of Ashwin Rao, Chuk-Munn Lee and Petr Suchomel. We were also privileged to have James Gosling give an intro at the start of the day.

Today's session gave me a good overview of NetBeans. Lots of power, and the roadmap to NetBeans 6.0 looks great! Some of the sessions that got me excited today revolved around the NetBeans Mobility Pack, Project Matisse, JavaServer Faces, support for Subversion and JMaki.

The Malaysian crowd seemed passive (as always?). Large student crowd, considering that it was a "free" open day. Most seemed only interested in the tea break (good food!), and freebies at the end (t-shirts, CDs, stress balls)

Here are some photos from today. Not the best of shots, but hopefully better stuff from tomorrow's main event.

For once, they got my details right on the name tag:


That's Ashwin (blocked by the rostrum, LOL -- why did I take this?):


Chuk conducted two great sessions -- engaged the audience really well. He's Malaysian by the way!


Chuk showed off lots of his good "terminal" skills:


Petr gave a good overview of the Mobility Pack:


Transitions between various projectors and laptops on stage were done quite well -- kudos to the Sun team! This one shows a Sony Ericsson phone running an app that was created on the fly using the Mobility Pack:


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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Rocking at the Sun Tech Days this week



I'll be attending the Sun Tech Days this week, starting with the Netbeans Day tomorrow. If you're headed down to the same place, emailme [at] praveenrajan [dot] com. We could hook up, and take over the world together!

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