Archive for October, 2005
10.21.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 5:18 am by kkj
We’re rolling out of San Diego on bus headed for Mexico and Ensenada, Cinderella of the Pacific. It is not yet 9 in the morning and it’s a warm, but hazy day. The chauffeur is cracking jokes and we’re sipping coffee as we reach the border and head into Tijuana, Mexican neighbor to San Diego, without even showing passports.
Tijuana is such a contrast to its Californian counterpart: poor, dirty, and worn, it’s suburbs and sprawl resembling a landfill rather than residential areas. In short, this is not a place I would want to visit and I am relieved that we booked the long tour and won’t be getting off until some 70 miles south of here. It gets better as we drive along the coast, the haze clearing, and the landfills less evident, when we finally reach our destination.
Ahh, Mexico!
Ensenada is actually a quite nice place. In contrast to Tijuana you’re not being constantly bugged by streetwise salespeople trying to persuade you to buy something you don’t need. They are there, but not in great numbers. The city is quite clean, and has a nice harbor and the largest flag-pole I ever saw. You can definitely shop there, but we didn’t find much worth buying and came back with little loot. Check out the gallery.
While on the trip, we evaluated Oopsla and came up with some points. On the upside:
- Wide variety of content. The conference has the usual tutorials, a peek into what the future might hold (onward!), keynotes, code camps, design fests, and more making it very versatile and wide in its scope.
- Not too big. The size is manageable, and makes it a lot easier to get actively involved rather than just being a listener.
- Generally high standard. Speakers at Oopsla come in different shapes and sizes as would be expected (and required), but they are generally dedicated professionals with varying presentation-skills.
And on the the downside:
- Poor structure. The website of the Oopsla conference is in defiance of all guidelines for structuring a website and it is really hard to get a clear overview of what goes on there. When constrasting Oopsla with JAOO, which is about the same size, I find it much easier to get a clear picture of what I want to see in the latter. There was a 30 minutes guidance for Oopsla-newbies monday evening on how to find your way around Oopsla. Well that’s fine, but it was 2 days too late and shouldn’t be necessary imho.
- Annoying payment model. At Oopsla you pre-register for tutorials, which you pay for separately. There are many tutorials and some of the ones I wanted to see ran concurrently so I had to pick. What do you do, when after 30 minutes it turns out that the next 3 hours will be a waste of time? You can leave, but you cannot go see the other tutorial instead. That sucks, and imho Oopsla should learn from JavaOne or JAOO where you can pop in and out of sessions at your leisure.
Did I learn something, get new inspiration? Yes, the trip has been rewarding and I will consider attending Oopsla again in the future.
Tomorrow I’ll get up at 4 in the morning and start my 24 hour journey home. Goodnight California. Until next time.
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10.20.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 7:21 am by kkj
Oopsla 2005 ended today, an event I missed on purpose as my one tutorial ran from 8:30-12:00 noon and there didn’t seem to be much more for me in the afternoon. Today’s presentation was on “Models and Aspects - Handling Cross-Cutting Concerns in the Context of MDSD”.
The sun sets over San Diego harbor
I have used AOSD for some time now, leveraged both Aspect/J and AspectWerkz for handling cross-cutting concerns in enterprise applications, and even given presentations on the topic. On top of that I’ve been using code generators, notably XDoclet, to generate various infrastructure artifacts from source code, but until today I was somewhat unclear on what exactly the term “Model Driven Development” encompassed. More so, I was curious to learn how to combine the two techniques and what exactly could be learned from such an approach.
Markus Völter and Martin Lippert made a good presentation, which explained the two topics and then went on to detail various patterns in the context of AOSD combined with MDSD. The most fun part was when the discussion went into modelling and what constitutes a domain specific model as defined by its domain specific meta model, which in terms can be described by a (domain-agnostic) meta-meta model, defining a language for domain specific models. Go figure 
Certainly more clear on the definitions, I took the concepts of domain specific modelling with me as being something I am already doing, but which I might take a more structured approach toward. Also, it was good to hear others echo my own reservations on AOSD as being a last resort for those issues that hard to specify otherwise. A good presentation, and cudos from me!
We left Oopsla for yet another shopping spree at the Fashion Valley Mall (phew: good thing we’re going home soon) and then strolled down to the harbor to visit the now retired aircraft carrier, The U.S.S Midway which was in service from 1945 through the first Gulf War until 1992. I got a little overboard so to speak and took quite a few pictures. The day ended with beer in the sunset along the pier, and nice californian cuisine at Tom Ham’s Lighthouse located at the beautiful point of Harbor Island. Check out the pictures, which are void of Oopsla impressions …
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10.19.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 5:46 am by kkj
Man I was tired this morning, when awaking after only 4,5 hours of sleep I scrambled up to get a bath and meet my colleagues down stairs in the hotel lobby. We decided to check out the breakfast restaurants in neighboring “Little Italy” and had a decent meal, which we did not rush. All this resulted in me missing the morning keynote at Oopsla when arriving at little to 10.
A fountain near the Shakespeare Theatre in Balboa Park, San Diego
Next up I went for a panel discussion on “Fostering software robustness in an increasingly hostile world”, which was interesting although somewhat depressing to listen to. Yesterday someone was crying for a call to arms to leave OO behind and give way to the new black, whatever that might turn up to be, and today a panelist was complaining that software can never ever become truly robust because it is not really real?! What is up with all this whining? Instead of complaining what we can’t do there should be focus on what we have truly achieved within software development, and where we can go from here to improve that which is not perfect. I am with Dave Thomas and his extreme statement that CMM is nonsense and that truly great software is not the result of rigorous processes and control.
Lunch again at the Fashion Valley Mall and I was back for the afternoon tutorial on making The Rational Unified Process (RUP) Agile. I knew the basic concepts of RUP and have practiced XP-style agile development on some projects, and was curious to hear how an *extensive*, commercial process framework such as RUP could become light and flexible to work with. The talk was given by Michael Hirsch and I must say he did a good job at taking a pragmatic approach to RUP, while still leveraging its advantages amongst others the templates for artifacts. Based on 8 years of experience with RUP and slightly fewer with the agile version, mr. Hirsch presented a methodology which sounds very useful, and I will look forward to reading the rest of the handouts.
One major critique of RUP is that it is commercial in nature, owned by IBM (previously Rational), and that the business strategy surrounding the framework has always been to provide tooling to assist with configuring RUP and building artifacts (e.g. UML diagrams). If you want to use RUP you’ll have to buy documentation, Rational Rose and possibly other tools … and you need a license per developer so since Rose is *really* expensive that is guaranteed to ruin you. To his credit, Mr. Hirsch gave practical directions on how to use RUP without Rose (but still with the commercially available documentation) and hence cut costs.
At 5pm we all headed to Balboa Park, a nice spot in the middle of San Diego, which has the Zoo, and ton of museums all set in spanish style buildings from the turn of the 19th century. I had made reservations at “El Prado”, which sports Californian Cuisine and very well made too. Check out the gallery.
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10.18.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 9:59 am by kkj
Oopsla 2005 day 2 and I find myself at the morning keynote on “Creativity” given by poet Robert Hass. IT-conferences often sport these kind of talks where someone from a different realm of the world gives his or her perspective on some topic computer scientist can relate to. Years back I attended the Sun Developer Network Conference in Moscone, San Francisco and was pleasantly surprised by an english historian giving a fun and clever lecture on the future of computing that was real food for thought. It is a good idea to pull someone from the outside in to do this.
Mr. Hass did a great deal of reading aloud of poems by himself and friends, and speculated over the foundations of creativity: he believes you need to be safe to be creative. Safety first, then innovation. While a certain amount of safety is a prerequistite for doing anything, but guarding yourself against an uncertain world (gather food, find shelter, etc.), I find that I get more productive when there is an element of risk involved. Not risk as in the adrenaline junkie bouncing off the rooftops of the world or a high-roller betting the family fortune, but as in controlled risk that can be dealt with: a smack in the face rather than a jump from the 14th floor. Quote Plato: “Necessity is the mother of invention” and as someone pointed out at the end of the keynote: “Most major inventions are made in an unsafe time, at war”.
I didn’t buy any tutorials today because none appealed to me, and so I decided to go hear what the founder of Wikipedia.org, Jimmy Wales, had to say. I must confess I didn’t have much expectation and entered the room with the opinion that Wikipedia content was somewhat less trustworthy than a convetional dictionary. I must say that Mr. Wales convinced me otherwise today. He gave a brilliant and dedicated talk on various issues surrounding the operations of a site where anybody can publish anything about any topic even anonymously. Jimmy Wales explained the governance model which involves various levels of voting, reviewing content, banning abusers, rating “wikipedians” (those that post content) in a way that aims to be open and consensus based if possible, but also has the ability to clamp down on vandalism. Interestingly, the committees, which consist of people with varying cultural backgrounds, at different ages, and in different physical environments, use a non-philosophical approach to rate content called “a neutral point of view” (NPV). With NPV you won’t judge a topic, but rather try to state the different variations on its definition or semantics. I will definitiely keep my eyes on Wikipedia and its siblings, WikiQuote, WikiBooks, Wikimedia, etc.
Someone asked where Wikipedia could go once all the interesting articles were written, and Mr. Wales had no clear answer. It struck me then that since these guys are now more popular than the Encycopedia Britannica, the next goal should be to replace The Encyclopedia Galactica … What we’re seeing here, folks, is really the first version of the Hitch Hikers Guide without the gizmo! A round of applause for Mr. Wales and his team of non-profit wikipedians!
Right next to the conference is The Fashion Valley Mall, a traditional Californian shopping centre with slightly more upclass shops than normal. We went here for lunch at the foodcourt, grabbed a latte at Starbucks and hurried back to the conference. 1:30pm and Gerald Jay Sussman, an M.I.T. professor was poised to give a presentation whose title he borrowed from Marvin Minsky, “Why Programming is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly Understood and Sloppily Formulated Ideas”. Intriguing enough, the title lured me into the midst of the room where I got squeezed in by Josh Bloch and some other fellow, utterly unable to escape. Mr. Sussman is of the old school who uses *real* slides that can (and should) be thrown into the *real* trashcan. These are slides of the type where quotations are added by means of the xerox technique: make a photocopy of the quote, cut it out using a *real* scissor, and paste it onto a piece of paper. Make a slide xerox.
If I got anything from the presentation other than obscure functional programming examples of equations from the domain of physics turned into programs (and yes: I too have written a Scheme compiler and coded my share of Lisp), it was that Mathematics is a language, not a tool and that the reason why I found mathematics so unreasonably annoying back in college was that most mathematicians are imprecise and sloppy in notation and at teaching. I completely agree there, but otherwise found the most of the talk a waste of time, as mr. Sussman pulled up his ancient slides and made just-in-time decisions on whether to show them or no. I was relieved when the talk finally finished around 3pm.
Oh yeah, and then in a flash of depression I went powershopping at the Fashion Valley Mall, buying a new jacket and the new 30GB iPod :-). That calmed me somewhat. Next, we went back to the hotel, relaxed a bit and then met up with a bunch of other Danes including my mentor from the college days at a nice restaurant; had too many beers and ended up at “Hooters”, a french-fry-odored joint where the waitresses wear very tight outfits. Check out the details of the day at my yahoo gallery.
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10.17.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 4:57 am by kkj
This morning we went to the Town and Country Resort & Convention Centre where the Oopsla conference is currently being held and had a meagre continental breakfast, which was too small to accommodate all the attendants. My first tutorial today wasn’t until 1:30pm so I was planning to browse the conference or whatever it is you do between presentations, but to my disappointment there was nothing there unless you had a tutorial planned. So why didn’t I just pick one out? Well, even if you’ve paid for the Oopsla conference, tutorials are extra and paid for separately so unless I was willing to cough up another $300 for a few hours of entertainment I had better make other plans. We ended up going back to the hotel and I worked(!) until noon.
So my first tutorial, “Programming without a callstack”, with Gregor Hohpe a Google architect and author of a book on enterprise integration patterns began right on time. An energetic speaker, Gregor started out real well, setting the stage by describing all the nice properties you get when you do have a callstack like sequential execution, ordering, shared memory, etc. He made a point of outlining the traditional constructs of threads and of “futures” in JSE5, then things got philosophical.
“Architecture is like buying an insurance policy: how much are you willing to pay to guard against future changes?” He asked, stressing the fact that there is no silver bullet in software architecture and it is a game of give and take. As an architect it is tempting to get caught up in the hype and overarchitect resulting in an “Architect’s Dream, Developer’s Nightmare” situation where a system is shining with all the virtues of a great architecture, but impractical to work with. For example you have to realize that loose coupling is essentially neither good nor bad: it is a design which has its strenghts and weaknesses and doesn’t apply to all situations.
Following a 30 minute break mr. Hohpe went on to talk about Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) and the mindset you need to have when you build systems where components send messages asynchronously rather than make method calls. While interesting, this section of the talk was rather thin and dealt solely with low-level applications of EDA. I would have liked to hear how EDA and SOA contrast (for instance Gregor mentioned fine-grained messaging as a defining property of EDA, where coarse-grained messages are recommended by most SOA gurus these days), about EDA with Enterprise Service Buses, and practical applications of this architectural style in general. Instead I got a C# and a Java example which was not all that exciting. Topping it, Gregor was pretty elaborate at times and missing at least 15 slides when we ran out of time. As a result he spent 10 minutes speeding over the most interesting ones, while slowly loosing the attention of his audience. That was not well-deserved.
5:30pm and the Oopsla welcome reception started out in one of the larger rooms of the Convention Center with an abundance of very nice mexican food, a sharp contrast to the morning breakfast. We had our free beer and burritos, and were treated to mexican f0lk-music for a little while, then left Oopsla and went to see the sun set in the west over the Pacific Ocean in all shades of red.
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10.16.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 8:15 am by kkj
I really like San Diego. The city resembles San Francisco in that it has an actual downtown built around the historic Gas Lamp District, an area which looks like a setting John Wayne would fit right into. The weather in San Diego is much nicer of course, and the downtown seems more clean and is - unike S.F. - almost void of the sad faces of homeless people. Like other major cities in California, San Diego is spun into a web of freeways that link up the major areas, sometimes passing over and under each other in that familiar entangled swirl. Thankfully we brought a GPS along for assistance and managed to find our way around with almost no errors.
The day was dedicated to shopping at Horton Plaza (clothes, candy, coffee) which turned out to be a nice place, at Fry’s with its usual large selection of gadgets and electric appliances, and at Walmart for the rest. It turned out to be a good thing we rented a big SUV with lots of trunk-space. Check out the pictures I did manage to actually take.
This morning we went and registered for the Oopsla conference, got our material consisting of the ubiquitous branded bag, proceedings thick as phonebooks and slide handouts for the tutorial that we registered for. I guess I will have to do a bit of skipping tonight and ready myself for tomorrow.
Since attending JAOO 2005 some weeks ago I have had this nagging feeling that most of the so-called experts of our industry are not true visionaries, but rather shrewd businessmen who know that to keep the public’s attention they will need a product tomorrow. What I mean is that there is a lot of rebottling of old wine going on these days and that it paints a picture of dynamic industry, when in reality very few groundbreaking discoveries are made.
Consider e.g. the current hype around ‘domain specific languages’ (DSL), a term which turns out to be nothing more than the well-known unix tradition of ‘little languages’ spiced up with fancy GUI tools. And yet some of its new evangelists present this technology as if it were a revolution within the field of sofware-engineering. Thankfully others take a more sober approach.
Let’s see what Oopsla brings tomorrow. Hopefully something truly genuine …
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10.15.05
Posted in Conferences, General Ramblings at 2:48 pm by kkj
The ride is bumpy and uneven, throwing my head from to side to side as I slump in the back of the express shuttle. Three rows further up, the driver is trying to make conversation with the guy who’s just returning from his honeymoon in Costa Rica. But noone on board is in a mood for talking, and as night falls on the sprawl that is the outskirts of Los Angeles, I drift off to an uneasy sleep. This was supposed to have been a domestic flight to San Diego, but to our dismay, United Airlines are overbooking their flights these days and we got bumped off in return for a round-trip-ticket between anywhere in the US within the next year. How am I gonna use that?
Oopsla 2005 is coming up in a few hours and I am here in San Diego with most of my colleagues for a week of geek-talk, hi-tech-sponsered-receptions, and a bit of sight seeing in our huge Chevy Trailblazer SUV. This beeing my first Oopsla I have no expectations whatsoever, but do look forward to getting some inspiration.
But that’s all for tomorrow. Right now I feel slightly dizzy with jetlag, but that won’t still my thrill of being back in California again: The sun is rising over a bright and warm day where we will drive to the beach, go shopping in general at Horton Plaza and gadget-specifically at the local Fry’s :-).
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