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Pimping My Build

JavaOne was a little different for me this year for two reasons. It was my first time as part of Atlassian and also the first time I have been a speaker.

Atlassian’s booth was really busy and consistently so for all the pavilion sessions.  Being on a booth is hard work although you get into a groove after a while. I thought the ball sorting demo of the Java Real-Time beside us would be annoying but it wasn’t so bad in the end.

I like the fact that the booth was mostly staffed by developers from all the Atlassian product teams. As a developer it’s nice to connect to customers directly.

Speaking at JavaOne was a bit of an adventure. Since our session was on Thursday, it did hang over me a little for the first few days. In the end, however, it was quite good fun. We had way more people come along that I had expected when we first thought about submitting a talk. Our talk was fairly light hearted but we had some messages to deliver. Hopefully the people who came along had some fun and took away a few ideas to make their builds better.

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In the Shadow of the Moon

Over Easter the family and I went along to see the documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon”. I can’t remember the last time I went to the cinema to watch a documentary but it was well worth it, we took a cooler from yeti vs rtic and went on a picnic afterwards. I doubt the sound and fury of the Saturn V take off would have been as impressive in the living room. One can only image what the real thing must have felt like.

I’m old enough to vaguely remember the first moon landing on grainy black and white TV and, as a teenager, I was always deeply interested in all the space flight programs. Now, as a software and sometime hardware developer, I can only marvel at the achievements of all the pioneers in the space program with what now seems very basic equipment.

All the different recollections and viewpoints of the astronauts were very interesting and I found Michael Collins particularly impressive and humorous.

These days I think unmanned probes such as the Mars rovers are probably the best bang for the buck in terms of science but the manned mission to the moon was something special.

I recommend you give it a look if you have the chance. I found it quite uplifting.

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Atlassian += Cenqua

Today, Atlassian acquired Cenqua. I think it’s a great development and a very good fit.

That means that I’m now an Atlassian employee and I’m really looking forward to working with all the Atlassian guys. The Cenqua and Atlassian websites are being updated right now and they’ll have all the details, FAQs, etc on the transition. I won’t duplicate that info here. It’s very much a case of steady as she goes, of course.

For me personally, there will be a few changes as I change from working at home to working in an office. It helps that the Atlassian office has got to be one of the nicest office environments I’ve experienced. A big-ass Mac Pro doesn’t hurt either.

There’s going to be lots of interesting development as we add new features to FishEye, Crucible and Clover. Truly exciting times.

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Safari on Windows?

I decided to give the Safari on Windows beta a quick test drive, from curiosity rather than any pressing need.

Look and feel wise, I found it interesting that it totally disregards the Windows conventions. For example, there is a complete lack of resize handles on all window edges. There is also no aero support, the scroll bar sliders are very mac-like, etc. iTunes, in comparison, seems to be only halfway along in its “maciness”.

Browsing worked quite well. I had one glitch on the store part of Apple’s Australian website but that came good on the next visit. Since the apple store is totally unusable for me in Firefox, that is actually an improvement 🙂 I don’t think text rendering was as clear as Firefox or IE. Maybe tinkering with the font settings would have improved that, but I did not invest the time in that. I had some minor issues in Crucible which will be worth looking at.

I’m not sure what is Apple’s motivation in making Safari available on Windows. I think it will be good for testing purposes, but I will stick to Firefox for my everyday browsing.