http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:cK8QtH3xycPVKM:http://www.turtletrack.org/Issues02/Co04202002/Art/Kangaroo_jumping.jpgThe TechDays traveling circus is in Sydney this week. Lucky me! I get to tag along. This is such a great town. If you're in Sydney and looking for a geek fest, come join in.

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We've been gearing up for JavaOne08 for a while now. Advance registration has finally opened. Inside the Java organization it hasn't risen to 'madness' yet, but by April everyone will be working 200% on it. The lineup of papers and technical sessions is looking great. Lots of deep SE, EE, FX and mobility sessions. While not many in the JavaOne crowd do realtime, the realtime group's demos tend to be the best crowd pleasers (if only because they have the greatest chance to maim). They've got a plan this year that won't have the same capacity to maim as last years, but if Greg can get so many stepper motors and sensors to sync, it'll be mesmerizing.

There's a nice discount for early registration. Come join the fun!

http://blogs.sun.com/jag/resource/JAGatMYSQLsmall.jpgI'm at the MySQL company meeting where we've just announced that Sun is aquiring MySQL. Everyone from Sun is excited, and everyone from MySQL that I've talked to so far is excited too. There are a lot of interesting things that we can do together. It's amazing how well the companies fit each other. Similar cultures, goals and markets.

https://duke.dev.java.net/images/thumbsup/thumbsup.gifDeveloper.com just published

I spent the end of last week in Geneva visiting CERN. I spent most of my time talking to Java developers there, of which there are a lot. They graciously gave me a tour of the Large Hadron Collider, which was a real thrill for a geek like me. It's an amazing piece of engineering.

At the end of Friday I visited UNOSAT, a small UN agency hosted by CERN that uses satellite imagery to build maps to aid other UN agencies. Most often to get up-to-the-minute geographic information for disaster relief.

Today has been mostly customer meetings in Frankfurt.

The big thrill has been the FCS of Netbeans 6.0. Well done folks! I've been downloading the alphas, betas and release candidates all along, and I've been incredibly happy with it. In my daily life I mostly notice the changes to the editor, which are dramatic. But there's a lot more. The feature list is long.

If you happen to be in or around Fran

One of the things that's always interesting about visiting Japan is looking at all of their cell phones. I've seen some great things here on this visit.

One was a very cool phone that flips open on the long side, something like a Nintendo DS - and in a piece of cool mechanical engineering, it can flip open on the orthogonal edge, just like a conventional flip phone. It has a lovely hardware implementation of OpenGL/ES and does truly impressive 3D graphics. Fluid frame rates, great modeling and texturing, ... a great handheld game machine. The games I played were great - and Java! Distributed multiplayer gaming - challenge your friend to a road race while you're both commuting on the train - and on different trains.

One of the games was a bowling game that you play roughly the same way that you'd use a Nintendo WII: you hold the phone as though it's a bowling ball, and you go t

I'm in Tokyo this week for Tech Days. We've got a crew of folks doing detailed talks all over the Java and Solaris technology landscape. I'll be doing a keynote, the opening of NetBeans day on Tuesday, and a pile of customer visits. If you're in the neighborhood, please come.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty cool.

I was at OOPSLA in Montreal and participated in a panel session on Simula. I learned OO programming writing Simula programs, and even did some bug fixing in the CDC 6000/7000 Simula compiler - the first real compiler I ever saw the innards of. Ole Lehrmann Madsen from Aarhus University was there: he was one of the three originators of Simula. Unfortunately, the other two, Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, passed away recently. I also got to meet one of the members of the team that wrote the original CDC compiler - but with my leaky b