Occasional Thoughts

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need the Internet for some things. If you drink too much, you can solve that problem by stopping entirely. But you can't solve the problem of overeating by stopping eating. I couldn't simply avoid the Internet entirely, as I'd done with previous time sinks.

His proposed solution is interesting and maybe worth a try, when your desk layout allows it:

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web.

...and brought many new ideas home. JAX 2008 was a great event, but also very exhausting. There were a total of 211 sessions from which to choose from starting at 08:30 in the morning with session until the late evening.

Main themes as I have collected them where:

• Dynamic Languages
• Spring
• SOA
• Eclipse
• Architectures
• Web frameworks and RIAs
• Complexity of the classic JEE offers. I would even say that I heard of a severe crisis of JEE and I doubt that a radically simplified EJB 3.1 will change peoples mind on that.

I used FreeMind to collect notes and here are the unedited notes I took during some of the sessions:

General Notes abut JAX 2008

In general JAX 2008 had more than 2000 participants - a record in the history of this conference. There where 211 sessions, 22 workshops and 10 short talks presented by 178 speakers. In my opinion JAX 2009 should rather try to reduce the amount of sessions and given the presenters more time. Most talks had to rush through the content as the time was limited to an hour and there was so much to say.

Here is the list of sessions from the time planer that I plan to attend:

What sounds like a provocative headline has really some substance. Who fears Microsoft today?