Business

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?

No computer processor can do multiple different jobs at the same time - there is no real multitasking going on. Instead a processor does one job after another.

When you see programs working in two different windows at the same time, it's just because the processor is doing a piece of work for the one program running in that window, doing a little bit for the other window in the background, doing a little bit for the operating system, again doing a little bit for that window in the foreground and so on. Suddenly a hardware interrupt requires CPU team and the current task will be interrupted.

A CPU constantly switches its context to simulate a parallel processing to the user. However these context switches cost quite some performance. The processor must load the working data into its internal memory, continue working on a chunk, store the current working data to the RAM, figure out, which chunk has to be processed next, load its data, continue working... and so on. The real computation time is wrapped by a lot of overhead.

A Human Brain is a CPU

Nothing new to computer pros - so why am I telling you that? Because humans do their work just as processors and both face similar problem: How to complete tasks while being most productive as team? This article shows some strategies on how you can deal with context switches in an engineers work environment while still being available to your team mates when they have questions and to keep them and you running. It's mostly about the right use of communication and that's what this article is focusing on.