Monday, mid-day

The general session kicking off the conference has finished prompting a seemingly endless stream of attendees flowing into the bag lunch area, each wearing the conference-issued and ubiquitous Java-branded backpack. It seems as though I'm one of the rebels opting to carry my Brenthaven backpack that was specially designed to safely carry my 17" PowerBook. I'm a creature of habit and there is some comfort provided by having my trusty, and familiar backpack with me.

A change I have tried to embrace is that of blogging tools. I'd been doing web stuff and creating HTML for a very long time. My editors of choice for this purpose had always been either vi or BBEdit. I don't mind just typing in the HTML tags where I need them. For this trip, however, I'm trying something new. I'm using ecto, a blog publishing front end. I got the pointer for this piece of software from Geoff Arnold's blog some time ago. Having a client that can publish with just a click is nice. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks.

Steve Harris provided my after lunch entertainment in the Java Community area by giving an overview of his project Mnemos, a lightweight object storage mechanism that solves some of the object identity problems associated with serialization. This spiffy system works with SleepyCat and MySQL. This is a nice "in-between" solution for developers who want more than straight serialization and less than the full power (and tedium) of a full database.

Afternoon sessions begin at 2:15 PM followed by BOFs later this evening.