October Talks

October is going to be a busy month for me. Next weekend I will be at Adobe's FlashCamp. I will be there Friday night and Saturday, and I may do a short session on TwitterScript, the ActionScript API that I maintain. In particular I want to talk about some of the authentication wrinkles present in TwitterScript and its forked brothers.

On October 20, I am speaking at AjaxWorld. I am going to be talking about a subject near and dear to me, Networked Applications. I'll be talking about why you shouldn't waste the power of your servers building HTML strings but why you should instead start using things like jQuery, GWT, or Flex to cash in on the power of your user's computers.

The week after that, I will be on the east coast speaking at EclipseWorld. On Day One, I am doing a day long, introductory workshop on Ruby on Rails. Of course I'll also talk about how Eclipse can help you out. On Day Two, I am doing two talks. One ties in to the previous day's workshop and is about RadRails. The other session is on ... iPhone development. Kind of a strange topic for me. Chris Williams from Aptana was supposed to do both sessions, but couldn't make it. So Aptana asked me to fill in for him. Hopefully they won't wind up regretting that decision!

Recent Other Writings

Last week, IBM published an article I wrote on using JRuby on Rails with Apache Derby. It concentrates on rapid prototyping/development. I didn't get too heavily into the IDE side of things, but when you add RadRails into the equation it really is nirvana-ish development. Very fun.

I've also been writing a lot on InformIT about Java Concurrency in Practice. I did some fun stuff over there too, like try to turn some Project Euler code into parallel code. I guess technically that succeeded just fine, but is a good example of when parallel code is not any faster. In this case, the algorithm was CPU bound anyways. Even having two cores didn't really help much. Oh well. I treated it like a strength exercise back when I took piano lessons.