Steve On Java

I had a great team hacking with the JUGICE members in Iceland last night as the first stop on the Nordic NightHacking Tour. They created some pretty cool projects in JavaFX for the Raspberry Pi within only a few hours (many of whom had never tried JavaFX before):

You can see that these guys are real geeks (Pacman), but have the weather on their mind quite a bit (Snowplow), so why are they in Iceland? Here are some of the reasons I came up with for being a hacker in Iceland:

1. Tired of Monitor Glare

In the winter Iceland only has 4-5 hours of sunlight, so forget about fancy anti-glare screens or fighting with the blinds… you won’t need it in Iceland!

2. You Aren’t Good at Sharing Bandwidth

There is nothing I hate more than my neighbors slowing down my Java update by playing games or downloading movies. In the U.S. they typically oversell bandwidth in the hopes that most consumers won’t use it. In contrast, Iceland is one of the top countries in the world for internet access with over 8% of the broadband connections using optical fiber and 626.8 Mbit/s per 10,000 population. My informal test at the JUGICE meeting broke the speed test, hitting their max test threshold of 100 Mbit/s on both download and upload!

3. You Like Your Sushi Properly Aged

Sushi is a great food for hackers, but it can be dangerous if it is not fresh enough. Fortunately, the Icelandic people have perfected the art of fish preservation so you don’t have to worry about your wind-dried fish, shark, or seal’s flippers going bad.

Yum, Harðfiskur!

4. Your Home Supercomputer Cluster is Destroying the Planet

You need good tools to do hacking, and that often comes at the price of power conservation. I am pretty sure every time I run a compile on my beefy quad-core system, the temperature of the earth goes up by a fraction of a degree. Fortunately, in Iceland all the power comes from renewable geothermal sources, so you can run your very own supercomputer cluster in your basement!

Note: You don’t really have to move to Iceland to do this, because the folks at Green Cloud have figured out how to package this up as a service so you can remotely take advantage of Iceland’s renewable natural resources.

5. You’ve Always Wanted to Meet Gosling’s Cousins

Iceland has a complete genealogy tree dating back to the Norwegian settlers in the 9th century, and geneologists say that all Icelanders are descendants of bishop Jón Arason. James Gosling is half Icelandic on his mother’s side, so when he went to visit last time he was surprised how many cousins he had! Maybe it is worth a trip just to visit all 320,000 of the relatives of the Father of Java.

I certainly had a great time in Iceland and would recommend at least a visit.

In the meantime, join the rest of the live-streamed trip throughout Northern Europe on the NightHacking Nordic Tour:

http://nighthacking.com/

With the trip coming up in a week, I figured it was about time to put the full event itinerary in one place. For this I created a public Nordic NightHacking Google Calendar containing all of the events along with links to sign-up.

All the events will be streamed-live, so you can participate from the comfort of your office/living-room. Some of the features I am adding this time around to make watching sessions more enjoyable include:
* Low-bandwidth option – All talks are going to be streamed at full resolution (480/720p) as well as 240p in case you are watching over a phone or low-bandwidth connection.
* Realtime chat – The social stream stuff is cute, but not the same as realtime chat, so I added an IRC-based chat option in the UStream broadcast. Feel free to use both, but I know where the hecklers will be hanging out.
* And some special guest appearances – I have a few special guests lined up for JFokus, including James Gosling and the Java Posse, so please watch out for these!

If you happen to be in Iceland, Gothenburg, or Malmo, there are free JUG events organized for all those cities; please click on the event details to register. I am working on similar events for Oslo, Copenhagen, and Tallinn, so stay tuned. Also, if you want to join me for snowmobiling in Turku, or hang out in Iceland or Tallinn on the weekend, ping me on my contact form.

The following schedule and full details of the tour are available on the NightHacking site:
http://nighthacking.com/

Timezone
US/Pacific US/Eastern Sao Paulo Greenwich Mean Time Central European Time Eastern European Time India Standard Time

Special thanks to AppleMan-K83 for use of his Lego Snowmobile pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32870260@N04/7996880922/in/photostream

My last NightHacking tour through Europe was a huge success, but I missed a big part of Europe. The farthest North I was able to go was the United Kingdom, which means I missed all the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, and Finland.

I am now planning the NightHacking Nordic Tour from Jan 25 – Feb 7 leading up to the greatest conference in Northern Europe, Jfokus. So what will this new tour include?

Interviews with some very interesting Java/EE/FX folks including:

• Aslak
• Martin/Par
• Joonas
• (more to come…)

User group visits across the Nordic countries:

• Iceland JUG
• Malmo
• Oslo – Javabin
• Gothenburg
• Cophenhagen (Javagruppen)

And finishing up with a great community conference

• Jfokus

Here is the travel map for the NightHacking Nordic Tour:

Please join me for the live stream as I travel across Northern Europe, and if you are in the area drop by in person for one of the user group events or meet me at Jfokus.

http://nighthacking.com/

I just finished my NightHacking Tour across Europe. In 3 weeks, I hit 2 conferences, 5 user groups, and did over 30 interviews with NightHackers in 7 different countries.

Some of the highlights included:

• Motorcycle ride-ons at JFall and Devoxx (Thanks Bert and Stephan!)
• JUG hacking events in London, Munich, Tourin, Lyon, and Paris
• Dancing robots at Aldebaran Robotics

In case you missed any of the NightHacking sessions the past month, I put together a YouTube playlist containing all of the video files:

And you can catch the photos from across Europe in my NightHacking Flickr Stream:

So what is next? Well, I have a few ideas, but can use your help to decide what to do. So here is a short survey you can take to let me know what should be the next NightHacking event.

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Also, I have been thinking of doing a NightHacking Show at a regularly scheduled time with online guests.

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If you have other comments or suggestions for NightHacking, please leave them in the comment section below.

In addition to the sessions I am giving at Devoxx, I also lined up an all-star set of speakers to have interviews with at Devoxx.  I will be running these Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning (CET).

To watch the show, go to the nighthacking show page here:

http://nighthacking.com/

And here is the full schedule:

• Wed 12:00 CET – Kirk Pepperdine
• Wed 13:00 CET – Bill Venners
• Wed 15:10 CET – Emmanuel Bernard
• Wed 16:40 CET – Antonio Goncalves
• Wed 17:50 CET – Dan Allen
• Thu 10:50 CET – Heather VanCura
• Thu 12:00 CET – Stephan Janssen

Also, in case you missed it, I uploaded the full tour of Aldebaran Robotics featuring the NAO robot, which was a pretty amazing experience:

If you haven’t been watching the live stream of the NightHacking Tour, you have been missing out on a lot of geeky fun.

I am only 1/3 through the tour route, but I have already had some pretty amazing sessions with Java Champions, Speakers, Authors, and Java User Groups.  Here are some of the talks you might want to check out:

• Sven Reimers with a prototype JavaFX port of the NetBeans UI
• Angry nerds, JavaFX Pinball, and other geeky coolness with Toni Eppel
• Java Champion, Adam Bien, showing his JavaFX performance profiling app
• A reverse interview by Toni and Adam standing in front of my motorcycle in Munich
• Live JUG hacking sessions with the Munich JUG and London Java Community
• JFXtras and behind-the-scenes look at the JFall keynote with Tom Eugelink
• Build security exploits with Sander Mak
• Discussion of modular design with Chris and Paul at JFall
• Interview with Trisha Gee on women in computing and no-sql databases
• Chat and brainstorming with Stephen Colebourne on JSR 310 and JVM languages
• GroovyFX hacking with Russel Winder
• Interview at Ben Evans’ hood
• 1-on-1 chat with James Gosling

Just tonight I had a great session with Terrence Barr where he showed a motorized solar cell controlled via a Java embedded board. Here is the video from the session:

I just finished up a live session with the Munich JUG that was organized by Toni Epple.  We started out with group introductions, and did an overview of JavaFX on the desktop and embedded platforms.  There were lots of good questions about JavaFX support on mobile platforms, deployment of JavaFX, and real-world companies using JavaFX (but to find the answers you will have to watch the live stream):

To get here i had a nice 7 hour ride down the German Autobahn…  I thought I was well equipped with my 1200cc BMW (seen below in a pic I took on the eurotunnel), but when fully loaded with luggage it had a scary high-speed wobble above 180kph.  And even at that speed, I was still being passed by little minivans and audis.

Although I have to say the German roads are very nicely done.  They are immaculately paved, and have very helpful electronic signs that let you know you should slow down miles before you approach an accident or construction.  Even though everyone was cruising along at speeds in which crashes are fatal, you felt quite safe and in good company. 

Tomorrow I will be interviewing Toni and Adam Bien, so don’t miss those live events on the NightHacking stream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nighthacking

James Gosling, the original Java NightHacker (see his great blog at http://nighthacks.org/), will be joining me this Wednesday to kick off the NightHacking Tour on a live video stream.  This is a chance to watch James live and interact with him via the social stream (via UStream or by tweeting with #nighthacking) as we chat, hack, and discover some of the things he has been working on in his new gig at Liquid Robotics.

You can sign up for the event on the NightHacking UStream site here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nighthacking

We will be starting the stream at approximately 11AM PST on Wednesday, October 24th, and keep it live until we run out of interesting things to chat about with each other or the virtual audience.

This is also the start of the NightHacking Europe Tour, which will include dozens of interviews/coding-sessions throughout Europe for the next 3 weeks leading up to the Devoxx conference in Antwerp Belgium.  All of this will be live streamed from different countries as I tour around Europe via motorcycle.

So come join me online for an exclusive hacking event with James Gosling, and follow the journey as I trek across Europe!