New Edition

Ruby Alexandra Finck was born May 17th at 1:19 pm and weighed in at 7 lbs. 6 oz. We're proud of our latest edition!

Server Load Balancing

I just finished reading Server Load Balancing. It was an OK book, but there's only about 50 pages of real content. The rest is specific information on how to configure various vendors hardware/software, which I'm guessing can be found in their manuals. It was a book purchased for our company library almost five years ago that I had been meaning to read. Five years later I finally got around to it. It taught me a little bit about networking and made me realize there's quite a bit I'd like to learn about general networking.

AIX DB2 Performance Tuning

I recently got sucked into helping out with some performance issues for a J2EE app running WebSphere and DB2 on AIX. So far, it's been a fun ride, and I've learned quite a bit. Now I remember why I hate WAS so much. I've never worked with AIX previously and this is my first time tuning an application running on WAS. I've started reading an IBM Redbook entitled Database Performance Tuning on AIX, which looks to be an an excellent read.

We have a sizable performance lab setup, and I'm learning all about LPARs, vmo, tuning IBM's JVM, WebSphere and QA Lab with hopefully more to come.

Twin Cities Software Symposium

I've spent the last several days attending the Twin Cities Software Symposium (a.k.a. No Fluff Just Stuff). Overall it has been a very good conference. I had attended it twice in Denver previously and thought it was an excellent conference, particularly given the price and the fact that the conference travels to you.

I just attended Charles Nutter's JRuby presentation. The presentation was a little dry, but very exciting stuff. It sounds like they've accomplished a ton with JRuby, but still have a long ways to go. I appreciated the fact that Charles didn't attempt to hide anything and was very straight-forward related to JRuby's current shortcomings. JRuby (and dynamic languages on the JVM) definitely hold quite a bit of promise!

Yesterday afternoon I attended two Google Web Toolkit (GWT) talks by David Geary. I was fairly impressed, but am going to reserve my final opinion until I've had a chance to take an in-depth look at GWT, to ensure it's not just hype. I personally hate the tedium of developing html-based applications, and GWT may be a game changer. David has a very good sense of humor and definitely kept the talk exciting. He mentioned that GWT is the single most exciting framework he's ever seen. This says alot given that he's been in the industry for quite some time, including being the second Struts contributor and playing a large role in evangelizing JSF.

I'm off to a talk by Howard Lewis Ship about TestNG and EasyMock.

A ran across an article in Wired yesterday describing Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) and a company called Numenta. One of the company's co-founders is the architect of the PalmPilot and Treo, Jeff Hawkins.

I've always been interested in Artificial Intelligence, but never have dug into it too much. Obviously Computer Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for quite some time, but largely have been unsuccessful up to this point. The founders of Numenta believe they have the correct algorithm, including the ability to scale to large problem sets. After reading several articles, I believe they might be right, but I don't want to be too optimistic at this point given that I know so little about the field.

Computers being able to learn is mind-blowing stuff. Once we teach them to learn and correspondingly make predictions and take actions, they will be able to do some amazing stuff (potentially both good and bad). Several science fiction predictions come to mind, like The Matrix and The Terminator. I want to be one of the people on the good side.

I ordered the book written by Hawkins, On Intelligence, which should be a very interesting read.