Jason Wong

In a perfect world, the client would’ve had the business rules worked out prior to starting a project, leaving the designer to wallow in artistic brilliance while a co-ed rolls by on a Segway drinking a soy protein shake, but as you all know, utopia doesn’t exist and it’s almost impossible to drive a Segway with one hand.

60% of the developers use Macs. All the developers from Japan seem to be using Windows/Linux boxes. I believe the number @ JavaOne was somewhere between 75-80% using Mac. 200 people here, 3x more than last year, and they capped the event size. I’d expect more than 3x next year, if they allow it.

Extremely cool use of collaboration here. Users would write comments over IRC, people would chat over AIM, and there were ~ 10 people who had a shared document using SubEthaEdit for collaborative notetaking in Textile. The kids in college and high school are probably already doing this.

A LOT of luminaries here. There were seven of us at a table for lunch, three from ionami. Matz, the creator of Ruby blessed us with his presence. There should be some sort of recognizable glimmer or shine about him, such that we can recognize him as he walks. Shuga Maeda, who wrote mod-ruby, also sat next to us. We’re not worthy! Chad got to shake hands with Martin Fowler, and I, well, I got to stand 2 ft away from him.

We missed the roundtable discussion with Matz, but I figured we already got our own.

I’ve arrived at San Diego for this year’s RubyConf. They do look like Linux kernel hackers, don’t they? This should be a blast with interesting topics every session. I’ll ask the good people organizing RubyConf to come to SF next year.

If there were ever a reason to stop by LA, it’s for Soon Tofu, in one of the 50 shops on the corner of Olympic & Vermont. In one of them, across from a small health store, they serve raw blue crab as one of the appetizers, and their Soon is mucho excelente (much excellent, for those of you not familiar with the tongue that’s south of the border).

If any Lowellites read my blog, I found an old Cross Country buddy, Tony Stubblebine, through a geek social networking app, Connections. What’s even wackier is that he’s the lead developer of Connections, it’s his baby.

Everybody out of the way, Tony’s on his way up.

With the Apple iSight and iChat, I had my first three way video conference yesterday, with my cousins Annabelle and Bradford.

Naturally, the first thing I did was pick my nose and clean my ears. One small step for man.

Getting started was a bit of a pain, as I had to open up about 16 ports within OS X’s built-in firewall. After figuring that out, it’s a matter of clicking the video camera icon with your buddy.

The quality on a Powerbook G4 is amazing. Audio comes through loud and clear, and video quality is crisp, as long as the bandwidth is sufficient (a T1 in Cupertino was more clear than ADSL at Lake Tahoe). If you look at the iChat screen shots, they utilize some basic, but cool 3d instructions to split the screen and mirror reflections of participants.

The iSight is a $150 toy and I drank Steve’s Kool-Aid. I don’t know nearly enough Mac people for this to be truly useful to me, and network effects are gonna require that I convince a lotta people to switch to Mac and get an iSight before this gets rip-roaring fun for me. Even then, how much value is there in a video of someone? I don’t know the answer to that one.

I’m making up for lost time, ok? Cross one off the list of things I’ve always wanted to learn. How to Wolf Whistle. With a few more days of practice, I’ll have better control over volume and pitch, but for now, I’m happy that my whistles are 30 decibles louder. Next trick to put into my bag: backflips

While I was down at the E(xecutive)-Board meeting of the Democratic Party, I caught the opening night showing of Serenity. In LA, you’d expect the movie experience to be just a little improved. For $15 (+1 for MovieTickets.com), you get to sit in the “Director’s Hall” of the Cinema: The Bridge Theatre. That means that you get reserved seating, leather seats, and the volume is cranked to 11. That’s an experience worth repeating.

After watching Serenity, I feel that I really, really, really should have watched the TV series. A lot of character development was probably done on the TV series Firefly, that left the casual watcher unattached when… certain events happened. That being said, it was like watching a 2 hour episode of a decent Sci-Fi show. If you’ve seen it, like Orson Scott Card has, you’ll probably think it’s all that, and a pair of clean socks. I’ll borrow the DVDs or rent them, but for now, I give Serenity a 6.5 out of 10.

In other news, a search for Jason Wong puts my blog @ the #1 position, against a search of 1,910,000 other references on the web to Jason Wong. The previous champion seems to have pulled his site off the web, for one reason or another. Two factors will improve your rankings. 1. Good, fresh content (wish I had that, but at least I’ve got) 2. Friends with high PageRanks

The Bay Area job market has turned a corner. In 2001, I posted a job listing for a Java Developer with 5+ years experience, Oracle, XML, XSLT, and Linux system administration skills. I received 600 resumes, and 150 in the first hour. That’s a six, followed by two zeroes. 2 weeks ago, I posted the following (and re-posted yesterday) job, and received 15 responses. If the numbers are still correct, the web application development job market is broken down to 35% java, 35% ASP and 30% other (with Ruby on Rails gaining. I could see a tightening, but I never thought it would get this . If you know anyone local to SF that could help us out, send an email to jobs at ionami dot com. I’ll read it personally.