Invert Your Mind

I got my JavaOne session review today. Not too shabby considering that my laptop was completely unable to display the presentation and only two of the three presenters spoke (hehe). Here are the stats:

Version-Aware SOA Using Jiniâ„¢ and Javaâ„¢
OF-0579
COOL STUFF

Overall
4.10

How accurately the session abstract matched the presentation
4.00

Speaker 1
4.05

Speaker 2
4.11

Speaker 3
3.50

Quality of the presentation materials
3.35

Demos
3.33

Q&A
4.36

I’ve no clue who speaker 1, 2 and 3 are but overall decent marks. We’ll see if I get a presentation in next year and what I get then. I’m surprised we got any feedback considering that we pretty much knew everyone there (except maybe 3-4 folks). Hehe. Helps to have friends backing you up I guess.

Go Jini!

The person who left the last comment has not yet revealed themself but they did state that they did not sign up for the GMail account. This is a bummer, but doesn’t mean that the hunt is off. Perhaps the secret GMail person will find my blog and post a few clues. In the meantime, I think it better to switch my efforts to the commenter. I do have their IP address: 24.15.139.119 This should help me narrow it down. Another clue is that their IP address hasn’t changed since the previous comment. I should be able to do a little network snooping and narrow down a location. The problem after that is determining who out there knows my blog and/or knows me. Probably some guess work will ensue. I can just hope that the commenter keeps checking back so my guesses don’t go un-answered.

The person who signed up for the GMail account left me a comment last night around 10:00 PM. The message is here:

http://brian.pontarelli.com/2006/06/22/inversoftgmailcom/#comments?

I’ve done a bit of investigation today and found very little, but a bit more than I knew before.

• The person lives in Chicago area (looks to be Plainfield)
• The person uses Comcast for their broadband provider.
• The IP address, unless Comcast’s DHCP is renewing things fast, is pingable meaning they either have it hooked directly into the computer or they have a router and decided for whatever reason to respond to pings. My guess is that it is the former, but I could be wrong. If it is the former, than the person is probably less tech savvy because they probably only have a single computer where most geeks I know have a minimum of 3 and usually have a wireless router of some kind.
• The IP address doesn’t appear to be Linux or Unix based because it doesn’t have SSH open. Thiis is a lame assumption, because they might have router and just decided not to open SSH and still be a Linux or Unix user.

So, very little is know thus far, but more than yesterday. We’ll have to wait and see if they drop another clue….

Something very strange happened today. Someone signed up for a GMail account using the address inversoft@gmail.com and they used my email address as the secondary email. So, naturally I received a verification email and wondered whether I was sleep coding last night and happened to sign up for a random GMail account or if James had signed up or something totally crazy was happening.

Well, I have no clue what this is all about, but since I was the secondary email address, I changed the password and hopefully whoever created this account (still could have been me last night) will turn out to be a friend playing a joke or something. Any-which-way they can’t use the account anymore, which is probably a good thing….

Strangeness.

Okay, I’ve been using ruby for a while now and I really like it, so don’t flame me. BUT! Ruby appears to be a single pass parser. This means if you have a class that uses another class in the same file, you have to define them in the correct order. Yeah, this is something that most languages have fixed a long time ago using a two pass parsing strategy where you collect the symbols in the first pass and then verify and compile in the second pass (or some variation on that). So, I’m annoyed a bit at Ruby for missing the boat on that one. Hopefully they fix this.

One solution is to define the class is a separate file and use a require to include that. This seems to be the best solution at the moment and will support modules as well, but really Ruby should handle both types of declarations regardless of ordering if they intend to let you define multiple classes in a single file.