UberConf

Yesterday's highlights were Emergent Design by Neal Ford and A
Crash Course in Modern Hardware by Cliff Click. Evidently
today's CPUs spend most of their time waiting for memory.

They've been doing the fun runs every morning. I went again
today. There was only one other guy but he said a lot of
people have been doing the 10K at 6:00 AM rather than the 5K
at 7:00.

Good last day. Stuart Halloway's Clojure presentation was the
best thing I went to in the whole show. Really cool technology,
plus I liked the way the presenter took a lot of pains to make
sure everyone got the 'lab' environment for the workshop
installed and working correctly. I haven't thought about Lisp
much lately but it really is a great technology and it would be
nice to see it make a comeback in the context of concurrent
programming on the JVM.

A few random impressions

• This wasn't super-surprising given the iPad workshop, but I saw lots of iPads
• The MacBook Pro is still a popular laptop choice
• Linux finally seems to be catching on. Weirdly, in the past at NFJS I didn't see a lot of Linux but there was a strong Linux presence at Uber. When I got a close look, it was always Ubuntu.
  

UberConf

Best session today was Paul King's Groovy Power Features.
Unfortunately he spent a lot of time on DSLs which I wasn't
that interested in, and he didn't have time to cover a lot of
the material in his long slide deck.

Ted Neward's Busy Java Developer's Guide to Advanced
Collections was also really good. Cool concept of using
Iterators for other things besides just collections.

I went to a couple of Spring presentations that were pretty poor and
left me feeling discouraged about Spring in general.

The Fun Run was a nice change of pace. I brought our dog and she
had a blast. A speeding cyclist startled her and she ran between
my legs and knocked me arse over teakettles.

UberConf

Getting ready for 3 days of UberConf. It's kind of torture because
there are so many good sessions. There are 8 presentations per 90
minute session and in many cases I'd like to see 4 or 5 of them.

Denver JUG

I finally made it to a Denver JUG meeting this week.
That was cool. I'm going to try to make that a regular
thing.

LOST More unanswered questions

More questions...

What happened to Sayid? How was he brought back to life
after being dead for hours? Why was he like a zombie
afterwards?

What happened to the resurrection pool at the temple?
Why did the waters turn dark?

In retrospect, it seems Ben was laboring under serious
misconceptions during his tenure as leader of the
Others. Why didn't Richard offer him some guidance?
Why didn't Ben ever meet Jacob? Was Ben somehow tainted
by his experience of being healed as a child?

What was going on with the cabin? The show seems to
imply that the MIB was imprisoned there by a ring of
dust or ashes. We saw Bram use the same technique
(ineffectively) in the statue base moments before he was
killed by the MIB, and we also saw this technique being
used to protect the temple. The Smoke Monster is seen
numerous times during the time the ring around the cabin
is presumably intact. Ilana seemed to expect to find
Jacob there; so did Ben. Did Jacob ever live there? In
'The Incident' (flashback to unknown time as well as
2007) and even earlier (Ab Aeterno) Jacob is shown as
dwelling in the statue.

Was there something special about John Locke's dead body
that allowed the Smoke Monster to take on his appearance
for an extended period? In other cases when the Smoke
Monster takes on someone else's appearance, it is only
for a few minutes. The Smoke Monster seems to mostly
assume the appearance of people whose dead bodies he has
recently come into contact with (Christian Shepherd,
Alex) but he also seems able to assume other forms
(Eko's brother, the horse Kate saw).

How did Anthony Cooper come to the Island? Via the time
travel apparatus at the Orchid? Was the 'Magic Box'
real?

What are the powers of the guardian of the Island?
Jacob was immortal, had the power to bestow immortality
on others, and could leave the island and travel about
in time and space. Jacob's adoptive mother was able to
wipe out a whole village and destroy the well they dug.
Was she a Smoke Monster? Did Jack and, later, Hurley,
gain any of these special abilities?

Why did Kate start season 6 up in a tree with her ears
ringing? Was there some kind of detonation? Juliet was
right at ground zero and she survived, for a few
minutes, anyway.

What was going on in the Swan with the 108 minute
countdown, the button and the failsafe?

Why was a submarine the preferred form of transportation
to and from the Island?

For a heroic effort at resolving many unanswered questions
of LOST, see Bigmouth's Big List of LOST Answers.