I caught the middle day of the three-day Sun Tech Days in London. Compared to last year, it was busier and felt to me like there was less in-depth technical content. There was too much "Hello London! Are you ready to rock?" and not enough to get rocking about.
Note to the organizers: yes, maybe we are a tougher crowd than the Japanese, but if your idea of crowd foreplay is just lobbing out a beach ball, you've got to try harder. Also: we need better coffee, make sure all the presentations actually match their titles and descriptions... I could go on... to gauge how unimpressed I was with the whole event I left before the free booze came out. And that's obviously a phrase I never thought I'd have to use.
But I like these events. Forget the coffee, forget the cheerleading, and forgive some of the content. What you get is time to think about the tech with like-minded people, and to look and hear about things you don't normally give yourself the change to think about. It's a good thing, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
For me "London's own" Simon Ritter was the star. I caught his presentation on Java 6 and 7 (PDF) which was useful for the explanation of the bounded wildcard stuff in generics.
His demo on music similarity was the best thing I saw all day. It looks to be the Search inside the Music project and the basic idea is to extract features from music so that you can cluster tracks by similarity. Reading from "A model-based approach to constructing music similarity functions" (which is a good review of the field) it looks like they extract features from MP3 data and then use a learning algorithm to classify a track by genre. What you get out is 10 genre likelihood numbers which you can plot by reducing from 10D to 3D (using MDS, which tries to reduce the dimensions in such as way that points that are close in 10D space are mostly close in 3D space too. I'd expect PCA to work too. In other words, don't ask what the labels on the axis are, because there's no easy way to say). Once plotted you can see the clusters of genre and sub-genre, and then take journeys from one genre to another. Cute.
What else...
- Netbeans 6 looks like it's getting to be usable day-to-day soon. The profiler looks excellent: so thanks to the guy on the stand who demoed that to us.
- I learned a little bit about Java DB (a.k.a. Derby, a.k.a Cloudscape): Mostly I learned (PDF) that it's a proper database.
- I don't think I need to worry about BPEL and JBI.
- The main features of Java 6 seem to be: Visa L&F; SystemTray stuff; access via Desktop to email, browser; splash screen support; scripting engine; ability to discover available disk space. All dull, but worthy.
- Java 7 looks to be up for lots of ease-of-development changes: maybe closures, syntax for list and hash creation, properties. Stuff people have been banging on about for ages. Due mid 2008.
- F3...looks nuts.
The event was held in at Central Hall Westminster. Nice building. It somehow seems right that events like this are held in places of worship.
