Colin Charles Agenda

Presented by Ronan McBrien and Sourath Roy, both from Sun Microsystems. The highlight of the show for me? Seeing the Sun Media Receiver. Not much information about it, except from the Sun Labs Open Day.

• Sun Media Receiver (developed at Sun Labs, now maintained by ISV Engineering). Sun make a PVR? Cool.
• RISC Processor (150-300MHz, predominantly MIPS, some ARM), memory, HDD optional, Ethernet port, USB, IR (remote control), Video output (SD, S-Video, composite, or HD, via HDMI connectors), hardware codecs (MPEG2, MPEG4-2, H.264)
• Makes use of the Java Media Framework API
• Can also expose talking to a SIM/smart card through the Java APIs, for security in your IPTV hardware

Presented by Jonathan Haslam, Simon Ritter, Sun Microsystems

In what I thought was completely great showmanship between Jonathan Haslam and Simon ritter, it was simply, pure comedy, having the two of them on stage. No reason to go deeply into notes (as the verbose slides are available), but the actual demonstration, the writing the code on stage, and the dynamics between the two - that made this session pure gold to attend.

You can ask a system to panic with DTrace if you want!

Some terminology:

• Probe: place of interest in the system where we can make observations
• Provider: instruments a particular area of a system, and makes probes available. Transfers control into DTrace framework when an enabled probe is hit
• Aggregation: patterns are more interesting than individual datum, so aggregate data together to look for arrays. Generally an associative array

DTrace has a PID provider, to look at applications based on PID

dvm provider is a java.net project to add DTrace support in. Install a new shared library, and make sure its in the path.

DTrace in JDK6 exists as a hotspot provider. No need to download a shared library. Its also more feature-rich.

Project DAVE (DTrace Advanced Visualisation Environment) was demoed. Also note that there’s chime.

First up, I want to say, I’m truly impressed with Brazil. One day I will visit this amazing place, and spread the good word of open source with projects that are close to my heart: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and in due time, a lot more. This is a live-blog, from a most interesting talk, at JavaOne 2008. As I wrote on Twitter, “Brazil, simply impresses me. Their use of open source in government, makes me think that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them”.

Free and Open Source Software: Use and Production by the Brazilian Government
Rogerio Santana <rogerio.santanna@planejamento.gov.br> +55 61 313 1400, Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat
Planning, Budget and Management Ministry
Brazilian Government

Households with Internet access: 70% in the US4k household income range. 70% of households have mobile phones (even when total revenue is USD$2k). Middle and upper class are all, generally on the Internet.

In 2007, 98% of Income Tax has been sent by the Internet. By 2009, there’s only going to be use of a Java application for this. About 17.5 million people filed via the Internet. Impressive.

Brazil has 142k public schools - 26k are connected to the Internet now (18%), and 92% are connected at low speed, while 8% have 512kbps connections.

Plan? Free Internet for schools, from 2008-2025. 1mbps for each connection, growth plans in the next 3 years.

There exists Computer Reconditioning Centres (CRCs) for recycling PCs.

www.eping.e.gov.br (e-PING: e-Government Interoperability Standards)
www.governoelectronico.gov.br (e-MAG: e-Government Accessibility Model)

Brazil has been using electronic voting since 1995. 136.8 million people voted in 2006 election. Next version of vote machines will use GNU/Linux!

Open Standards. Interoperability. Free Software. Free License. Community.

e-PING: uses XML, browser compliant, they have metadata standards

Many organisations of the Brazilian Government use Java as a primary development platform. Remember, Java is important because its the first that allowed even Linux users to interact with government applications.

Brazilian Digital Television? Middle-ware responsible for the interactive process of digital TV also developed in Java. (Ginga is the name of the application).

In education? Enrolment is done via the Internet for universities. e-Proinfo is an e-learning project that has already trained 50k students.

Developing clusters and grids, with focus on high availability, load balancing, database replication, distributed mass storage, and virtualization. The government is backing this, since 2006.

I was at yesterday’s MyOSS meetup, and the topic was on the Selenium Web Testing Framework, presented by Yuen-Chi Lian. Here are some notes, and hopefully the slides and code make it up to the website soon.

- Java guy, who is a MyJUG guy
- Employed by CustomWare Asia Pacific, and is experienced in JIRA, Confluence, and Mule (are they an Atlassian reseller?)
- He started web development using PHP. Didn’t do unit tests then. As he started to do web development again, 2 years ago, he found that JIRA guys used Selenium to test their web UI. He started Selenium, last week :)
- A Common Web Development flow: analysis, design, development, then its testing… Unit test, integration tests, and acceptance tests using Selenium
- for web UI testing, Selenium helps you invoke a JavaScript method, rather than clicking a button to trigger it… These tests can be recorded and scripted. You can do it in a simulated browser environment, or use a real user agent
- He hasn’t tested Sahi yet, but he thinks its better than Selenium, based on the blogs that he’s read
- Selenium can be integrated with Continuous Integration (CI)
- Lots of examples using Java and Ruby
- Imagine doing FOSS development, on the Windows platform. It actually looks scary…

Overall, a rather basic talk, with a highly motivated/dedicated speaker. This being my second talk that I’ve attended on Selenium (last year at the Ruby Conf), and now, its pretty cemented in my head that I’ve got to make use of it, the next time I write a web-front end. Oh, it has great Firefox integration, with the Web Developer Tools plugin…

After that, it was off to Pelita for dinner. This ended up becoming supper, and there was lots of chatter… Drive home was eventful - on the way to Puchong, to send KageSenshi back, got pulled over twice - once for a license inspection, once to find out where we were headed. Odd. This has never happened before.

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