J1: Geeks, Toys, and Duke Awards
The Friday keynote is always dedicated to geeks, toys, and Duke awards. As usual, the host was James Gosling and there were a few presentations worth to mention.
First, we got another demo of the JavaFX Authoring Tool. It is still in its early stages but it already looks quite impressive. I especially liked the way the handle different screen resolutions. You work on a master scene and at the same time you see alternate screen resolutions which you can specify. If the default scaling for other resolutions is not good enough you can tweak it such that it overrides the master scene. On the other hand, wiring up events was not so new to me. The NeXT (and subsequently Mac OS X) user interface builder has had that for a long time.
There was also a demonstration of a huge NetBeans-based application for monitoring a satellite ground station (more than 1000 modules). On this occasion we learned that James Gosling’s first payed job was developing software on a PDP 8 for satellite monitoring. And a picture of James at the age of 14 in front of a PDP 8 proved that he actually had hair!
The most impressive demo was about Visuvi. This is a visual search engine, i.e. queries are not submitted as text but as a picture. A trivial example would be that you are standing in front of a painting and would like to know who the painter is. Take a picture of the painting with your mobile phone and submit it to Visuvi. A more interesting application comes from the health care domain. If a physician is looking at a biopsy and is unsure whether the patient has prostate cancer he can use Visuvi. The search engine will deliver similar pictures and the result of the diagnosis of similar pictures.
The last Duke award was given to a Sun employee who developed the control software for Neil Young’s ‘58 Lincoln. Neil Young had the idea to convert this fuel guzzler into an eco hybrid. The car runs on electric power and the batteries are charged either through a power plug or a generator (using ethanol) which is built into the car. The Lincoln is so big that it is no problem to put in electric transmission, generator, ethanol tank and a huge array of lithium cells. However, it is still questionable whether driving a 3 ton car is environmentally sound at all.
