Morpheus

How to meet James Gosling.

http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/

BIO Here's a brief academic-conference-style bio and some images: James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". He spent many years as a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs' for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java, and a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest was software development tools. He then was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun's Developer Products Group and the CTO of Sun's Client Software Group. He briefly worked for Oracle after the acquisition of Sun. After a year off, he spent some time at Google and is now the chief software architect at Liquid Robotics where he spends his time writing software for the Waveglider, an autonomous ocean-going robot.

Long days in Hawaii

Monday October 21, 2013

I'm still hacking away on robots... We're getting down to the finish line on our new robot model. It always amazes me that the big stuff is often easy, it's the little stuff that kills. Autonomously avoiding ships.... Easy! Getting a compass to report reliable headings.... Hard!For a small break from the grind, Stephen Chin from Oracle will be visiting and doing a live streaming video conversation here with me as part of his nighthacking tour. Should be fun. Tune in :-)

I haven't disappeared...

Monday April 8, 2013

I've been in the clutches of a product release. It's been real Soul of a New Machine stuff. We've just announced the newest robot, so its a lot easier for me to talk. While it looks roughly the same as the previous machine, and operates on similar principles, every part is different. Every piece of hardware, the electronics, and a total software rewrite. Most important to me is that it's now got a real computer onboard: an ARM processor with more than enough horsepower to do interesting things. One of the more interesting things it does is autonomous navigation. We funded part of this work using a SBIR grant. They require progress reports, for which I did a couple (so far) of videos: Episode 1: basic autonomy: avoiding obstacles from James Gosling on Vimeo. Episode 2: Autonomous Ship Avoidance from James Gosling on Vimeo.

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It's long past the time.....	Sunday December 16, 2012
(as seen on Richard Branson's blog)

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PapaMau arrives in Australia

Monday November 19, 2012

No, I haven't disappeared. I've just been having way too much fun coding. It is so incredible being a user of the Java ecosystem. I'm always amazed at what's out there. And the tools... I've been using Netbeans, Jenkins, GitBlit, Jira and Artifactory. All lovely!The first of our 4 transpacific voyagers has made it to Australia. After a hectic final dash through the East Australia Current, Papa Mau is going to be picked up in the next day or two (the white line on the map). It got far ahead of the other waveglider headed for Australia (Benjamin) when the other took some damage to it's solar panel, so we had it detour (the red line) through Samoa and have a pit stop at a beach resort - our repair technicians get the best business trips.

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JavaFX Ensemble

Thursday October 18, 2012

It's been ridiculously long since I've last written a blog entry. Lots has happened (like giving a talk at JavaOne, which was fun). But life has been such a mad dash that I didn't even blog that. But this evening someone pointed me at something so cool I just had to write something: JavaFX Ensemble. It's a really nicely put together app that demonstrates all the amazing stuff in the new JavaFX. What a lovely new world of UIs. There's a lot more to it than I knew. I can't wait to start playing with it.As cool as the new JavaFX is, I was doubly impressed by the fact that it's in the Apple app store. What an earthquake... Tectonic action... If you're not reading this on a Mac, you can try out Ensemble here.

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Working crazy hard

Tuesday August 21, 2012

Having lots of fun. My usually-slow blogging rate has gone totally into the trash. A couple of weeks ago I did a talk on some of what I'm working on. There were some issues with the recording: it's missing the animations in the slides and the demos. But you'll get the idea :-) The PacX challenge robots are strolling across the pacific, getting closer and closer to Australia and Japan. One major sadness is that one of the robots heading for Japan (Fontaine Maru) came to an unknown end - it's drifting with everything dead except its tracking beacon.I finally got a job opening for a JavaEE/cloud hacker, based in Sunnyvale. If you're looking for something different, apply!