Driss-A-Blog

Yesterday's arrival was otherwise uneventful. Matt and I flew in to SFO, took a $30 cab ride into downtown, and checked in to the Mosser. It's the same hotel as last year, so I wasn't surprised much.

Checkin at WWDC was different, though. Apple had a huge logo sticker put on the outside of Moscone West, and it looks fantastic. As I'm guest-speaking on behalf of FrontBase, I signed in at the guest speaker booth, and got a nicer, embroidered shirt instead of the t-shirt that everyone else got. Matt then went off to register at JavaOne, but that's about all for the highlights of the day. Except for Jack, Matt, and me downing beers at the bar next door.

This morning, I got up at 7. I went to Moscone early so that I could talk to someone at the First Aid station. I ended up talking to a nurse who insisted that since my knee isn't swollen, it's not a big deal. She kept on asking if I exercised much. I didn't quite follow how that caused my knee to screw up, but took her ibuprofen pills and left. They didn't help.

By now, everyone's probably blogged about the contents of the keynote, so there's not much for me to say. I'm of mixed emotions. On the end-user hand, I didn't see so much to make me want to run out and buy it. On the developer hand, there's lots of cool stuff there. The open sync services? The metadata store? The breaking up of the Two Kernel Funnels?

Unfortunately, I can't risk installing Tiger on my laptop lest I break my demo for the talk on Friday.

After the keynote, I tried looking around on the second floor for the battery recharging station, as I'd finished off my first battery taking notes on the keynote. I couldn't find it, so I went to eat.

Two years ago, you had to ask for the kosher meal. Last year, the boxes were just in the row with the others. I'd guess that people were just taking them, because this year they're once again by-request. I ran into someone I knew from U of M Hillel, and I introduced him to Matt, Jack and Patty as we talked.

He told me about two kosher restaurants within walking distance. Kosher restaurants! Whoo!

It was an hour until the next session. So I spent that hour scouring the second floor for the battery charging station. It doesn't exist, despite what anyone says.

Next was the OS X State of the Union. They're now scanning a barcode on your badge as you enter. Our Apple rep claims that it's just so they know the attendance of the sessions. But then, why bother scanning? It's easier to just count people who enter with a hand clicker thing.

The session was mostly a rehash of the technical stuff from the keynote, with just a few new things added.

Jack calls me. The battery charging station is up! I dash downstairs only to find that they don't have chargers today for the 17" PowerBook's battery, only the 15". Tomorrow? Yep.

They were really pushing Xcode in the Development Technologies session. Hard. Look at the new 64-bit support, or the SDKs. Nothing really new there. Meanwhile, my PowerBook's battery is dying.

Finally was the Graphics and Media State of the Union. This was fascinating, and they're ripping up and redoing much of the core graphics systems. Finally, lots of long-overdue fixes.

At this point, both of my batteries are dead, so I headed back to my room, started charging the battery, and went to dinner.

I met two guys who went to JavaOne. They're from Israel, working on the J2ME Wireless Toolkit. "Oh," I say. "That's the one that doesn't run on the Mac, right?" They keep talking to me anyway, and even invited me over to their table.

So we talked about programming and languages and things. It's funny to hear someone say, "v'az ani tzarich lichtov ant task limtzo et ha memory leak."

They left, and I finished the meal. I was unimpressed. It was expensive and not very good. I'll try out the other place tomorrow.

I need to get to bed soon. I need to give my knee a rest, and need to make an early run to Kinkos to get some AdHoc flyers made up.