The "no fluff, just stuff" conference has been around for a while, but until now it's always been in the US. The first European event is happening August 29th-31st, here in London; more details can be found here. I'll be presenting on JavaFX and in keeping with the theme of the conference I'll be digging into the syntax of JavaFX script as well as the libraries and tools for developing applications.

If you're interested let me know and I can provide a promotion code that will get you £100 off the registration fee. Hopefully see you there.

Yesterday we held an event at the Customer Briefing Centre in our London City office. This was extremely well attended, to the point that we were probably on the verge of breaking fire regulations. A hundred and ten people in a room that really should have held a maximum of ninety and I was very grateful that the rather temperamental air conditioning decided to work. There seemed to be a lot of interest in both Java FX Script and Real Time Java. Now that the real time JVM is available running on top of Solaris (rather than the bespoke systems that were used originally) I'll definitely be digging into this with the idea of using it in some kind of interesting demo, possibly also involving the Sun SPOTs. Sadly, the demo gods were not looking favourably on us yesterday as my Minority Report Sun SPOT demo decided not to work. I think Matt had a harder time than me given that he needed to reboot his laptop during his presentation and did his best to fill the void whilst the screen was blank.

In the afternoon I went over to Imperial College to attend their Inaugral Workshop at the Centre for Pervasive Sensing. This was very interesting, as I'd not attended a proper University lecture in a long, long time. Some of the work went rather over my head, but I did find a lot of what was presented fascinating, especially the work on power scavenging for small wireless sensor devices using all types of movement, including someone just walking around or moving their arms. Maybe it's time to start thinking about going back to university.

That's a great analogy for just how useful British Airways customer service and baggage tracing is.

The good news is I finally got my bag back! I got home from Malta on Saturday morning and checked, once again, the baggage tracing web site. "Tracing continues, please check back later". A few more futile calls to their telephone number and I just accepted that I'd have to continue my wait.

At 11.15 that evening I was tucked up in bed when the phone rang. I just got to it when it stopped ringing. Back to bed. Two minutes later, the phone rings again. Again, I get to it just as it stops ringing. Whatever. In the morning I get up and find a card has been put through the door telling me that BA tried to deliver my bag last night and getting no response have left it with a neighbour. Of course, at 11.15 they couldn't find many people awake so it's half way down the road.

Like I say, as useful as a trapdoor in a rowing boat. BA say they'll deliver baggage until ten at night. Well, 11.15 is definitely after ten pm. If the delivery monkey bothered to ring my phone twice, why didn't he try ringing the doorbell? To make things even more ridiculous, I checked the web site and it's still saying "tracing continues, please check back later".

Still, according to the BBC news I'm not alone in having to wait for my luggage. The fact that BA needed volunteers to help with the backlog of luggage speaks volumes for their organisational skills.

The first Sun Java Developers conference in Malta last week was a huge success. In fact, so much so, that I would say that it was the world's largest Java conference, ever. Obviously the fact that we had 305 people attend means that in absolute terms JavaOne, JavaChina and the recent Indian TechDays still hold the record for number. However, think of it a different way. According to the last census (about 18 month ago) the population of Malta is 404,079. That means that one in every 1,325 people in the population turned up for this event. Extrapolate this to the UK (based on the number from the Office for National Statistics) and you'd have an audience of just under 45 and a half thousand people. I think that we'll definitely be doing more events in Malta.

I had the 'pleasure' of flying out of Terminal 4 at Heathrow on Wednesday last week and I was really, really glad I was flying Air Malta. Terminal 4 was complete and utter chaos with, at a rough guess, over a thousand people queuing up outside the terminal, since a number of incoming BA flights had had to be canceled the previous day due to the security alert and evacuation. Frankly, had I been flying BA I'd have just gone back home again. As it was I was able to get into the terminal with only minimal hassle. Getting through security was actually quicker than normal since there were less passengers flying that morning.

Thankfully I don't have any travel planned until September which means I can relax a bit.

"...just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?" Lyrics from Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. The words are very apt for my morning, although I wish the title were. British Airways customer service is not going up in my estimation at the moment. I did finally manage to speak to someone at their baggage tracing centre yesterday, who confirmed the details they already had and informed me that one bag had been located. I'm now waiting to see if, and when this will be delivered. Since the other bag is still shown as "Tracing in progress" I have been trying to call again today and all I get is the message saying we're so busy we can't even put you in a queue to wait for a representative. I tried phoning their dedicated customer service line and got the same result.

I'm leaving for Malta tomorrow where we'll be running our first Developer Day there. If you're in Malta and in the IT business please come along as we've lots of interesting things to talk about. Sadly I won't be doing as many demos as I'd planned unless there's some kind of divine intervention and BA manage to find and return my bag today, since that has all my Sun SPOTs in it.