Return to academia

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.