Today (yesterday) was the keynote, WHICH STARTED WITH A VIDEO CLIP OF Marc doing the numa numa DANCE (explanation). Unfortunately, as an an employee, I had to give up my seat and then there was not enough standing room (and when you see the picture, you will see that this was a huge room but could not have possibly fit everyone) and so I missed everything after Marc's talk. I was bummed, being in services the customer panel was the most interesting part to me. Oh well, we should rent a bigger space next year. It is a huge hotel but we kinda took it over and so what would have been a mostly empty space in previous years is feeling cramped in some of the busier sessions.

Some day I will get to talk to Thomas Diesler about the "nokia" branch of JBoss Mail Server so that I can merge in his changes (I think I get it now, but I wanted to make sure), but I couldn't make it 10 steps without getting wrapped up in a conversation with a partner or customer. Good conversations, and I'm really interested in the Novell stuff, especially Linux side, security/single sign on stuff, and IKVM/Mono stuff -- but I managed to keep almost getting to sit down with Thomas until it was time for another session and too late.

The main sessions I went to were the JBossProfiler by Clebert Suconic and the one on Helios by Nicholas Whitehead and the ADP gang. I met Nicholas on a training gig for JBoss back when this was a mere shadow of its new self. Our admin tool guys were salivating in the back as they saw all the pretty graphs and ease of use features. I was like..."so when are you coming on tour with me to just go add this everywhere JBoss is?" The thing about it is that you can create your own custom views and really tie anything into it. They were monitoring....uh hum....IIS threads next to JK threads.

The JBoss Profiler is something I kinda can take a little blame for. Clebert contacted me asking how he could get his profiler stuff into Apache. He knew me from POI, a project I co-founded, back when we were still a little project on sourceforge. I told him he might want to bring it to JBoss instead and so now he's gainfully employed at JBoss. He's kicking butt too. He mentioned how I whine about his web interface (I'm known for criticism for some reason :-P ). Its come a really long way since then (and it wasn't that long ago that I looked at it last). So now I'll just complain about the documentation which is really just starting to be fair (so give it a try, then ask on the forums -- this will help get the documentation process underway). This session was also packed. The really unique thing about JBoss Profiler is that it has promise for use in production by being able to filter down to the low level and do disconnected profiling. It has some cool features and things that are in the works, like JUnit-based profiling, but its the potential for use in production that attracted me and that I think attracts most folks to it.

Both sessions were packed and while no one sits in the nose-bleed seat (except me), there were people standing all long the walls. I remember when we barely could fill a room 1/8th of this size for a whole training -- let alone concurrent sessions.

I didn't get to go to some of the sessions I wanted to because they were concurrent or I needed to TCB.

So the party....yes...the party. Okay... The fur bus was really something. I'd never ridden in a fur bus, let alone a pink fur bus. I did feel like I needed gold teeth a furry hat and a gold medallion to go along with the decor, but oh well. So Ciara cancelled on us, but we had a great 12 PIECE band band play anyhow. There were also...umm...the ladies of JBoss. Anyhow, it was a party. Bob Bickel, impressed with his dancing skill and I learned that I may be the only person in the company that cannot dance what-so-ever (okay I took a couple swing dance lessons but I don't think that would have fit exactly). Nathalie and Marc Fleury were all over the floor. Even Bill was out there. I danced a little with Julien Dubois, but I'll let the inevitable incriminating pictures along with the time....oh nevermind. Marc promised that next year will be more than twice as big and as fun. That I hope to see. Only next year I hope not to have to leave early due to this dang cold.