Oracle OpenWorld Day #2
Long Exposure Night Shot from Hotel
Day two of OpenWorld was Monday the 12th. It was my first day of sessions although there were some yesterday but after the flight delays and getting registered I was not able to make any of the ones I wanted to. Not a huge deal, I am sure throughout the rest of the week I will learn more than I bargained for.
Before I get into day two I wanted to finish talking about Sunday. After the keynote speech we met up with some folks from EMC for dinner. They took us to the Franciscan. This restaurant is located in the tourist popular area called Fisherman’s Wharf. As you can guess this is primarily a place to get fish. Sticking with this theme I ordered the Halibut with Spicy Tomato Conserva and baby heirloom potatos. It was fantastic, the dish had just enough spice but didn’t overpower the fish. I would order it again in a heartbeat. The EMC guys ordered a couple of the meat appetizers which were also great. If they read this I want to thank them for the fantastic dinner(s) this week. After dinner we walked back to their hotel and had the hotel car take us back to the Kabuki. The ride back is a story for another blog, but the driver did take us down the steepest street in the city which was kind of cool.
Jumping back to day two, the day started at 8:30am with a keynote speech from Charles Phillips, and Safra Katz, both presidents at Oracle. They started out with what would be the theme of most of the conference, open standards and listening to the customers needs. She spoke about how they (Oracle) needs to ship products that work with open standards. The products should work well with other Oracle offerings as well as other vendor software. Anyone who works in IT will probably agree that half of the challenge (if not more than half) is just getting all of the tools we are given to work together in a stable and consistent manner.
After the first keynote was over, I had to leave and did not get to hear Ann Livermore from HP speak. I signed up for some additional ‘Develop’ sessions for the conference. These sessions are hands on labs with instructors and they were meant to challenge the participant while teaching them skills in real world situations. My first session was called ‘Latency is a bug: Tuning your JVM for Optimal Performance’. I won’t bore my non-technical readers with deep details but it was basically a session on using Jrockit Mission Control to tune a real world application. The session was well laid out, the exercises were just the right level of difficulty. I hope they put them online as I would really like my team members to go through the process. It provides a good insight into how the JVM works and why changing certain things, even a little bit, can severely impact performance.
My second session was ‘Adavance Java Diagnostics and Profiling with JRockit Mission Control’. This session was similar to the first in that it used the same base tool. It started out with a few quick lessons on navigating mission control(not really advanced) and went into how to dig down in the application code to look for bottlenecks and how to fix these bottlenecks to improve performance. This session was very helpful as well.
I will save the rest of the session overviews for a later date and talk about the rest of the day. I had a short break in-between sessions so I grabbed the Oracle provided lunch, it was not that great, the food at TechEd was 100 times better. Typical ham sandwich and mediocre cake thing for dessert. I went to a keynote given by the ‘Father of Java’ and went back to the room for a quick nap. The time change had caught up to me at this point. Even two hours can throw you off pretty good.
After the last session of the day we met back up with the EMC folks again and had a fantastic dinner at Castagnola’s on Fisherman’s Wharf. The dinner was typical geek talk with some good conversation thrown in. I had the lobster tail with asparagus and french fries. It was the best lobster I have ever eaten. Dinner always seems to taste better when someone else is buying. We closed the place down (10:30pm) and headed back to the hotel to get some much needed rest.
I did have a funny/scary moment when trying to take pictures of the street near the Hilton. I was framing a shot and out of the corner of my eye I see this lady coming darting across the road. She stopped in the middle of my viewfinder. She was dressed in crazy clothes that didn’t match were all kinds of different, bright colors and obviously had not been washed in some time. I am guessing she was homeless but I really have no idea. She turned and looked at me and mumbled something. I politely asked her what she said and she walked about five feet to my side. I let it go and started to frame another shot. I hear her again and turn to look, when I look at her I see she is flipping me off. She said, “You better not be taking my picture” at least 10 times very quickly. I decided I should leave. I noticed her about 10 minutes later a little down the block giving random people the finger as they walked by. I didn’t have my camera out and was running late or else I would have gotten the picture that time.
Tower at Japanese Peace Garden
Random Street Shot
Oracle Racing Boat
