Monday, July 26, 2010

Looking Ahead, There's No Turning Back

Time moves in but one direction, forward, so it's generally best spent looking ahead. It helps avoid hitting obstacles, something in which our girls take a personal interest.


Subjectively it moves slowly or quickly, but rarely slowly or quickly enough. With our move to Vancouver and the Helios release quickly receding into the past, there's definitely no turning back. One thing I can say for certain, neither pictures nor words can fully reflect the beauty that is British Columbia.


Did you know that the Helios release included 26 modeling projects? That's one for every letter of the alphabet! How many will be in Indigo? Time will tell. Modeling is most certainly an exciting place to get involved. Not quite as as exciting as wake boarding, mind you; yes, that's really me on the board!


Speaking of excitement and getting involved, our next main event is Eclipse Summit Modeling, err, I mean Europe. With all the excellent modeling content, it's all too easy to get the names confused. I'm a little torn on how to split the slots between tutorials and symposia; we have two half day slots. Probably it will be best to have a half day tutorial and a half day symposium. Given we can have only one tutorial, I'd like one that covers a broad range of technologies in a cohesive way, so I'm going to try to force people to work together on that. I'd also like a symposium that's more interesting than the one I organized last year, i.e., more discussion, less lecturing, more demos, fewer slides. Action packed is the goal. Oh well, that's my problem. Your problem is to get something submitted as soon as possible; the deadline is August 16th---no you can't wait until September---and the early bird contest deadline is August 2nd---only days away! Hurry, time waits for no one.


Looking ahead further, I'm a little concerned about the future of the Ecore Tools project. We had to give it a transfusion of life blood, Kenn's, Cedric's and my own, just to get it built for Helios, but it really needs some active committers for Indigo. Interested? It's a fairly big challenge to tackle, though not as big as this "stick" Else is trying drag out of the water. She's too ambitious to notice it's more of a log really. Not only that, the boat itself is tied to it.


Looking ahead on the personal front, I've been working hard on my own secret project: generating a GWT application that exploits App Engine. I suppose it's not really a secret given that I'm publicized to present this topic at the Modeling Day at Googleplex 2010, err, I mean the Eclipse Day... I'm making excellent progress. I'll be able to share the details when the gem is a little less rough. It's so very nice to be doing some really solid technical work for a change.

5 comments:

Denis Roy said...

Great post as usual, but it's funny that in the first pic, two of the girls are looking behind.

Ed Merks said...

Denis, you might say it's ironic.

Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

Is that you wakeboarding!?

Ed Merks said...

Chris, you still doubt when I say, yes that's really me. Apparently my snowboarding skills help with the balance aspect of the sport...

Knut Wannheden said...

I agree, BC is a really beautiful place! I've had the pleasure of visiting parts of it for the last four weeks and the next two weeks to come. It's truly a stunning place.