Man, I’m a geek! I just couldn’t bring myself to go to sleep tonight at 10:00, like a good (smart) boy, and instead of hacking on KPilot or doing something else productive, I watched an extremely cool web presentation from Sun’s JavaOne Technical Sessions. That’s right… I chose to watch a Sun web presentation instead of TV or a movie. That makes me… a geek, yep… just checking….

I was totally blown away, 4 years ago, at BorCon when I got to see Sun’s Project Looking Glass demo. Jonathon Schwartz did a fantastic job of demoing it, and he did so following an especially obnoxious and irritating Microsoft presentation. I still remember walking out of the room with my friend, both of us in awe of what we just saw that Sun was doing. And what a stark contrast we saw between the heavy FUD machinery of Microsoft compared to the truly innovative work that Sun was doing.

Incidentally… yes, I’ll admit it, I (currently…  =;) ) program in Java during the day for a living, and I actually enjoy the language.  I know there’s been distrust of Java from the FOSS community for a long time now, and I very much wish Sun had Open Sourced Java a LONG time ago so it could have had a bigger role in the FOSS desktop.  And having had experience with early Swing apps years and years ago, there used to be good reason to be wary of using Java–it was slow and painful, especially on the crappy hardware that I could afford back then.  But I do not see any of those road blocks in the successful Java apps of today.

So anyway, tonight, in all of my geekiness, as I watched Paul Lamere’s presentation titled “Search Inside the Music: Using Signal Processing, Machine Learning, and 3-D Visualizations to Discover New Music“, I once again enjoyed seeing true innovation happening in a place like Sun. Compare that with Microsoft’s arrogance and Borg mentality, and it’s all the more refreshing. Anyway, you might have to sign up for Sun’s developer network to see the multimedia presentation I mentioned above, but it’s totally worth it.