The last few months have been perhaps some of the busiest I have ever known. The sheer volume of work that was done in the period leading up to SimTecT was far beyond what I could have possibly expected. It would seem that when the rains come, they do so flood like proportions. Both jaRTI and Middlesim have demanded a significant amount of attention, while my PhD work has been humming along since the beginning of the year.

With the coming and going of the annual SimTecT conference last week, the littlebluefrog labs made the first genuine public release of both jaRTI and Middlesim; the development of which has engrossed the “after hours” portion of my life for almost the last year. Judging by the turnout to my “Open Source and the HLA” presentation, there is significant interest revolving around the topic. Presentation wise, I felt like it was perhaps the best I have ever given, and the onslaught of questions at its conclusion was so great that the session chair had to cut it short as we were already over time. However, the most encouraging aspect was the “feeling” (the buzz, if you will) in the room. Open source has never seen much penetration in this domain (beyond Linux) and there was a tangible feeling of interest and excitement in the air both during and following the presentation. I’m excited for what the next 2-3 years might bring in this regard.

Now that SimTecT is over, I had perhaps unrationally expected things to calm down. However, there is still much work to be done on jaRTI (not to mention the other labs projects) and now that it’s publicly available, a whole new realm of work has opened up: documentation. While getting things ready for SimTecT took up just about every minute of every weekend for the last 3 months, the effort that went into the final one was huge. Sometime around Saturday afternoon, EVERYTHING stopped working (every single demo we were working on). Thankfully, after a big effort from Mick and myself we got it all sorted out around midnight-1am.

With all this in mind, I must say a big thanks to Mick for his giant efforts on the console project during the lead up to the big event. It has now been fully integrated into the main codebase and is actually part of the available download, although it isn’t officially released yet Beyond that, a bigger thanks needs to go to Marni. Every time she turns around I have snuck off to the computer to get some more code out of the way. Despite this, she has been very supportive and given me absolutely no grief whatsoever. I truly am lucky. Now, if you will excuse me, fedWS2 is broken and I need to go and apply a bandaid. Realistically it needs a lot more than that, but at the moment it will have to do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 3:49 pm and is filed under personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.