Blogging Roller

Here's what I tweeted about in 2011:

Get yours here.

The first Triangle Tweetup of the year is tomorrow at the stylin' Glenwood South facilities of Edge Office. There's a site now with an interesting speaker line-up and people tweeting about it (and food).

Count me in!

Update: Reminder the #triangletweetup is a food drive too, bring some nonperishables, info: http://tinyurl.com/6vn3ct via @ginnyskal #givingback

Even when you're mentally prepared for a layoff and you know it's probably for the best, its still a life-changing shock when it happens, a loss. It's hard not to feel fear, anger, sadness, self-recrimination and all those stages that fellow RIFee David Van Couvering blogged about. I still cycle through those, but not as frenetically as before.

I got over the sadness and fear part pretty quickly thanks to my tweeple, the very supportive network of friends, colleagues, former coworkers, etc. that's grown around my blog, my work at Sun, my involvement at Apache Software Foundation and my social network accounts like Twitter. I got the word out on Twitter first and word spread quickly. I posted to my blog and some very kind friends, Tim Bray, Ted Leung and Robert Donkin helped spread the word on their blogs and said some very nice things about me in the process. Within hours a flood of supportive tweets, emails and calls come rolling in, including about a dozen real live job leads.

So, thanks folks. I really appreciate the help. I'll keep you posted.

As you can tell from the links below, I've been goofing around with the Twitter API and JavaFX. The Twitter API looks pretty nice and very easy to use. JavaFX looks cool to this old Swing geek, but I'm a little surprised at the state of the docs and the absence of apps. I expected more after the hyped-up launch last year. Oh, well. The Netbeans plugin is pretty nice. I'll stick with it and maybe I'll be able to squeeze a Twitter Client or at least a Java.net or O'Reilly article out of my late night JavaFX noodlings.

• Twitter API docs
  Documentation for the Twitter API
• org.json Java API docs
  Easy to use JSON library for Java
• Sven Drieling, "JavaFX -- Beispiele"
  Nice set of JavaFX examples, even if you don't know German
• Introduction to JavaFX Script
  Nice introduction to JavaFX in the German version of O'Reilly
• openjfx: downloads
  JavaFX documentation, tutorials downloads, demos, Netbeans plugins, etc.
• Jim Weaver's JavaFX blog
  Jim Weaver is the author of the Apress JavaFX book
• JavaFX Script Language Reference
  Reference for the scripting language, seems kinda spotty, w/lots of TODOs
• F3 Classes
  JavaFX class docs, out of date but I've found them useful