Most importantly I won a copy of Erik Hatcher's Ant book. :-)

But seriously, other good stuff happened, too. I attended a good overview of JAAS, which helped to cement the programming and reading I've done. I went to a very good presentation on XPath, (XML technologies are something of which I've managed to maintain a deep ignorance). I re-attended Dave Thomas' talk on Ruby, which served to remind me how nice it would be to program in Ruby full-time.

I also attended James Duncan Davidson's presentation on Objective-C. He did a great job, but I was left well-reminded that reference counting, at least as implemented in O-C, is a thing best left to the computer. I mean, what's the difference between having to remember to explicitly increment and decrement a reference count and having to figure out when to use malloc and free, or to new and delete things? It's all baggage to me. Hell, every project team I've been on has had a hard time just managing to consistently match up close() calls with the creation of JDBC resources. At least with that particular bug, your connection pool gets chewed up pretty quickly and it's obvious what the problem is. Memory leaks (forgetting to decrement a reference) and null pointers (decrementing when you shouldn't) are much worse to deal with. The GUI-wiring stuff in O-C is pretty cool, though, I must say. However, to stick with my crusty attitude here, you can hack together a GUI pretty fast in VB (and I assume C#, etc.), too.