Yesterday (Saturday, May 8th), I accepted a position with vmware's new Cambridge, Massachusetts office, as technical employee # 2. One of their in-house recruiters saw the words "Virtual Machine" on my resume and decided that there must be a match. I'll probably start on Monday, May 23rd. So, after almost sixteen years away, I have finally returned to Cambridge.

I also had a competing offer from Mazu Networks, another fine firm with its headquarters in Cambridge. Where was either of these offers when I really wanted one in Los Angeles three years ago?

Thursday, March 31st was my last day as a contractor at IBM's T. J. Watson research center in Hawthorne, New York. I didn't properly set up new infrastructure outside of IBM for myself to use, and so I am only now back to having a Linux workstation that I can build Jikes RVM on! I still don't have a permanently connected server that I can run some of the Jikes RVM nightly tasks on in places where I can get to the results.

Since April 4th, I have been in Massachusetts, consulting on an (unfree) Personal Digital Video Recorder product that is implemented in real-time Java on top of Embedded Linux. Pretty cool, except for the proprietary software aspect of it. I like the people at Motorola's UCentric division, and I like what I'm learning there; I'll be sorry to say goodbye to them. But I'd be a fool to turn down VMware, which is offering me more money, better benefits, a better location, and more interesting work.

I sent in my resignation letter today. Tomorrow I'm driving in from home in New York to work in Maynard, Massachusetts. I don't know if they're going to want to keep me on for two weeks or to end the contract immediately; either way would be fair.

I libelled the Jikes Java-source-to-byte-code compiler in my diary entry of January 12th, 2005. Jikes seems to have done a fine job of building GNU Classpath; my troubles were almost certainly due to other causes, ones which I have still not fully tracked down. I apologize to the members of the Jikes project and retract that diary entry.

I retract my unfair accusations against the Jikes compiler. The problems I was experiencing were almost certainly due to other causes.

I have retroactively edited this diary entry to prefix it with this retraction, but am leaving the diary entry untouched.
--14 January 2005

Trying to get GNU Classpath 0.13+CVS and Jikes RVM to work together. Sigh; the Jikes compiler is not behaving very well these days. Jikes 0.21 [Here I meant 1.21 --14 Jan 2005] seems to be building a bogus version of GNU Classpath; ouch.

It's the first snow of the year here in New York. Whee.

I'm glad to see that Advogato is back up; I can post blog entries again now.

One of my software patents has been granted. Time to contact some sort of free patent foundation.

I've been sad for the past week, and not very interested in software. Nancy's pregnancy didn't take. Dimitri may end up being an only child.