Monday, September 25, 2006

A "Gigantic Tour" of Metal

Last night I attended the Columbus Gigantour concert. How was it? It rocked.

I met friends beforehand at a local bar to watch the OSU/Penn State football game (GO BUCKS!), which I knew I'd miss the end of since doors opened at 4:30pm and the game started at 3:30pm. I wanted to see one of the opening bands, Into Eternity, so I headed over before my friends did, at about 5:30. By the time I got inside, the fourth band, Overkill, was already playing! How short were those sets?? At least I didn't miss any of the main stage bands.

Arch Enemy played a short but really good set (5 songs), follow by Opeth - the band I was most excited about seeing. Opeth's set was short, too, only allowing for four of their typically long songs, one each from their last four albums: The Grand Conjuration (Ghost Reveries), The Leper Affinity (Blackwater Park), Windowpane (Damnation), and Deliverance (Deliverance). I thought that Mikael Akerfeldt, their singer/guitarist, was particularly funny with his dry humor between songs.

Next up was Lamb of God - definitely a crowd favorite. Their set was longer and they played many songs from their newest album, Sacrament, which they thanked the crowd for helping to debut at #8 on the Billboard charts.

The headliner was metal legend, Megadeth. Dave Mustaine and group rocked the house with a range of their hits, plus a track from their upcoming album.

Bands signed autographs after their sets, but none of the bands were enough of a favorite for me to miss any performances for that. The set changes were quick enough that there was barely time to get a beverage between sets (Bud Light was the only beer choice - blech).

It was a really good show, well worth the $40 ticket price (thanks goes out to Ticketmaster for all of that "convenience" you get for $7.25). I was a little disappointed by the turnout, though. Ticketmaster said general admission was sold out, but it didn't look like it to me - and the stands were even more bare. There are a lot of metalheads in central Ohio - where were they?

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

The Sun Rises for JRuby

Yeah, this is old news by now: the two core JRuby developers have been hired by Sun to work full-time on JRuby.

Still, I'm posting about this because I'm happy it, as a lover of both Java and Ruby (though, admittedly, I've done almost nothing with JRuby itself yet). But I'm also happy about it because it strengthens one of the rising stars in the "multiple languages on the JVM" world, and that strengthens Java as a platform (very similar in effect, of course, to the multiple language support of the .NET CLR).

I also think it is great that these guys get to focus on their pet project - and get paid to do it! Congrats on that!

In terms of Vendor interest in Ruby and/or Rails, apparently Adobe developers are making Flex Rails-friendly.