Archive for May 14th, 2007

The Weird Geeky T-shirt from Sun’s CommunityOne Event

Monday, May 14th, 2007

It took me a while to figure out the cartoons on Sun’s “CommunityOne” T-shirt …

The front of the T-shirt says: O-pen-sew-(hor)se: Open Source

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The back of the T-shirt says: Comb-ewe-knit-e-one: CommunityOne (Thanks David for the correction, see comments. I am bad at math ;))

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The In-Room Sensor in the W Hotel

Monday, May 14th, 2007

I stayed in the W Hotel for this year’s JavaOne conference. It is a very nice hotel with the best location for JavaOne — I can go back to my room after a session, change, and catch the next session in time. The room is tiny for its $400 / night price tag — it can barely hold two people chatting with each other. But hey, this is San Francisco real estate.

What I found most amusing about the room is that it has a small box mounted on the wall facing the bed. At the first glance, it looked like a video camera. Why would a hotel install a video camera to spy on guests? So, I decided to climb up the desk and have a better look. It turns out to be more high tech than I thought!

It is actually an IR / heat sensor capable of detecting people in the room. If it detects no one in the room, it automatically adjusts the A/C to save energy and notifies the housekeeping staff that it is okay to come into the room now. That is pretty neat. I guess each housekeeper would also have a handhold device to query for this information as they go from room to room? That would be excellent use case for a Java end-to-end application. :)

Now I think of it, maybe such sensors have been installed in many hotels I stayed in the past. But this time I stayed in the tiny W hotel room for week — so I had a better chance to actually notice it. ;)