SUN announced that Java will be GPL. This is huge - finally, there will be no license issues (and "hacks" to get around them) for easy Java inclusion on every Linux distribution. Excellent Java support is both good on its own right, and it may (hopefully) result in removal of the Mono cruft that was creeping into some distributions.
I decided not to go for the job in Heidelberg - although it looks like a great town and university, some details of the job didn't seem quite right to me (there's a good chance I wouldn't be working on Unix, it'd be a 3-year commitment, it's part-time, and there's no IT component (I have lots of ideas about the way IT should be done, and would probably be unhappy if I couldn't do them). Sigh. Thatsaid, this does whet my appetite to live in Europe - I'm going to see if I can arrange something better suited to my skills/interests - I'll probably start seriously looking in March or April, with a hope of moving sometime over the summer. Amusingly, if that works out, my stay at CMU will be a very good mirror of my undergrad years, or the years of the undergrads here (including one friend and several who are in the murky friend-acquaintence borderlands) -- that would make for a 5-year stay (roughly as long as my awesome undergrad years). I wouldn't say that CMU is a repeat of that exactly - I understand wholly what my parents told me about university being the highlight of one's life (as well as, including the first job, the period of most rapid change), but it's about as close as I might come. I long to go out into the unknown world again, this time to Europe.
If any of you missed the Ceilidh post somehow, please go fill out the poll on livejournal.
