One of our employees, Mr. Vitaly Tsikoza has died in a tragic accident on Sunday Sep 24th. He fell off a cliff in American Fork Canyon in Utah while trying to rescue a 3-year old girl. See the local news site for details:
- Man Falls Off Cliff While Trying to Rescue Girl
- Crews Recover Body of Hiker
- Girl Who Fell Off Trail Doing Well
Sorry, I cannot find the right words to continue this post. I have personally known Vitaly for over 20 years and still cannot believe he will not return from his trip.
Update: Vitaly’s ex-spouse and friends have created a memorial Web site (in Russian)
An add-on for Excelsior JET 4.5 is available that adds support for Java SE 5.0 Update 8.
Excelsior JET 4.5 Maintenance Pack 3 is available for download. It is a highly recommended update that fixes multiple customer issues.
One of us has been searching the Web for pages that mention Excelsior JET and spotted the name of our flagship product in an unusual place – a job posting:
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Desired Skills:
Experience with a wide variety of development tools (Eclipse, Visual C++, Borland JBuilder, NetBeans, gcc, gdb, JProfiler, Excelsior JET)
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It was a pleasure to see it in such a good company! 
According to Mark Reinhold’s recent blog post, the JSR 270 Expert Group has voted unanimously for the removal of the MIDI Package from JDK 6 in an attempt to reduce the Java download size. It is the only package on which the group could agree at the moment, but Mark mentions CORBA as the next candidate for removal.
It is interesting that although the MIDI package shall become optional, the respective tests shall remain in the JCK (the test suite through which all Java technology licensees have to pass their products before release.) I believe this was not the case for Optional Packages such as Java3D or JavaMail before they went open-source.
Anyway, MIDI removal is unlikely to stop complaints about Java download size, so it seems Excelsior JET will not lose in the near future one of the selling points it has just gained. This makes me feel a bit more relaxed at least until Java 7, which is set to incorporate JSR 277 (JavaM Module System)…
Maintenance Pack 5 is the latest recommended maintenance update for Excelsior JET 3.6 and should be applied by all customers.
