Category: Fun

Anything that’s just plain fun

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My MIX09 Schedule

Well, soon I’ll be off to MIX09!

I can’t wait to go, but already we’re off to a rocky start.  The first Keynote starts at 9am with registration and the breakfast anytime before that.  That’s not bad but I probably won’t even show up in Vegas until 2am that morning to say nothing of checking in and finally falling asleep.  This is because we have our Inland Empire .Net User Group the night before.  Tom Opgenorth is presenting on ASP.Net MVC.  He is a great speaker and this is a great topic.  Tom is the guy who got me back into TDD and, after playing with MVC for about 6 months, I’m excited to ask him some detailed questions.  If you missed his presentation on TDD you’re in luck.  We recorded it and you can view the entire session on the user group website in the Videos section.  So anyway, the meeting will end about 9:30, so by the time I pack up, hit Starbucks and head out I’ll probably be pulling into Vegas at ~2am.  Rough day when you want to be conscious during the keynote.

Anyway, before all that we had a great plan.  About 8 of us were going to leave the meeting together and caravan to Vegas.  Now, through various schedule changes and some bosses reneging on their approval we’re down to 5 in the caravan.  No big but it kind of lets the steam out when your “party group” gets cut in half.  But, those of us going are still jazzed and ready to hit the town.

To add to the misery my kids have been pretty sick.  It’s the saddest thing to see your two year old just absolutely miserable with a cold. :(  Anyway, he has graciously let me participate in that I’m starting to come down with it.  I hope I am not full blown sick in Vegas. 🙁

OK, on to the real topic (about time!):

So, as I am architecting a site for my new department in MVC I am hitting most of the MVC talks.  Silverlight 3 is probably one of the main focuses of the event along with Windows Azure.  However, I have no actual business use for Silverlight 3 yet (mainly due to the technical restrictions hampering Silverlight’s adoption for my clients) so that’s just eye candy that I don’t have time for.  Also, most of the Azure talks are fairly elementary, rehashing the same “What is Azure” topics.  I’ve seen most of this stuff and, again, have no real practical use at my paying job for it so I’ll skip most of these as well.  I am checking out the Azure Storage because I’m interested in queues, however, since I’m leaning towards SDS I could easily find myself in another session. 

That leaves me with MVC.  Prior to my move to a new department I have been working with MVC for the last 6 months on a particular project, which coincidentally was for my new department.  Now that I’m in my new position this task has grown.  The entire department site will be hosted in MVC with several sub-apps based on various technologies, including MVC.  So, naturally I’m hitting most of these.

I’m the dev guy who puts a high emphasis on “usability” but wish could design better.  So, for Friday afternoon I’m not sure whether to go for the “Advance Your Design with UX Design Patterns" session (quince looks like a great tool!) or the mini sessions on Infographics and Microformats.  I don’t care about the “UI discussion” much so I’ll probably hit the UX Design Patterns session at 12:30 and then skip out to see 12:55, or I may just stay for the whole thing.  Whatever I miss I can catch later from the online recordings.

Here’s my schedule for those of you who happen to be interested:

Day 1 – Wednesday

Time Activity
9:00 AM Keynote – Bill Buxton & Scott Guthrie
11:30 AM RESTful Services for the Programmable Web with WCF – Ron Jacobs
12:45 PM Lunch
2:15 PM ??? – Not sure what I want to go to yet.  Have an idea? 🙂
4:00 PM How’d they do it? Real App. Real Code. Two Weeks. Nothing but .NET – Scott Hanselman
6:00 PM Attendee Party at TAO Las Vegas

Day 2 – Thursday

Time Activity
9:00 AM Keynote – Deborah Adler & Dean Hachamovitch
10:30 AM Windows Azure Storage – Brad Calder
11:45 PM Lunch
1:00 PM Securing Web Applications – Eric Lawrence
2:30 PM File|New -> Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) – Scott Hanselman
4:15 PM ASP.NET MVC: America’s Next Top Model View Controller Framework – Phil Haack
6:00 PM Movie Screening: Objectified

Day 3 – Friday

Time Activity
9:00 AM Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC): Ninja on Fire Black Belt Tips – Phil Haack
10:45 AM There’s a Little Scripter In All of Us – Building a Web App For the Masses – Rob Conery
12:00 PM Lunch
12:30 PM Advance Your Design with UX Design Patterns – Ambrose Little
12:30 PM User Experience Design for Non-Designers – Shawn Konopinsky
12:55 PM Effective Infographics with Interactivity – Joshua Allen
1:20 PM Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit – Tim Aidlin
2:00 PM Building High Performance Web Applications and Sites – John Hrvatin

 

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“Twitch” Coined on Twitter Fan Wiki – Glossary

OK, sometimes you get a small opportunity to change the world.  And in this case, only the crickets can offer their “chirp, chirp”. 🙂 That’s them saying, “uh, you did something?  Sorry, no one noticed.” 🙂

I’m a recent Twitter convert and I just got off a recent binge.  Feel free to follow me at @MattPenner if you so desire.

Anyway, I made a typo in one of my tweets.  It, of course, caused me to re-tweet with a correction.  So, my off-topic mind asked the question, “what is a typo called in Twitter?” 

If you don’t know, there are several coined terms in the world of Twitter.  For instance a Tweet is a message in Twitter and Twiterature is when you give quotes from literature on Twitter.

So, what is a typo in a tweet called?  It turns out there isn’t a name for it.  So, in all trumpets and fanfare (there are those crickets again!) I added Twitch to the list:

Twitch – When you tweet a typo causing you to tweet a correction before getting a load of replies.

 

You can check out a lot of other Twitter glossary words at the Twitter Fan Wiki

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Recorded sessions from Code Camp?

I record the monthly presentations at the Inland Empire .Net Users Group.  I’m half way done developing the distribution area for our groups website.  This is taking a while because I have no free time!  J/K, I’m also guilty of putting in the kitchen sink.  I’m creating it so that users will have a single place for all session content including a Silverlight player for video, access to downloads such as slides and code as well as ratings and content.  Will be nice, if I ever get it done!

Anyway, back to the topic.  Is anyone interested in recorded sessions of Code Camp?  I know I sure am.  There are so many sessions by so many great speakers that it is impossible to see them all.  Why not record them and make them available after the show?

I’ve volunteered to Lynn Langit and Daniel Egan, who I know have vested interest in Code Camp, to do the work.  I just need funding for the resources.  It’s not expensive, but it’s not trivial either.  The setup I currently use for our IE .Net sessions is a VGA frame grabber from Epiphan (great equipment!), a wireless mic and my laptop.  That’s it.  Turns out when I went to the ESRI User Conference in San Diego they do the exact same thing, although they use Macs and a few mixers since they also have PA systems for the presenters.  They sell their week’s worth of presentation recordings on DVD’s for ~$400.  I’d like to make this content freely available for viewing on the web much like PDC.

This would be relatively easy.  I could get a few bodies to help set up and keep things running smoothly.

Code Camp 2009 has at most 9 simultaneous sessions.  Assuming this doesn’t grow I’d need to purchase and put together 9 recording “kits”.  If we went the “inexpensive” route, without any vendors kicking in free or discounted gear, we could probably build a kit for a little less than $1,000.  This would be for the frame grabber (VGA2USB model), a decent but inexpensive laptop, wireless mic and miscellaneous cabling gear.  We’d get 5-10 frames per second at 1024×768, which for 95% of the presentations would be adequate.  So, we’re looking at the need to finance ~$10k of equipment allowing for one spare.  Any takers? 🙂

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Baaaaad User!

I’m in the process of installing ArcGIS Server 9.3 and moving all our GIS data over to ArcSDE.  It’s been 6 months since the last ESRI UC so most of the time I’m reading over docs trying to remember all that I learned.

 

Anyway, our data is now in SDE.

 

I attempted to publish a locator service to the web.  Here’s what I got:

clip_image002

Baaaaad login user!  No, no!

I’m getting scolded by GIS!

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World’s first flying car prepares for take-off

Check this out:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article5489287.ece?print=yes

I think an idea like this is a bit far off yet.  Sure, the technology and physical product may be ready fairly soon, but I doubt the FAA is ready to let any person just jump in the air flying over buildings and roads.  If I run out of gas right now I coast to the side of the road.  You run out of gas in one of these things and you may be wishing you topped off before you left for the last time. 🙂

However, think of what the world would be like without traffic?  I live in the Inland Empire (southern California) and commonly travel to Orange County and Los Angeles.  The only three freeways between the IE and OC/LA are the 91, 60 and 10, which are 3 of the highest traffic freeways in the country.  If I could fly from my house to OC and avoid the entire freeway system it would make the commute a thing of pleasure rather than frustration.

It is set to list at $200k.  Maybe to pay for it I’d initially shuttle business execs from IE to OC/LA.  Get to work in 30 minutes!  Just $50 a trip! 🙂

Let’s see, supposed I did 3 runs in the morning and three in the evening.  That’s $300 per day.  5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, that would be 75,000 a year.  After overhead for gas I could have it paid off in 5 years. :)  Of course, it may cost $1 million a year just for insurance.

In all seriousness though think of what transportation would be like if these really did take off (no pun intended).

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Microsoft Surface: SecondLight

If you know anything about Microsoft Surface than this will probably peek your interest.  Things like this may just be eye candy for now, but you can see in just a matter of years (or less) the way we interact with computers in our daily lives will be drastically different.

I don’t mean the way we all normally use computers, but how we do everything else.  Look at the way people are using phones now.  They play games, text around the world, get driving directions, take videos and pictures, listen to music and a whole host of other things we never though of 5 years ago.  If you went back to just the year 2000 and told everyone what phones would be like today most would never believe you.

That’s where Surface and technologies like it are taking us.  When you’re out and about you’ll be interacting with display technology like this every where.  Whether it’s ordering off a menu at a restaurant, getting plane tickets, adjusting your hotel amenities and upgrading your rental car all during your layover at the airport, finding where stores are and what sales they have at a mall display, etc information will be much richer and more interactive than we have now.

OK, get the point.  🙂

SecondLight is a technology where a second image is literally projected through the first.  It isn’t visible until a translucent item is placed in front of it.  This could be something as simple as a sheet of tracing paper.

that isn’t so special in itself, this easily could have been simulated with the older Surface technology.  It’s the fact that this second image is projected that really beefs things up.  Suddenly displays are becoming more "3D".  Not in the traditional sense but you can hold the paper above the surface for an easier view.  They showed some plexiglass "disks" that were molded with a prism inside.  This allowed the light to bend and display the image on the side.  It’s all simply amazing.

Check out this article and watch the video.  It’s just mind blowing.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/233511/secondlight-surface-on-steroids.html

As I always say, this is an amazing time to be alive.

Take care all!

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SQL Injection Attacks

What fun.  Looks like a good friend of mine, James Johnson (also the president of the IE .Net User’s Group) got attacked by a potential SQL injection.  Fortunately he’s pretty up on his secure coding so it wasn’t a problem.  Props to James!

Anyway, he threw it my way because he thought I’d be interested.  Was a pretty nasty one.  Take a look at his write up and you can also see my comments there.