Saturday, December 19, 2009

BCSD6: San Diego Barcamp (6th)

Barcamps are great, don't miss out! So mark your calendars everyone...

SD Barcamp Info (from barcampsd.org): Barcamp has grown – again. This coming barcamp will be SD 6, which means we’re on our THIRD year of barcamp. Technically, since we had to push BCSD6 to January, we’ll be beginning our FOURTH year.

Here’s the current lowdown:

  • January 16th and 17th
  • Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

Friday, December 18, 2009

CES 2010

Consumer Electronics Show is approaching quickly. It will start on 7 Jan 2010 @ LV. We may see plethora of new mobile devices from many vendors in the show. Of course, I am quite interested with Palm's WebOS as a developer. I think they have a great product in their hands!

I bet many small form factor devices such as new wave of PDAs, smartphones, tablets, e-readers and other exciting gadgets will show up in the show! Recently, I saw Mag+, a new concept on the future of digital magazines. It was quite amazing. Check it out. They might be in there as well...

Microsoft and Apple are also working on their secret tablet devices! According to Gizmodo, MS's new tablet called Courier will show it's face next year. Late prototype has beautiful 7-inch dual screens. Probably they will not call it a tablet pc, most likely it will be called a booklet.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Palm's WebOS SDK (Mojo)

Finally, I got the email to download the SDK this evening at 11:19 pm! I will give it a try soon...

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

CodeCamp @ UCSD (27-28 June 2009)

We had a very good CodeCamp @ UCSD. I talked about Software Design Patterns and Objective-C for iPhone development in two consecutive sessions. Attendance was pretty good, I will post my presentations here soon...

Saturday, May 30, 2009

SD BarCamp (30-31 May 2009)

SD Barcamp 5 started @ Intuit today. Very cool sessions :)

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

SoCal Code Camp Announced

I got an email from my friend Woody Pewitt from Microsoft today. Yes, it is that time again :) We will have our next code camp at UCSD (27 and 28 June 2009).

Come and join us. It is fun, very informative and extremely useful for all of us...

Here is the link: http://www.socalcodecamp.com

Sun's Future (21 April 2009/Tue)

OK, Sun & IBM deal didn't go through, as we all know. Now this week, we have a new offer for Sun, this time from Oracle! Many expressed their concerns about the future of the Sun's technologies. What will happen to Java? How about MySQL? Same questions apply to the others as well, such as Netbeans, OpenOffice, Virtual Box?

Personally, I would like to see Sun standing still on its own feet and continue its wonderful contributions to the technology world. However, company's financial trouble is suggesting the otherwise. We will see what would happen to this deal in a few short days. Is it going to go through or will it fall off like the IBM deal? Again, another interesting development in the tech arena to observe...

I was also thinking today, what if IBM increases its bid for Sun? Think about the other extereme case: Wouldn't it be also funny to see Microsoft jumping in and offering yet another bid for our beloved Sun :)

Well, today is our San Diego Java User Group meeting at Sun, and I bet many of us will be talking about these issues at the meeting all evening long :)

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Cloud Computing

In the near future, our data and programs will be floating somewhere in the connected servers known as the Cloud. All of the computation will be done within there, and the processed results will be stored in there as well. The main idea is to incorporate software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is the big promise of the so-called "Cloud Computing". As a matter of fact the concept is a reality today in the form of proprietary implementations, thanks to the pioneers in this field. The concept has been considered as the first major IT market disruption that has taken place since the open software movement.

There are quite a few big players out there: Amazon, Google, Sun, IBM, and Microsoft. New players are joining to the game day by day. Now there is even a manifesto (Open Cloud Manifesto) circulating around the techno corners: Promoting openness! Isn't it too early for a manifesto in this area? I don't know. Manifesto, standards, many companies who are willing to jump on the bandwagon, these are all good, however it may hinder the innovation in this early stage! Maybe for this type of reasons and also to protect their initial investments, some of the big companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft didn't say yes to the open cloud yet! On the other side, the impressive list of supporters (such as IBM, Aptana, SAP, EMC, VMWare, GoGrid, Red Hat, Novell, OMG etc.) of the movement is groving fast.

Is the cloud computing a big hype as some will argue, or a revolutionary new computing platform for all of us? We will see the results soon :)

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Windows 7 == Vista 2.0 ?

I just downloaded the Windows 7 test version (build 7000) today and quicly set up a virtual machine using VMware Fusion for it. Installation went smoothly (business edition installed). Once I installed the VMware tools, I was ready to go and give it a try. I am using my MacBook (w/4GB RAM) and I allocated 1GB RAM for Win7. Later I shutdown the system and restarted again just to see how long it would take to reboot, it took 50 seconds to restart, little better than Vista VM.

On the surface, it looks almost like Vista! Minor differences on the taskbar, but start button and panel are exactly the same. Documents, Pictures, Music, Computer, Control Panel, etc all have the same icons like Vista. In the start panel I noticed Snipping Tool for capturing the screen image. I also did take a look at the Math Intput Panel (under Tablet PC) and Windows PowerShell.

By default, .NET installed of course (that's good). No flash or Java there, one needs to install them seperately. Flash installation was a breeze, I didn't install any JRE yet. I will check the security enhancements soon.

Task manager: Memory section now shows total, cached, available and free memory in the system. This is a good change since in Vista we could only see total, cached and free memory! That gives the wrong impression because Vista tries to cache as many system resources as possible, and one can see that there is no free memory left! This is a misnomer, in fact, Vista will release the memory and replace it with new content as needed.

Still, there is no built-in virtual desktop support (although many applications available freely)! I was hoping for a cool looking virtual desktop app from MS in this release!

OK, here is the screenshot of the desktop:


Monday, January 05, 2009

CES Starting

World's largest consumer technology trade show "International Consumer Electronics Show" is starting this week in Las Vegas (8-11 January 2009). Even in recession times that we go through right now, the show would be very interesting to see. Probably, a lot of start-ups will show their innovative technologies in the event. I am eager to see which products, tools, would be the big winners this year...