Chrome Experiments

Google put together a very cool collection of demos showcasing the V8 JavaScript Engine and what I'm guessing is HTML 5.  For those Linux and Mac users, Firefox and Safari will run the demos as well.

Chrome Experiments

Google Developer Day

This was a pretty interesting opportunity for some small group time with some Google people to talk about their current product offering.  First off, their office on 20 W. Kinzie is pretty freakin' awesome.  It fits into any other office tower layout, but they've done some inventive things with the space.

The 'Keynote' was just that, a kinda state of the union for Google product offerings, breaking them down into Client (Chrome), Cloud (Data APIs, App Engine, Google Docs, Apps, etc.), and Connectivity (Andriod, GWT, OpenSocial).

Breakout 1: Google App Engine

Don Schwartz, an App Engine engineer, went through a demo/tutorial about how to create a messageboard.  It took only 45 minutes, granted he's an expert with notes, but it really showed the power of being able to deploy an application to the cloud.  This is he app he built.  He also talked  about how the question and voting part of Obama's digital townhall was built on App Engine.

Breakout 2: Geo APIs

Delson Ting presented the Geo APIs.  The presentation was basically a breakdown of a demo he had prepared beforehand which showed how to gracefully degrade an app based on what plug-ins the client machine has.  The mapping points are pulled from a Google Docs spreadsheet feed, but could work with any xml feed.  Check out all the code here.

Breakout 3: Google Data APIs

Sarah Graham presented a use case for the Data APIs and data aggregation.  Most things are based on AtomPub and REST-ful communication.  She showed a handy JSON inspector and explained how a MLB Calendar/Map mashup works.  I was surprised that so many people use Google Docs or Calendar as a reliable datasource, but I guess it makes sense in some cases.

All in all it was a good experience.  There could have been fewer code demos and more about how large brands or enterprise companies are using Google's products.  I think the tipping point will occur when those entities begin using Google products.  It could occur when a critical mass of one-off developers use the products, but I'm more interested in seeing how enterprise level companies are using Google's product offerings.  You can find a review of the day here.

Photos embedded in Google Street view

I noticed something this morning when I was mapping my route to the Google Developer Day.  Google Maps Street view has added an embedded picture feature to their street view.  Click through to the map and look for the thumbnail in the upper right corner.

View Larger Map

Surface

Worth watching.

DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish - Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

Mohawk

After PhizzPop we went to Mohawk to meet up with Jamie and Wendy.  It was a great venue and a great time.

I joined Twitter

SXSW - ThemeSong

I went to a generally unimpressive presentation but did come away with one cool idea.  ThemeSong is a new AIR app that you can setup to provide some extra office humor.  ThemeSong

SXSW - Graffiti Research Lab

This presentation was kind of a wash but there were some very cool stories and I found the next cool project to play with: GRL Laser Tag

http://muonics.net/blog/index.php?postid=15

SXSW - CMS Showdown

The open source CMS showdown was between Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.  I generally don't think of Wordpress as a CMS, but apparently they've been moving into that space.

The showdown was based on a challenge to provide a community leardership organization with an easy to use content managed website.  They all had the same design template and had to have the same features.  In the eyes of the intended client, Drupal was the winner with Joomla a close second.  It was the separation between the blog and the admin dashboard in Wordpress that tripped her up.

• CMS Showdown
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Wordpress

The Ironworks

We finally got over to The Ironworks for lunch.  This is a barbecue place really close to the convention center -- you're actully look out onto the convention center from the back porch.

The food was great.  As you can see, Jamie enjoyed it as well.

SXSW - Scaling Synchronous Web Apps

This presentation was a bit of an indulgence.  Synchronous web apps are services like web based chat where the multiple users are expecting to interact with the same content in real time.  There were plenty of questions about load testing, server monitoring, how to rollout new features, and the actual application stacks used.  It sounds like nagios is pretty popular along with keynote.

In the work I've done at CM, we've had expert release engineers who've taking care of all the servers.

Facebook Party

The Facebook party started about an hour after the SXSW award ceremony.  We got to watch as someone's car was towed from right in front of the club, Pangaea.  We were fortunate to get there early enough that getting in wasn't all that big of a deal.  It turned out to be not just a party, but a show as well.  The first act was a band called Lights from TO.  Next up was a very good break dancing crew.

SXSW - Agile Developement/Design

Dave went to this and came away with a few interesting links:

• HCD meets Agile
• Human Centered Design meets Agile

SXSW - iPhone Dev

Dave strongly suggested I go to this...so here's some notes.

browser devs don't consider system resources when developing

browsers have built in status/progress indicators

iphones don't have any of that – how to do that?

Iphones are asynchronous and should think consider multithreading

Objective-C, what is it?

C w/OO added

Different from web languages

pointers

memory management

non-linear code execution

syntactical old-school

Gotta use Xcode

Cocoa – the display/interface framework – interactions are asynchronous

Protocols

https, u/p authenticated, REST, JSON (rest is considered best practices because it's lighter)

Demo & Tutorial:

MVC, events & delegates

Use Xcode to pull templates down onto the gui

AppDelegate is like the master controller and is where the app is initialized – has to be AppDelegate.m

below that sits models and views

use http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/  to parse json

Memory Management

if you alloc/init then you have to release it

if you don't, do not release cause you could cause exception

use instruments to profile apps, cause you need to be able to respond to release memory request

SXSW - Nate Silver Interview

This was a pretty interesting interview. Nate talked about his experiences forecasting the 2008 presidential election (FiveThrityEight) as well as PECOTA, the baseball performace prediction system.

• Irrational Exuberance

SXSW - Kick-Ass Mash-Ups

Kent Brewster, a self proclaimed 'Web Guy', gave a seminar on mashups, pipes, and YQL. These are all things that I've heard of and things that I can easily conceptualize, but have never really looked into.

As Kent said, this stuff is pretty powerful and easy to implement. He rightly highlighted several shortfalls, a couple of which are: the content you're repurposing is not yours and could become malicious and when a badge or mashup becomes popular it basically turns into a distributed denial of service attack.  All in all, it was some very interesting stuff.

• Badges
• Blog Juice
• Yahoo Pipes
• YQL
• The Future of the Internet

SXSW - Neocartography

I missed the beginning of this, but the general idea is how digial map and their interfaces are evolving.  I've pulled some of the links from the presentation:

• http://chicago.everyblock.com/ - This is what was up when I walked in.  I don't have much context.
  
• http://code.google.com/apis/earth/ - The Google Earth app has come to the browser.
  
• http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/ - This was a very interesting mashup where you can use sliders over a map to show different metrics.  One of the maps on this page shows London with real estate prices and commute times.  Very cool.
  
• http://walkscore.com/transit-map.php - This is another cool mashup that superimposes walk times over a Google Map of an area, in this case the Bay Area.  It's a good example of the time access
  
• http://www.london2012.com/map - This is another very cool example of time based mapping.  There's a lot of different data that you can toggle on/off of this map.  Too bad it's all in flash.
  
• http://www.areyousafeatlanta.com - This was shown inn response to a question about direction engines routing people through bad areas.

SXSW - Metadata and Bite Sized Info

I started last session in the metadata talk and left.  It's pretty simple, apply metadata where it fits and where it'll have a lot of contributors (if it's user generated).  In my opinion, the point was belabored.

I then went over to a panel titled Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet.  I didn't catch enough of that one, but I wish I had.

SXSW - Opening Remarks - Tony Hsieh

I'm sitting in one of the simulcast room watching/listening to Tony Hsieh talk aboutwhat make Zappos a great company.  After reading two of Jim Collins' books, I can tell you that this is one of the few true implementations of that school of thought.  Zappos was built from one set of core values with everything based on that.  For Zappos it's customer service.  You find the right people, people who share your core values, and then keep them happy.

One quote I just heard and lots of people jotted down: "Hire slowly, fire quickly."

Update w/materials from the keynote: Slides

SXSW - The Secrets of JavaScrript Frameworks

This was a decently stacked panel that spoke to 4 topics: YUI's new loader, meta languages, ARIA, and JQuery. The YUI and JQuery materials were most interesting. Some interesting things to check out are the firebug js profiler, fireunit, and testswarm.

We went to Stubb's for lunch.  Yum.

SXSW - Even Faster Websites

Steve Souders, writer of YSlow, gave a talk about making websites even faster.  Here's my notes:

• parallel script loading
  
• if you use script dom element method, make sure you check race conditions in IE
  
• DO NOT put inline scripts after stylesheets
  
• iframe suck
  

His full deck is at http://stevesouders.com/docs/sxsw-20090314.ppt

UPDATE:

One this that's interesting to note about this PowerPoint deck are slides 66 & 67.  They show how the frontend optimization discussed impacts a business's bottom line.  This is how you would sell in the extra initial cost.

Heading out to SXSW

I'm going to do my best to post during South by Southwest.  I dono if it'll turn out that way, but who knows.

Herdict

Crowd sourcing has become one of those buzz words. I usually try to ignore such things, but I heard about Herdict by way of The World's Technology Podcast. Basically people can post that they can't view a website. The crowd either verifies or refutes the claim. The podcast coverage was better than I could do, so see that for more info.

Mom's Birthday at Shaw's

Last night we went out to Shaw's Crab House on Hubbard in Chicago.  I've heard about Shaw's plenty of times, but it was my first time dining there and I strong suggest the Alaskan King Crab (you can see  Emily playing with one in the picture).  The crab was delicious and dinner was fun.  Happy Birthday Mom.

EeePC 1000HE

I got a new laptop today!!!  I ordered an Asus EeePC 1000HE netbook last Saturday and it finally (no fault to newegg) arrived this afternoon.  I gotta say that I'm really impressed.  This little laptop has just the right sized screen, 160Gig of storage, the newest Intel Atom (N280) processor, a multitouch trackpad, realtime performace stepping, and what seems to be a realistic 7 hours of battery.  Read the Tech Report review for the details and good pictures.

The realization that no laptop under $2,000 was going to satisfy my application development needs lead me toward getting a netbook.  The Tech Report article pushed me to purchase, and so far I'm very happy with the decision.

Mundial

Erin and I went to Mundial Cocina Mestiza for dinner this evening. I won't get into a full blown review because I could just do that on Yelp.

That said, if you go, strongly consider having their Chile en Nogada. Simply put, it was stuffed peppers, but in truth the flavors were a fantastic, delicious combination. Erin's rib eye entree was very good, but not great. All in all, not a place we would return, but a nice dinner as a one-off.

gChat comes to iGoogle

I've been waiting quite a while for this, but finally, gChat has come to iGoogle.  It looks and functions basically like gChat in Gmail did before they added the SMS and video capabilities.  Finally iGoogle is becoming the one-stop-shop.