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

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.

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.