Central Coast Technology Blog

The Power of Now

2009-04-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

I spoke at last Wednesday's meeting about the effect of iPhone generation devices on society. If you couldn't make it here is the video.

The Power of Now: How the iPhone generation devices are changing society from Roberto Monge on Vimeo.

SLO .NET User Group is BizSpark's Local Network Partner, helping startup companies get access to Premium Microsoft Development tools

2009-03-31T16:14:00.001-07:00

What is BizSpark, you ask?

BizSpark is an exciting new program from Microsoft that allows eligible startup companies access to the top of the line Microsoft development tools and platforms. And the SLO .NET User Group is proud to be the local network partner, in charge of approving local startup companies for the program.

So if you're a startup company, and you meet the following criteria:

- Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business,

- Privately held,

- In business for less than 3 years,

- Less than US $1 million in annual revenue,

- Headquarted in San Luis Obispo County or the Santa Maria area, and

- Willing to join and participate in the SLO .NET User Group

Feel free to contact the User Group at info@slodotnet.org and get approved. For more information you can check out http://www.slodotnet.org/bizspark.aspx.

Robert Hope, Founder

San Luis Obispo .NET User Group

Best of the PDC Comes to SLO

2009-03-13T13:15:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone!

It's not every day that we can get speakers from outside the area to come and grace us with a visit. Every once and a while we get an INETA speaker to come to the .NET User Group meeting, and then we get a pretty good mix when the Central Coast Code Camp is in session.

However, on March 12th, Developer Evangelists Daniel Egan and Bruno Terkaly of Microsoft came to San Luis Obispo to give a three-plus hour presentation on some of the new developments in the Microsoft world. The event, SLO MSDN Unleashed: Best of the PDC (Professional Developers Conference), was held at the Embassy Suites. Over 60 people attended, a great turnout for the event, and the presentations were great as well. I saw a lot of people I usually only see at Code Camp.

Daniel started out by talking about some of the dynamic language features coming in C# 4.0. For those of you that don't know, C# is (in my opinion) the language of choice when developing applications on the Microsoft platform. He then followed up with some impressive enhancements in the Ajax world, including some sweet new extenders for the Ajax Control Toolkit. Personally I think the ToolKit has come a long way.

Daniel Egan talks about C# Dynamics. (photo by Steve Evans)

After a short break, Bruno took over to cover Windows Azure, the new Microsoft Cloud Computing system that rivals similar offerings from Google and Amazon. The discussion was thorough and at times contentious. I personally feel like there are a few too many assumptions in terms of data scalability, and it will be interesting to see how and what feature sets are provided on the new relational database platform. Until 2 days ago, Azure was only going to support simple table structures. Speaking as someone who has managed to scale up a fairly large data structure without sacrificing relational integrity, I have to hope that they will not shortchange the SQL Server featureset in the cloud.

In addition, there was some talk about companies being able to host the Cloud locally on their local servers for a while to try it out, or program against, or even in theory to pull their applications back out of the Cloud should they need to for budgetary or proprietary reasons. I think this is very important myself.

I would like to thank Daniel, Bruno, and .NET User Group member Steve Evans for putting this event on. We're hoping to try and do something like this maybe every 6 months or so as a public event that goes beyond the scope of the .NET User Group and involves everyone. This kind of thing is great for San Luis Obispo and the technology community.

Thanks to all who attended!

Robert Hope

San Luis Obispo .NET User Group

http://www.slodotnet.org

Central Coast Code Camp Schedule Is Up, and don't forget about the Softec Symposium!

2008-09-17T14:29:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone,

The schedule has now been posted for Code Camp next Saturday and Sunday, September 27th and 28th. Be aware, it is subject to change prior to the event, but it's generally set to go. We have a great lineup this year, featuring 25% more content than last year. Thanks for all the speakers who stepped up! We've got everything from database technologies to agile methodologies to scalability to rich interactivity to legal advice to new exciting technologies, and much more! So please, if you haven't yet, register for this great event, and help us out by spreading the word and forwarding this to everyone you know who might be interested. Registrations help us get an accurate count of how many to expect.

We're still looking for event sponsors, so if you or your company might be interested, please visit the website at http://www.centralcoastcodecamp.com/Sponsor.aspx and help us out! There are sponsorships of any level available, and every little bit helps. All donations go toward covering the great venues and events that occur at the camp.

Don't forget our exciting special events! For starters, there's the Geek Dinner Saturday night at 6:30 pm at the Suites. This is a great way to meet your fellow campers and speakers and interact and network. It was a lot of fun last year and we're hoping for a great time this year. Also, this year we have our inaugural Programming Contest! At 3:45 pm on Saturday in the Los Osos South room, we'll be featuring a Java Programming Contest with prizes and the thrill of victory! More information can be found at http://www.centralcoastcodecamp.com/Competition.aspx. Finally, there's our end of Camp raffle, featuring a ton of books, software, and our Zune grand prize! You must be present to win!

Lastly, we would like to make you aware of our sister event, the Softec Symposium. This exciting business technology event is occurring on Friday, September 26th, at the Embassy Suites. It will feature a keynote by Citrix (of GoToMeeting and GoToMyPc) and concentrate on Remote Technologies. More information can be found at http://www.softec.org/. There will be the keynote, several panels, and a trade show. Please pass this information on to anyone who you think might be interested or to any companies who might be interested in getting a booth at the trade show. It's a great way to introduce yourselves to the local technology community business leaders.

See you at Camp!

Robert Hope and The Central Coast Code Camp Team
http://centralcoastcodecamp.com
info@centralcoastcodecamp.com

Central Coast Code Camp Returns!

2008-06-14T06:49:00.001-07:00

Hey all,

I'm not sure how many of you attending our stunningly successful first code camp last year, but if you did, then you know we had 32 presentations by 20 presenters from as far away as Texas, that we had a fabulous "Geek" dinner, that we gave away prizes and swag, including two Zunes, that we had over 120 people show up from as far away as Ventura and Bakersfield, and that it was all FREE to everyone who attended! A fantastic time was had by all!

So fantastic, in fact, that we are going for v2.0 this September, on the 27th and 28th, the Central Coast Code Camp Returns to the Embassy Suites in San Luis Obispo!

http://www.centralcoastcodecamp.com

We've already got 28 registrants signed up and are looking for presenters and topics. There are so, so many new technologies out there this year that are coming to the forefront and we want them all properly represented. So sign up to speak, but just as importantly, sign up to attend!

Robert Hope

Founder, San Luis Obispo .NET User Group

User Groups Attract Visitors...and how technology saved my shoulder...

2008-04-04T12:06:00.001-07:00

So in past blogs I've mentioned the possibilities of creating your own special interest groups, or user groups. I've done so with the San Luis Obispo .NET User Group. One of the byproducts of that is an ability to use your group's contacts for a chance to do some good for the community. I had this opportunity recently when the Code Trip, Microsoft's bus trip featuring its new technologies, tried to come to town. When a visit to CalPoly fell through due to scheduling issues, Woody Pewitt from Microsoft contacted me seeking help with a place to park the bus. I put him in touch with Randy Scovial and Cuesta College, and the Code Trip stopped in for a successful visit this past Monday, with two sessions for students and a general session that night that attracted over 40 local technology professionals. You can read more about the trip, including its visit to SLO, at its website.

The Code Trip

The picture of the bus is from outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where I went this week for VSLive, a technology conference. I caught up with the Code Trippers there, and they interviewed me along with a bunch of other technology people, asking if they knew about the Code Trip.

They also asked me about my ultra mobile PC, my new toy that I got for just this reason. I spend a bit of time at conferences, and I am sick to death of carrying around the 40 lb deadweight that is my Laptop and its accompanying bag. So I picked up one of these:

An Ultra Mobile PC. It is hand held, has a 7" screen, runs Windows XP Tablet, and has built in wireless capabilities. And most importantly, it weights only a couple of lbs. It was heaven! I picked up some accessories so that when I had table space I could set it up almost like a regular PC:

including a folding keyboard like you would use for a PDA. But it works perfectly fine on its own, with a stylus for its touchpad and a fairly easy to use thumb keyboard split on either side of the unit. I got a lot of inquiries about this neat little toy. I even held a meeting in my car, over the phone, using this on my Verizon Broadband connection!

If you do a lot of traveling this is the toy for you.

Robert Hope, founder

San Luis Obispo .NET User Group

EVC 08 Capital Event Keynote address: The Future of Innovation: The New Rules for Entrepreneurs and Investors

2008-03-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Robert Hope covered the EVC event in the previous blog post. It was definitely a great event. I was able to talk to the keynote speaker Bill Reichert of Palo Alto-based Garage Technology Ventures after the event and he mentioned that he was really impressed with the scope of companies in the area.

In case you missed it here is keynote speech on The Future of Innovation: The New Rules for Entrepreneurs and Investors

Opening statements by Mike Manchak, King Lee, and last years winner.

Other coverage
Pictures of event
EVC Websites summary
Biz Buzz coverage

Bill mentions the book the Art of the Start in his talk. If you haven't read it you can get an overview from Guy Kawasaki himself in this video:

Past and Present Events

2008-03-21T11:31:00.001-07:00

So as my involvement in the community has grown I get to attend some pretty cool events. The latest was the EVC Venture Capital Event this past Tuesday, March 19th, at the Madonna Expo Center. I've got this neat idea that I don't want to put out there in public too too much, but if you know my background you wouldn't be surprised to find that it is a new web site idea. But it's only an idea, so I went with my little placard of mockups, some business cards, and a fact sheet, and crossed my fingers that some angel investor might write me a check.

That went ok. What was interesting, however, was the level of technology that is being developed here on the Central Coast. Aeromech, who will be presenting at the next Softec meeting, builds Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for both commercial and military applications. They were in the booth on my left. Phoenix is looking to upgrade the Kit airplane to a "sexy" two seater plane that actually kneels so you can get in like a car. They were in the booth on my right. Fleet Management Solutions, who does asset tracking via GPS, a company that is building the next electric car, and New Image Technologies' Elements, a custom networking website platform, and another company doing specialized wireless video, were all there. And while I was personally outclassed, I was also amazed and proud to be part of the tech industry here in SLO County and beyond. There's a lot of great stuff going on around here if you know where to look. Hopefully you will all come to the Softec meeting and see Aeromech in person. It's well worth the visit.

In addition, Microsoft's CodeTrip will be coming to Cuesta College on March 31st. CodeTrip is basically a bunch of code geeks on a bus, touring the West Coast in support of some new, really cool Microsoft technologies. Through my contacts via the San Luis Obispo .NET User Group, we were able to get them to visit us here in SLO on their way from LA to SF, where they will be stopping by VSLive the first week of April.

Code Trip at Cuesta

They will be giving presentations to student classes and then holding a general session at 6 pm at the school. Another great opportunity to expose yourself to the great technologies available to you.

Hope to see you there,

Robert Hope

Founder, San Luis Obispo .NET User Group

Meeting: Utilizing Open Source Technologies to Build Enterprise Class Organizations

2008-03-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

Shopatron talked about their use of open source technologies. It was interesting that they not only used open source technologies in their server LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) configuration but they also took it to the desktop. They chose to standardize on Open Office and Kubuntu as their desktop systems.

Here is the video in case you missed it:

Some benefits they cited:

Saved ~$400 per machine in licensing costs

Ability to tweak their software to meet their special needs

Ability to scale their DB without having to resort to buying more expensive DB hardware

Transparency into their software providers, access to key architects and developers of MySQL

Some challenges they cited:

New tools do have a ramp-up time, they included training

Just because it's open source it doesn't mean you don't pay for premium support

Cutting edge software can cut

Going from proprietary solutions to open source solutions can be a significant effort and should be planned carefully.

Overall they were very pleased with their choice to go open source across the board and they recommend that others take the leap.

Recommended reading/viewing:
I would also highly recommend reading Wikinomics. It has a very good overview of how the open source philosophies have affected business in the last 10 years. It has some great examples ranging from IBM to motorcycle manufacturers in china.

If you still want more this TED talks also hints at what open sourcing other areas of life can mean. Video embed below but you can also watch it on the TED website

The open source model has proven as an effective method of tackling large common problems. Various areas are looking to this type of collaboration model and reinventing themselves.

NOTE: I chose Jonathan Coulton's "Code Monkey" as the sound track because he's opening up some new ground in open source music. He gives Creative Commons licensing to his music so I could use it without calling his licensing agent. I did however pay the $1 for the song out of respect for the fact that he has to make a living. The ccMixter site allows users to share their samples in this open source way.

Tom Brokaw at the Microsoft 2008 Launch Event Celebrates Technology Heroes

2008-02-29T11:00:00.001-08:00

It's not often that you hear people who are involved in technology referred to as "heroes". Most of us are just techno-geeks trying to do the best we can. And while I don't necessarily drink the kool-aid as far as those of us who are using the newer Microsoft technologies being called heroes, I have to say I was struck by Tom Brokaw's opinion of what technology has meant to our world and our society.

I went to Microsoft's Los Angeles Launch Event 2008 this past week in celebration of the release of their three new products, Windows Server 2008, Sql Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. Lots of great advances, lots of awesome stuff, and their theme was "Heroes Happen Here". By that, they mean that the people who are using these new technologies are the heroes of technology.

But Tom's keynote speech (I was actually surprised when he came out on the stage at the Nokia Theater) revolved around what technology has meant to people in other parts of the world. He admitted to not being very computer savvy...and admitted he would probably never write a line of code with Visual Studio, or manage a Hyper-V Virtual Server Farm...but he did recall the importance of technology in making our world smaller, and hopefully better. He talked about the people who went to Pakistan to help during their last devastating earthquake, and how that when they came down from hiking into the deep mountains they were able to put fingers to keyboard and let the world know what had happened. He talked about how technology was helping to improve farming, and irrigation, and what that meant to the lives of people living in Africa. He talked about surgeries being led remotely by doctors via videoconferencing. I can't recall all the stories he told, but they all held essentially the same meaning: that the people, the programmers, the administrators, all of us who help make technology what it is, and make it available to the true heroes of the world, we all have a stake and a helping hand in that heroism, and he wanted to thank us.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, gave the rest of the keynote address as the event moved from true heroism into our own personal versions of "code heroes"...but what Tom Brokaw said does ring true. Technology helps in ways that sometimes we never know about, and our role in that is crucial, and we shouldn't take for granted what we do with it. We're all heroes.

An Intro to Amazon Web Services

2008-02-24T18:49:00.000-08:00

Amazon Web Services, or more simply AWS, provides a wide range of web services for building technical infrastructure. It's not a replacement for having an ISP (or a data center, if your firm is that large), but it's a great way to avoid spending too much money on infrastructure before you even have a proven business model. It's also a brilliant way to scale up resources on demand, even if – and sometimes, especially when – you already have a successful business model. In this article, let's introduce the web services available from Amazon, discuss a bit about use cases, then talk about business strategy for leveraging AWS.

Have you ever had a great idea for a new tech business, but weren't sure what to do next? Write a business plan? Set up a meeting with a venture capital firm? Launch a web site? Getting from A to B can become enormously expensive, when you start to think about buying servers, hiring sysadmins, leasing facilities, etc., before you can even demonstrate your idea running on the Internet.

Amazon considered that problem. For a few years at the start of this decade – post Bubble-bursting – they analyzed what it cost for new businesses to launch on the Internet, where the risks seemed to hit worst. They took their internal technology infrastructure and re-examined what parts could be rolled out as public services. Associates (ECS) was launched in 2002, then much of what people recognize now as AWS really began to catch on in 2006. More services roll out just about every quarter, it seems.

So about your great idea for a new tech business... Do it. If you have a web app, then go prototype it using Ruby on Rails, or Django, or any number of PHP frameworks. Build it on your laptop, upload code to EC2, save an AMI, replicate as needed. (Don't worry, we'll catch up on these acronyms in a bit here.) Or, if your business idea involves a lot of data crunching, maybe something like Hadoop, again you can build on your personal computer, then upload and run it at scale on EC2. The bottom line is: pay only for what you use, and scale up to enterprise size on demand.

One minor thing you want need to know beforehand: Amazon.com staff abbreviate terms and even acronyms using numbers. Have you seen how the term internationalization gets abbreviated as "I18N" sometimes? They do that. A lot. Apparently, it comes from the top; it's a geek thing, and at Amazon.com even the business types are dyed-in-the-wool tech geeks, all the way up to the CEO. So the AWS web service names follow similar spelling conventions: instead of saying Simple Storage Solution, they use the term S3. Having a good decoder ring might help make reading their documentation a wee bit simpler. Ahem.

Let's take a tour through their current set of web services...

Associates

Amazon Associates, formerly called ECS, was the first web service offering from Amazon. Use it in conjunction with Amazon Associates Program to create web storefronts. In other words, your site acts as a reseller that refers products at Amazon and its third-party vendors. Earn up to 8.5% in referral fees – which can be quite good money, overall.

EC2

Elastic Computing Cloud provides resizable compute capacity. Servers on demand, rented per hour. Grid computing, clouds, or – as they say on Sand Hill Road – "Google scale". You can configure a Linux server, then store it as an image (Amazon Machine Image, or AMI) and launch as many as you need. It takes only a few minutes to launch a new server, and you can stop it anytime you like. You pay by the hour, paying only for capacity that you actually use.

Small Instance (default)

$0.10/machine/hour, plus data transfer
1.7 Gb memory, 1 32-bit virtual core with 1 compute unit each, 160 Gb disk

Large Instance

$0.40/machine/hour, plus data transfer
7.5 Gb memory, 2 64-bit virtual cores with 2 compute units each, 850 Gb disk

Extra Large Instance

$0.80/machine/hour, plus data transfer
15 Gb memory, 4 64-bit virtual cores with 2 compute units each, 1690 Gb disk

Are there any downsides? Sure, EC2 is not a direct replacement for running your own data center – if you need that. For starters, there are no dedicated IP addresses (they're working on it). You'll need arrange for dynamic DNS. That happens to be a very good way to combine the strengths of a local ISP and EC2, by resolving your DNS from the local ISP and pointing into the cloud.

Another downside is that while you do get root on your virtual server, you never really know what the actual hardware lives, and you face some restrictions when it comes time to make kernel mods. Amazon documentation keeps repeating the refrain about a hypothetical "circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor", but that may be the most you'll ever learn about their data centers. (I hear they're stacked in shipping containers near hydroelectric plants, but that's just rumor – albeit a rather "cleantech" rumor, at that). My dev team ran into problems with some special uses of MySQL that required kernel changes. Hadoop won't run on the standard AMI, but there are special Hadoop AMI which work well. Generally there are work-arounds, but be forewarned that you're not going to walk into any data center and push a reboot button on an EC2 instance. Ever.

Still, I find that EC2 runs better than other Linux virtualization systems that I've tried. Tough to beat that price-point, too.

S3

Simple Storage Service allows you to write, read, and delete objects in "buckets". Each object can range from 1 byte to 5 Gb in size, with an unlimited number of objects per bucket. Think of S3 as a very large hashtable – think of key/value pairs – persisted to disk and replicated across several different data centers. Use REST or SOAP operations to read and write objects. You can also use BitTorrent for streaming media out of S3.

One application is to store LOBs in S3 instead of in your database. Or serialize large objects directly out of your middleware. A good approach is to use some transport language like XML or JSON to encode data objects, so they can be used directly in an AJAX call by a web client. An even better idea is to put a Distributed Hash Table (DHS) as a kind of middle-tier cache for objects persisted out to S3. Read more about that in Amazon's paper about their Dynamo project.

How much you ask? $0.15/Gb/month, plus data transfer. That's almost getting cheaper than buying a disk upgrade for your laptop, byte by byte.

One thing to consider: how do you manage your business requirements for off-site backups? I know that our business insurance certainly requires that kind of practice in place. Frankly, with S3 you must manage it yourself, and that implies costs for network transfer. One suggestion to Amazon would be to provide alternate means to bring S3 data out at a reduced speed, trickled out for backups.

SQS

Simple Queue Service provides a way to manage message queues – up to 8 Kb of text data per message – which can scale arbitrarily large. It's inexpensive and highly reliable. This is my favorite part of AWS, and potentially the most valuable to Internet entrepreneurs.

If you're familiar with MQSeries from IBM, you understand what this provides. For example, when I was working in banking software, MQSeries could harden gigabytes of transaction data reliably, while we waited to have new mainframes booted on the other side of the queue. That may be only 25 words of description, but in practice it was a nightmare made simple through an amazing IBM technology.

SQS follows that pattern. Integrating SQS into a web app is a little bit of a cognitive stretch for many developers; you really must embrace a different mindset. Once you do, you probably won't be thinking in terms of MVC design patterns much longer.

Costs? $0.000001/message, plus data transfer. In other words, $1 per million messages processed.

SimpleDB

SimpleDB might be described as a cross between a relational database and a spreadsheet, except that each cell may have different attributes. The whole shebang gets indexed automagically, then you can perform queries, joins, intersections, etc. – in very large quantities. Think of it as a good place to store pointers and metadata for those large objects stored in S3. You can hit the SimpleDB part of an object first, run its metadata through your business logic, then determine whether or not you want to stream out gigabytes from, say, some video you stored in an S3 bucket.

How well does that compare with Oracle licenses? At a mere $0.14/machine/hour, plus $1.50/Gb/month, plus data transfer, and with less headache about scaling and performance issues, it does look rather compelling.

FPS

Having worked around e-commerce for 15 years, in my opinion Flexible Payment Services has got to be one of more ingenious parts of AWS. It's a web service that simplifies the process of taking money reliably (for you, the seller) and conveniently (for your customer). It handles payment the same as how people do checkout on Amazon purchases – which is pretty much guaranteed to be familiar to consumers. You can program rules about billing, create recurring fees, add a Pay Now widget to any web site, or set up to handle micro-payments which would be prohibitively expensive through most financial processors.

You may be able to negotiate a better rate with your bank – once you have sales established – if you're not concerned about little nuances like chargebacks, fraud, etc.

MTurk

Mechanical Turk is described as "a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence" or an "elastic workforce". See this Wikipedia entry for more background about the name. You describe a kind of task, called a "HIT", then people sign up to perform your HITs. There is a $0.005 per HIT minimum commission, and Amazon takes 10% of commissions.

This is the kind of service which has been used to coordinate massively collaborative search for downed planes and lost ships, such as the search for Steve Fossett.

Alexa

There are also four Alexa web services, primarily for web analytics: Site Thumbnail, Top Sites, Web Information Service, and Web Search. I've used them a little commercially, and they are quite different from the other AWS offerings. Probably best to reserve that discussion for a follow-up article.

Strategy...

Let's repeat this point again, because it's important: the strategy for leveraging AWS is to build out your engineering so that operations can scale from Day One. Get running quickly, only pay for what you use. Get early feedback from testers and customers about your business ideas. Most importantly: save your seed equity for expenditures which are more important than technology infrastructure.

What could be more important in a tech start-up than technology costs? The following items top my list:

Legal fees for NDA, HR, contracts, financing, etc.
Health insurance and family benefits for employees
Patent and trademark filings, which grow increasingly complex internationally
SG&A to establish initial sales

If there is any way possible, avoid going for VC money until the last possible second. VCs appreciate that, probably even more than entrepreneurs. Wait on a cash infusion from venture capital sources until you have initial sales established and need to build sales channel, need to spend on marketing to establish your brand, etc.

AWS has been crafted by some of the most successful people working in e-commerce to give you exactly that kind of quick-start advantage. And why not? Ask yourself, would you rather earn a few hundred dollars each month from multitudes of new tech start-ups, early in their growth curve, assisting them to grow larger (and spend more)... or would you prefer to wait until a start-up has proven itself in the marketplace, then try to sell e-commerce and fulfillment services? Amazon has been active in both areas, but I have a hunch that the former strategy (AWS) earns more revenue over time.

We can discuss more later about system architecture, design patterns, and how to build infrastructure that scales up and scales down on-demand. Meanwhile, keep in mind that AWS can provide you with enabling services so that your new business idea has a much better path toward becoming a success.

So you are looking to connect with people like you...

2008-02-13T16:29:00.001-08:00

Maybe the best way is to start your own group. And no, I don't mean therapy group!

When I relocated to the Central Coast, I wanted to see how many .NET developers there were here because that was my specialty and something I was interested in. In Los Angeles where I had lived before, it was not uncommon to find several "User Groups"...groups of people who shared a common interest that got together once a month to talk about what they are interested in. So I started hunting around for a User Group here.

I couldn't find one, although certainly there is SLOCAMA, and SLOBytes, there was no .NET or even a general "programming" User Group. So I started asking around, and it was hard for me to explain to people what exactly it was I was trying to accomplish.

So I started my own. In November of 2006, I founded the San Luis Obispo .NET User Group. Now we are 40+ members strong and meet once a month. A typical meeting will generally consist of pizza or pasta or panda express, a 90 minute to 2 hour presentation by a member or an outside speaker on a topic we are interested in, and then everyone hangs around to chat. It's a great way for all of us to expand our knowledge and share our ideas.

And the reality is, it wasn't that hard to get it started. You basically need two things: a conference room, and a projector. In most cases, you can find conference rooms at banks, accounting firms, there are many local places that you can get one. In fact, the San Luis Business Center will rent one to you, and KCBX.NET will rent you one with a projector! Granted, you might spend $80 a meeting, but the benefits far outweigh the cost. If you're lucky like we are, you have someone in the group with access to a room and then you don't have that cost either.

Then you need a vision, a purpose. In our meetings, it's .NET programming. Yours might be databases, or design, or even electrical engineering. The topic and vision don't matter as long as you have one. And if you have one, I guarantee that there are others out there who share it.

Finally, you need speakers. Our group has only had two or three people from outside come in and speak. For the most part, our own members have been willing to step up and investigate something and come back with their findings. None of us are professional speakers, and it's very laid back and low key and about the sharing of ideas.

I placed a single comment in the Tribune with the weekly Central Coast Technology article written by Dan Logan and set up my first meeting. Fourteen people attended, and we've just grown from there. Dan continues to be supportive, and groups like Softec have stepped up to offer their support as well in the interest of "Community Education".

It's really that easy to start a group. Get a room, a topic, a projector if you need it, a speaker (even if it's you), some food, and set up shop. Even if only two people show up the first time, word will spread and your group will grow.

It's definitely worth your time and effort.

Robert Hope, Founder

San Luis Obispo .NET User Group

Meeting: Annual Buckboard 07

2008-01-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

This year's annual buckboard event opened the floor to all members. Each person was asked to introduce their business, to talk about the past year, and to talk about what they need for the upcoming year (funding, resources, presidential pardon).

We had various types of folks at the event including venture capitalists, early stage startups, mature local companies, cal poly and cuesta professors.

In case you missed it or want to revisit what was said the video can be played below or you can watch it at google video here:

2nd life for a Laptop

2007-10-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

No, this has nothing to do with Second Life, the online phenomena and everything to do with re-purposing an old piece of hardware.

I am currently working on several projects that involve team members that work in different parts of the county. I work out of my home office in Atascadero but I spend quite a bit of time meeting with clients and colleagues in the SLO and AG areas. A lot of meetings are held at coffee shops, the home-office worker’s conference room. Silly me, the last time I bought a new computer I put together a rockin’ work station rather than buying myself a laptop. At the time I didn’t really need to travel or work away from my office and opted for the high powered server.

So here I am today in need of a laptop but I don’t want to plunk down any amount of money right now. However I have an old 3rd or 4th hand Dell Inspiron 7500 PentiumIII. Last year I reformatted the hard drive and loaded Windows XP on it – originally it came with WindowsNT or Windows98. I loaded XP because I needed to run a demo application for sales calls and it was all I had. XP loaded and I got it up and running no problem. But I had no apps on it and it ran the demo app very sluggishly.

The laptop sat on a shelf for over a year. It was not quite at door stop status but it was getting close. However I have always advocated that with the advent of web apps and remote admin software any old PC or laptop that can run a current version of a web browser still has life as long as the hard drive holds out. Now I have an opportunity to heed my own advocacy and I am going to resurrect the Inspiron 7500 to help me be mobile as I work on my various projects and spend little or no money in the process.

I followed Roberto Monge’s lead and set up one of my projects on BaseCamphq.com. BaseCamp is a web based project management tool. I am testing out the free version that allows you to work on one project. I am setting up the URL for the project on Google’s business apps and will run my spreadsheet and documents through there along with setting up Gmail on my domain.

Next I loaded Skype on the laptop and plugged my VoIP headset in and made a high quality call without a hitch. Finally I loaded Radmin Viewer on the laptop and set up Radmin server on my PC. Now through the web browser on the laptop I can run any app and access any data on my home server.

Other than the cost of the Radmin Viewer license (which I already had) it took no money for me to turn a rather old laptop into a very usable machine by limiting the software on it to the OS, Internet Explorer, Skype, and Radmin.

With this configuration I can almost divorce myself of a piece of hardware whether it be a PC or laptop. If all my apps and data are online, then all I need is access to machine with a web browser and I have all my tools and resources at my disposal – as long as I have an Internet connection.

Managing the crud via RSS, more like this, search filters, and social networks

2007-09-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

I'm often asked "How in the world we are supposed to keep up with the various sources of information out on the net?" Part of the problem and what makes it extremely interesting is that more and more people are starting to blog. This means much more content but according to Sturgeon's Law it means 90% more crud. The key managing this big influx of data from varied sources is to have update notifications (RSS), with search filters (like google alerts), allow others to do the foot work for you (rank, trusted sources that you respect, blogroll, friends, or particular journalists), and finally a system that learns your preferences (ala amazon's more like this). I haven't seen a system that really helps you manage your data like this in one place. I use a combination of Google Alerts, my Google Reader, ims from friends, email links, del.icio.us for this but it is lacking the coherence of one system and it's missing the more like this and trusted network ranking. It looks like a few products are in beta to provide a service that might meet my criteria. Streamy looks very interesting

Check out the YouTube ad:

Here is the review article
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9743458-2.html

Office 2.0 Conference videos

2007-09-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

In my Web 2.0 and Beyond Talk I talked about how Web 2.0 was influencing the enterprise. The Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week was dedicated to this topic. They chose to use one of my favorite collaboration suites to run the conference. Clearspace X was used by the speakers and attendees to post documents, general meeting discussions and for displaying videos. Check out the site and especially some of the videos here

Office 2.0 Live Broadcast

If you have a small business and are thinking about expanding your internal office suites you should check out some of the products.

Opening Pandora’s Music Box

2007-08-29T12:36:00.000-07:00

It seems I am on my computer way too much; such is life for a high tech entrepreneur, the modern day office worker, or just a plain old geek. I login first thing in the morning and logout the last thing at night. I use my computer for work, personal communications, finances, and entertainment. The family television set has been put in the closet and we don’t have a stereo system hooked up in the house. My computer and my wife’s laptop have replaced television and radio. The 22” Wide Screen monitor I treated myself to - much to my wife’s displeasure - is now one of the smartest purchases I have made lately but I “really should have gotten the bigger one”.

My family relies on NetFlix, Comedy Central, and a variety of video content sites for our audio/visual experience. For music I have a dedicated hard drive with ripped CD’s and purchased downloaded music. I can queue up quite a bit of music – but I am limited to the music I own. When I am focused on work I want music to suit my mood without having to think about it. Rather than sorting through my collection and making a play list, I want to have mood or setting based selection of music like radio but with a focus on my musical tastes and preferences and without commercial and DJ interruptions.

Of all the online music listening options available the one I use the most; the one I have set as a “home page tab” in IE7; the one that keeps me from closing my web browser is online music broadcaster Pandora® (http://www.pandora.com/). The folks at Pandora® and The Music Genome Project® have put together a rich music portal that blends radio and social networking with an emphasis on delivering songs I want (and many I didn’t know I wanted) to my desktop. No commercials – no interruptions. Like radio I can select Stations to listen to based on tastes. As with the social networks I can share my Stations with other listeners and look for people with similar tastes in music.

I can’t describe what Pandora is any better than the people at Pandora, so here is the FAQ from their site:

Q: What is Pandora?

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you'll love.
It's powered by the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken, the Music Genome Project: a crazy project started back in early 2000 to capture the complex musical DNA of songs using a large team of highly-trained musicians.
Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the musical universe.”

“complex musical DNA” is an accurate description in trying define tastes in music. There is a great deal of information that we process to define our likes and dislikes for most anything in life. Music has many facets as do moods. For Pandora to have the intelligence to cross reference a massive database of music, tastes, and preferences and find songs that I will probably like is pretty cool. After experiencing the day-in-day-out use of the site I swear it alters mood based on the time of day. Melodic and instrumental in the morning and a little more up tempo in the afternoon. It also pushes my musical boundaries by testing the waters with different artists. I can tell Pandora what I like, what I don’t like, and it will respond accordingly.

What’s really cool about the service is I have found many artists I would not have found otherwise. I am learning about musicians and bands from years ago that I never came across as well as new artists breaking onto the music scene. With a click I can read a bio of the artist, see a catalog of their work, and hear samples of their music. If I like what I hear there are convenient links to Amazon and iTunes. I have purchased more music this year than in the last two years combined and my Amazon Wish List keeps growing. Pandora is the ultimate online music station and store.

When I first came upon Pandora in February of this year I was hooked instantly. By searching for a favorite Artist or Song I want to hear I have started my first Station. For the ease of use and the great user experience I was willing to pay up to $10 per month for the service. Upon reading the FAQ’s I found out it was only $36 per year without advertising and with additional benefits. My initial thought was “Why pay, I’ll never see the ads. The music will just play in the back ground.” Wrong.

Why am I wrong about not seeing the advertising? Because I am drawn back to the site by curiosity – I want to know more about the artist or I want to rate the song. I keep going back and in the process my mind is being imprinted by very well done ads whether I like it or not. I tend to block out quite a bit of marketing and advertising, but the nature of this site causes a very high imprint rate which is what the advertisers want. After six months of daily eyeball hits to the site I can recall the names of their top advertisers.

I still haven’t forked over the $36 and I’d like to think it is probably better for the company if I don’t. Pandora’s effectiveness imprinting ads in my mind should create very high demand for their web real estate while at the same time delivering a very high quality online music service. IMHO the folks at Pandora have created high standards and value for delivery of music and advertising in a Web 2.0 environment. When you open this Pandora’s Box a world of music escapes and engulfs you.

by Fred H. Dyste

Meeting: Second Life - User-created Content - Social Networks

2007-08-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

Paca Nathan from HeadCase labs gave a great talk at softec last week about Social Networks focusing on Second Life and Facebook. One great point he made was that we are in a good physical location to take advantage of the collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood in the emerging 3D social media and machinima space. These social 3D worlds are being designed by architects, scripted by programmers and animated by artist. He though that Cal Poly has a unique advantage to be a leader in Virtual Worlds because of their strong Architecture and CS departments.

If you missed the meeting you can watch the video here:

Paco has also posted his slides, notes and links on the HeadCase blog.

Pictures as usual are up on the softec photo gallery.

Serious Fun Games

2007-08-09T15:33:00.001-07:00

I'm an mechanical engineer by training and I used to spend hundreds of hours simulating load on virtual mechanical parts using finite element analysis. It was great I could try various permutations of length, width, tapers etc to optimize the load bearing capacity of the part and minimize the amount of material needed. I didn't have to build 50 different parts and test them in a lab. I learned many things in the simulations and after a while I intuitively knew where to start and was able to optimize the parts in 2 or 3 passes.

That's the power of games, you can simulate complex (economic, organizational, etc) models and have real humans run through the system to test your designs . We can tap massive player pools we can leverage the collective actions to understand if the models work or don't work. As we send new people through these models they can walk out with a better understanding of the whole system. Another advantage games provide over just learning from life experience is that we can do time compression in games. What if we make a simulation of our projected human population growths and current resource consumption patterns and have it run a 10X speed in Second Life. That would have an impact on the players, how would they react, how would the work together to solve this collective problem?

I've always been interested in social and political editorial in the media (e.g The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show and Colbert Report). Often humor is the best tool for analyzing our society and politics. Historically Lampoon cartoons have been a very effective political tool. How about games with some of these models and a political/social editorial edge?

I think Serious Fun Games is an untapped market and could help us understand our systems better.

Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games) wants to

harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining.

Check out his interview on the Colbert Report:

The rest of the article is here:

Game On Ian Bogost Dished on The Colbert Report

I'm pretty jazzed about what Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Ian Bogost is up to these days with his Persuasive Games consulting/development project (see my review of Food Import Folly). Okay, you pick up his latest book (also called Persuasive Games) and it's still a little heavy with the theory (though it does drop most of the unnecessary in-crowd jargon that plagued his prior uber-treatise, Unit Operations). But its hook? Fascinating. Bogost wants to harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining. Get over your Puritan-esque pleasure-guilt -- having fun while learning is hardly "entertaining yourself to death," (where studying socio-politically irrelevant nobodies like Paris Hilton, on the other hand, is). How about a game that deals with China's treasury bond threats against the U.S. dollar? The international political and economic factors post-global catastrophe in terms of responsibility, cooperation, bureaucracy, and aid management? Cultural collisions (and compromises) when global economies collide?

June Meeting: End-to-End Software Integration and Implementation

2007-06-28T23:41:00.000-07:00

Justin Couto was the presenter at last night's softec meeting. He had a record 3 projectors for his presentation. He walked through how a business would go about deciding whether to hire a custom solution provider. One of the key decision points was if a business had very repetitive tasks that could be programmed. He suggested that businesses should think of a custom software solution as a "Software Employee".

He also gave a great demo of an on going project his company created for Spalding Labs, a Beneficial Insect provider. The application was very impressive in the scope of the overall system systems (online orders, fullfilment, billing, VOIP CSR, shipping systems, weather systems, CRM,...etc) and depth of custom features (marketing code tied to call numbers, call logs tied to customer records, google maps integration). My favorite feature was the weather systems integration to help dynamically predict when customers would need to purchase more or less insects. The UI and usability of the system showed the love that Couto Solutions puts into their work.

If you missed the presentation check it out video here:

Some pictures from the last couple of softec events

2007-04-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

Softec dinners happen the last Wednesday of every month and are usually held at Pelican Point Restaurant in Shell Beach.

Here are a few pictures from the last couple of events (it's an album so click on the first image to see more images):

softec

Web 2.0 and Beyond Softec talk

2007-04-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks the fifty or so of you that came out last night for my "Web 2.0 and beyond" talk. I really enjoyed meeting everyone and I hope to see you at future softec events. We had some technical difficulties with the video capture so I can't upload the presentation video but I've uploaded my presentation slides to:

The softec website: softec-web20.ppt

There was much interest about that Web 2.0 video so I'll embed it here:

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

If you feel like you understand the fundamentals of Web 2.0 this is a funny video to test your skills Super Market 2.0

.NET user group for the greater San Luis Obispo area and Central Coast of California.

2007-01-12T11:32:00.000-08:00

Justin Couto has informed us of a .NET user group that meets every 2nd Tuesday of the month. Everyone is encouraged to attend, including those who are new to the .NET world.

Check out their website at http://www.slodotnet.org/. If you would like to present at or sponsor one of their meetings, please contact the administrator at info@slodotnet.org for more information.

Bill Moyers "The Net at Risk"

2007-01-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

Bill Moyers has a website dedicated to issues in America. He picked three topics and one of them is a technology related topic. The Net at Risk series delves into the importance of the Net on our society.

COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
"The Net @ Risk" takes viewers to Lafayette, Louisiana, where residents and officials took on their phone company, BellSouth, and their cable company, Cox Communications, and built their own high-speed fiber network after the firms refused to bring true broadband connections to their community. Both telcom giants lobbied the state legislature to block Lafayette's plan, citing unfair competition. Ultimately, lawmakers put it to a vote to let residents decide. The measure allowing the community-built network passed overwhelmingly. BellSouth then filed suit, delaying construction by more than a year, before losing their case in court.

The Community Connections section resonates with Ken Dozier's presentation (skip to slide 31) at the Softec Symposium. Ken talked about a small community that decided to bring fiber to their homes as a community project. Bill Moyers also highlights a small town that decided to take on broadbad access as a public utility. He talks about how the economic and political vitality of small towns is greatly affected by their broadband penetration. Thomas Friedman in the "World is Flat" also talks about how we are far behind in our Broadband penetration compared to the rest of the industrialized world and how this will affect our competitiveness in the information age. As a remote technology worker this issue hits home. My ability to work effectively is directly proportional to by bandwidth (both down and up). I'm also in the gaming industry and it's amazing to see the breakthough's in the Korean and Japanese markets due to broadband and wireless penetration.

Should the Information Super Highway be a public utility like the commerce highways are? What role if any should associations like softec play in bringing up these topics into the local politics?

Events and Meetings in Google Calendar

2007-01-11T10:59:00.000-08:00

All of us struggle with keeping up with the constant barrage of events in the local community that we'd like to attend. Getting this information into our calendars usually means subscribing to mailing lists or visiting each site individually and adding the events by hand into your calendar of choice. For those of you that use Google calendar or any iCal compliant calendar app we have good news. We've created a Softec Event Calendar

Just click on the subscribe link to add it to your Google calendar or to add it to your calendar application. If you use Google Calendar you also have the option to have it send you sms messages 10 minutes before each event. That's come in handy when I'm not in front of my computer quite a few times.

Enjoy