Atlanta Code Camp

I just got home from the 4th Atlanta Code Camp attended by approximately 350 dedicated passionate IT professionals evidenced by giving up their entire Saturday to be there. The venue host was DeVry University Decatur campus just a few miles from my home.

I've attended all four Atlanta Codecamps and this was definitely the best yet. Codecamps tend to be a full day affair beginning at 8:30 and ending around 6pm. And you have to stay until the end to participate in the highlight...a grand giveaway of the best prizes and swag you will ever see at any technology event. At every past codecamp I've always been the "Charlie Brown" as one of the few there winning absoutely nothing (almost everybody wins something). But this year I won a 4 gig Zune and a 5lb book on ASP.Net 3.5 development. I couldn't believe how my luck has suddenly changed for the better.

The day started off well when I attended my first session on how to setup 3rd party hosted ASP.Net sites and found the presenter is a fan of WebHost4Life the same hosting service I signed up for last week. He gave us a good set of tools like Filezilla and tips for 3rd party hosting that will save me much time and many headaches. Another good session was on the Community Kit for Sharepoint an open source initiative to "fill in" some needed sharepoint functionality around blogs, wikis, and forms based authentication. I can't wait to install the new enhanced blog solution on our sharepoint 2007 portal.

Codecamp is a wonderful learning event with a full money back guarantee (it's free). The only bad part is the lack of a wireless connection all day. This year they fed us grilled burgers and dogs with all the trimmings or veggie pizza for lunch.

Some of the new tools I gained from camp were Filezilla ftp client, WSPBuilder, Sharepoint Skinner, Sharepoint Manager 2007, .Net Reflector, and how to create a 12 hive toolbar. Guess I can't ask for a refund this year :)

Virtual Worlds are Getting Real

Virtual Worlds New Realities Conference was held Feb 11th at Emory University. Co-sponsored by The Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning, Goizueta Business School, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. This was an impressive event. Everything was well organized starting with free parking and a shuttle bus from the parking lot at Emory's Briarwood campus to the main campus at the Goizueta Business School where the conference was held. I knew I was on the right bus when I boarded and heard comments like “I’m used to teleporting” and “leave now you have 5 minutes until the region shuts down”.

It was a full day event starting at 8:30 ending at 4pm.

Topics covered were

(1) Virtual Worlds Evolving
(2) Emerging Virtual Institutions in Business and Politics
(3) Mirrored Influence of Virtual and Real-World Elements
(4) Possible Futures of Virtual Worlds and Society

by four outstanding panels throughout the day. The panel members were an impressive mix of both academic and business professionals. Most virtual world discussion centered on Second Life and the majority of attendees had experience in Second Life. A portion of the conference was broadcast live into multiple Second Life venues where it was viewed by groups of avatars including mine. It was fun and interesting being at the conference live while also watching as an avatar from inside Second Life.

Speakers included the new CFO for Linden labs, John Zdanowski and Chris Klaus, co-founder of the Atlanta based virtual world Kaneva. Intellagirl was in the audience along with other numerous high profile citizens from Second Life.

Some of the highlights for me included hearing a VP at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta talking about the recent Ginko banking scandal that occured in Second Life. The Federal Reserve is studying how new banking models emerge and evolve inside virtual worlds. IBM has 5000 employees working on virtual world technology to create a better way for IBM customers to work and collaborate inside the firewall. And I have to mention the lunch was fantastic with ceasar salad, stuffed turkey rolls, wonderful selection of grilled veggies, spagetti and meatballs, and amazing deserts.

Sun Tech Days in Atlanta

This was my 2nd Sun Tech Days in Atlanta on January 9-10 held at Cobb Galleria. Actually technically Jan 9th was Netbeans Day and Jan 10th was Tech Days. As usual Sun does a great job putting together an information packed day with plenty of sessions that go into some depth on new developments with both Netbeans and Java EE and Java SE. Netbeans is Sun's free open source IDE which has been dramatically improved in this latest release with version 6.0. Other new technologies hightlighted included JavaFx the Java equivilent of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe Flash and JRuby which is a pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. Open Solaris is covered extensively as well but being a developer I tend to concentrate on Netbeans and Java technologies. One session I enjoyed was a basic intro to Ruby on Rails development. This year the highlight for me was hearing James Gosling (inventor of Java) speak and answer questions. Someone asked a question comparing Ruby and Python to Java and it was interesting from James response it seems to me he really likes both languages. Another interesting question was why .Net coders are so much more efficient than java coders. James answer was that many java coders don't use the new tools like Netbeans and so are unable to compete with developers using tools like Visual Studio. The most interesting question was "what is your favorite java application"? In response James described Brazil's national health care system which is written in Java. Amazing every citizen in Brazil is covered by this system including the indigent peoples living deep in the Amazon jungle. They all have bar coded ID cards and their medical records are all electronic available anytime anyplace. I thought about this as I visited my doctor this week and filled out the same piece of paper with the same information that I seem to do over and over again in the USA health care system. Maybe Java is the answer?

Force.com On Demand Platform

I attended a 1/2 day seminar by salesforce.com held at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Buckhead to get an update on their new "platform as a service" product offering...force.com. I have to say I was impressed. Here's a quote directly from salesforce about Force.com. "With the Winter ’08 release, salesforce.com introduces Force.com, the world’s only platform as a service that lets you build any application, any database, any logic—and run it all on demand." I was impressed by the panels of customers who are using force.com to replace legacy client/server systems with hosted web applications thus eliminating the cost of maintaining local servers. It's always interesting to learn what salesforce.com is up to...they have to be one of the most innovative companies in the world today. As a bonus they always provide a great social at the end of their seminars...free drinks and great horderves. Hard to beat the combination of exciting new technology with free food and drink.

Microsoft Momentum - Building a Better Infrastructure

Seems like I attend a Microsoft event every month. This was a good one. I got a great overview of Microsoft Forefront(suite of security products), unified communications, and sharepoint 2007. Not to mention they served a great breakfast...scrambled eggs, bacon, sauage links, french toast, and waffles. You can visit the website for this event here.

Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds

Friday, Nov 15, I attended this full day event held in Washington DC...without leaving my office at Georgia Tech as I attended entirely in Second Life as an avatar.

The event was put on by the Federal Consortium for Second Life (http://www.ndu.edu/irmc/fedconsortium.html) and consisted of presentations by a variety of government agencies and contractors who are exploring the use of virtual worlds in government.

The entire event was projected into second life and was free to attend in-world.

Some of the presenters were inside second life projecting to real life conference attendees on a big screen.

I've attended several conferences now from inside Second Life and continue to be amazed how real it feels...even down to the after event reception for mingling with other attendees.

Here's the event agenda:

8:00 – 9:00
Registration, Continental Breakfast, Networking
9:00 - 9:15
AnnouncementsPaulette Robinson, PhD, IRM College
Welcoming RemarksDr. Robert Childs, Director, IRM College
9:15 - 10:15
Using Virtual Worlds to Shape the FutureSusan Stucky, PhD, IBM
10:15 - 10:45
Coffee Break/Networking/Virtual Worlds Demos
10:45 - 11:15
Second Life 101Eric Hackathorn, NOAA
11:15 - 12:00
Second Life UpdateCollapsing Geography: Distance, Learning, and InnovationSue Singer, Program Manager East Coast, Linden Lab
12:00 - 1:30
Lunch/Networking/Virtual World Demos
1:30 - 2:30
Second Life Government User Panel (NOAA, NASA, CDC)Michael Piller, PhD, Moderator, IRM College
2:30 – 2:45
Break/Networking/Virtual World Demos
2:45 – 3:45
Virtual Worlds Panel (Forterra, Active Worlds, National Guard)Dwight Toavs, PhD, Moderator, IRM College
3:45 - 4:00
Closing RemarksPaulette Robinson, PhD, IRM College
4:30 - 7:00
Reception—Ft. Lesley J. McNair Officer Club


I'm looking forward to future events from this organization.

Salesforce.com Rocks

Yesterday (Thursday April 5th) I attended a nicely done seminar/reception at the Westin Buckhead by Salesforce.com. There must have been several hundred attendees at the 1:30pm keynote which provided a good overview of Salesforce, APEX, and AppExchange. After the keynote there were several breakout sessions; one for beginning/potential customers, one for experienced customers, and another for developers focused on the new on-demand (SaaS) APEX language. I attended the APEX seminar for 2.5 hours where I received a good introduction to Salesforce customization and programming techniques. Salesforce is like many of the new Web 2.0 companies offering a unique and innovative value proposition to customers and partners. It is more of a platform where many types of applications can be created by development partners and then offered to customers via AppExchange, an "eBay like" space for selling/exchanging applications. Of course most of the applications are functional extensions of Salesforce CRM or are complimentary to CRM in some fashion. But they don't have to be. Since Salesforce offers a free developer account I have signed up and plan on trying my hand at creating an APEX application. I predict Salesforce could potentially dominate the CRM market, and apparently so do many large corporations such as DuPont, Cisco, Panasonic, Avis, and United Way just to name a few Salesforce customers.

All attendees received two books, "Salesforce for Dummies" and "AppExchange for Dummies." And the reception with open bar and lots of munchies (butterfly shrimp, crab cakes, steak on a stick, etc.) was super nice.

Thanks Salesforce!