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WWDC from a first timers perspective

Tom and I went to WWDC to meet our 360|iDev speakers again, make new contacts, pimp the upcoming show in Denver and make some noise about InsideMobile. On those two fronts I think WWDC was a big success for us. The USB  Drive Scavenger hunt was really popular and each drive was found really fast.

From a conference attendee perspective, it’s too big, and seems to be all about Apple making us feel like we don’t matter. I’ll break my thoughts down below.

Keynote line: Tom and I got up early and waited in it. We’d never done it before so wanted to see what it was all about. We didn’t get up crazy early, but still waited outside for I think 2 hours, we were numbers 404 and 405 or something. About an hour before the keynote the line moves inside, where they’ve put out coffee and donuts and stuff. Then the line essentially breaks down into mayhem to get up the 4 escalators then mad rush into the keynote room. Why we waited in line to be ran past I don’t know. Why we waited in line when Apple could have let us get in and get seated earlier, I don’t know. Other than it’s a nice way for Apple to show everyone who’s in control.

Sessions: with 5200 people in attendance and only like 12 or so sessions at a time, do the math, each session was a mini keynote. Complete with having to wait in line to get into the room. Why wait in line? No discernible reason, other than (to me) to further make sure everyone knew it was Apple’s show we waited in line at their leisure.

Each session had at least 400-500 people, some filled to capacity, around 1500. How do you present a topic to 1500 people? just like a keynote, you talk at the crowd. Each session ended with “go see these sessions to get more info” pitches then a little Q&A where you have to go stand at a mic, ask your question, take the answer and sit down.

Content: I’ll admit, a great deal of the content was over my head. I’m still very much a novice iPhone app dev. Be that as it may, it was still very dry and very not deep. A lot of the time, sessions were slides of code, with explanations (i can read the docs myself). Every once in a while a session would get into some live coding,but that wasn’t the norm.

Oh and since each session was a mini keynote, they dimmed the lights, and kept it warm, it was WAY too easy to fall asleep, especially in the more “sales pitch” type sessions.

After Hours: WWDC is like… well I don’t know, I’ve never partied like that before that I recall. THough I barelly recall the partying I did at WWDC, so…

There’s at least 6 or more parties every night. Most are “invite only” or “RSVP and hope you get a ticket” deals, which sucks, and further promotes the crazy superstar nonsense that exists. Sadly most party venues are dive bars around downtown SF, so they’re crowded, noisy, did I mention crowded and noisy? The House of Sheilds is a popular place to end up. Bring a catheter and strap a bag to your calf. The bathroom (used as loosely as possible) is like stepping into the 9th level of hell, which if you’re curious is the sewer for the other 8 levels.

WWDC’s official party is a concert in the Yerba Buena park. We got there just as Cake started their encore (The Distance, w00t!) and as soon as the band finished, the tables were cleared off, the booze stations closed up, and the stage crew went to work. This was all before the folks up front had stopped jumping up and down. Very weird.

As much as I liked the parties, they were completely useless for meeting people. You ended up in a group that migrated place to place and sometimes members would come and go, but meeting new people was tough. If you were in one of the parties the music and voices were so loud, you couldn’t hardly talk.

I much prefer the 1 party to rule them all approach that Tom and I do. Sure the people who need their own party to feel special, are denied that, but hey, they can still throw a party elsewhere. Cynergy did it in Seattle. But at least you can meet people, talk, and not be running from place to place trying to catch up to the “in crowd”

Overall: WWDC is just like MAX. It’s the place to go to be seen, it’s the place where you’re assured to be in the presence of people like Wil Shipley and Brent Simmons (though, Brent will be at 360|iDev) and the rest of the luminary Mac/iPhone guys. Oh and of course Gruber, who probly will never be at one of our events.

It’s not the place to get a ton of new knowledge. It’s not the place to try and meet new people, forge new relationships, etc.

It is the place to get new NDA goodies you can’t talk to anyone about, and of course be in the room, when a new laptop is announced.

It’s definitely the place for Apple to assert their dominance over us all, and make sure we know our place in the order of things,which is pretty low.

Tags: WWDC

Do something that matters

I’m not by any means a Tm O’Reilly fan boy, half his posts I don’t agree with, but when I do, I seem to really agree. This is one of those.

My only gripe is that it’s easy for people with funds, to talk about doing things for reasons other than money, unfortunately, “changing the world” isn’t a check the mortgage company can cash, so it’s not so cut ant dry. So point 1 only does so much for me, although I do agree with Kathy, that if you focus too much on the competition, and not enough on your customers, you’ve already lost.

Point 2 however I really agree with and it really speaks to what Tom and I trying to do. One of our chief philosopthies is that we don’t pay speakers, we try to raise them up from the community. We certainly don’t take credit for their successes but we’re very proud that a great many of our attendees, have become our speakers. I see that as creating more value than we take away.

It doesn’t always work, some times a speaker from the community doesn’t receive the feedback we’d hope, but we still think it’s better for the community to have a larger pool of people willing to speak and share, than a smaller one that charges for their time, rather than give freely.

I think 360Conferences, has several goals, many of them larger than us, and that makes it something that drives me to be successful at it.

Tags: O'Reilly, Startup

Happy Festivus to one and all!

I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2008. It’s been a great year with lots of twists and turns.

2008 was the first full year of 360|Conferences, and saw us visit; Atlanta, Milan Italy, and return to San Jose CA, where it all started for 360|Flex. It also saw us start to make some money, enough that we paid ourselves a little money, not a salary, but we’re able to show a bit of income for our efforts, which in a start up never hurts! Lastly, 2008 saw us announce our first non Flex event, 360|iDev, the first and largest iPhone developer conference.

I moved from being a Flex  developer consultant, working for some really great companies like Universal Mind, and Esria, to being the Community Evangelist/Solution Engineer for EffectiveUI. I love writing code, and still do, albeit not daily, and I’m trying to learn to write some iPhoneSDK code as well, but there’s something about helping EUI get more out of social media and community. I’ve learned a lot in a short period, and can’t wait to see how ‘09 treats me.

2008 was also the year we lost Terrance :( He was 10, I’ve lost a few animals over the course of my life; Chip, Mandy, Hamster Little Tike, Turtle Duke, Rat Eon. The dogs were family pets, and the others I was pretty young, I guess it never sunk in back then.  Terrance hit really hard, I had had him and his brother Philip since they were about 8 weeks old. Losing him so suddenly really hurt.

2008 was our first year in our new house in downtown Denver, w00t! We left Highlands Ranch in December ‘07 leaving behind moms in SUVs with nothing to do all day, starbucks on every corner, and more kids than I’ve ever seen in my life! We love it in Denver, if you can’t tell! We’ve enjoyed meeting our neighbors, and exploring our new neighborhood.

I also joined Jeff as co-host of The Flex Show, in 2008, and we just recorded my 1 year anniversary episode. I can’t believe it’s been a year! It’s been awesome, and I can’t wait to spend another year, helping Jeff to deliver the best source of news and interviews in the Flex Community!

Thanks to 360|Conferences, 2008 is also my first year in any type of frequent flier program. I’m finally Ascent level on Frontier Airlines. Granted they’ve been sucking more and more as an airline, and may not exist for all of ‘09, but hey, for the time being, I get on the plane first, and get my bags faster, can’t beat that.

2008 also (in December, but still) saw Tom and I launch OurStartupStory, where we’ll be talking about our views and experiences with 360|Conferences. We’ve got some great guys writing with us, so it should be a wealth of view points, definitely something to keep an eye on. (as if I need a new blog to write for, but oh well!)

Here’s to 2008, and an awesome 2009! Can’t wait to see what the new year has in store for all of us!

Tags: 2008, life

What a stupid AIR problem to have

Lately I’ve become very fond of the expression “This is a stupid problem to have”, the other night I got to use it in relation to AIR.

I’m working on a tool to view (hopefully) live survey data for when we have booths at conferences. We’ve come up with a simply iPhone survey, and want to be able to see the data in, more or less, real time.

I’ve been working on it, largely at the office, checking the code into SVN when I’m going to work from home. At some point in the last few days, I ended up with Flex Builder 3.0.2. Probably my best friend Adobe Updater.

The other night, I wrapped up at the office, checked in all my code, went home, fired up Flex Builder. When I went to test the app, ADL fired up, then immediately vanished. weird. Tried a few more times, still no joy. Restarted Flex builder, restarted my Macbook, nothing. Checked to make sure my Flex Builder was up to date, it was.

After finally giving up, I check back at work, app runs. Then I check to see if that Flex Builder was up to date. It wasn’t, 3.0.1, so I updated. Ran the app. ADL vanishedright after launching.

I decided to run the app in debug, see if that revealed anything. It did sorta. The message was just about useless, something to the effect of “The app crapped out before the debugger could connect”

I say just about useless, since it was enough to lead me to Cameron’s blog, where he mentioned an error he had gotten. It wasn’t the same error, but since I had just moved from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2 and AIR 1.5 had recently been released, I figured I’d check it out. Sure enough in my app descriptor it was set to 1.1 for AIR.

Now I certainly don’t need Adobe to hold my hand, but really, maybe just a few more descriptive error messages, shoot I’d take a message that gave me a few possible causes that I could run down on my own.

Why make things harder than necessary? What a frustrating waste of a night, just because Flex Builder and ADL couldn’t suggest I check my app descriptor.

Tags: Adobe Flex, AIR

Solution: iCal, gCal, and iPhone. A happy threesome

If you followed my previous post about wanting to trade my Kingdom for a way to sync my iPhone, iCal, and gCal, you know that the current situation for an iPhone owner, with a gCal account is pretty much W.E.A.K.

the blackberry definitely one ups the iPhone in this category.

While I’m not 100% happy with my current solution (Thanks commenter Toby), it’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far. My environment is convoluted for sure, but can’t be unique.

Toby pointed me to nuevaSync, which let’s you sync a gCal account through an exchange gateway, which you can then sync to the iPhone. Unfortunately the iPhone can only handle one exchange sync, no idea why.

So I’ve got 2 way Sync from gCal to the iPhone through nuevaSync. Then since I like using iCal when on my mac, or not connected, i use Google’s new calDav support to have 2 way communication between iCal and gCal.

ok mostly there. gCal is my hub, and iCal and the iPhone can talk to it, and get updates back and forth.

Unfortunately since I’m using my single exchange connection for nuevaSync, I had to disconnect from my EUI account. Solution, just as convoluted.

I connected my iPhone directly to the mail server via IMAP, and have entourage (blech) syncing to iCal in an Entourage, which then, mostly, sometimes, will make it up to the cloud that is MobileMe.

I can only imagine what kind of trouble I’d have if I was trying to sync contacts across all these services.

So there we have it. A mostly good solution, to a really stupid problem to have. Thanks Apple, this kind of stuff reinforces why RIM is the business choice still.

Tags: Google, iPhone, Mac

How would I change education?

What happens when you have a bunch of United Air miles that are about to expire, but aren’t enough to use for anything? They offer you magazine subscriptions, lots of them. One of mine was Time. The latest issue, had an article that really struck a nerve with me, it was on education, specifically the Chancellor of the Washington D.C. school district.

As a product of public education, I’m 100% opposed to private schools and vouchers. I’m more opposed to our current school system, which I think needs to be completely scrapped. Not just a little, but scrapped and started over, get rid of the teachers, the principles, the assistant principles, and even some of the guidence counselors (though that’s just cuz I think they’re lame).

One of my biggest beef’s with my pals the democrats, their allegiance to teacher’s unions. They’re as bad the auto makers unions, and unfortunately for us, they’re mess ups, are children, not just crappy cars.

Teaching is one of those jobs, where all you have to do is make it 10 years, or 15 years, and you’re set. You can suck as much as you like after you’re earned tenure. Man I wish I had that deal, so my job well enough to not get fired for a while, then coast until retirement. SURE not every teacher is that way, a great many are heroes in the truest sense, and have my undying respect, but easily as many, are terrible. I’m not being over dramatic, I’ve suffered through them, their not really caring about the students, or the curriculum, simply fullfilling the lesson plan requirements, whether we learned something or not.

What should we do? Make teachers live in the same world we do. If I start sucking at my job, EUI will fire me. If I’ve worked there for 10 years, they’ll still let me go if I start to do a poor job. Why should a teacher be any different? Why should we give them that break that gives them the freedom to stink it up?

My idea? It’s easy, make teaching pay what it’s worth in the market like any other job, and make it no more guaranteed than any other. Teachers should be paid what they’re worth, and fired when they stink, it’s really that simple. We shouldn’t promote poor teachers to principle, and poor principles to super-intendant. Sure every industry has it’s share of “promoted to highest level of incompetence” but teaching seems to have institutionalized the concept, and codified it into their very fiber.

This quote is awesome,

She says things most superintendents would not. “The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely,” she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn’t respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. “People say, ‘Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning,’” she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”

Damn straight!

The data back up Rhee’s obsession with teaching. If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children’s lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15% of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level–and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up.

I can’t agree more. I came from what I consider a pretty bad district, my high school opened with not enough teachers, and an empty library. I sat on the floor for more than a month in my 70ish kid english class. Several of my classes the first year, we had to share text books. The Gym, never had showers, etc. etc. I had a history teacher, and while I thought he was nice and a cool guy, he never spoke to the class. He assigned chapters, and tests. I went to that class about once every two weeks and passed with an A, and don’t recall a damn thing! I was in an AP class that so horribly prepared me for the AP exam, that I failed miserably. What Senior AP Lit class spends the class reading a loud? Mine did.

Teachers are brave souls, and I think we treat them mostly like dirt, but I think too many of them are doing our (actually ‘your’ since Nicole and I aren’t breeders) a terrible disservice, and we as a society have empowered them to do so. We bitch and moan about the state of education, yet parents don’t get involved, we throw money at “no student left behind” which really means, “pass the dummies so they’re some one elses problem”, rather than holding students AND teachers accountable. Every job has metrics, every single one. Yet somehow teachers don’t? Test scores aren’t good metrics, blah blah blah. There MUST be a metric, and we owe it to students, and teachers a like to find it, and make it standard, and hold all parties to it. That’s it, it’s not rocket surgery, it’s not impossible.

Tags: politics, teaching

My Kingdom for a calendaring solution!!

I can’t be the only person in this situation.

I’ve got an iPhone, googleCalendar, and iCal/MobileMe.ANd a headache the size of Denver, maybe Los Angeles. The easy solution between iCal and gCal, is easy now that gCal supports calDav. However mobileMe doesn’t sync calDav calendars, so my iPhone has no calendars.

I’ve been using busySync, but that requires me to run it on a machine, which is ok, but then the failure point is that machine, and if I’m traveling with a different machine, well unless I leave it running, no sync-y. That’s a no go.

I found an Applescript, that comes pretty close. It takes my calDav calendar and copies it to “John Wilker iPhone”. Two problems; 1. it doesn’t sync recurring events, and, 2. it doesn’t allow me to add events to my iPhone cal, to be copied back, it’s a one way deal. So that’s kinda whack. But that could be livable.
I won’t even go into Entourage (EffectiveUI’s calendaring). I’m resigned to manually copying my work appts over. So Be it.

So what’s everyone else doing? Surely I can’t be alone! What’s everyone using to make gCal and an iPhone talk? Why does it suck so bad!?

Help me please!

Tags: iCal, iPhone

MAX ‘08 Day 1 Recap

Looooooooong day.

I’m about to pass out, but wanted to get my thoughts on MAX ‘08 day one down on paper.

For Tom and I, MAX San Francisco, started on Sunday. We ran some errands, put stickers on our fliers for 360|Flex Indy, and then headed over to Moscone for some socializing. We hit up the community leader mixer thing, which was awesome. Congrats to the team that organized it.

Monday morning we hit up MAX bright and early, setting up our 360|MAX Unconference area, which is a cool area.

Enter the Keynote. So, oddly enough the keynote didn’t start until 9:30 am, yet the doors opened at 7am. I found it a bit weird since breakfast was just sandwiches.

The keynote was good, I gotta admit, The pre show dude was AWESOME! (video above). Shantanu and Kevin are both great presenters I have to say. Kevin more so, he’s very casual, and seems to be pretty unflappable, even when things don’t go the right way.

The information in general was pretty much what you’d expect, “State of Flash” type stuff, blah blah. One cool thing was some future tech they demo’ed as strictly early labs internal, but really sweet! Screens that know what’s going on around them, even where they’re pointed. I’d post a video, but then it occured to me, it might not be fully “open to the public” I can’t imagine why, but ya never know. It was cool though!

OK, the rest of the day.

Tom and I were pretty much tethered to our unconference area, which went really well. Slow start, but I think we’ll start seeing more people as the word gets out more.

Our sessions were all kick ass, especially Mate and Degrafa, which really pulled folks in. Tuesday has a bunch more killer sessions!

The bummer is not being able to wander around as much as I’d like. MAX for me is walking around the halls, finding people to chat with. This time around, I gotta chat with those who come to us.

The general session for TUesday is supposed to be Gumbo, Thermo, and future goodness. We’ll see. I’ve got my Thermo and gumbo installed to play with.

360|Flex Indianapolis MAX discount!

Also for MAX attendees, make sure to swing by and see Tom or I. We’ve got 100 tickets to 360|Flex Indy, for only $100 each. That’s $150 or so off our lowest possible price. Available only during MAX, so there’s only two days left to get this price!

Tags: Adobe Flex, Adobe MAX, Conferences

I’m at Defrag ‘08 Today and Tomorrow

I’m at the Defrag conference, here in Denver. I missed last year’s event, so wanted to make sure I didn’t miss this years event.

I can’t wait to see what the hype (Yeah, there’s some hype) is all about, Eric seems like a great guy, and my pal Rob from eventvue gave high praise to last year’s Defrag.

I’ll be live blogging from the conference too so stay tuned.

Tags: Conferences, Defrag

New and improved johnwilker.com

After tapping one of my good friends for some of his mad SQL skills, as well as dusting off more of mine than I intended to, I’ve now successfully moved johnwilker.com over to a hosted wordpress blog site.

Same Domain, same feed (assuming you’re using the feedburner feed, sorry Sim, but you can use this one)

A few comments got lost :( No posts did though (I think). It turned out to be much more manual than I expected. I’m still re-categorizing old posts, I’ve done 5 of 23 pages of posts in the admin, sheesh!

There’s a few reasons for the change. As much as I love BlogCFC, it was time for something a bit more robust and widely used. Mainly from the third party options stand point. Twitter updates, and other plugins, themes, etc. Using third party tools like Ecto or Marsedit to post. Or posting from my phone, consuming Flickr feeds, etc.

Ray’s done a damn good job, and my wife’s blog is still blog CFC. My Personal blog (which will be closing down in favor of a single point of contact (this blog), is still BlogCFC as well.

I also use Wordpress for the EffectiveUI blog, so having a single admin to master is kinda nice.

There were also some small annoyances with BlogCFC that crept up during the last update I performed; inserting a link was a multi step process. the first time I inserted a link, it would use some weird javascript thing, with a string of numbers. I’d have to go back to the link and edit it re-pasting the URL. Very likely a PEBKAC thing, but still annoying, and with my new and varied responsibilities, digging around in CF isn’t likely to be a priority for me :(

Future dating of posts was very frustrating. Ray and I worked on it for a good couple weeks, and I think it just comes down to not being a big part of BlogCFC. When possible I write blog posts days in advance. That worked pretty well with BlogCFC, however, if for some reason I had to change the post date, all hell broke loose. Unfortunately, that’s a common occurence, as I sometimes blog about things that won’t be public until a certain date, and sometimes that date changes (despite my frustrations, LOL). Inserting rich media like youtube, etc was hit and miss too.

Like I said, most if not all of these hassles could be solved by tinkering, but I just don’t have that leisure now. the Wordpress community is huge, godzilla huge!

Writing for the Denver Metroblog, the various 360Conferences blogs, and the EUI blog, I got used to working with Ecto. It’s nice to have a native mac app to do my blogging through. However I couldn’t use that tool with BlogCFC.

So here I am, on Wordpress. Let me know what you think :)

Tags: BlogCFC, Wordpress