Practice Pad
Technology, Programming, Music, Percussion, Drums and Stuff

.. and I haven’t exercised since my last entry. The week of the last Monday in April I spent in a suburb of Seattle, WA at a 5-day Java development training class. Excellent content, though the instructor was a little weird. Dude looked like a cross between Penn Jillette and Fred Thompson. His politics were just touch to the right of Rush Limbaugh, too, and he insisted on being right about everything, whether it was related to the course material or not. Still, I learned a lot, and from having read half-a-dozen java BOOKS, I have to say, wack-job instructor or not, there’s value in instructor-led learning.

Anyway, here’s how this happened: The project manager for my team came to me (the only real “programmer” in the group) and said, “Willy, it seems like we need to hire a Java dev. Is that right?” and I said, “Well, this is the VA. You could spend 6 months making a hire, or you could send me away for a week.” My logic won the day, and when we tried to book the training locally, the company told us it was canceled, but that they would pay travel and lodging for me to go to Seattle. Done deal.

So, now I’m a Java developer. I spent all of last week working on a java project (an annotation tool for comparing original text to machine-processed text) so that I could make sure I “had it”. Now I’m sure I “have it”, and I’m demo-ing last week’s work to some collaborators in Indiana tomorrow.

Next week I’ll be in Washinton D.C. at the Web Maniacs conference learning about the latest and greatest ColdFusion stuff, as well as Adobe Flex and AIR. Exciting stuff that frankly rivals Java and .NET and all the others for integrated Desktop and Internet experiences. We’ll see if it’s useful for the job right away or not.

An interesting note: The best deal on a hotel within walking distance of the conference was the Hotel Helix. Check it out. It’s like a 60’s-hipster themed hotel. I just needed a place to lay my head at night, and instead I’ll be staying here. Crazy. More later.

/w

40 minutes on the stationary bike. This time it was Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention. Worked pretty well to keep my mind off it. After that, I did arms and core.

One of my colleagues at the VA was in my office the other day. She said, “You know who my favorite drummer is?”

I said, “Are you sure you really want to tell me? Because I’m liable to judge you fairly harshly.”

She said, “Oooh. Um, now I’m not sure. I’ll tell you anyway. Terry Bozzio.”

At first, I wondered if I was being set up. Like, I was going to say, “OMFG, really? Terry’s the BOMB!” and then she was going to say, “you geek.” and punch me in the arm or something.

So, instead I said, “What? Are you a Zappa fan?”

She says, “Oh yeah. I love the Baby Snakes album.”

“Ok then,” I said, “You know, you’re alright.”

So, now I’m on a Zappa kick. I’m going to start at the beginning with the Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention album, “Freak Out!”, and refresh my memory of the whole catalog. My current sense of my favorite Zappa albums: Joe’s Garage and Thing-fish. I’ll be posting a bit as I go along about my experience of all these albums.

/w

30 minutes of cardio, worked on upper body. I find the best thing to have on my iPod for the stationary bike is This American Life. Too bad it’s only new once a week!

/w

Seems to happen about once a year. Came home at lunch not feeling very well. Slept from noon to about 4:30. Got up to go get my son from school. Next thing I know, I’m on keeled over into my laundry pile. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I just have to remember to stand up more slowly.

We weren’t playing up to our standards, but it was ok because we were very nearly the only people in the room. I made a recording, so I’ll post some clips if I have anything good on it.

/w

The Blue Wailers will be appearing tonight from 10pm-1am at Club Orange. 533 South 500 West, Salt Lake City. Should be fun. We’ll be playing our funk/fusion/blues sets instead of our jazz sets. You know, give the kids what the want.

Today was the first annual RIA Dev Shed event. I thought overall it was a success, and a credit to it’s creator, Matt Reinbold, and its sponsors, Adobe, Twelve Horses, Fusion Authority, Vox Pop Design, and Bountiful Wireless.

The conference location at the Franklin Covey building was terrific, and lunch was great. The conference was not without a few hiccups that seemed about right for a first-time showing. The quality and polish of the presenters was a little un-even, and there were some late presenter cancellations that lead to serious headaches for Matt. The wifi situation was also problematic, and they had to co-opt some tech support to get it up and routing to the inter-tubes. The door prizes were terrific, and included the requisite t-shirts for all and a raffle with a big pile of books, “The most powerful wireless router allowed by law” provided by Bountiful Wireless, and a $2100 software pack from Adobe. Overall, I give the event about an 8.5 out of 10. Definitely worth the money and, more importantly, worth the time.

I attended 4 sessions:
ColdFusion-Powered Flex 3 applications by Mike Nimer. I really think this is a breakthrough topic. Flex has been very slow coming into it’s own, mainly because it was wildly over priced for the first two iterations. Now it’s a free open-source technology with a moderately priced professional IDE. It’s an amazingly rapid and robust development language, especially when coupled with ColdFusion 8, which has been enhanced to be the best back-end interface to it. Cool stuff, especially for us CF old-timers.

Adobe Integrated Runtime and Flex with Zach Stepek. This was a good session. Stepek is a geek’s geek, even going so far as to take a shot at Apple in retribution Stevie J’s recent announcement that the iPhone wouldn’t run Flash Player. AIR allows web developers to use their existing skill sets to create, package and deploy applications to the desktop. Very very cool stuff. In the session, we banged together a quick RSS reader application. 60 lines of code. I don’t know another DESKTOP application dev language that you could do that with. Certainly not Java or C++/#.

Adobe Media Server by Louie Penaflor. Pretty cool technology for bi-directional streaming of audio and video. Not immediately applicable to anything I’m doing, but it really put me in mind of some telehealth video-conference stuff that could be amazing at the VA.

Spry framework with Ray “The ColdFusion Jedi” Camden. Ray’s the bomb, and Spry has gotten much more sophisticated since I demo-ed it for the crew at the MBM office. I’ll be using Spry for any AJAX/DHTML stuff I need to do in the future. It’s got the right balance of flexibility vs. ease of use.

Kudus Kudzu Kudos to the organizers and the sponsors/underwriters and presenters for putting on a great day of content, and particularly, to Matt Reinbold for having the vision and the drive to push this one-of-a-kind event into reality.

Tomorrow is the first annual RIADevShed event. It’s being put on by Matt Reinbold, the Salt Lake ColdFusion User Group manager. Good guy, and super sharp. I think he’s got the right idea with this one. I’m not sure which track I’m most interested in, the Flex track or the AJAX/AIR track. Probably flex. I may do a little live blogging from the site, but I’ll definitely post about the event laster tomorrow or on the weekend.