Impressions Scholarcast

The registration page for Barcamp Gold Coast meeting 3 gives details of those attendees who chose to include their contact details. We had a range of very interesting talks that were streamed live in a very professional manner by Glenn Goodman.

Thanks must go to Steve Dalton and the organising committee for a most interesting day. Only DW, DM and MR made it to The Grande for a very noisy follow-up drink.

CoverItLive interactive record

Barcamp Gold Coast 3

(03/15/2009)

11:25

Michael Rees:  Kicking off with Warren Toomey talking on Reconstructive Software Archaeology

11:31

mrees:  RT @aussietechhead: streaming live now http://www.live.thesecrethub.com

11:31

bmn:  listening to @doctorwkt talk about ancient software recovery & preservation at #barcampgc

11:31

bmn:  RT @aussietechhead: streaming live now http://www.live.thesecrethub.com #barcampgc

11:36

aussietechhead:  streaming live now http://www.live.thesecrethub.com barcamp 3 gold coast

11:40

mrees:  From my blog: Barcamp Gold Coast Meeting 3 http://tinyurl.com/cew664

11:41

spidie:  at barcamp goldcoast – there be people here! #barcampgc

11:42

aussietechhead:  #barcampgc live on http://www.live.thesecrethub.com

11:47

mrees:  Follow CoverItLive coverage of #barcampgc at http://is.gd/nnXw, @barcampgc

11:55

bmn:  Next presntation about to start with @mrees talking about ‘Working in the Cloud’ #barcampgc

12:08

spidie:  http://twitpic.com/23xyy – Jaron Dalton (3yo) – youngest ever Barcamp presenter? #tuxpaint #barcampgc

12:11

suziecheel:  RT @spidie http://twitpic.com/23xyy – Jaron Dalton (3yo) – youngest ever Barcamp presenter? #tuxpaint #barcampgc

12:48

Michael Rees:  Finished my talk at #barcampgc; talk resources plus CoverItLive coverage at http://dotdolfin.com/talks

12:50

Michael Rees:  Bond graduate Ben Novakovic now talking about Cairo for the Web

1:05	Michael Rees:  Interesting talk by Ben with simple code demo that was impressive.

1:07	Michael Rees:  Now we have Steve @spidie talking about One Laptop Per Child with two OLPC machines for us to try out. Whoa, the UI takes some working out for adults. Steve’s little 3 yo manages to use it without a problem!

1:09	bmn:  Just finished my talk on ‘Cairo on the web’ at #barcampgc

1:17	Michael Rees:  OLPC project objectives and achievements to date hugely impressive

2:19	aussietechhead:  resuming live stream of #barcampgc shortly on http:www.live.thesecrethub.com

2:28	aussietechhead:  streaming live now http://www.live.thesecrethub.com #barcampgc

2:32	deswalsh:  RT @aussietechhead streaming live now http://www.live.thesecrethu… #barcampgc

2:36	Michael Rees:  After good pizza lunch, Lawrence Meckan is speaking about broken web accessibility

2:48	spidie:  not seeing many talks today…. #barcampgc – any stixcamp peeps wanna link up.

2:51	Michael Rees:  Warren Toomey, the Tivo Man, speaking again about the Australian Community-Driven TV Guide

3:18	Michael Rees:  Floodwatch http://floodwatch.hinternet.com.au speaker Steve now in progress

3:23	aussietechhead:  streaming live now Bar Camp Gold Coast 3 http://www.live.thesecrethub.com #barcampgc

3:44	Michael Rees:  Des Walsh now giving a summary of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney recently, http://www.futureexploration.net/e2ef09/

3:48	Michael Rees:  Des extolling the virtues of CoverItLive

3:53	Michael Rees:  Des Walsh coverage of Enterprise 2.0 Forum http://deswalsh.com/2009/03/02/perfect-setting-enterprise-20-executive-forum/

3:55	votech:  About to do a talk on SMS Security/Spoofing at #barcampgc

3:57	bmn:  @votech sorry I’m missing it Had to scoot #barcampgc

3:57	Michael Rees:  Sascha Voevodin @votech starting to speak about SMS security

4:01	Michael Rees:  Article from Sascha online at http://www.votech.com.au/media.htm

4:06	Michael Rees:  Sascha just sent an SMS from Kevin Rudd to himself!

4:15	Michael Rees:  Warren Toomey up again speaking about Comparing Code Trees

4:17	aussietechhead:  still streaming barcamp gold coast 3 live now http://www.live.thesecrethub.com #barcampgc

4:38	mrees:  RT @spidie: Those interested in OLPC and OSDC prep join the osdgc mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/osdgc #barcampgc

4:40	Michael Rees:  James Ottaway now speaking about Dapper.net

4:51	Michael Rees:  Please fill out the Working in The Cloud survey at SurveyMonkey http://is.gd/np80

4:53	mrees:  Please contribute to a very short anonymous survey about your use of online applications and services, http://is.gd/np80

4:55	Michael Rees:  Barcamp Gold Coast 3 now wrapping up; many thanks to Steve Dalton and the other organisers for a very productive and useful day

5:17	jms_:  finished #barcampgc for the day. met some cool people and listened to some fantastic talks. i stole @bjeanes’ dapper talk

5:59	bmn:  About to test GPS+Live Video on google maps http://bmn.name/mygps/video.html – it will start shortly

6:09	bmn:  Should be working now: http://bmn.name/mygps/video.html

6:09	bmn:  should be working now http://bmn.name/mygps/video.html

7:47

As a Fellow of the BCS I receive free access to the digital facsimile edition of the weekly IT news magazine Computing. The following fragment from the front page of the 7 August 2008 edition caught my eye as a wake up call to the amazing scale of data handling in modern science, the CERN nuclear research lab in Switzerland in this case:

There is yet another lucrative initiative to attract more computer science graduates, the Gaming in Computer Science Initiative from Microsoft. This paper indicates:

…educators are turning to inventive and often unconventional classes to attract and ultimately teach the next generation of computer scientists. By offering a variety of game-inspired courses, colleges and universities are beginning to see a resurgence of interest in computer science, and are attracting a more energetic and engaged crop of students.

Apparently this has led to beneficial outcomes:

The schools we’re working with, the ones offering game-based courses, in some cases are seeing over a 100 percent growth in enrollment. It’s unprecedented the way students are responding to the gaming courses.

A lot of this work uses C# and the XNA games framework. Is this worth a try?

Read this extensive blog post by Alex Iskold and see if you agree with the top ten list of things a software developer should know:

1. Interfaces
2. Conventions and Templates
3. Layering
4. Algorithmic Complexity
5. Hashing
6. Caching
7. Concurrency
8. Cloud Computing
9. Security
10. Relational Databases

Difficult to argue with and pretty comprehensive but I know colleagues would add unit testing at the least and modelling would be close behind.

Wiki: Barcamp Gold Coast Twitter: @barcampgc, Hashtag: #barcampgc

I was one of a  group of 40 attendees at the inaugural Barcamp Gold Coast held on the Griffith campus on 5 July. This barcamp was organised by a team headed by Steve Dalton who has attended Barcamp Sydney and also organises Barcamp Brisbane. T-shirts, soft drinks, text book prizes, pizzas for lunch and a bar tab for the following pubcamp were provided by sponsors. We only needed to pay for coffee from the convenient mobile coffee van that appeared a couple of times.

Within minutes of his arrival Steve had the well-tried butchers paper and sticky notes notice board system up and running with boards for 20-minute formal presentations, informal BOF sessions, local groups and jobs available/wanted. Using two adjacent small lecture rooms, one for presentations and one for networking, informal sessions and prizes, worked well. We started with an introductory informal discussion about the purpose of a barcamp and how to get the word out to likely participants on the Gold Coast.

Fearing it might be a one-eyed open source gathering I was pleasantly surprised that the Web 2.0 orientation meant that the platform wars were very much in the background. More importantly many attendees were switched on to social media and twittering went on throughout the day via the excellent wireless Internet service provided by Griffith, at cost, for the event. Des Walsh about his work in creating the first Australian chapter of the Social Media Club in Brisbane on Friday this week. I was able to  chat with him about the possible formation of a Gold Coast chapter.

I attended all the more formal presentations on topics such as:

• software development and IP from Darren Mackay
• social media in high schools and in general (video live streamed from http://www.live.techwiredau.com/ using Ustream ); Ben Grubb was the speaker
• IT Bondy David Novakovic showed us how to create a Del.icio.us text search in 100 lines of code; see his blog post for details and his photos especially of my back!
• another IT Bondy Ben Novakovic talked about using AJAX for web-based messaging systems – an extension of his Bond Honours project; his blog post about the barcamp contains his slides and code
• Aaron Spence showed us how he constructs his amazing map-linked, very high quality panoramas at www.panedia.com – wins my personal most impressive web site and software development prize
• Fabienne Rabbiosi spoke about SEO with some useful tips; her site is at www.untanglemyweb.com and she specialises in the tourism industry
• there was further Bond involvement in a couple of impromptu talks:
  • Bond IT School staffer Harry Sukumar talked about virtualisation
  • IT Bondy David T Baker gave us the shivers as he demonstrated the horrors of XSS – see http://barcamp.dtbaker.com.au/

With formal/informal presentations running in parallel I was not able to hear Chris Saad’s data portability talk.

I was impressed with the range of attendees and their depth of technical knowledge. There was much that is valuable for my professional life. The format and simple administration were very effective – this is how conferences should be run in the future. With the addition of live streaming of speakers from afar this can eliminate the huge costs of traditional conferences. The social media tools both during and after the event allow the information to be published in a relatively structured fashion. It just needs the professions and academia to recognise this is the new way to conduct professional training and research.

Look out for later posts as more information is published about this barcamp.

I attended an expanded CodeCampOz at CSU Wagga Wagga campus during 25-27 April 2008. There were extra sessions on the Friday afternoon this year with plenty of new .NET technologies to catch up with. What is so valuable about CodeCampOz is that the speakers are practising software development professionals from around Australia. We had a couple of overseas speakers as well this year. The whole event is organised by this loosely coupled group of software developers themselves, although we do have some sponsorship from Microsoft, CSU and some of the leading .NET consulting companies like Readify, Solid Q, SSW and Avanade.

To the chagrin of several instant messaging diehards CodeCampOz 2008 was well covered on Twitter and with the hashtag #ccoz, becoming the most used hashtag during the weekend.  Social media was definitely at the forefront with a whole talk by Tom Gao from EuroRSCG (huge advertising company) on how to build Facebook applications with the .NET Facebook Developer Toolkit. He showed us the Sony Facebook app his company has just deployed.

Other impressive technologies covered in one or more talks were:

• SQL Server Compact Edition: originally designed for Windows Mobile devices SSCE is now the .NET managed code competition to SQLite (used in Google Gears) for lightweight desktop and mobile apps. A second talk showed how very easy it is to use SSCE for true disconnected apps because it has built-in synchronisation with SQL Server databases when the app becomes Internet connected again.
• Silverlight 2.0 and WPF: as expected several talks covered the benefits of Silverlight for rich Internet and browser-based apps in .NET. Silverlight now has the long-awaited ui controls that also bind to data sources. The toolset around WPF and XAML in the Expression suite are much improved, and our Norwegian speaker, Jonas Folleso, built a complex Silverlight app from scratch during his talk.
• LINQ to Entities: ORM was another technology on many lips; one talk attempted a very one-sided playoff of LINQ to Entities/ASP.NET Dynamic Data extensions versus the nHibernate ORM. Even though it is in beta still LINQ to Entities in Visual Studio 2008 really rocks
• BI extensions to SQL Server: not being a db person I was surprised how attractive from the ease of development perspective the data mining features of SQL Server seem to be.
• Team Foundation Server: the new version of TFS was demoed by CodeCampOz co-organiser Mitch Denny who always gives brilliant talks. He showed us every step of creating and auto deploying an ASP.NET web app. Every build is deployed to clients automatically for their immediate feedback – this is the way all apps should be developed.

The standout talk for me though was a totally innovative and hugely useful application of bindable and reactive .NET managed code given by Paul Stovell. Basically reactive code classes report automatically all changes to their data members and collections. This allows all UIs displaying the data for example  to be updated in real-time with virtually no extra code, just the hooking up of events. Paul has extended his ideas to changes in databases and many other data sources in a technique he calls SyncLINQ. Basically this is syndication (like RSS) brought to object oriented programming. Mind blowing!

There were other interesting talks tool. I now know much more about database performance from the presentation by Fernando Guerrero, founder of Solid Q. I should also mention the talk by Shane Morris, Microsoft UX Evangelist, who gave developers very useful and applicable advice on working with UI designers. I know Shane from HCI conferences in years past. I can’t wait for Shane’s slides to be available.

All in all the best CodeCampOz for me. Lots of inspiration and lots to follow up.