Jasrags.Net

This is my review of the Technology Summit, have fun!

Wednesday 3/26

Welcome Keynote:

Good intro by Sam. Nice open talk about why we are here.

Introduction to Microsoft Research:

We were presented some interesting products that are in the research department, and got to hear about how Microsoft Research works.

ASP.NET MVC Framework:

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 introduced MVC to the .NET world. I think that it is good that Microsoft is providing this to .NET developers but it’s a hard sell to people in the open source community that have seen this for years and wondering why Microsoft just jumped on the boat. This is a trend that you will see continue over the next three days.

Silverlight Product Review:

So Silverlight is a much bigger product than i first understood, it actually is a platform to run any .NET application client side. I can see some uses of this, but in the large i think it’s a market that either is not realized yet or that Microsoft hopes that they can force down on everyone else. Where i think Silverlight brings a win is Multi-Platform/Multi-Browser WMP streaming support, so this allows someone to bring WMP content to say Linux or OSX where it was not possible or needed some funky plugin (i.e. Flip4Mac).

The Windows Live Platform:

This was the most open discussion we have had so far. What i got out of this was that no one outside of Microsoft was aware that dev.live.com was even a website. I have developed against Yahoo!, Google and Amazon webservices, and i could not see any reason in the current form why i would even think of using Microsoft Live at it’s current stage. Alot of good suggestions were made by the group but will they be followed up on by M?

LINQ Product Review:

I had not heard of LINQ since i have been out of .NET development for about a year and a half now. But the .NET side of me thought it was pretty cool, even though it of goes against what i have tried to do which is keep as much SQL out of my code as possible.

Olympic 2008 Technology:

Wrong Presentation for the wrong audience. This was a presentation by someone from NBC about what they are doing for the 2008 Olympics… If he stuck to the tech details it would have been a OK topic. But when the words “It’s all about the revenue” came out of his mouth the room turned hostile very quick and i would have hated to be that guy. The one thing i got from this topic is that the entertainment industry is in the same mindset that the music industry was 5 years ago and trying to deny that digital media without DRM is what they will have to do at some point…. it’s just a matter of when do you think they will understand this if ever?

OpenID:

Interesting to me as i have not looked into OpenID much yet. It did get me to activate my OpenID settings on my Yahoo! account.

Party - Novelty Hill Winery:

A wine bar is the WORST place ever to put a bunch of tech people together and expect any sort of good end of day discussion. Most everyone left right after dinner for the hotel.

Thursday 3/27:

Intro to Microsoft’s OSS Lab:

The OSS lab is where Microsoft let’s a group of employees play with *nix equipment. I like that they are helping projects like Samba and providing documentation and code where needed.

IIS7 Product Review:

IIS7 <= apache 1.x nuff said.

Introduction to Microsoft’s Local Software Economy:

Longest.topic.evar, perhaps i just was not interested in how microsoft is trying to bring up it’s brand in developing areas.

Popfly Mashup:

Had to skip this, had work to do.

Internet Explorer 8 Product Review:

IE8 <= Firefox 2.x

Dynamic Languages in the CLR:

It’s cool that they have Python and Ruby in the .NET world.

Robotics, Concurrency and distributed services solution:

Way cool stuff by Microsoft…. this has gotta be the coolest thing i have seen the entire time i have been here. The Robotics studio is very nice and i am going to buy a Lego Mindstorm when i get home and make it terrorize the office!!!!

Microsoft Company Store:

Bought the Xbox360 wireless adapter for PC, Lost Odyssey, a nice pen and laser pointer.

Rock Bottom Brewery: 

Finally a place that is conducive to talking with multiple groups of people about tech stuff, lots of space and beer.

Friday 3/28:

Microsoft Home Tour and Center for Information Work Tour:

Had to sign an NDA…. but i would not talk about it anyways…

XNA Development:

XNA 3.0 Preview - Spring 2008 / GA Holiday 2008

Added in Zune game support…. new way to handle music and sound effects in all XNA platforms. It sounds like they may relax or move the $99 Xbox Community Fee so more people can develop games without having to drop 99 bucks a year. Community games will be in the Xbox Dashboard this holiday. They said they have not finalized on the topic of if they will charge for community games or if it will be left up to the developer. The XNA team seems to have their stuff together.

How Microsoft supports Emerging Businesses and Startups:

Not sure why they had us go-to this one….

Overall:

I had a good time, they put us up in a nice hotel and fed us well and sometimes they actually provided interesting topics for us to discuss. Sometimes it felt that some of the presenters were crow-barred in or perhaps put into spots to fill gaps. More technical talks would be great for next year, combined with a format that allows more for time overages and sidebar questions and conversations. Too many times in the first day mostly we were in the middle of a good discussion and had to cut it off for the next topic. All in all i would like to come back next year to continue the discussion and perhaps see if any of the items we brought up for change happen.

Ok quick updates:

• Flying to Seattle tomorrow for a Microsoft Tech Conference
• Bought Tide of Iron, pretty fun but complicated. Need to play more so i know the rules and have to look at the book less.
• Bought Army of Two, pretty fun co-op mode. Think i will trade in Assassins Creed when i get back for Rainbow Six Vegas 2
• Finished putting the new floor down upstairs and painting, going to start on the new flooring when i get back from Seattle.
• Re-Financing the house to get to one 15 year mortgage.
• Paid off my student loan and the wife’s car with some side work money
• Had to pay taxes this year

Cool game, i want to pick it up.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/tideofiron.html

I agree with my friend Matt in this post. I think i will try to only buy 6 new games in 2008, if i trade in a game that will free up a slot from those six. I will go even further and include games i bought in 2007 but did not finish. Let’s recap ‘07 shall we? Here is what i said i would buy and my post release comments:

• Assassin’s Creed
  • Bought, Not Finished
• Half-Life 2
  • Bought, Finished Portal, Working on HL2
• Halo 3
  • Bought, Finished many times
• Fuzion Frenzy 2
  • Not Bought (It sucked)
• Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
  • Bought, Finished
• BioShock
  • Bought, Not Finished
• Grand Theft Auto IV
  • Pushed to 08
• Army Of Two
  • Pushed to 08
    
• Battlefield: Bad Company
  • Pushed to 08?
• Mass Effect
  • Bough, Finished
    
• Forza Motorsport 2
  • Bought
• Blue Dragon
  • Not Bought (Not my kind of game)
• Kane & Lynch
  • Not Bought (Just did not look good enough to buy)
• Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
  • Not Bought (Kind of fun but play control killed it for me)
• Wireless Racing Wheel
  • Bought

Ok now the games i want in 2008:

• Xbox 360
  • Fallout 3
    • Perhap, i did not play any other fallout, so a demo would be nice
  • Fable 2
    • Perhaps, i did not play fable one so i would like a demo first
  • Burnout: Paradise
  • Rainbow 6 Vegas 2
    • Will Buy on release day, RB6V was a hell of a good game
  • The Club
    • If the real game lives up to the fun of the demo
  • Hitman 5
  • Grand Theft Auto IV
  • Army Of Two
  • Battlefield: Bad Company
• Wii
  • Wii Fit
  • Mario Kart Wii
• PC
  • Starcraft
  • Spore

So here is what has happened since my last post in September:

1. Drama free Thanksgiving
2. Drama free Christmas
3. Mostly drama free New Years / Helena’s Birthday
4. Work, Work, Work
5. Helena started school
6. Drama filled last few weeks in relation to an upcoming marrage

Sorry for the delay in posting but as you all know life takes priority. As of yesterday there started to be alot of rumors that Yahoo is going to lay off anywhere from 100-2500 people. I would guess it will be more in the 100’s range and mostly from overseas offices. There may be some stateside cuts on smaller properties but i am 98% sure that we are safe here in Dallas. Ill keep you informed as things happen, i would expect everything to go down after the Q4 earnings call on 01/29.

See the full size photos in my photostream

Pictures are up

So, lets start off on a general rant. Dallas county finds it necessary to make it even harder for a small computer business to make money. My partner and i just found out last month that they tax business equipment, and business equipment apparently also includes our servers at our colo, even though we paid for them, and we are not claiming them as capital equipment and deducting them from our taxes, and we paid sales tax when we bought them. So all in all it would have not been to bad as our real value of our servers is about 3k at most. What is bad that our former colo estimated our value at 20k, and dallas county taxed us on that for 2005/2006 to the tune of ~$2000. GREAT!!! way to suck any hope of a profit in the next 6 months at least.

On to the next topic, ill try to mix the good with the bad.

I got my wii… after searching for 2 weeks straight, going to multiple stores every day, my father ran across one in colorado. I received it the day of my birthday party, so it was a nice gift:) I like it alot, the games are fun, it’s no replacement for my PC or my XBox360 but it’s real fun, Wario Ware is great party fun. Guitar hero 2 has been taking up my time on the Xbox, love that game, wish i was better at it so i could play through the hard songs and unlock the rest of the songlist. Perhaps one day ill get better.

Next…

28, i am 28, my 10 year reunion is next month, i am 28. I am married with a great child, but i am 28. I think i have gotten over my mini-freakout about being 28, but it was a rough one. I think most people at 28 worry about not being far enough in their life, i am not saying that at all, i just think i missed out on me 20’s.

Next….

Still love Yahoo! We are doing some great things over the next year with video, i think it will really make the difference for us against the looming giant of G+Youtube. I guess taking the high road and blocking our users from uploading content they don’t own is a good and bad thing. Good as we are not getting sued by every tv and movie studio, bad that we do not have the web presence that Youtube has. I must say, we are good at what we do, we get video to users just as good as Youtube (better in some cases).

Next?….

There is a slight chance i MAY win a iPhone Monday from a contest at work, cross whatever you want and let’s hope i win. Ill check back with you soon whoever you may be that cares about what i am doing…