Posts with keyword: etech08

10 entries

CouchDB from 10,000 Feet

Thu Mar 6 11:23:00 2008

Jan Lehnardt and Damien Katz(click to enlarge) Damien Katz and Jan Lehnardt are talking about CouchDB. My students have mentioned it several times and we've had brief discussions about it, but I've never spent much time on it. This seemed like my chance. CouchDB's goal is a simple, non-relational database. Damien started the CouchDB project after working for a number of years on the Lotus Notes project. He loved the document model of the data store (as did a lot of other people). He wanted an open source version of that model and CouchDB was born. In real life,
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Larry Lessig on Changing Congress

Wed Mar 5 20:49:00 2008

Larry Lessig on Changing Congress(click to enlarge) Lessig's keynotes are hard to blog, but the message isn't. Lessig's basic message is that government makes poor policy--even when the choice ought to be easy. The problem isn't overt bribery. In fact, we may have the best situation we've ever had in that sense. But even good people are affected by indirect dependence on money. Money in politics causes problems in three ways Divert access - congressmen pay attention to donors over others. Change reasoning - Sets up an perverse incentive where regulation creates money raising opportunities This has created a
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Kicking Ass

Wed Mar 5 12:52:00 2008

Kathy Sierra talks about kicking ass(click to enlarge) Kathy Sierra takes the stage again at ETech to talk about kicking ass. She says that people aren't passionate about things they suck at. Finding passion is a way to kick ass. She talks about neurogenesis, the idea that the brain can change positively. It's more plastic than we ever thought. She recommends an article by Jonah Lehrer in Seed Magazine on the work of Professor Elizabeth Gould. Stimulating environments matter--cages (or cubes) aren't stimulating environments. The common thread of people who perform at a world class level is that they
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John McCarthy on the Elephant Programming Language

Wed Mar 5 10:28:00 2008

John McCarthy(click to enlarge) He wasn't on the program, but this morning's keynote was given by Professor John McCarthy--the inventor of LISP and coiner of the term "artificial intelligence." This morning, he's talking about Elephant 2000, a programming language designed for writing programs that interact with people. One of the things he points out that I find interesting is the idea that the compiler should generate required data structures without the user having to specify them. I'm not sure how that works from his explanation, but I'm certain that if we want languages that admit more parallelism, this is
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DIY Drones: Building Cheap UAVs

Tue Mar 4 17:51:00 2008

Chris Anderson(click to enlarge) One of the reasons I love ETech is talks like this one from Chris Anderson (of Wired) on building homebrew drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). He has a Web site that shows how to build the various kinds of drones he talked about. He's used Lego Mindstorms, cell phones, and microcontrollers on planes. The results are pretty astounding. Jordi with the blimp(click to enlarge) He wanted something you could do indoors, and hit on the idea of using blimps--which are inherently autonomous since they float. The blimp uses ultrasonic sensors to maintain altitude. When
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Amazon's SimpleDB

Tue Mar 4 16:47:00 2008

Jay Ridgeway from Nextumi(click to enlarge) This afternoon, I was torn between the session on botnets and one on Amazon's SimpleDB by Mike Culver and Jay Ridgeway. I chose the latter. The goal is a durable, flexible datastore at a cheap price: $0.14 per machine house, $0.10/Gb into the cloud and $0.18/Gb out. The API call list is short. Domains are used to partition data. You can think of them as tables, that helps. To add something to a domain you use this syntax: PUT (item, 123), (description, Sweater), (color, Red), (color, Blue) The first name-value tuple is the
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Sectored Wi-Fi Architecture

Tue Mar 4 11:35:00 2008

Xirrus Wi-Fi array controller(click to enlarge) O'Reilly is using one of these Xirrus Wi-Fi arrays and so far, I've got to say I'm impressed. The bandwidth has been great with none of the traditional conference wi-fi problems we all have learned to live with The picture is of the operational array on the light truss in front of the stage. Looks much cooler in real life since all the lights are blinking! According to the Web site, the XS16, which is what we've got here, can deliver up to 864Mbps of bandwidth. Very cool.
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Your Carbon Footprint

Tue Mar 4 11:18:00 2008

Saul Griffith(click to enlarge) This morning's opening keynote at ETech was Saul Griffith who ran down the steps he used to calculate his own carbon footprint and then what he had to do to put himself on a "carbon diet." It's not pretty. Doing the calculation is relatively straightforward in terms of the math, but gathering the data isn't easy. I'm hoping that we can get his slides when we put the audio up on IT Conversations because there's some great data there. Speaking of IT Conversations, a recent IEEE show has a section on home co-generation. You can
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Marc Hedlund: Debugging Hacks, What They Never Taught You About Solving Hard Bugs

Mon Mar 3 15:42:00 2008

Marc Hedlund talks about debugging(click to enlarge) There's no doubt that debugging is a critical skill for anyone who codes. Marc Hedlund is talking about how to tackle the really difficult ones. I enjoyed Marc's tutorial from last year, and picked this one on that basis. Most bugs aren't hard. 95% of the time, you can find a fix easily and move on. Marc's tutorial is about what to do when the simple methods don't work anymore. He gives an example of a login that would fail once every 10,000 times or so. Turns out the problem was a
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Kathy Sierra: Storyboarding for Non-Fiction

Mon Mar 3 10:09:00 2008

Kathy Sierra talks about storyboarding(click to enlarge) How do you create riveting technical presentations and user manuals? Tell a story. Kathy Sierra is teaching the tutorial and using her own experience creating the "Head First" books on Java and Design Patterns as examples. Define your "post-click" behavior. After someone has gotten your message, what would happen in the reader? Does you message change the readers behavior? Do you know how you want it to change them? You can't create the right material without understanding what you want to achieve. In the case of What creates a page turner? Suspense,
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