March 2009 - Posts

Native, Immigrant, or Practitioner?

Marc Prensky coined the term digital native to refer to persons who have grown up with digital technology including computers, Internet sites, and applications. In particular, Marc said that today's "students are no longer little versions of us, as they may have been in the past. In fact, they are so different from us that we can no longer use either our 20th century knowledge or our training as a guide to what is best for them educationally."

Admittedly, terms digital natives and digital immigrants shocked me when I first heard of them.Last night I caught my son (11) in his room doing "some urgent work" and precisely:

  • Chatting over latest Messenger with a friend about the day and the tennis lesson they just had.
  • Imparting instructions on how to configure the Windows desktop over Skype.
  • Using iBrii to do his homework in collaboration with another couple of friends. 

And my 11-years old son just self-installed Windows 7 and is actively using it and learning most of available configuration aspects. Which is definitely a good statement about Windows 7. The end of Windows hell? In some way, I glimpse similarities between Windows 7 and the first OS I really enjoyed so many years ago--the mythical Windows 95.

When I mentioned all of this with my wife, she said "How do you call yourself? Are you a native too or are you an immigrant?" Well, I believe that, all in all, I'm just a practitioner :-)

Posted 31 March 2009 08:48 AM by despos | 51 comment(s)
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There’s a lot of Software in Our Future

It’s quite a bit of time that Juval Lowy—a Microsoft software legend—talks about energy and its relation to software and calls this the next bubble prefiguring the next boom for developers. To paraphrase John Lennon, he may be a dreamer, but he’s not the only one.

Weeks ago, having heard me a bit concerned about our future, my kids (11 and 8) started their own conversation about a world without computers and programs. How could do school homework without Word to help us put down writings? How could we search for details without Google? How could we get in touch without email? And how could we chat without Messenger?

And I also wondered what else I could do in a world without computers? If nothing happens, if the drift is unremitting, is the Western society destined to collapse?

It’s certainly possible. Never set limits to the human stupidity.

But, beyond temporary depression J, the software is the key to the future. Not a remote future, but the future that begins tomorrow morning.

A lot is being said about alternative energy, but I feel that real point is optimizing the demand/response pattern through which we get energy for our everyday life. I totally buy Juval’s statements in the DevConnections Spring 2009 keynote “The Energynet: the next boom in software”. We need smart power grid as opposed to today’s dumb grids. It is impossible to imagine a physical replacement of the grids all over the world. But we can make the grid smart. In just one way—the software.

It seems like we are witnessing an era of epochal changes—for our generation, the second big change after Internet. We’re not there yet. But we’ll get there. And the key of everything is – and will remain – the software.

Thanks God, kids, dad is in the right business J

Posted 27 March 2009 04:24 PM by despos | 65 comment(s)
The Future of Software Conferences is … Software

I had a geek dinner last night and a slice of a conversation kind of got persisted in my mind. So when I resumed my OS this morning, it was automatically deserialized. It was a chunk of the conversation I had with Carl Franklin and it was about the future of conferences. Carl voiced his convincement that the future is online. People stay home or in their offices—Carl said—pay a fair amount of money, and get the content they expect.

How much money? It doesn’t have to be necessarily little money; it doesn’t have, at the same time, a lot of money. Just the right amount money measured mostly against the quality and added value of the content they get.

I’m not saying that in some sort of near or remote future technical content should be paid as you like. I’m not certainly thinking of a donation model. I’m just wondering how much a typical conference fee is burdened with “extra” costs such as infrastructure, wireless, hotels, food, travel.

I did quite a few small tiny events myself and we constantly managed to keep costs as low as possible: no food, no CD, no bag, no accommodation, just great content. And small margins, enough to pay the day of the (very) few people involved. Clearly, it is a too extreme scenario to be replicated on a larger scale. A lot cost airline may propose you pay for the toilet, food, newspapers, drinks, water, but they can certainly not ask you pay an extra for the pilot J.

Are online conferences a concrete, starting-up business today? No.

The technology is not ready yet. As Carl pointed out, this is going to happen in a future maybe only a couple of years away. LiveMeeting and similar technologies are today totally insufficient and obsolete. We need stunningly beautiful and realistic graphics, bandwidth, ad-hoc software. But it can happen. And probably it will. Look at Xbox games; look at HD video technology; look at VOIP progress. It seems like we have all the pieces as single entities; someone will certainly merge them together quite soon.

Awaiting for that, don’t forget to stay tuned on next “traditional” conferences. As far as I’m concerned, DevConnections in Las Vegas, and BASTA in Frankfurt, Germany. But the first of all, is Microsoft DevDays in Sofia, Bulgaria, 16-17 April.

 

Posted 26 March 2009 03:48 PM by despos | 65 comment(s)
My 2009: less writing, more code

I'm back to blogging after a year or so. I'm not particularly original by saying that a lot has changed around us in this time. For me, it means less writing and more code.

I will still be writing books and articles as long as there's a publisher with some concrete interest :) But I'm more active in the consulting arena and following two key projects.

One is IntelliMaker from AppAround.com. It is essentially an application to cover the last mile between sources of data and end users. The concept of a data source is quite wide here as it includes Office documents, SharePoint catalogs, anything under OLE DB and ODBC, Web services. Mapped to an IntelliMaker data set, any data source can be exposed as an object including a subset of the native properties and creating any sort of relationships, joins, and groupings. The final data set is then available to feed forms and workflows to model business processes. It is an ideal tool for the consultant engaged in system integration projects and for companies who can't afford developing ad hoc front-ends for their data and processes. Massively RAD, IntelliMaker is an ASP.NET 2.0 application and will go to the cloud quite soon. If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and pay a visit to AppAround.com. In particular, have a look at Office Extensions. 

The other cool project I'm working on is a new social networking application entirely done in ASP.NET and jQuery. It is named iBrii and is the electronic and cloud version of the old faithful yellow sticky notes. You have unlimited space to create notes that include videos, links, and images and can publish them to a permanent link and share them with other users. You can also simply send them out via classic emails. Your notes remain up in the cloud and if shared with other users they can receive changes instantaneously. The primary reason that convinced me to use iBrii is the possibility of storing in a single place all the content of otherwise long emails threads, especially when the thread goes on for a few minutes, contains valuable information, but you won't be using it soon and want to save it for further reference. Sharing data with groups of people and publishing it is the driving force of iBrii. Not just as Twitter; not just as Facebook, not just as Google Documents. If this sounds somewhat interesting to you, and you want to give it a try, register today here and let me know. It is still a beta and works great with FF3, IE7 and IE8. My account there is despos. Send me your notes then!

 

Posted 23 March 2009 10:50 PM by despos | 57 comment(s)
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