JoshSweeney

BarCamp Atlanta 2 – The Final Hours

The final hours of BarCamp was a testament to how much everyone wanted share knowledge and learn from each other. Everyone was tired, some hung over, and many just waiting to go home and pass out for a day or two. Either way, here is an overview of the last sessions that I attended.

After lunch I attended Russell Journey and Loren Normans overview of Amazon Web Services. We received a quick overview of Amazon EC2 and then talked about when to make the switch from your standard hosting environment. The consensus seemed to be that you never actually make the switch. EC2 and other services are really built to assist in making your application fully scale when traffic starts to flood in. One example use is to have you website configured to spin up new EC2 instances when a certain load is met. With the correct structure EC2 is a cheap alternative to building out your own infrastructure and can easily handle getting Slashdotted or making the Digg front page. The second part of the speech was a flurry of URL’s to help developers more easily handle instances and cloud services. Here is a list in case you are researching cloud services and management. It also include some of the audiences preferred web hosts

• bluehost.com
• slicehost.com
• ylastic.com- I believe someone said these guys were local.
• rightscale.com
• scalr.net

Next I jumped into a security talk from Shauvik. He was giving an overview of the latest web security, projects, and updates. He went over various FF extensions used for auditing and some tools from OWASP.

Tools:

• FireCat
• Live HTTP Headers
• Wikto
• Nikto
• W3AF

Following the security update I sat in on the Mini Startup Gauntlet session paneled by Lance, Sanjay, and Don. For those who are not familiar with Startup Gauntlet it is a reoccurring event in which you present you startup pitch and the panelist tell you how to make it better. During the mini version there were presentations by Russell Journey, Mike Mealling, and Tejus.

Tejus completed his pitch of SCMPLE and I had to rush out to give one of my presentations which was Attack Detection and Remediation using RIA’s. I will have full posts up on my presentations shortly.

Now it was time for the last session of the day. Actually, it was the second to last but it went so well that most people turned it from a 30 minute session to an hour. Doug hosting the open discussion about tagged Open Source: The who, what, when, where, and why. Since most people in the room could fill in those answers pretty rapidly we attempted to think on a deeper level about open source. By doing this we really expanded the conversation. Here are some example answers that were written on the large white papers surrounding the room.

What: Other than software what are other uses, copyright and media,

• Who: attributes of who? Customers are architects and devs, freelancers, cheapasses, savvy cio’s, “do it yourselfers”
• When: when to use the Open source structure/arch?
• Where: everywhere
• Why: cost savings, community / collab, learning, better and easier to maintain, ready made consulting markets,
• How: more freelance help, google code
• How much: is open source free, jboss was purchased for 360,000,000 , mysql was bought for 1.2B, redhat 30% yr over yr growth for 4 years running,

As you can see, many of these were more questions just to expand the topic. We spent much time analyzing companies that were open source/free, open source enterprise, commercial open source, and other forms of hybrids. Overall my biggest take away was that the word open source has really gotten skewed over time. In the past and even today many people treated open source as if it was synonymous with free. For a period of time that was somewhat accurate. However, some of the largest open source companies today don’t have as much to do with free software as when they started. Overall this was a very compelling end to BarCamp.

Lastly I have to thank everyone who made it happen.

If it weren’t for Mike Mealling and Lance Weatherby this would have never happened. Thank you for a great event.

I must also thank the BarCamp sponsors that make these possible.

• Angus McRae
• Appcelerator
• Microsoft
• Ryma
• ATDC
• GeorgiaTech Venture Lab
• TechLinks

BarCamp Atlanta 2 Links:

• Pictures from Lance
• Why Erlang Slides
• BeagleBoard
• Web Security
• Generating Buzz ( Without being a scumbag spammer )
• Push Protesting
• How to build your own Guitar Hero/Rockband clone in a week
• Hacking Ubiquity
• All of the Tweets

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Tags: amazon, atlanta, barcamp, cloud, open source, security

BarCamp Atlanta 2 – Morning of Day Two

Day Two started off a little slow mainly because people that didn’t camp had to drive in to join the crowd. Those who did camp, including myself, stayed up until 4am discussing various topics of interests. Thankfully we have good sponsors in Atlanta who have provided food for the entire event. Breakfast from Flying Biscuit assisted in getting everyone moving and prepared for another day of talks and demonstrations.

The first presentation that I attended on day two was RSS tips, tricks and discussion with Will Powell. One trend that many people at the table were seeing was that they spent less time reading blog posts and more time watching Twitter since it is a real time update and less time consuming from a dedicated reading perspective. Some other take aways were that nobody in the room pays for a RSS readers and from a user level nobody really cares if you are using Atom or RSS for feeds.

After the RSS discussion I sat in on Rachel K’s presentation of Squidoo. From her presentation I would describe Squidoo as a web page building platform that has built in widgets for functionality and also provides monetization. Squidoo uses a shared revenue system and distributes the cash based on the popularity of your lens ( page ).

Sanjay Parekh gave the next presentation on How I built StartupGossip.com in a weekend ( using Yahoo Pipes ). For those of you that aren’t familiar with Sanjays site, it compiles startup blog posts, news, and tweets that are focused on the Atlanta startup scene. Unbeknown to me there is the capability to get Tweets that are geolocation based. Users of the Twitter API can also set a range and get tweets from people within the vicinity. This is what Sanjay used for the Twitter section of StartupGossip.com. The other sections use a compilation of data that is gathered and filtered using Yahoo Pipes. Then the new Pipes streams is fed into StartupGossip.

After Sanjays presentation I visited Greg Tuve which was presenting on memory fractals. Since I had never heard of memory fractals I thought that I should find out just what he was talking about. what the presentation ultimately boiled down to was a highly efficient study technique. By giving the brain three different words or images it would instantly trigger a forth word or piece of information. One example was as follows. Here are three words: lime, salt, Mexico. Now say the forth word that is linked to all three. For most the answer is tequila. Greg uses a program called Memory Weaver which allows people to quickly create study grids. During the presentation Greg also provided explainations down to the neuron level. To get more in depth information you can visit Gregs website: Memory Genesis.

For Lance Weatherby’s second act of the weekend he presented Everything Twitter. Below I have listed some information that Lance gathered and presented.

Reasons to use Twitter:

• Stay in the loop.
• Learning
• Connections
• You are bored in board meetings.

Top Twitter Tools:

• TweetDeck
• Thwirl
• Twitteriffic
• Twitterfom
• Twittercelerator

Useful Twitter Sites:

• Summize
• Favrd

What makes you unfollow people?

• Bad Signal to noise ratio

Tips for Newbs:

• Follow people in your industry
• Do not automatically reciprocate people who follow you
• Find a good client

Another interesting thought was to follow your competitor. I have seen people who follow the Twitter accounts of their competitors but the extra step which was mentioned here was to actually follow individual people in the competitors company. It would be interesting to do a study of this and determine what kind of insights that one could gain.

Next, Brad Gilbreath presented on Location Based Services. Being a Dash user Brad has created addons that allow a new level of interaction with your GPS. One of his examples was a site that integrated with your GPS to list all of the haunted houses in the area that was updated real time. So if you wanted to go out for Holloween and hit every haunted house you could quickly and easily pull this into your GPS. The discussion also went over some potential abuses for a GPS that gets real time data from web services. For example: if you wanted the closest gourmet coffee shop, a service could provide a coffee shop that they were being paid to direct people to.

The last speech of the morning was from our sponsor representative. Glen Gordon is a locally based Microsoft evangelist that always knows the latest happenings coming out of Redmond. He went over the various pieces of recent Microsoft news which is listed below.

• The release of ASP.NET MVC
• Silverlight 2
• Microsofts adoption of JQuery
• IE8
• XNA Framework for Zune and Xbox 360

After asking about the innovations in IE8 it quickly turned into an IE8 Q and A session. One of the cool new features in IE8 is web slicing. You can pick out a portion of a website, create a slice, and every time that particular portion of the website is updated you get an indicator in the browser. From the description it is almost and instant RSS feed for a specific section of a website. Glen also told us that IE8 is packaged in a VM for anyone that wants to try it out. To top of the final meeting of the morning Glen offered free one year subscriptions to anyone interested in joining the XNA Dev Network.

After Glens speech we went off to have pizza and drinks provided by the sponsors. This would be out last meal at BarCamp until next year.

Tags: atlanta, barcamp, ie8, microsoft

BarCamp Atlanta 2 – Day One

We are wrapping up day one of BarCamp Atlanta 2 with some Texas hold’em and Jameson. Josh Watts won the first game and is hoping for a second win. So far it has been another exciting event with lots of good presentations. I will give quick recap or the presentations that I attended.

The night started off with a presentation from Lance Weatherby about Atlanta StartupWeekend 2. This years StartupWeekend will be a little different in that there will be multiple projects started and no actual companies organized. It will be up to the group members of the project to determine if they would like to move forward in any way. Lance had a quick talk which then opened up the floor for Calvin and Paul to tell us more about Skribit which was the company formed at last years StartupWeekend. Paul and Calvin gave us a little insight that they will be moving to the freemium business model which should be completed by December. Another piece of good information is that Sanjay is working on the patent filing for the provisional patent.

After getting the update on Skribit and StartupWeekend 2 I watched Kieth McGreggor present on Genetic Algorithms in Javascript. Kieth is a member of Venture Labs and from his presentation has dealt with a large number of algorithms for all kinds of data. His presentation displayed a lot of deep information about mapping genes ( 1′s and 0′s ) and grouping chromosomes ( groups of 1′s and 0′s ) that get fed into fitness functions to detect the optimum outcome from data sets. Examples of his javascript code can be found at http://theconceptory.com/ga/.

Next up was Brad Anderson which spoke about why people should use Erlang. His main points were that if you wanted your program to be massively concurrent, seamlessly distributed, and fault tolerant then you should use Erlang. One very shocking point was that the London mobile network runs Erlang and has 9 9′s uptime. This means that they have 32 milliseconds of downtime a year. To me this means that they don’t really have downtime. One of the reasons for this is that you could hot swap code. To me this was an amazing concept. You can swap in new code and all current processes will finish using the old code and all new threads will use the new code.

One thing about many of the people that are in the Atlanta community is that many of them love Ruby on Rails. So the next presentation was Screen Scraping with Ruby by Jeremy Raines. You can check out his slides on slideshare. The presentation consisted of using Xpath and RubyRegex to screen scrape any data that you need off of a website. The base concept is to request a page and turn the html tags into a xml document that can be iterated through. Each iteration uses Xpath and Regex to pull out the required data.

The last two presentations that I witnessed were related to food. With Ivey we took a total detour to discuss coffee. I learned that to truly get the full taste from coffee that you should use it within 10 minutes of grinding. The next thing that I learned was that the water used for fresh coffee needs to be at least 200 degrees. I am not a big coffee drinker but at least I am more educated than before I started.

The last presentation that I watched was Randalls: Fun with Food and Nitrogen. This pulled a large crowd because everyone wanted to see what he was going to do. Dressed in a lab code and using $600 liquid nitrogen container Randall moved forward in creating frozen marshmallows, frozen Cheetos, and instant ice cream for everyone to eat. This was a huge hit and a great ending to the presentations for the night.

Currently all attendees are either drinking and playing poker or drinking and playing guitar hero. All in all, day one was a huge success and a great deal of fun.

Tags: atlanta, barcamp, erlang, javascript, nitrogen, startupweekend