Category Archives: Conferences

Live blogging from web 2.0 expo – ignite

Posted on by
3

Earlier in the year, Scott and I live blogged from the server side symposium. I’m going to try to do the same from here at web 2.0 expo. The big differences is I only paid for the keynotes. While I will go to some sponsored sessions i’ll only blog about those if there is non-commercial type content. The other big difference is that it is dark at the keynotes and I am typing on my lap. Will see how that goes.

As with last time, I am typing on my ipad and will edit for typos/add formattimg from my real computer later.

Anyway, tonight is Ignite. I’ve never tried live blogging at ignite. I have tweeted during it though so worst case is this blog post is a bunch of one liners. And if you’ve never attended an ignite you need to! 15 second slides for 5 minutes; what a pace.

I already learned something. I should have decided i was going to attempt live blogging at home and entered the speaker names and titles then.

—————————–

Alexis Ohanian – make the world suck less

  • Co founder of reddit – cool!
  • “not in the one percent” – current events anyone?
  • Slide with reddit guy with two others hipmunk (travel) and breadpig (geeky products using proceeds for good)
  • Forbes list will habe more geeks and builders in future
  • If everyone does a little thing…

Amy Herman – how picasso helps to solve a murder case

  • noticing detail in art helps train. As does changing perspective or talkingabout difficult things
  • Cool. The stuff people point out or is hard to notice

Caroline Drucker – how to get more women in tech in under a minute

  • If want to be respected, use word woman not girl. Huts making tech a better place.
  • Girl implies authority on behalf of speaker or reinforces old way
  • We are happy to be out of high school. Girl ends there
  • Avoid verbiage “I may not be an expert” diminishes you. Makes sound unconfident
  • Women engineer not geek girl
  • Cute pictures of little girls on slides
Note from me: *** really well said and no negatives in the talk impressive.  I use the term girl more than I should.  I need to train myself not to.  Caroline is completely right on this.

Corvidea Raven – how to unstale your cheerios

  • Microwaving doesnt help umless eat the second they come out
  • Water them. So the soggy bothers you more than the staleness
  • Dry clean them 🙂
  • 2 qts liquid nitrogen 🙂

David Phillips – los angeles survival kit

  • Culver city The ie 6 of la
  • Rich people throw out clothes in a year. Go get them
  • Save phone calls for when in car/traffic
  • Not an actor – professional auditioner

Emma Persky – how to win at karaoke

  • Traveling karaoke across country in ran
  • Matching a tune is singing; don’t need to sing well for karaoke
  • Feeling energy/ passion is how you win
  • Choose a song people knowsosense energy
  • Sing with friendat same time (not duet)
  • stick mic at someone else so they help
  • Dress up, props

Jack Aboutboul – let’s talk

  • Future : higher bandwidth communication. Holograms?
  • Showed past of communication evolving – smoke signal, carier pigeon.
  • Pigeon to web is a big jump
  • Community board is original “wall”
  • Punchcard – few characters. Like twitter
  • “are you living your life ir being distracted from it?”

Jonathan Levy – life of an infomercial before and after model

  • Entertaining story. What the title sounds like. More than I ever wanted to know about weightloss

Lucianne Walkowicz – explosions in the sky: the new era of time-domain astronomy

  • Cool chile is recording sky over 10 yrs. Like giant cosmic movie. Data will be public right away
  • Sky alert tells you when interesting eventhappening socan see
  • Sky inherently democratic – open to all to see
  • Lsst.org

Mark Malkoff – stretching boundaries, challenging societym testing limits

  • Will the apple store let me bring in a goat? (that video was hilarious)
Gags:
  • All starbucks stores look the same – visited all starbucks in manhattan in 24 hours
  • Turbulence is like being in a boat getting over a wave – lived on a plane for a month
  • NYers are nice! – had people cary him from southern tip of manhaattan. Went 9 miles
  • Mta buses are slow – beat 42nd street bus on kids big wheel. Won by 2 minutes
  • Crumbs cupcake kill abs in 5 days

Mark’s channel with videos – I really enjoyed the Big Wheel vs Bus one.

Matt Lemay – my new software company

  •  LOL. Loved the rip on lack of business model – it was hilarious when he got to the point. The software is a band. Music is software. And musicians are entrepreneurs
  • Problem to solve : “i don’t have enogh software”
  • $10 live software demo

Michelle broderick – how mayor mccheese built mcdonaldland into a hyper local community

  • Make odd mcdonalds characters look like a group
  • Community starter sets tone for most of time
  • Love the cat on a mac slide!
  • Cats with booze. Opening strong with the cat slides.
  • Want both ofline and offline connecttions for people in your community

Ron Goldin – workcation in the modern era

  • Finding ways to inject energy into work
  • Take a day – less work days per week to avoidlayoffs. But people liked it because got chores/distractions. Half of people dont even take their vacation days
  • Break the day – take break outside work or even go work outside to get more energy/ new ideas
  • Go away – work in different city/culture to get new ideas

Samhita Mukhopadhyay – outdated: 5 reasons dating is ruining your life

  • Dating is sifting thru people like resumes looking for right one
  • Sexist myths – This is a tech blog. Not posting this part. But it was good.

Sarah Feingold – the laws of ring pops

  • Hmm law school has a metal class?
  • Copyright – ip protection grounded in constitution. Like art on ring pop wrapper and the ring itself
  • Trademark – word phrase symbol or design. Like ring pop phrase itself. R = registered trademark
  • Patent for idea such ad”combined candy and ribg” and “ring having a metrics for candy”
  • and they threw out hundreds of ring pops to the audience!

Suraj Patel – the social media echo chamber

  • Politics and twitter. Hmm. I came here to getaway from politics
  • Social media reinforces our beliefs because follow people with similar beliefs
  • Cool tweet cloud graph
  • “everyone is entitled to own opinion but not own facts”
  • Leaving out which party he pointed out. But this is new your city so youcan guess. Where is the other party’s example? Ooh found one – far right and far left picked on at least in passing

Nick Crocker – floss the teeth you want to keep – how to change yourself

  • Little changes take months. Can’t just decide to change
  • First time people dying from too much food
  • Tech makes worse because shorter timefrom impulse to action
  • Tip make only one change for (21 days to habit)
  • do repetitively
  • Easier to ad behavior than remove one
  • Create trigger for new behavior
  • Change with a friend
  • Measure the change so know if on right track
  • Change environment – hard to change if old way all around
  • 10 points in 5 minutes is a lot

Tereza Nemessanyi – i digitized my mom

  • Putting off decisions makes stress which makes us make worse decisions
  • Eustress – make decision making a game
  • Better qus get better answers – must be a decision, close decision could go eithet way, it could happen to you, result matters
  • Site is community polling. Honestlynow.com

Amitguptaneedsyou.com – bone marrow info

Live Blogging with an iPad – part 2

Posted on by
6

iPad with Keyboard and DockScott wrote about his iPad live blogging from The Server Side Java Symposium flurry of posts.  While I wrote a little bit about the iPad at the time, I too wish to reflect.  My perspective is a bit different since I operated almost exclusively with the touch screen keyboard.

My path to blogging

Since this was the first time I was live blogging from my iPad, I was learning as I went.  I encountered a few things that didn’t work over the course of a day and a half.

WordPress iPad App

I was excited to see there was an app for WordPress.  I tried this app at home and it was fine.  Turns out it was fine because I was typing everything in one setting.  Problems:

  1. Despite indications to the contrary you can only have one draft in the iPad app at a time.  This wouldn’t be so bad if they provide a warning when you try to create a new draft.  Instead they silently delete the first draft.  FAIL.  I lost a whole blog entry that way.  The website indicates you can have multiple drafts, but it didn’t work when I tried it.
  2. One of my blog entries posted twice.
  3. I learned of other even worse problems that I didn’t encounter first hand.  Scared me sufficiently to jump ship though.

The WordPress web page

I started out happily typing in the wordpress app.  Then I got to a screenful of content and no scroll bars appeared.  Using one finger to scroll scrolled the whole page and not the textarea.  (see below for solution) My blog posts tend to be long.  Since I didn’t know how to scroll, I deemed the web page approach unusable and looked for a better solution.

Notes

I spent a while typing my text in Notes and copy/pasting it into the WordPress app.  This worked ok, but I got frustrated typing HTML characters.

HTML Editor

I thought HTML editor would solve my problems with Notes because it would be less tedious to type “<“.  Turns out not so much.  While the “<” was on the main screen, the “/” was still not.  (Anyone know of an HTML editor that is easier to use.)  Granted this wouldn’t be a problem on a Bluetooth keyboard because then all the keys are on a keyboard.  More importantly, the editor didn’t wrap text making it hard to read what I wrote.

The WordPress web page – redux

I later learned that you can scroll in the textarea by using two fingers.  Once I figured out how to scroll, I stayed with the web page for my blogging.  I’m wondering if the two finger scroll is supposed to be something “everyone knows” ?

The Bluetooth keyboard

Scott lent me his Bluetooth keyboard to try out for blogging a session. Unsurprisingly, it feels like a real keyboard so I touch type faster and more accurately than on the iPad directly. It’s also really easy to configure. Scott paired it to my iPad right in front of me.

I wouldn’t buy one for two reasons:

  1. The point of an iPad is to have less to lug around. I can’t see myself carrying a metal keyboard.
  2. I wouldn’t use it often so it’s not worth it for me.

Why it is useful:

  1. HTML is so much easier to type on a real keyboard. To the point where I am still actively avoiding it when typing on the iPad.
  2. It’s great having arrow keys to move between lines. Turns out I didn’t miss that at all when I was typing on the iPad because then using my finger on the touch screen was convenient. With the iPad screen a good 6 inches from my hands, I revert to my “use the keyboard over the mouse for almost everything” habits.
  3. You get a full screen on the iPad since they keyboard isn’t using half of it. While this is cool, it turns out not to matter for me, because I’m watching the speaker and only looking at the screen rarely to see what the iPad has “auto-uncorrected” for me.

Basically, it’s not better enough to be worth it for my usage pattern.

An interesting side note: I forgot the part where you have to look for a few keys when you get a new keyboard like the “end” button.

Conclusion

I’m surprised how fast my iPad typing speed has gotten. I am able to touch type with all ten fingers at a “fast enough” speed. And I can often do so without looking at the keyboard. Unless I need a single quote of course. Then I need to look to find the special symbols button.

Also, turning off autocorrect helped as Scott noted.  This helps because the iPad un-corrects technical words. There are a lot of those at a conference. The downside is that turning off auto correct also turns off spellcheck. I could still use spellcheck.

All in all, it took a day, but I am able to blog on the iPad in a sustainable fashion.  Six thousand words later, I had fun doing this.

I got a tip yesterday to turn off auto correct.

Live Blogging with an iPad

Posted on by
5
iPad with Keyboard and Dock As regular readers know, Jeanne and I blogged heavily at TheServerSide Java Symposium 2011, writing over 30 articles in a three-day period. What we may not have had time to mention is that we both did so entirely from a pair of Apple iPads. Below is a summary of some of things I learned during my experience.

1. Set up and Blogging Software
For my blogging spree, I used an Apple iPad 2 with an Apple Wireless Keyboard. I started with the WordPress iPad application, but found it too frustrating to use. The local/remote saving of articles was problematic, as Jeanne explains, and the interface felt very last-minute and cheap. I had three options remaining for blogging: the WordPress web interface in Safari, word processing software such as Apple Pages, or a plain old text editor. Since Internet was unstable at the conference, the first solution was out. I also vetoed fancy word processing software, since in the end the articles would be copied as plain text to the web browser for publishing. I settled on a plain text editor and was pleasantly surprised that my document management app, GoodReader, doubled as a text editor.

2. GoodReader as a Live Blogging Software
I liked blogging in GoodReader right away because it presented me with a full-screen text editor and my documents were always saved locally. I wrote up dozens of articles in GoodReader and then pasted each article into the WordPress web browser editor for publishing, which only took a minute. The only downside of using GoodReader was in the creation and naming of new files. By default, new text files are saved as “New File.txt”. In order to change the name of an article, you have to exit out of writing, open the file management interface, select the file, rename it, close the file management interface, and re-open the file. I would have preferred a more direct approach, such as offering me the chance to name the file when I created it. Also, a spell-checker after I had finished typing would have been nice.

3. iPad + Keyboard
Prior to this conference, I had never used my iPad with a keyboard. After writing thousands of words with the wireless keyboard, I can honestly say I would never go back to touch-typing for blogging. With the keyboard, the iPad became much closer to a real laptop — or more accurately a netbook — but was much smaller, lighter, and lasted a lot longer on a single charge than my full-sized MacBook Pro.

Advantages:

  • Easy access to special characters such as @, #, $, often used in developer presentations. Also easy access to HTML brackets for writing HTML tags quickly.
  • Arrow keys for easy navigation, particularly on web-pages with missing scroll bars. Side note: Jeanne discovered you can use two fingers to scroll in HTML windows with missing scroll bars.
  • Command-Up and Command-Down worked as Home/End keys moving the cursor to the top/bottom of the window.
  • Special keys give instant access to control brightness to prevent people from viewing what I write if I wanted to check my mail.
  • I could type faster with fewer mistakes; tactile feedback means I don’t need to look at my hands while typing.
  • Shortcut keys! I never realized how much I relied on Copy/Paste/Cut/Select All while writing until they were taken away!
  • Shortcut to show/hide on-screen keyboard using the eject button.

Limitations/Notes

  • Turn off AutoCorrect. On a keyboard mistakes are far less common and AutoCorrect often makes mistakes with technical words. Rejecting AutoCorrect suggestions interrupted typing and slowed it to a crawl since it required an on-screen click.
  • No Command-F for find, much needed feature.
  • Command-S for saving with the application. Had to touch the screen to save. This is more likely a limitation of the software than iOS, although it’s difficult know for sure.
  • The Apple Wireless Keyboard desperately needs an “Off” switch. I had a lot of issues on the final day with putting the iPad in my bag only to discover later that the battery had been drained by 10% when I wasn’t using it due to the keyboard waking up and activating.

Conclusion
I loved typing with an iPad, so long as a wireless keyboard was available. Contrasting this to JavaOne two years ago, where I had to go from presentation to presentation hunting power outlets because my MacBook could barely go half the day without power. I could honestly see taking it to business meetings and typing for hours on it. While there are still some additions I’d like to see to iOS, such as Command-F for find, the experience was quite enjoyable.