Review : Sembang Tech.Ed 07
By Serge Norguard. Filed in Events, Personal |
Wait a damn minute, what happen to Serge ? Why is he promoting this Microsoft product ? Don’t be afraid people, Serge is still here but as he has attended the Sembang Tech.Ed 07, he would like to talk about his experience there. Focal points of this entry will be
Silverlight
Popfly
Home Server
Robotics Studio
The following is a review on the event. Text is plenty, Pictures are plenty too !. Do take note of the comments left by Serge on the pictures taken.
“I bring you GOOD NEWS !”
Black + white = Grey. Grey + shine = Silver , Silver + Light = Silverlight. Microsoft Silverlight is something that will in the humblest opinion of Serge change the way web designers, programmers and the general publics perception on the way the world wide web is to be seen and heard and inter-acted with.
Why Silverlight ? Besides being a small 2mb plug-in that allows awesome media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces. You’ll have cross-browser compatibility, which means if you’re viewing this in Internet Explorer and the font size is 10, you will see the same font size under Firefox, IE for Mac and even Opera. Thus the need to open up multiple browsers to make sure as a web designer that your website is compatible with all browsers is not needed.
“Pianoman Oliver”
Besides this, you can even add vector-like graphics and text. And we all know that vector is based on mathematical calculations to ensure that even when stretch or compressed, there will be no artifacts / pixellation cause. But what does this mean to the current plug-in which you have now ? Don’t worry about it, Silverlight is here to improve their performance and capabilities. Thus your swf/flash plug-in, mp3 plug-in, adobe vector graphics, etc is all enhanced.
“Pianoman Oliver is taking a break”
As of this moment, Serge is testing out the Silverlight plug-in and it is working well. Have not tried out the Linux’s Moonlight version yet.
Now, because Popfly is under private alpha, Serge does not have a chance to fully try out the items which can be done with Popfly (invitation request sent !). Popfly can be considered the soon-to-be rival to Adobe’s Flash. And from what he has seen it, even your mom who is scared of a mouse can do this. Serge kids you not.
“German Keyboard is QWERTZ not QWERTY …. WHY?!!”
So what the heck is Popfly ? Consider Popfly the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts:
1.Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
2.Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.
“some participants”
During the session, we were shown the godliness of mashups. Just as how it is implied, a mashup is basically getting more than one item, mixing it up and pray to God that something good happens. Popfly does that and you don’t even have to pray. It is that good.
So why should you get it ? Seriously, not all of us knows C++ or VisualBasic, heck some of us don’t even know what is WWW. With Popfly Creator, you can create Web experiences without being a programmer and even if you’re a programmer, this will make your life easier.
Just by connecting services on the Web is as easy as drawing a line between two blocks. Popfly creator also enables you to create static Web pages and even insert custom mashups directly into your static page.
“Chewy the most Hyper speaker of the evening”
Think about it, during the heydays it was key-in 10 lines of coding to make an object move from left to right and then we need to add another 20 lines of coding for that object to call upon another object. Worse still is that when the other object is called upon and does not have the appropriate keys, we got to program functionality to it as well. With Popfly, it’s drag, drop, pull strings, apply and voila !.
“Other participants including one famous smashpop”
“Other participants including one famous Jeff Ooi”
Now what about this Popfly Space ? Popfly Space is a social network designed to connect the millions of non-professional creators in the world who work on everything from mashups to game development to hardware hacks. Users can build and share projects using Popfly Creator, or for more advanced users, Popfly Space provides an easy way to upload and share Visual Studio Express projects to the world.
“You want a piece of me Nic ?”
“I’ll have two pieces please”
For JavaScript/CSS/HTML developers, it provides a free “playground” to build and share fun Web experiences. It’s the “YouTube for applications” where you can discover, rate, comment, and remix everything. In other words, you and the rest of the Popfly Space community will be the greatest collaboration team known in the world wide web.
For maybe you know how to edit that video to get that guy to speak in Russian but you just don’t know on how to remove that awful pimple on that guys head without spoiling the video..thus you pass it on to another person who can. Popfly Space is THE ultimate playground to collaborate and to combine skills.
“Zeddy on Robotics”
Besides the first two topics, this one is something. It’s the Microsoft Home Server.
Imagine yourself with more than 2 computers. Backing files up is such a pain in the neck, don’t you think ? You have Computer A as the one which has the backup and Computer B is the main computer you normally fiddle with. Most of the time it’ll be drag and drop from B to A and it will take time for :
1.It is highly unlikely that you will remember that file name abc.jpg in Com B was modified on the 15th of July 2007 and the file in Com A abc.jpg was modified on the 16th of July 2007 (you could have been drunk and use Com ) and thus you’ll don’t overwrite it..even though that file in Com A could be the wrong file.
2.Com B maybe in FAT 32 and Com A is NTFS. Of course you could do some hoo-hah to make it compatible. But, for the sake of Serge’s sanity, why ?
“participants
“participants
So what can Microsoft Home Server do for you. Besides backing up your data on a daily basis. Wait, did Serge say daily basis ? I think i heard him say that. Is he crazy ? I have 500 GB worth of information and making a backup for the whole 500 GB takes me at least 6 hours. I do not have time for this !
Now, now hold your horses. During the first initial backup, it will take a loooong (eat some food first) time. But after that it will be fast. Why ? After the initial backup, this software has already taken a snapshot of the harddrive that was backed up just now. Thus any file that has change on the currently uses system will be sent to the backup system.
“The second Pianoman”
Surely, you’re asking how does it know ? All files on your system has a hash-base on it and every time you make a change, the hash-base changes. So if your backup has a text file name Woman.txt with a hash-base of 12345678 and on the system that you’re using Woman.txt has a hash-base of 12345678.1 , the backup will take that file and replace it in it’s own system.
Now, what happens if you have accidentally replace a file by mistake and you turned off the computer and the cache is now gone. One, you can just cry your eyes out for there is nothing you can do or two; go to Microsoft and screw them over. Serge will take neither, for as he has mention the word “snapshot”.
“Think ! I can’t ! What ? Just give that prize to him !”
Every time Microsoft Home Server makes a backup, it’ll take a snapshot. Those snapshot are like Microsoft XP /Vista’s safe point. As with safe points, just open that up and your file which you thought has been replace is still there.
There are many other things that this software can do and from the talk given, the potential is there.
“Winner !”
“Winner !”
“Winner !”
The final session of the day was robotics. Now not much to say about this talk as it does not spur Serge’s passion.
The people that facilitated the event were
Nic the Emcee from Down Under
Oliver Scheer from Germany who spoke about Silverlight
Chewy Chong from Singapore on Home Server
Zeddy Iskandar from Indonesia on Robotics Studio
Rohan Thomas from Malaysia on Popfly
Many thanks to Nuffnang for organizing this event of which met a long time schoolmate which he has not seen for nearly 5 years. We could say, that Nuffnang makes us make money, brings bloggers together and also as part of their awesomeness, bring old friends together.
“The Trio”
Other famous people who attended the event was Smashpop and Jeff Ooi. Other famous but Serge just cannot remember their blogs right now were there as well
The above is using Popfly’s Mash-Up and requires Silverlight. Windows Plugin and Mac Plugin available.
You can also check out the album at Sembang Tech.Ed Pictures
Tags: Techno News, Visual Comm
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