Software Development in the Real World

Deep Zoom Composer

If you Silverlight 2 Beta 1 announcements at MIX, you should know that Silverlight 2 includes support for the Deep Zoom technology to allow you to quickly and smoothly zoom in on really large images. You have to check it out to see what I am talking about, it's pretty crazy cool.  If you want to see an amazing implementation of the Deep Zoom technology, check out the Hard Rock Memorabilia site: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Deep Zoom Composer allows you to quickly import your own images, arrange and position them to your liking, and export the final output as either a Deep Zoom Image or Collection that can be fed into Silverlight's MutliScaleImage control. This means that you too can use your own images and display them using our Deep Zoom technology.

Deep Zoom is related to the SeaDragon technology that Microsoft has been demoing in their PhotoSynth application.

 

  Download Deep Zoom Composer

 

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Deep Zoom

Headed to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco

The Web 2.0 Expo is coming!  If you are in the San Francisco area the week of April 21st, 2008, make sure you ping me and come check out the Web 2.0 Expo.  The Web 2.0 expo is a combined conference and tradeshow.  Last year's event drew over 8,500 people.  This years event promises to be even bigger.

There are nine different tracks you can choose from in the conference including:

• Strategy and Business Models
  Marketing and Community
  Design and User Experience
  Fundamentals
  Development
  Focus on Mobile Web
  Focus on Web Operations
  Focus on Social Platforms
  Sponsored Sessions

What really sets this expo apart besides all the different tracks, is the level of interaction you can have with everyone at the event.  It also has vendors and companies from all different platforms, which makes this conference so appealing.

You can check out all the speakers, join the facebook group, join the crowdvine, and download the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Brochure.

Conference Speakers I Will Not Miss!

Marc Andreessen - A Conversation

Multi-millionaire software engineer and Silicon Valley "whiz kid" entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a cofounder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

Max Levchin - A Conversation

Max is the visionary behind Slide, the largest social software company in the world. He is also renowned as the co-founder of PayPal, an expert in combating online fraud and one of the hardest working entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Before starting Slide, he incubated several other start-ups, including Yelp, where he currently sits as Chairman of the Board. Max started PayPal in 1998, immediately after graduating from college, and sold it four years later to eBay for more than $1.5 billion at the age of 26. Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Max moved to Chicago at the age of 16 and later received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max sits on the board of several other companies and trains for triathlons when he’s not obsessing over Slide’s business.

Rob Bagby - Building a Microsoft RIA from the ground up

A Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. Rob works with customers, as well as delivers presentations at numerous regional and national conferences, to illustrate how to take advantage of Microsoft’s developer technologies to deliver performance and secure applications faster. Rob bases his discussions on over 10 years of consulting experience, along with a Masters Degree in International Business from Thunderbird.

Mitchell Baker - Opening the mobile Web

Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Trained as a lawyer, Baker coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. In 2005, Time magazine included her in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world and she has been affectionately given the title of "Chief Lizard Wrangler" at the Mozilla Corporation.

Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs

Dan Lyons is a senior editor at Forbes and the author of the The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. In the persona of Fake Steve he authored “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs,” a novel. He has published two previous works of fiction, a novel and a collection of short stories. Dan joined Forbes in 1998 and before that wrote for various computer trade publications including CRN and VARBUSINESS. He’s been a journalist for 25 years and has a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Tim O'Reilly - O`Reilly Radar

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also publishes online through the O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

John Allspaw

John has worked in systems operations for over ten years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster.com and Flickr.com, where he currently manages the Operations Engineering group.

Ari Balogh - Yahoo! and Open Platforms

Aristotle “Ari” Balogh is currently Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo!. He is responsible for company-wide product development which includes optimizing resources, speeding innovation, and ensuring the quality of Yahoo!’s products and services. He is focused on establishing a common architecture and building blocks to drive development aligned with corporate strategy and on improving the overall effectiveness of Yahoo!’s engineering efforts. All of Yahoo!’s engineering functions, including technical operations, infrastructure, and internal IT support groups, report into Balogh.

Blaine Cook - Building the Real-time Web

Blaine Cook is the Architect at Twitter. He is currently building and maintaining Twitter’s Jabber-based real-time backend infrastructure that tracks and distributes millions of updates every day to users on the Web, instant messaging, and SMS.

 

 

Technorati Tags: web 2.0,san francisco

Amazon Releases New Fulfilment Web Service

Amazon launched a fantastic web service today that allows merchants to tap into Amazon's network of fulfilment centers and logistical expertise.  Fulfilment Web Service.  Basically you can ship them your products, and they will in turn, store them for you, and ship them whenever you need, to whichever customer you need to ship them to!

What makes this so powerful, and worth noting on this software development blog is that this is the first time someone has successfully merged web services, with such a "brick and mortar" task, and allowed the world to use it through a simple API.

The new Fulfilment Web Service builds upon the Amazon Fulfilment by Amazon service by adding this impressive programmatic access to the fulfilment process.  Manufacturing companies have been doing similar things for years with EDI, however, the implementation of electronic data exchange is very expensive.  With the new fulfilment web service, amazon finally evolves EDI with Web Services, and brings order fulfilment capabilities to millions of entrepreneurs.

What a smart move by amazon.  The do what they do so well, they are building ways of sharing everything they do well, with the rest of the world, and taking a profit in the process.  Books will be a thing of the past in the coming years.  Sure amazon will still sell books and other merchandise, but they will also be the backbend for many companies.  It just makes sense.

Make sure you check out the Amazon Web Services Blog for more details.

Technorati Tags: Amazon,Web Services,Fulfillment by Amazon

Used Macintosh Computers for Cheep

Right now I have ten or so Windows based computers sitting around at home that I use for everything from file servers, to software development machines.  One thing hit me the other day however, I don't really have any Macintosh machines kicking around.  With the baby that has just arrived in our house, I was thinking, wouldn't it be a good idea to have a cute little macintosh in the baby room that I could use to play his favorite music, etc.  I was thinking one of those cute iMac's that came out a few years ago.

I started my search by looking around eBay for a cheep Macintosh, but then I found this awesome site that sells used macs for dirt cheep.  I'm talking up to 75% off.  If you look through the selection they have, it's pretty impressive!  I have always wanted to have a few Macintosh's kicking around the office as well to do testing and some software development on, at these prices, I have to seriously consider getting a couple of them.

Anyway so I think I'm going to order a Macintosh from these guys, its only $299 and will look awesome in the baby room.  I might even get an extra one for the kitchen so that my wife can look up her recipes and what not.

Checkout the DV Warehouse Macintosh selection at: http://www.dvwarehouse.com/Used-Macs-c-53.html

Where in the World is Miguel?

If you read my personal blog at all:  Miguel Carrasco's Real World, you will know that I recently became a proud father!  I have a few software development articles on the go, just putting the final touches on them.  He was born on March 5th (Same day of the legendary Steve Ballmer, Guy Kawasaki Keynote, and same day Silverlight 2.0 was announced!).  I had wanted to go check out Mix this year, but I was little worried the little dude might be early.  And he was!  Same day Mix kicked off!  Is it a sign?  Truthfully my plan is to make sure he is the best at whatever he decides he want's to do, and provide him all he tools he needs.  Of course, I would love it if he followed in my footsteps and had crazy passion for all things software development :P

Some new phrases I've learned:

"Can you get me a cloth"

"I think you have to change his diaper"

"How are we going to eat all this food"

"I want to go out"

"Why won't he just go to sleep"

"He's growing so fast!"

If you want to read a non software development related post from Dominic, read his posting here.