truetech

Today started off with a nice breakfast, followed by the REAL World 2008 Keynote. Right off the bat, the projector was causing trouble. After a few moments of watching the Omni staff fuss with the set up, Geoff quipped, “If I was Steve Jobs, people would be getting fired right now.”

Once the equipment was up and running, Geoff began by talking about the past year. He said that their platform distribution is evening out, with Mac users still commanding 44% of their sales, followed by Windows at 34%, and Linux at 23%. Both Mac and Linux sales are growing, though. In particular, their Linux user base is up 48%. That’s pretty impressive. In addition, their revenue is up by 43%. That’s encouraging news to hear about a company to whose fate you have hitched your proverbial wagon.

I did get some Cocoa news, but only as much as this: the Cocoa transition plan has resumed and will be worked on this year. Here’s hoping.

Then Geoff gave us some statistics from their surveys. 99% of their users are male. No great surprise there, at least judging from the demographics I see at REAL World each year. The number one reason for using REALbasic that people listed was developing cross-platform applications. Number two was building database applications. A full 66% do both. Perhaps not coincidentally, my two sessions today were on Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Understanding SQL.

Next up was REAL SQL Server news. Some great new features coming up include LifeSaver (which is essentially Time Machine for REAL SQL Server), client messaging (which can be server-to-client, client-to-server, or client-to-client), server plug-ins (which allows you to put your business logic in the database itself), and multi-version concurrency control (which you have to be a database nerd to understand, so I’ll just link to a description). Cool stuff.

As Paul surmised, 2008 looks like it will be the Year of the Database for REALbasic, which tickles me pink, or at least peach. Geoff showed off some upcoming database features that will be rolled into REALbasic. The first was connection sets for databases: connecting to different databases for development, testing, and production. The second was more exciting: automatic data models, based on the schema of your database. In other words, REALbasic looks at your tables and creates classes for each one, with properties representing the table’s columns. Very, very cool.

After a short break, Inspiring Applications (comprised of Brad Weber and Joe Strout) took the stage and announced Yuma. I’m so freaking excited about Yuma that I can barely write about it. It’s an HTML preprocessor like PHP, but with REALbasic syntax. This is good because PHP is nasty. It’s powerful and ubiquitous, but it looks like someone with a mouthful of punctuation sneezed all over my screen. Yuma appears to be powerful, flexible, and reasonably priced. Kudos to Inspiring Applications on this one. I think I heard Swordfish die, only to be reborn in a new form.

Lastly, the three keynote contest winners gave their talks. First up was Paul Lefebvre, who gave us all a much appreciated reminder on the value of simplicity. Paul is the Community Evangelist for REALbasic, and I was glad to hear him speak on simplicity. I’d heard one of his sessions at REAL World before, so I knew I’d enjoy his talk. Next was my boss and friend David Mancuso, who talked about how REALbasic has transformed how we do things at Etown. David is a great presenter and spent a lot of time talking about how awesome I am, so two thumbs up! Lastly was Jay Jennings, the man with the mohawk, who gave me a much needed kick in the pants about marketing my stuff. His best line: “I went to get a PCjr in 1984 but went to the wrong store and ended up buying an Apple II by accident.” Hehe.

After the morning keynote a nice lunch, we began with the breakout sessions. I attended Version Control and Team Development by Jon Johnson and then Internet Classes by Andrew Bredow. Both were very good. Then I taught my two sessions, which I think went pretty well.

And then there was dinner. Wow. They took us to the Alamo Drafthouse, which is a movie theater and a restaurant. They bring you the food right in the theater seats. Then they showed Back To The Future complete with MST3k-style commentary from Master Pancake Theater, three very funny guys. I mean very funny. My face still hurts from laughing. The food was good, too.

Another year, another REAL World. David picked me up just after six o’clock this morning. We headed to Philadelphia, and from there we flew to Chicago. Our connecting flight was delayed due to weather conditions in Chicago, but we eventually got on our flight to Austin. Our flight to Austin took longer than anticipated because of a storm in Austin. The pilot suggested we might have to land in San Antonio instead, but the weather broke, and we made it to Austin.

All in all, not bad. I could have done with the delays, but it could have been so much worse.

After checking into the hotel, David and I went down to Stubb’s for a quick dinner, then we headed back to the hotel so we could pre-register for the conference. They gave us some really nice stuff this year, including a 1 Gb flash drive with PDF versions of all of the conference sessions. They used to give out CDs, but I think the flash drives are much more practical. No shirt this year, though. Oh well, I have four REALbasic shirts in my collection already.

Apparently Bud Cort, who played Harold in Harold and Maude, was in the hotel at this time. Pretty random, eh?

While David did his sound check for his part of tomorrow’s keynote, I chatted briefly with Marco Bambini about REAL SQL Server, and I must say I’m looking forward to his sessions, especially the one about packaging REAL SQL Server into your application. That should be really interesting.

Then I had to find a drugstore, because I’m an idiot. I forgot toothpaste and I forgot my Zyrtec and I brought along a razor blade that I’m afraid will shred my scalp if I try to use it (note to other folks at REAL World 2008: if you see me bleeding profusely from the head, I’m probably okay). Also, my deodorant exploded en route.

So tomorrow kicks off with the keynote, which is part Geoff Perlman, part Jay Jennings, part Paul Lefebvre, and part David Mancuso. It should be a very interesting and entertaining keynote. Personally, I’m really hoping for some information on Cocoa or on Swordfish, but I’m not holding my breath this year.

I would imagine there will be some sort of group-edited play by play of the keynote. If that happens, I’ll do my best to save it and post it here.

I also teach two sessions tomorrow: Understanding SQL and Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Tricks. Understanding SQL is a slimmed down version of the database session I did last year, which will focus just on the SQL language itself. Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Tricks is mostly the same as the session I did last year, but updated to reflect some changes in REALbasic since then. I teach one more session, All About Toolbars, on Thursday.

Here’s Paul’s rundown on Day Zero.

This is my son, Jonathan.

We adopted him today at the Lancaster County Courthouse.

He moved in with us a little more than a year ago, but since he was still in foster care, I couldn’t say anything about him. But now he’s all mine and I can say whatever I want, so here he is!

Handsome fellow, isn’t he? Takes after his old man, I guess.

I’ll write some more about the adoption itself soon (I had no idea the hearing itself would be so involved yet simultaneously so anti-climactic), but I just wanted to make sure everyone out there knows that this is my son.

So, DreamHost (who hosts this site) went down tonight. Hard. Nothing was working. I wasn’t sure what to make of it until I saw this:

Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline. This includes all email, web hosting, etc. A technician is about 15 minutes out from our datacenter to undo this mistake.
I apologize for this mistake. I was intending to be editing our non-live access-list, and edited the live one by mistake.

It would be really easy to sit here and pass judgement, and declare my intention to leave DreamHost, and all that stuff. But you know what? Accidents happen. Typos happen. And I really respect that they were honest about what happened, even though it’s rather embarrassing.

Besides, after the SQL oopsie I pulled at work today, I’m hardly one to judge.

Wow, these are pretty funny. Here’s my favorite of the bunch: Garlic, The Silent Killer.

Okay, so I signed up for Twitter. And then I set up my Twitter RSS feed to display on this blog. And then I installed a Facebook application that uses my last Twitter message (I refuse to call them tweets) as my Facebook message.

And then I got to thinking. Why not use Proxi to set my iChat status to my last Twitter message?

So, yeah. I’m a huuuuuuge dork.

The Freakonomics blog asked some experts to weigh in on the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war. My favorite comment was from Andrei Hagiu, shop assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School:

Perhaps one lesson that this particular war drives home particularly well is this: not fighting in the first place might be a very good strategy to win, if only the contestants could be smart enough at the beginning. Mounting investments in standard wars is akin to a bidding war for a $20 bill: once you’ve decided to participate, you are sucked into a wasteful battle, in which people bid higher than $20.

Certainly true enough.

Great article by a non-tech type dude who wanders into the Apple Store at the mall. Not intending to buy anything, he walks out with a new machine: It was bitter cold, snowing. The mall was quiet. You could actually hear the water streaming from the marble fountain a floor away. But the Apple Store was packed with people–folks laughing, banging keyboards, sampling the rows of gleaming computers and gadgets, like they were in a high tech Disney World fun park. And there were no give-aways, no store discounts; just another (frigidly cold) day at the mall.

Me? I love the Apple Store, although I’ve only been to a couple of them: King of Prussia (David and I made a pilgrimage on its opening day in 2001 or 2002) and Chicago (when I went to PowerSchool University in 2004). Grace still remembers “the cool computer store” we went to in Chicago, even though she was only five at the time and she’s soon turning nine. She just thought it was cool that they had a kids’ section, and that they let the kids try anything they wanted. And that they had bean bags chairs at the kids’ computers.

I do wish that Apple would open a store closer to me. King of Prussia is the closest, and that’s a good 90 minute drive. Ideally, I’d love to see one at Park City Center in Lancaster, but that’s probably unrealistic. Maybe Harrisburg? Or even York? Come on, Apple! There are large pockets of non-Amish across central Pennsylvania!