All aboard!

Nov 102005

Well tomorrow I am off to the west coast AGAIN. I’m leaving for San Jose at 10:45 AM. Gonna get there a little early. It’s for some Sylantro training session. I am not attending as a student, however. I am helping out with some of the labs and they want me to check out the program they have so that I can help them with future training sessions. All in all, it’s a distraction right now since TEO is getting so close to wrap up, but I promised I would do it and I want to keep my relationship good with them.

With that said, I decided to do things a little differently this time. Rather than fly to San Jose (which by the way, no one does nonstop) I decided to take a train for a variety of reasons.

First of all, I hate air travel. Scared to death of it. I try to avoid it whenever possible but it’s even worse when I have to travel alone and even worse still when I have to make multiple stops.

Second of all, (well kinda goes along with the first one) is that I lose lots of sleep and I get very distracted in the days leading up to a flight. This is extremely unproductive. I’m really looking forward to a cross country train ride though. Not feeling nervous before travel is a great feeling that I’m not used to.

Third of all, flying sucks unless you do it first class. I hate breathing that recycled air, feeling cramped like sardines next to some fat smelly knucklehead who acts like I just flipped off the pope every time I want to get to the bathroom or stretch my legs. It’s a 6 hour flight to San Jose from Philly and it’s not fun. I looked into first class and it was a lot more expensive than I thought it would be (granted, the week before I was supposed to leave). That still doesn’t solve problems #1 and #2.

So I booked a first class train ticket on Amtrak.com from Philly to Santa Clara. I’ve got a bedroom so I can sleep and most importantly work on TEO uninterrupted. I’ll have EVDO or 1xRTT for much of the trip so I’ll still be connected. On a train, they have lounge cars and bar cars where you can watch football games and have a few beers.

This is my first time on a long distance train ride so I’m real excited. I packed lots of food and clothing and my supplies:

  • My tablet of course
  • 3 GPS’s (with Streets & Trips to watch my progress)
  • Advil, Pepto, Tums, sleep aid, etc
  • Nintendo DS
  • Book: Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Couple of Seinfeld, South Park, Simpsons, etc. episodes
  • My EVDO-equipped Pocket PC Phone

And of course my entire itinerary is in Outlook along with maps of my destination when I get there.

The whole trip will take about 3.5 days each way and I’m staying for 5 days. I have some business I need to tend to with the folks from Sylantro before the training. This will be the longest I have been away from my fiancé, Heather since we started dating. I’m sure it will be as tough for her as it will be for me. But I’ve got the web cam and I will be in touch with her regularly. I’ll try not to say anything corny like my dad has been doing from his boat in the middle of the Atlantic…

I’ll try to be in touch via email if you have any support issues.

Sylantro Global Summit is a blast!

Sep 132005

This is without a doubt the most fun at a conference I’ve ever had. The hotel we are staying in (JW Marriot in Las Vegas) is amazing. Maybe Coar’s Tours should do a review haha (inside joke). But seriously the pool area is huge. That is where I am at this moment with my Tablet PC on the Verizon EVDO network.

I’ve done far more pimping of the Tablet PC platform than I have of my own Sylantro development efforts. The thing is, my presentation was targeted completely wrong. Apparently I misunderstood that the session called “Developer Roundtable” which I (a developer) was asked to speak at would only have about 5% of the audience that were developers. About the same percentage raised their hand when I asked how many used Microsoft .NET with their Sylantro deployment. Not good, but completely expected. After all, up until now, Sylantro has pushed the Java platform for integration. Their API’s were EJB and CORBA based. Only recently (and not even released yet) were there web services and even more recently (at Supercomm) did they announce a partnership with Microsoft and a plan to port to Windows.

So my intention is to help build up the Sylantro .NET community which they need to thrive in the Windows world. But I’m not coming away with much else from the conference and I don’t think I got through to many people. But like I said, it was not my target audience.

With that said, I am having tons of fun here in Vegas with Heather. We spent most of today by the pool and in the hot tub. We were completely alone in the hot tub which is kinda secluded. I can’t say enough how beautiful this place is.

Virtual Earth demo will be featured in Pete Bonee’s keynote

Sep 072005

Talked to Sylantro and they liked what I did with the Virtual Earth demo that I am going to present at Sylantro Global Summit and they want to demo it during the keynote. That’ll be really cool because it will get me some exposure to non-developers too. Since my session later that day will be focused on developers, the marketing oriented people probably won’t see it.

While the application itself doesn’t have a lot of practical application (perhaps in a call center to quickly visualize where a regional problem may be occurring) what the application represents is more important – the integration of Sylantro and .NET to enable better business processes and bridge the gap between two completely different worlds.

I’m excited about this conference. I’ll talk more about it when I get back.

Sylantro and Virtual Earth

Aug 222005

I decided to try my hand at incorporating Virtual Earth into a Windows Forms application and surprisingly, it wasn’t all that difficult.

The result of my work will be downloadable after the Sylantro Global Summit in September and this screen shot gives you a basic idea of what it does.

r_SNAG-0025

Einstein Technologies at Sylantro Global Summit 2005

Jul 222005

I have been invited to speak on behalf of Einstein Technologies at the Sylantro Global Summit 2005 (Las Vegas, Sept 12-14), a private conference for Sylantro customers, partners, and developers. I accepted the invitation and I’m really excited to showcase some of the awesome technologies I have developed around SAI and CDR using Microsoft .NET.

While my development of SAI.NET and CDR.NET have slowed significantly (temporarily halted, even) due to the tons of work I’ve been investing in Tablet PC, I am going to continue to try to juggle these two technologies because I think they both have a lot of potential and I’m really proud of the work I’ve done with both.

Oh and I’m taking Heather with me this time so there’s no chance of coming back to find that she moved to another state.

Whoever SAId programming was fun?

May 292005

Been working on my C# implementation of the Sylantro Application Interface (SAI) all week, including this weekend. Don’t really have a catchy name for it right now other than SAI.NET. It’s going to come in two flavors: A command-level layer and an application-level layer. I’m currently working on the lower level command layer.

Here’s how it basically works…

SAI is a bidirectional TCP/IP stream that receives and sends comma separated values. The number of commands is pretty massive. I think I counted something like 50. But anyway the commands are not human friendly, the structures are inconsistent and unpredictable, and being CSV, you need a reference manual just to see what’s coming and going. Enter SAI.NET’s command interface.

What I’ve done is basically grouped all of the commands by common parameters and behavioral categories and created a large (really large actually) object model hierarchy. Each command class represents a command in the SAI specification.

Then we’ve got the all important magical Connection object which hides the underlying TCP/IP tasks that are required to maintain a successful SAI session such as authentication, session keep alive, and asynchronous command responses and events.

All in all, I really like the application and once I start working on the application layer (you gotta see it in action to appreciate how cool that is) I will talk about some examples of what I’m doing with it.

The bottom line is, I am getting burnt out from all this work. I didn’t go out all week/weekend. I did however, get a significant amount of work done out on the balcony though and I got to sit and watch afternoon rain showers which I always find fun to watch and a really nice and sunny day today. I’m actually out on the balcony now in my pajamas. Hope the neighbors don’t mind.

Oh well back to work. Just thought I’d take a break and ramble on about some useless shit.

Working the booth at VON

Mar 102005

Thanks so much to Sylantro Systems who was kind enough to invite Einstein Technologies to their booth at VON. I got to meet a lot of great people and show them how Einstein Technologies is developing the technology on top of the Sylantro platform that makes the best hosted PBX and IP Centrex platform even better!

VON 2005 008

For a guy that hates to fly…

Jan 232005

For a guy that hates to fly, I’ve sure got a lot of it coming up. Microsoft is being kind enough to accommodate me at Microsoft Windows Anywhere, a conference for Tablet PC developers and enthusiasts which is located in San Francisco, CA. I of course live outside of Philadelphia so I have about a 6 hour trip. The conference is Feb 6-10 but you’ll need a lot more than Tablet PC’s and fellow geeks to pry me away from the Superbowl. Especially since I’m sure the Eagles are going.

Once that’s done, I will be representing Einstein Technologies as an attendee for VON the VoIP conference in San Jose, CA March 7-10. Another 6 hour trip, only this time with a stop. Twice as many takeoff’s and landings. Sigh.

I have a completely irrational fear of flying. I hate it. Scared to death of it. All I can think of are engines falling off, failing during takeoff, landing gear not coming down, etc. Terrorists don’t scare me. We know now how to deal with terrorists. Human error and mechanical failure scares me. After all, I want to make it long enough to get to Mars, don’t I?