Gartner is holding its Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit at the "lovely" Rio hotel in Las Vegas.  I have "won" the task of blogmeister for the week which means I get to run around taking pictures, interviewing, capturing thoughts from talks, etc. and shipping them off for publication to the Gartner ADI blog. My flickr accountt will have pictures.  See that work really does get done in Las Vegas and that hopefully not everything that "happens" or is heard in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.

Lately I have been having a major hair pulling experience with Vista and Windows Update.  A couple weeks back sound quit working and that in turn makes the entire system unstable.  IE and Windows itself (since it is a big Explorer) hang, iTunes won't start, etc.  Problem a new driver was downloaded and installed.  However, this doesn't show as an auto-update item so you can pull it out, rollback driver doesn't seem to work (so there may be a couple conflicting pieces here) you have to select a baseline and roll the machine back to that state...then I just have to wait about a day and Windows Update does its job and puts me back where I started.  I hate the idea that I need to go to real configuration management software for my little home network which means manually having to run each update, test the system and then "release" it to the family for use.  This however seems to fit the goal of much technology currently.  Keep sucking up more and more time until we are totally subservient to the technology that makes our lives so much easier.

Lately we have been car shopping and for many years the internet has been a great source of information (and disinformation) to help narrow the search, understand ratings and pricing.  I have been bouncing back and forth between Yahoo Autos and MSN Autos and while both have lots of information and different information: MSN has reviewers as well as user reviews and pulls information from Consumer Reports and has the price it with options function, Yahoo does a better more flexible job with total cost to own, and showing estimated market price vs. list.  But what really sets Yahoo apart for me is the way the site is built.  It is what I would call web user friendly.  What to see cars from Mazda, that is http://autos.yahoo.com/mazda or for a specific model that would be http://autos.yahoo.com/suzuki_grand_vitara_luxury_4wd/ .  The same basic information from MSN is http://autos.msn.com/browse/Mazda.aspx (not too bad) or http://autos.msn.com/research/vip/overview.aspx?year=2007&make=Suzuki&model=Grand%20Vitara.  After you have the yahoo pattern down it is very fast to get to just where you want to be but the MSN style forces you pretty much to work through drop downs and build the query and then get to the car you want.  While I appreciate the data consolidation on the MSN site, I really like the navigation ease of Yahoo.

The iPhone looks sweet and they are starting the barrage of ads as it hits the street in a few weeks...of course probably way lower supply than demand already.  However, the ads I have  been seeing today are all about "the real internet" and you see a user moving around a page then selecting a link and it looks like you are on a normal high-speed connection only with scrolling to see all the page.  If I understand from talking to the AT&T guys the iPhone is GSM/GPRS/Edge capable not UMTS which is the fastest system plus the one that supports simultaneous voice/data.  So it makes a cool add but the "real internet" that you are going to have on this phone isn't quite what they show...at least not over the mobile network.  However, it does support WiFi so you can use it like any other wireless 802.11g device and then have much faster connection speeds.  So, very cool but still not perfect.

Google has a relatively new tool for creating mashups with Google Spreadsheets and Google Maps.  This seems like there are a couple cool ways to utilize this in the HAM world.  One would be to dump from your LogBook to pull a map of all the contacts you have made and the other would be to feed APRS data into the system for plotting rather than using a stand-alone package.  I have been working on my own logging system and also been playing with Ham Radio Deluxe and this seems like some nice integrations that could be done combining info from QRZ and these other sources.

CodeGear has changed CEO's.  Hopefully rather than being like the parent company this isn't going to be a regular occurance but a shift from the original move to sell CodeGear off to a recognition that they need to establish a track record and then potetntially return to the market with Ben Smith going back to his natural home in finance and bringing in a startup guy to try and grow this thing.

I was interviewed last week byRedmond Developer News to talk about Microsoft's efforts to win developers early with their Visual Studio Express products and the relatively new Beginner Developer Learning Center.  I applaud the overall effort and when I was working at MSFT I went to a preso on some simplified development tools for building games where one of the leads on the project had his kid come in and demo what he had done.  More needs to be done in the US to rebuild interest from students in technical degress.  When I grew up, I was fascinated by electronics and building things (I still am) and that drove me down many interesting paths.  While US universities still have a lot of great research going on, the is a shrinking number of US students in technical programs.  The same is true for most of Europe. 

I believe that this creates an interesting paradox for MSFT.  Certainly one they are trying to respond to now in many ways.  This is that there are declining numbers of new technical talent in developed countries and a growing number of people in emerging economies.  So you have a shift in where thought for new technology is being developed.  At the same time, these countries don't already have a huge dependence on MSFT, nor do they want to commit a large portion of their capital to building a bigger MSFT.  Thus in these locations, the lure of open source is strong.  When I get to the MSFT learning center who am I greated by...some preppy private school white kid.  Probably reality here but I wonder how MSFT will effectively reach out on a global basis?  How do they inspire a generation that realizes that power comes from content and who would rather focus on YouTube than coding a new version of tetris?  What are they doing that inspires cool? 

They certainly have the resources to bring together a lot of content and to teach a lot of kids but you have to do some digging at the MSFT site to even find this stuff, unlike Eclipse you can't extend the environment or add new functionality (it is specifically locked against add-ins so as not to compete with Pro etc.), there isn't a cool scripting version, and most important, it is a one way pipe.    MSFT is missing the key ingredient for working with the digital generation, there is NO Community.

Microsoft teams have for several years utilized personnas as a way to categorize users and drive product requirements.  For developers there are 3 types of developers and as feature sets are planned for VS, these come into play.  A personna describes behavior, attitudes, and approaches utilized in working on problems and with the system.  Now MSFT has embarked on a path to personify Linux users in an attempt to better understand the market and to presumably build into its own products the attributes that will be attractive to these users.  Currently as can be seen on the site, the personnas are woven into product releases but appear as part of a "battle card" to help point out to sales partners how to potentially win more business. 

I believe it will be challenging to really weave the personnas into the product line because the product teams already have personnas for customers and you have to keep them happy.  In addition not all of the personnas are going to be satisfied by specific feature/function changes, it is pricing, behavior, market, influences.  However, it is interesting insight into the market that actually will be useful to the Linux communitee as well.  What is interesting is that this channel (beta) is up on the internet for anyone to look at currently...like open source market research. 

If you are a Linux user, take a look and see how you have been identified.

I think this is a great idea.  For me as an industry analyst, most vendor events are mostly a waste of time but with online I can focus on sessions that will be useful, don't have to travel and can work like normal.  For CodeGear it cuts down on costs, get a feel for where the faithful are at and get something going early.  Planning a conference and scheduling, etc. take LONG lead times and while CodeGear could just throw in with the Borland conference, I like that they are building their own presence and getting something out there now and on their own.  I expect that this conference will be a place where they can really launch their new product oriented at dynamic development languages Delphi for PHP and now that are rumors of a commercial Ruby endeavor it is time for this team to get active about the future.  I would still like to see the company do more with dynamic web technologies but they are making good steps.  It will be a new challenge to go at a market where Free has been the standard mantra for several year.

This team has to be scrambling to pull this conference together and get all the site developed though I am sure much of the content was already lining up for other occasions.  It will be a good measure of if this company can execute in the marketing department and if they can create some buzz. 

I just loaded up and am using Windows Live Writer for this post.  It seems like a nice overall tool though you don't have much capability to control the site just create new content.  You get spell checking, WYSIWYG editing, can manage different blogs from one tool, open posts that are already there for editing or create new ones but you can't create new catagories (at least in current beta).  Overall though it is a better editing experience that working inside the Live system itself.  You can easily switch between views from html to web preview, add metadata like related URLs, keywords, etc.  When editing posts from the desktop overall this is a nice way to work. 

There is support for browsers other than IE and for Blogs other than Live and a plug-in community and a bunch of these like inserting screen captures and movies will radically simplify the ability to create better overall posts for Live.  The current edit environment is a pain for many of these things.

If you haven't seen it yet, Live Search Maps now has a 3D view that lets you tilt and rotate the view.  The map the link goes to is looking from just past were we live towards Seattle and the Olympic Mountain range.  It is really cool and you can fly around the landscape, etc.  You can do hybrid views blending the aerial photos with the landscapes.  It seems like a lot of the technology that Microsoft has had and "perfected" over the years with Flight Simulator is being put to use behind this application. 

I say "perfected" because Flight Simluator X on my Vista box (now fully Vista Ultimate capable) is definitely not tuned and inspite of the fact that I exceed the required performance for memory, proc, video, I still can't get full rendering and after flying around I often have wild z-buffering issues.  Still in Live this is totally cool and you should check it out.