Technically Speaking

I met with someone this morning at breakfast who works for an Irish company aimed at helping non-developer types create applications for mobile devices.  Including the iPhone.

How does it work?

You can download the application from your devices app store and an Adobe Air based application for PC or Mac from TheAppBuilder.com.  Then you start pulling in content, perhaps your twitter stream (by selecting the twitter portion within the builder and entering your username) or a feed for your blog, by selecting Feed and entering the URL to the feed you wish to fetch.

After adding some content and clicking Done, your information is pulled into the emulator (or preview app on your device).  You can customize tile names and make changes to content to get it suited to your needs all within the preview/builder app. Getting this going doesn’t cost anything.  the preview features are free, its when you go all in and publish content for mobile that you will be billed.

What is the cost?

After playing with the preview and poking around the site for a bit I found that there are three plans:

Preview – free starter plan to allow you to preview your work

Standard – the basic content plan which costs 29$ per month and includes free setup

Premium – the whole enchilada which includes developer support and other things and costs $59/month with a $499 setup fee

With the Premium service you get to create your own app store accounts and charge for your app, standard accounts cannot charge for an app.

Are you serious?  My own App?

Being a blogger for both my own amusement (this blog) and other paid publications I can see where extending your brand to a mobile environment… wait, I meant all the popular mobile environments (iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7) could be a hugely worthwhile move.  The applications can receive content updates as soon as they are made, for example, if I am out at the Microsoft MVP Summit Reception and take a photo of someone doing a headstand for a beer (stranger things have happened) and wanted to push that out within my app, I could select it from the camera roll and off it goes.

In addition to feeds and twitter streams, you can include the following:

News – which allows you to publish events and other stories right to the mobile app

Contact – your contact information

Web – a webpage right in the app

YouTube – a YouTube Channel

Gallery – a photo gallery

All of these parts can be used for multiple items within the app, for example a feed containing this blogs content and another feed containing content from other blogs or publications I work with.  It is all very simple to get moving with and really requires no developer chops at all.  I would suggest a mobile friendly theme for your blog if you are going to use a feed, but will caution you that the emulator does not render as a mobile browser when testing.  This was the only thing that I found frustrating, other than that the app is a breeze to use.

I am considering taking myself mobile but will likely spend some time talking further with my contact at JamPot before I do.

The last couple days (minus travel) I have been in Fort Collins CO learning about Converged Infrastructure, 3PAR, VirtualSystem and other things HP is doing in storage.  I got the invite about a month ago and having attended other events in the past, I was all in.

I am not sure if the knowledge, and technical learning or the people and networking I get the opportunity to do is the best part.  I will admit, the technical things I liked the most were the ones I knew the least about going in.  My organization is small, and we have bigger storage than we did even two years ago, but some of the storage I have been learning about lately is definitely in the Big Enterprise category.

3PAR

I knew 3PAR was a service provider focussed storage company that HP acquired.  That is about it.  I think I also knew they used yellow bezels.  Some of the programming and data handling software that 3PAR is using to efficiently handle data is amazing.  A good amount of the decisions made (once the user decides where the data should be placed) are handled on the backend in the array.

Once the offload happens, 3PAR has a set of algorithms and software called ASIC that get to work on the commands passed in by an admin.  The compute work is also handled in storage and the whole thing is very fast.  The hands on lab was a great experience, allowing me to play with a 3PAR array, something I will likely not get to do in the real world.

It would be cool if HP could make some of these labs available via the web to allow further learning by us geeks who just have a desire to know as much as we can hold about storage.

I know that I havent covered everything we saw from 3PAR, but for me the ASIC discussion and the efficiency of the system were definitely the highlights.

Virtual System

I have always wanted a kick ass pile of compute in a box.  You know, the kind that falls from the sky and plugs in, bringing you an enterprise quality system.  HP is doing this on medium, large, and huge scale.  They sell certain levels of virtual system which brings compute, management compute, networking, and storage into one or more interconnected rack enclosures.  The customer works with HP and chooses the options they want, and the racks appear  (plus shipping of course). Even though the systems can be high to start, it is a ground up, quick way to take the mess out of a datacenter and get a clean, fast, product that just works.

Networking

The networking opportunity that came from this event, with both other bloggers (some of whom I had met before and some new faces) and HP employees was incredible.  I know that I will be reaching out to a few of the HP-ers to learn more about some of these products and to the other bloggers to help my network and general knowledge of storage technology grow.  I am amazed how much I have learned over the past few years both from attending events and meeting people.

Next up.

Once I get back to Wisconsin (boarding the plane in just under 2 hours) I will be knee deep in Tech On Tap.  That kicks off tomorrow and really is a similar event in style to what I have been doing this week.  On a smaller scale, since we selected a technology and found some smart people to come in and help us talk about it. As much as I am tired at the moment, I cant wait to see what tomorrow brings.

I know that I will also be chasing down a good digital recorder before I goto another event like this.  It is really hard to keep up sometimes and maybe getting notes that way and sculpting them into useful stuff after that is the way to do it.  I missed a good chunk of a virtualization integration session while fielding a couple of support calls, nobodys fault, but a good opportunity to record and review later.  The portions of the session I did catch were interesting to say the least.  I have a lot to learn about virtualization.

Thank you

I want to thank HP (@HPStorageguy and @beccataylor) for putting this event together and all the other HP-ers and bloggers who participated and helped me learn something new.

 So this week is storming right by and is capped off with a trip to Fort Collins CO to learn about 3Par and Lefthand and how HP does storage.  I am interested to learn more about both of these products, and even storage in general. There will be lots of useful discussion for sure which is the best part.  

Bringing bloggers together to discuss and learn about HP products and the tech that makes them work is great and I’m glad to participate.  Like others attending I have read some of the white papers covering both 3par and Lefthand but have no experience with them. No worries, I’m sure it is coming soon. After going to CO, next up is Tech on Tap I am very much looking forward to the first event and hope it is the first of many.

Time to pack and charge my iDevices.

It all started with an idea during a panel session at the Microsoft MVP Summit earlier this year.  Simply stated, my thought was that sessions in or near the bar are almost always full.  Why don’t we do some sessions locally for all different types of technologists and geeks at brewpubs.  This way we can all network around beer and the technology du jour.

When I got home, I talked with Jes Borland (@grrl_geek) about the idea and if I remember she was on board from the word beer.  We did some brainstorming and came up with a few ideas to help determine if this was feasible or not.  Amazingly, it was very feasible.

After some discussion we enlisted another person to help out.  Mark Cyrulik (@mcyrulik) came on board almost as fast as Jes did, although I think that discussion was a few tweets.

Then came some paperwork and more brainstorming and as of this week, Tech on Tap spun up and we are racing toward our first event.

What is the idea?

Brewpubs are great places to network and socialize and technology is fun. Bring the two together and who knows what kind of learning might happen.

For more details about the organization and upcoming events visit Tech on Tap.

Our first session on Virtualization is Saturday November 12th 2011 at the Stone Cellar Brew Pub in Appleton.  We have an attendance limit for this event of 50 people.  If we get more signups than we can accommodate, that will help us work toward the next Tech On Tap Session.

Where are the details?

The details of the specific events, especially the first one are still being finalized and are coming soon.  Because this is our first event, it will likely take a little longer than we’d like, but should make going forward that much easier.

Thank you for all your help

Working on this project has been exciting and sometimes a bit scary, but Jes and Mark have been great partners in getting this rolling.  Without their help, and form filling skills, I do not think this would have been more than an idea.  You guys Rock!

My wife Laura is also at the top of my thank you list because she believed my idea was worth a shot and that I wasn’t crazy for going after it.  Sure I’m busy and have a lot on my plate, but what’s one more thing?  Thanks Honey.

We hope that others in the Fox Valley will find these sessions useful and share them with those they know.

I head to Austin Tx for Tech Field Day 7 on Wednesday morning. Should be a good couple days of sessions and overall discussion. I am not sure at the moment who I am most looking forward to. I think all of the presenters have things that interest me.

The Presenters are:

Dell (Dell | @Dell_Storage)

SolarWinds (SolarWinds | @SolarWinds_Inc)

Symantec (Symantec | @Symantec)

Veeam (Veeam | @Veeam)

Some of them I have seen before, but there are new product releases since then and probably some new faces as well. I think the networking opportunity is what I like the best about Tech Field Day. In my neck of the weeds… er woods there aren’t many user groups so these events and the online stuff that tends to go with them are high on my list. Although the local tech stuff may be changing soon, but I cannot divulge that just yet.

I am looking forward to seeing some old friends again and definitely making some new ones. These events are busy, but in my past experiences they are enjoyable.

A bit of a thank you in advance to Stephen, Matt, and the rest of the TechFieldDay crew, without them, we wouldn’t be doing this. Oh and for the links above, I apologize as the editor I can access right now doesn’t seem to HTML friendly – will fix those soon. Update: Links Fixed… much better.

Over the next few days I will be attending the Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond.  This year, another organization, GeekGive.org reached out to the MVP community in partnership with Microsoft to provide volunteer time for Northwest Harvest.

Northwest Harvest is an organization in the Seattle area that helps provide food to local food pantries to feed people in this area who need assistance.

When I read about what GeekGive was doing, I was happy to chip in and help.  The MVP group, of which there were 60 or so volunteers, spend this morning packing pasta and frozen green beans to be distributed throughout Seattle.  This was a great experience and I hope that the great people behind GeekGive keep up their hard work in helping us (the geeks) give back to the communities we serve.

Microsoft helped to coordinate the event and get us all over to Northwest Harvest to help out, they too deserve a huge thank you.

As for myself, I worked with the pasta team to package about 8 pallets of bulk pasta for redistribution.  I had a great time and met some really great people today all while helping people in need.  Thanks Geek Give for the opportunity.