midhudson | It’s always more complicated

Last night we did the first, of what I hope will be many, MHV Android Hack-a-thons. The basic idea was to get folks together that are interested in doing android mobile development, and having others around they could bounce questions off of. We did it at Panera because they have food and wireless, though future sessions probably have to move elsewhere, like Barnes & Noble, because the 9pm closing time came a bit too early.

Turnout was promissing. Frank, Kershaw, and Muller all showed with their android phones and laptops, plus we got 3 other folks that just wanted to see what an android phone looks like. Frank and Kershaw both had the Droid, Muller has a google issued G1, and I’ve got my Hero. It was definitely interesting to see the differences across all of them, and supports my theory that there isn’t a straight road when it comes to android base platforms. The Droid did some things the Hero didn’t, the Hero did some things the Droid didn’t. A big reason for these differences is how modular Android is. You legitimately can replace any part of the core interface with your own code. HTC Sense, for instance, is a Home replacement. You can write your own. HTC also replaced the default mail, sms, contacts, and a few other things. Some for good (mail, contacts), some for worse (messaging power bug). But as a user you are empowered to replace the SMS system with a 3rd party app, which I did.

The evening started off with “oh, have you seen this yet?” which got a lot of knowledge cross shared. Frank’s starting a wiki page to try to keep track of that. I got out my laptop early and started working through the Sudoku example application in Hello Android. It’s a pretty good example that includes many of the widget systems as well as the 2D graphics API. I’m pretty impressed with the book so far. Frank and Kershaw spent some time getting the SDK installed and poking it, and Muller was focused on the Android Scripting Environment to do some python on the phone.

All of use except Muller are still a bit in the “ooo shiney” stage, as I’ve had my phone for a whole month now, and Frank and Kershaw have had theirs for less than a week. I suspect that future hack-a-thons will actually start generating a bit more code. I continue to be impressed by the API model for Android, and really look forward to working on applications on it. Yes, Java is not as nice and terse as Ruby, but at least I won’t have to write widget packing code. And that makes me a happy camper.

Our local IEEE chapter does an annual fall workshop each year. Last year was robots (which I apparently forgot to blog about…). It was quite good, and showed off robots for largely military and educational purposes. Some live demos (not for the military types) and videos were shown over the course of the day. Good times.

This year the IEEE is doing their workshop on Cloud Computing. While the website and pdf still say Nov 3rd… it’s not, it’s Friday the 6th (this event is always on a Friday). I’m going to repost the details embedded in the PDF here, because while google deals with PDFs, it’s a lot easier to refer people to a website.

Sponsored by: The Mid-Hudson Section of the IEEE and The School of Science and Engineering, State University of New York, New Paltz Co-sponsored by the Mid-Hudson IEEE Computer Society

When: Friday, November 6, 2009

Where: The Terrace Restaurant, SUNY New Paltz campus (all campus facilities are fully accessible and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act).

Registration Fee: $20 per person – free to Mid-Hudson IEEE members or students with valid ID (includes coffee breaks and buffet lunch, plus CD ROM with presentation materials and invited papers). Please contact the organizers for information on registration fee waivers due to economic hardship. Advance registration payments (checks drawn on a U.S. bank only) may be made out to the CAS 8600. Send check to: School of Science and Engineering, 1 Hawk Drive, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY 12561. Attendees may also register at the door on the day of the workshop.

Scope and Purpose: There has been a great deal of recent interest in new ways to deliver information technology (IT) resources to large organizations. This has been driven by significant reductions in the cost of computing cycles, mass storage, and network bandwidth, as well as a desire to pursue more federated data center designs, reduce operating expenses, and conserve energy. One significant emerging trend involves outsourcing selected business to IT service providers; the enabling technology and business model are both referred to as Cloud Computing. There has been a great deal of discussion around what cloud computing actually means to the IT industry, maturity of the enabling technologies, and training a new generation of IT staff. In this workshop, we’ve invited a number of distinguished speakers with first-hand experience in cloud computing to describe their work and share their vision for the future. The emphasis will be on development of cloud computing architectures, software, and networking for a range of practical applications, and on the viability of this approach for emerging data center designs. A panel discussion on current trends and directions in this field will also be included.

Attendees will have the opportunity to interact with the guest speakers through informal discussion breaks throughout the day, and a question/answer session will be held at the end of the panel discussion to assess those attendees wishing to apply for continuing education units under the New York State Professional Engineers program (there are no prerequisites for this workshop). Attendees will also have the opportunity to provide written feedback on the various sessions during the day. Invited papers and other presentation materials will be made available on CD as part of the registration package.

Agenda (as of Oct 23):

8:00 – 9:00 On-site registration and coffee
9:00 – 9:30 Welcome (Dr. Daniel Jelski, Dean, School of Science and Engineering, SUNY New Paltz; Dr. Baback Izadi, (2009 Chair, Mid-Hudson Section of the IEEE) Prior and future SUNY workshop topics (Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, IBM)
9:30 – 10:00 Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, IBM, and Todd Bundy, Adva Optical Networking, “Cloud Computing Fundamentals & Applications”
10:00 – 10:30 Michael Haley, IBM, “Emerging Cloud Data Centers”
10:30 – 11:30 Brian Goodman, IBM, “Building the compute cloud: firsthand experience”
11:30 – 12:30 Buffet Lunch, The Terrace Restaurant
12:30 – 1:00 Carolyn DeCusatis, Pace University, “Converged Networking for Cloud Data Centers”
1:00 – 1:30 Dr. Robert Cannistra, Marist College, “A new curriculum for cloud data centers”
1:30 – 2:00 Dr. Aparicio Carranza, City College of New York, and Jorge Martinez, EMC, “Migration of legacy storage area networks”
2:00 – 2:30 coffee break
2:30 – 3:00 Aneel Lakhani, IBM Global Services, “Cloud Computing showcase data center”
3:00 – 4:00 Panel Discussion, “The future of enterprise data centers: what will be the role of cloud computing ?” (all invited speakers)
4:00 – 4:15 Concluding Remarks (Dean, SUNY New Paltz)

It’s always more complicated

Tag Archives: midhudson

Mid Hudson Valley Android Hack-a-thon

Midhudson IEEE Cloud Computing Workshop – Friday November 6th