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Yet another technology conference season is upon us!

There a many great events being planned and some are already announced.

Here is a short list of events and links to their websites. Save this link, as I hear of new events I’ll make sure to update this blog post to add them.  Just a reminder that most of these events are in the “Heartland District” as defined by Microsoft which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee but I’ll add events in other neighboring states as well. Don’t mistake me, this isn’t just a list of Microsoft events either! Any technology event in the area that I hear about I will list. If you know of any drop me a line and I’ll get it added!

February 2010

Grand Rapids Code Retreat - Grand Rapids, MI - February 6th, 2010 (Free)

March 2010

Roanoke Code Camp - Roanoke, VA - March 13th, 2010 (Free)

Southern Maryland Give Camp - St. Mary’s City, MD - March 19th - 21st, 2010 (Free)

Lansing Give Camp - Lansing, MI - March 26th - 28th, 2010 (Free)

April 2010

Pittsburgh Code Retreat - Pittsburgh, PA - April 3rd, 2010 (Free)

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Philadelphia, PA - April 8th - 9th, 2010 ($325.00)

Philadelphia Code Retreat - Philadelphia, PA - April 10th, 2010 (Free)

Kalamazoo X Conference - Kalamazoo, MI - April 10th, 2010 ($35.00 Professional / $15.00 Student)

Great Lakes Ruby Bash - Lansing, MI - April 17th, 2010 (????)

Grand Rapids Silverlight 4 Firestarter - Grand Rapids, MI - April 17th, 2010 (Free)

Pittsburgh Code Camp - Pittsburgh, PA - April 17th, 2010 (Free)

May 2010

Ann Arbor Day of .Net - Ann Arbor, MI - May 1st, 2010 ($10.00)

Chicago Code Camp - Chicago, IL - May 1st, 2010 (Free)

Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition - Columbus, OH - May 7th, 2010 ($25.00)

IndyTechFest - Indianapolis, IN - May 22nd, 2010 (Free)

June 2010

CodeStock - Knoxville, TN - June 25th - 26th, 2010 ($55.00)

July 2010

Ann Arbor Give Camp - Ann Arbor, MI - July 16th - 18th, 2010 (Free)

Cleveland Give Camp - Cleveland, OH, July 16th - 18th, 2010 (Free)

August 2010

DevLink - Nashville, TN - August 5th - 7th, 2010 ($100.00)

September 2010

Ohio Linux Fest - Columbus, OH - September 10th - 12th, 2010 (Free)

October 2010

erubycon - Columbus, OH - October 1st - 3rd, 2010 (~$300.00)

November 2010

NO EVENTS

I can’t stress enough how much fun these events are. Not only can you learn a lot of things but you get a chance to hang out and socialize with some of the top developers in the area. I encourage all developers to try to attend at least one local event. You will not regret it!

Another CodeMash Conference has come and gone and now it’s time to reflect on the event.

Well first I guess I should let you know what CodeMash is, if you never heard of it before. What better way to explain it than just copying from the offical website! “CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices, methodologies and technology trends in variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP. Held January 13-15, 2010, at the lush Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio, attendees will be able to attend a world-class technical conference amid Ohio’s largest indoor waterpark.”

Wednesday was the optional PreCompiler that you had to pay extra to attend. The precompiler is made up of two long sessions; morning and afternoon .

I only attended the morning session “Bootstrapping your Bussiness” presented by Nate Kohari and James Avery. They spent the time talking about starting your own technology business using the examples of the businesses that both of them have started. This was very inspiring and motivating presentation. I learned a lot and just enjoyed hearing some of the inside story of how they found their on inspiration and energy to make the move to being their own bosses.

The Thursday morning keynote was present by Mary Poppendieck on “Five Habits of Successful Lean Development”. The 5 habits are; Purpose, Passion, Persistence, Pride and Profit.  This was a great presentation and I wish I could get Mary to come speak to everyone at my company. It might just inspire a few folks there to try a different way of working. One that focuses on making the company as a whole run better. Which isn’t that what everyone wants a company to do?

As far as the sessions go, I only attended 4 this year.

“What Makes Ruby Different” presented by Joe O’Brien, Mark Peabody and Leon Gersing. This was an interesting session where the presenters provided sample code in Java, C# and Ruby on how to perform different coding functions to compare and contrast the languages. One thing though, I feel I need to call out that while the presenters were trying to be objective it was very clear to me that they showed a favored bias toward Ruby. I understand that’s the purpose of the talk to promote Ruby but there was one example for file I/O that really bothered me. In both the Java and C# examples they wrote 10-15 lines of code to open a file and print the contents to the screen that included a lot of exception handling for catching common file IO errors (file not found, no read permissions, etc) but the Ruby example had none of this and was only 5-6 lines. It was implied by this that somehow ruby doesn’t need this but Java / C# does. Which I disagree and call shenanigans on. Ruby will error our just the same if there are IO issues and you need to add error detection code too to handle these issues. That aside I enjoyed the side by side examples and learned a lot!

Next was “An Introduction to MongoDB” presented by Mike Dirolf. MongoDB is one of these new “no-SQL” database engines that are built around document and key-value pair storage instead of being a full relational database like mySQL or MS-SQL. Mike did a great job of explaining what MongoDB was, where it would be useful and some examples of how to use it. I’ll admit being a SQL man I’ve looked down on these new data storage engines as something out there that’s kind of second rate but Mike did a very good job of making me see the benefits of them and I could see myself perhaps in the future making use of them where a project would benefit from it.

“Refactoring the Programmer” presented by Joe O’Brian was one of my favorite sessions. This was another one of those “soft skills” sessions that I find myself attending more and more these days.  Joe did a great job of providing real world examples of how to improve yourself and your work life. He spoke about the idea of learning to invest in yourself and not expecting your boss to help you grow. He also brought up a good point about finding mentors to turn to, to guide and help you grow. This was a great session and I’m glad I was able to see it considering it was a packed standing room only crowd to hear this talk.

“Oh Crap! I Forgot (or Never Learned) C!” presented by Chris Adamson was the last session I checked out. I actually learned C in college but the title just screamed “watch me Alan” so I had to stop by and listen in to see what Chris had to say.  It was a wonderful walk down memory lane and very informative considering the growing iPhone development world which uses the Objective-C language.

The attendee party Thursday night was a ton of fun. People were having great conversations about many technology topics from .net to ruby to cell phones. The drinks were flowing and hors d’oeuvres and deserters were found everywhere to keep us full and happy. Several Wiis were setup at different vendor booth and people were playing Mario and Star Wars games. Surprisingly I don’t think a single vendor had a music games setup this year. I think maybe the Rock Band / Guitar Hero fad has officially been passed. It’s about darn time too! You can only stand hearing the same 3-4 songs played over and over for days on end before you go homicidal!

There was a game room where people were planning board games and a poker tourney was going full steam.

The big surprise was that the fine folks at EdgeCase brought in the band “Enter the Haggis” to play! Enter the Haggis is a Celtic rock band from Toronto, Canada. They rocked the house and were a fun way to end the day!

One of my favorite things about CodeMash is the fact that it’s very family friendly. The conference provides plenty of activities for children with their “KidsMash” room full of games and toys and water park! Even if you don’t have children you can bring along your girlfriend or wife with the promise of 2-3 days of sitting around a heated water park in the middle of winter. It wouldn’t be right not to talk about the amazing world class water park at the Kalahari Resort, I mean really that’s half the reason we come to CodeMash.

The Kalahari has a great water park full of fun activities. There’s a bunch of different water slides, a huge wave pool, several giant hot tubs (inside and outside) and the totally cool Wave Rider indoor surfing ride.

I know as computer people we many times don’t feel comfortable in large public groups but I encourage everyone I meet at the event to just go for it. It’s a lot of fun to splash and play. If nothing else just check out one of the inside/outside hot tubs. There is nothing cooler, no pun intended, that sitting it a cauldron of hot bubbling water while being outside in the snow. Try it and you’ll love it!

Make sure to take some time and check out all the CodeMash v2.0.1.0 photos that I took.

And finally mega props must be given to Jim Holmes (@JimHolmes), Jason Follas (@jfollas), Brian H. Prince (@brianhprince), Jason Gilmore (@wjgilmore) and many others for doing a great job putting on such a wonderful event!

Thanks! I can’t wait till next year!

This is probably a pretty poor review as the drive died after 3 days of use. I purchased it from Best Buy because it was on sales and the cheapest 1.5 TB external drive I could get in the store.  The Model Number is ST315005EXA101-RK.

The reason for purchasing such a large external drive was to provide a backup location for all my computers at home; 1 Windows Small Business 2003 Email/File server, 1 Windows XP desktop, 1 Windows 7 laptop and 1 Vista laptop. I need enough space to store backups for all those systems which equals roughly 1 TB is raw storage counts or about 700GB used space. I am using some free backup software called CrashPlan that I will be reviewing in the future.

Well I get home and within 2 hours I started hearing clicking noises randomly.  As I run some raw file copies (large 2-4GB ISOs) I notice the transfer rate is abysmal. I’m averaging around 5-7MB/sec sustained with bursts of 12-15MB/sec.  Just for reference an internal directly connected modern HD should easily do 60-80MB/sec, while a USB2.0 external should max out the USB bus around 25-35MB/sec.

As you can guess I was rather disappointed but then I justified it by reminding myself it was for backups. It doesn’t need to be a barn-burner to hold a ton of files for backups. I could live with a slow drive I kept telling myself.

However, after 3 days I found my fileserver locked up one morning. Upon reboot I checked the event log and there were literally over 12,000 I/O write cache corruption errors.  The drive spun up but when I ran scandisk the entire file system was basically blown.

The other issue I ran into and what I think might be the underlying culprit of the death of this drive is the running temperature. After 3 days of running the drive temperature was running around 54C (~130 F). That is way to HOT folks! At that kind of range you are drastically shortening your drive’s lifespan and pushing the threshold for data corruption (the physical media that holds the magnetic bits start to actually looses it’s ability to read and write the bits).  By the way your average internal drive with proper cooling usually runs in the 35-40C (~ 95 – 105 F).

I did some research online and found forums and review sites full of people that had the exact same thing happen to them with this drive. At this point I called it quits. I boxed up the drive and dug out my receipt. I returned it to best buy and exchanged it for a Western Digital MyBook Elite 1.5 TB external drive. After a few weeks of using this drive I’ll do a short review of it as well.

Happy New Year 2010

Can you believe it’s really 2010 already?

I hope you all had a safe and fun night and enjoyed it with someone special.