Science fiction convention

I visited the local science fiction convention (Balticon) this week-end. A good decision.

The "con" was filled with science fiction enthusiasts. Many were people involved in IT; I talked with several folks about programming technology. Mind you, I made it easy to spot me as a computer geek. I wore t-shirts with computer programmer themes and carried the trusty HP-35 calculator. The shirts and calculator were conversation-starters, and I talked with people about things from FORTRAN to Python.

The con had a lot of creative and smart people. It had sessions for science fiction, hard science, culture, and writing/publishing. I looked for the sessions with the odd-sounding titles; I've found that those are the sessions with the new and different ideas.

It was good to get away from the office and talk with other people about the future of computing.

Lunch among techies

I lunched with a long-former co-worker, someone from a mid-career UPS project. He was a contractor on that project while I was an employee. Now he is an employee at NCQA in Washington, and I am a contractor at a government agency. Odd how situations change!

We had a nice lunch, talking about things technical and fun. The ability to meet folks for lunches like this is one of the reasons I like this assignment.

Fun with virtual machines

I spent some time with virtual machines today. It was interesting comparing the behavior of VMware's VMware Player against Oracle's Virtualbox.

I'm using VMware Player 3.1.4 and Virtualbox 4.0.6. (Microsoft's Virtual PC refuses to run on my PC. Apparently my hardware is not worthy of such a lofty program.)

I have VMware and Virtualbox running on Windows 7. I created virtual machines for Ubuntu and Kubuntu in each virtual environment, four machines in all. My experience has been good with both VMware and Virtualbox. I can install the guest operating system, configure it, get updates, and install new packages.

There are some differences between the two.

The machines under Virtualbox can use bridged networking to find my DHCP server; the machines under VMware cannot and must use NAT.

The installs for Ubuntu went well. The installs for Kubuntu were a little rougher for VMware. The VMware Tools package expects gcc and make, neither of which was installed by default. Running the Kubuntu Software Management package solved the problem easily.

Performance is acceptable but not stupendous. This is due, I am sure, to my equipment. The PC is a fairly recent one (about two years old) but it is not the datacenter-class server designed for hosting virtual machines.

Overall, I am pleased. I can work with the virtual environments, which is my goal.

IBM z/OS

I attended the CALUG (Columbia Area Linux User Group) meeting tonight. The presentation was on IBM z/OS and virtual Linux machines.

It was a good presentation! A clear overview and lots of technical details. More impressive than the presentation was the set of questions asked by members of the audience. They knew their stuff, from old IBM mainframe concepts (partitions, microcode, and DASD) to the new concepts (virtual machines, Linux instances, and databases). OK, perhaps the concept of a virtual machine is not that new. But the audience was interested and inquisitive.

I left with a lot of information about z/OS and Linux. IBM has made some good choices with its technologies, and I think they are well-positioned to leverage their tech for cloud apps.

Into the cloud

I am building a vision of my next set of technology. Here's what I have:

- Tablet for user interface (the "front end"), probably Android
- Cloud for data storage and processing (the "back end"), probably Amazon.com EC2

I have considered other platforms (Google App Engine, Azure) and interfaces (iPhone, Windows Phone). My picks seem the easiest for starting a new venture. In part, I follow the path of least resistance. I will say that my experience with the Android phone was an influence in my choices.

Code but no coding

I attended the CMAP meeting tonight and heard a presentation on MVC 3 from Microsoft. MVC 3 is a web development thing, allowing you to build web applications. it takes advantage of .NET, HTML 5, jQuery, and a few Microsoft-specific packages. Using the packages and tools, one can assemble a slick web application quickly.

The presenter walked us through the development a calendar application. It took all of about 90 minutes.

My impression: easy to use, lots of code, but very little coding. There was code on the screen (C# and HTML) but not much in the way of creating code. The wizards did a lot of the work, and the work was mostly connecting existing pieces, not writing functions, methods, or classes.

Is this the future of coding? I guess it is, in Microsoft's view. This is coding so simple that anyone can do it -- as long as the understand the components that are available. Sixty years ago, coding was in assembly language and you had to know the processor architecture and the operating system calls. Forty years ago, coding was in a high-level language and you had to know the language and its (rather limited) library. Now you have to know the language syntax and a large collection of library classes and their methods, and most of the effort is for the libraries.