Cloud computing group

Yesterday I attended a meeting of the Capital Cloud user group. Since I arrived early, I was pressed into service as a volunteer at the check-in desk. (Sound familiar? The same thing happened at OSB back in June.)

The Capital Cloud group is a small, "young" group, and getting a good start. They have interesting presentations (last night was Hadoop) and they also have a good networking session prior to the presentation.

GnuPG and Android tablet

I attended the CALUG meeting tonight, with its talk on GnuPG and public key cryptography. It was a good presentation, and the most pleasing aspect was that I knew most of the concepts. (So my studies have been successful.) I also had some nice chats with other folks there, about things technical and non.

At home, I have been playing with the Viewsonic gTablet, an Android tablet that has wifi but not cell net. It's fairly nice, but takes some time to familiarity. Viewsonic implemented Android with a slightly different design than my cell phone. I made the mistake of thinking that my cell phone was the implementation of Android, when it is an implementation. The gTablet does not use the Android market; it routes you to handango.com. (Possibly because it has no gmail.com ID.) I spent some time looking for the New York Times app until I realized that I didn't need it -- I could use the browser.

I'm beginning to like the gTablet. I've downloaded and installed the Andiko e-reader and loaded an O'Reilly book. The reader has its quirks (or maybe the .epub file has its quirks) but it is usable.

AOP and MS Azure fabric

I attended the CMAP meeting tonight. I enjoyed the presentation on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and Microsoft Azure fabric. The presenter knew his material and demonstrated the need for AOP and the proper use of it. I came away with a good understanding of how MS implements AOP in .NET and some of the extra tools needed to make it happen. (Interestingly, you cannot do it with just Microsoft tools. Or so I currently believe.)

After the meeting I chatted with a few folks about programming, assignments, and non-techie stuff.

All in all, a good meeting.