Betascape

I attended the Baltimore conference Betascape this Saturday. Betascape is a small conference for creative people: artists, writers, programmers, designers... you name it.

It's an informal conference; the small cons can be informal. Yet while informal, it had interesting sessions and was run efficiently.

There were lectures, conversations, workshops, and of course the "hallway track". The last is a feature at all conferences, although not all conferences recognize its importance and accommodate it. The venue for Betascape was multiple buildings, so the hallway track was actually the "sidewalk track". The weather was pleasant and chatting outside worked well.

I attended several sessions, including "How gadgets can change our culture", "Visual Design: Why It's Necessary", "Now that the internet has arrived, are writers dead?", and "What happens when everyone is a publisher?" Beyond the sessions, I contributed to a project at the con: a person is constructing a reading of a book, with people reading one sentence each. (I read sentence number 13.)

Betascape is an enjoyable conference. I had short notice of it this year and could attend only a fraction; next year I will block out the entire week-end.

Today was a day of technical development.

For the past few years, I have avoided Microsoft's WPF and the associated .NET technologies. I would see presentations at user groups and read about it in magazines, but I didn't use it.

I wasn't keen on it. The more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I felt that it was cumbersome and required a lot of typing.

Today, I used it. I used WPF and XAML and a few other things. Invested the entire afternoon building a simple application for Windows. Got the application to work -- or at least perform the basics. It's not fancy, but it gets the job done.

I'm still not impressed with WPF and XAML. Oh, It's better than the previous WinForms, since it transports to web apps. And it's way better than the old MFC applications.

But it still feels clunky. I feel that I am doing too much work, writing too much code.

Perhaps the new world of HTML5 and Javascript is what I am seeking.

BaltoLUG meeting

I attended the monthly meeting for BaltoLUG, the Linux User Group here in Baltimore. This was an administration meeting, since we did not have a speaker. It was a good meeting, with a lot of ideas about the direction of the group. One topic was the limitation of Linux items; our presentations tend to run with open source but not restricted to Linux.

Betascape, courtesy of Facebook

Facebook earned its pay today. It notified me of the Betascape event here in Baltimore, through one of the local technology groups. Without it, I would not have known about the event.

Betascape is later this month. It runs on the same weekend as the annual book fair, which is an interesting choice. (I expect that the audience for Betascape would like to visit the book fair. But the two events are fairly close, so perhaps the thinking is that people will come and attend both.)

This will be my first Betascape (is this the first Betascape ever?) and I am looking forward to it. It seems to be a mix of crafts, technologists, and hackers (the good kind, who like to mix-and-match tech).

Thank you, Facebook groups!