Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

I am getting ready for a trip out to San Francisco.

Jaduka is exhibiting at Web 2.0 this year, next week actually in San Francisco.

Trevor, Bill and I attended the Web 2.0 conference last year. I found the conference to be very insightful and I know that I have tried to use much of what I learned at the show over the course of this past year. (Last Year's Blog Posts)

I have taken notes on which conference sessions I want to attend. However, I am not sure which sessions I will be able to attend as the booth must be staffed!

We are going to be scheduling the booth staffing from the standpoint of morning and afternoon sessions.

This years conference sessions look good, but possibly not as good as last years. I am not sure yet.

I have to do some laundry, find an available suitcase (or otherwise make one available), pack for the trip, make sure I have all my various bits of technology that I will be needing.

It will be interesting to see if they plan for the need to have more power drops this year than they did last year.

Well I best get started.

Laterz

At the Web 2.0 Expo I sat through a technical presentation by the Facebook guys, they were talking about their new API, FQL.

It is an interesting take on building a web service. Rather than write a series of primitive API methods or a combination primitives and more advanced task related items. The issue that they were trying to resolve was the idea of returning too much data. This could be resolved by adding additional parameters to the API methods or making specialized methods to limit the return of data.

They took a different course, they looked at solving the issue from a very intriguing perspective. They decided to make an API that resembled SQL. The rationale was that almost all developers know SQL, thus having the syntax of FQL match up with SQL was perfect.

Now, the first thing that popped into my mind was 'OMG, they opened themselves up to injection attacks,' that thought lasted about a split second, basically because with the amount of money these guys have been given I knew they weren't morons. The 'not morons' thought was reassured about 30 seconds later.

However, my next thought revolved around the fact that developers would have to learn the table structure or the structure of the data they are interacting in detail. This thought also lasted a split second. Because, developers would have to learn the data structure of the API returns in detail anyway.

One interesting (and highly logical) bit was that they do not allow any sort of JOINs in FQL. They stated that they are not simply just passing the SQL to the database, they have to manipulate it and what not. However, to ensure speed they can't allow JOINs. It would be just about the same as an injection attack. They would open themselves up to allow people to join against tables in a way that would ultimately thrash the db within an inch of it's digital life. However, then you get into federated data and data segmentation, ie the data is spread across physically separate machines therefore JOINs are not actually possible.

Anyway, I signed up for Facebook so that I will be able to play around with the APIs, including FQL. Jaduka will likely end up doing some sort of mash-up.

In the meantime though, I have managed to catch-up with a few friends from high school. The whole application seems much cleaner than MySpace when it comes to social networking that doesn't directly relate to business. One of the features that I really liked was the fact that you can have Facebook pull RSS feeds from your blogs. This seems like genius, it aggregates the content. Doesn't force you to maintain yet another blog.

I think I would have to give Facebook a 9 out of 10.
(I reserve the right to change that score at a later date.)

I will keep playing around with it and I look forward to messing with their APIs.

Time for bed.

Laterz

Ok, strange title for an entry. Here is an even slightly stranger title for a conference session I attended at Web 2.0 expo.

"How to run a startup like Genghis Kahn."

I had to attend the session, just because of the name.

Even though there wasn't tons of content, there were some very good principles in the session.

One of which was the idea that you should "Put yourself in uncomfortable conditions."

The presenter was basically talking about how the Mongols were better in battle because they regularly subjected themselves to harsher conditions than the people they conquered. He used imagery of a professional football team that trains in a tropical climate, to explain why they always seem to lose the games that are held when the temp is below 70 degrees.

He also brought up a slide about the US army and boot camps. He should have had a much better image for this. Right now 'Band of Brothers' is on TV, it is one of my favorite mini-series. One of the things that I remember throughout the series is that all of the men in 'Easy Company' were better soldiers than the others because of their commanding officer Sobel during boot camp.

He managed to whip them into great physical shape, but furthermore he managed to galvanize the unit together, unfortunately it ended up being completely against him. But later on in the series, one of the original Currahee soldiers remarked that they wouldn't be as good a unit as they were without the tough times they suffered through under Sobel.

This reminds me of the old saying "What does not kill me, makes me stronger." So yeah, whether your trying to start a business on a shoestring budget and no hardware, to whether your training for war, or football, or just living, you should not be worried about going outside your comfort zone, in the end you will be better off.

I believe that because of my time spent during my first job here in Texas I learned to do a very lot, with very little. I remember asking to start up a project and the executive had only this to say "Fine, as long as it doesn't cost anything." So I scrounged around the office for the parts to build the web server for the project.

The presenter also brought up another principle that resonates with me "Don't fight the enemy on their terms." His example was based upon a siege that the Mongols did once against some Hungarian knights. They drove all the serfs into the castle. The knights apparently did the usual thing, stayed in the castle and taunted the Mongols about how they wouldn't be able to get into the castle.

Genghis apparently, decided that it was fine for them to stay in the castle. As a matter of fact, he would help them out with that. He had his army cut down trees from the surrounding area and erect a wall around the castle. Forcing the knights and the serfs to stay in the castle, which likely wasn't stocked for a long-term siege. Apparently, the Mongols would then start catapulting things into the castle, like dead bodies (notably plague victims).

Now, what does this tell you and me? It means, don't just accept the standard way of doing things. You need to be able observe the problem in front of you and come up with an appropriate solution. Sometimes this ends up being the standard way of doing things. However, these days there are many ways to skin the cat.

I'm heading out.

Laterz

"I came to the conference and think of words. Words like ..."
-- The pause between "... and think of words." and "Words like ..." was a little too long. It was sort of one of those, 'And your point is ?" type of moments.

"Architecture 2.0" -- And 'Web 2.0' and 'Office 2.0' and 'Voice 2.0'. But hasn't architecture been around long enough to be like 300.0 ?

"I love Data!" -- Who doesn't? He was a great addition to the Star Trek crew.

"... huge data-fest." -- As long as it isn't a sausage-fest.

"Swivel Preview" -- Not an Alpha, not a Beta, but a 'Preview'. I loved that.

"I started thinking about usability." -- I don't know why exactly I wrote this one down, but I just liked it.

"... Desire based thinking ..." -- Most thinking is about some form of desire

"... Psychographics ..." -- Pyschotic demographics?

"It's all experimentation." -- Isn't that true about everything?

"... Merging Research & Design ..." -- Notably different than Research and Development, so R&D becomes R&DD or R&D&D?

"... Scrum Master ..." -- The speaker was talking about 'Scrum' a form of project management, but the name just sounded too funny.

"... Feng shui for your app ..." -- I heard this and thought back to a VP who used to bring in plants to move the energy around, thought about how one would do that in PHP. focus_chi_energy() ?

"... creating more of a closed web ..." -- Seemed sort of an oxymoron type statement. Because the web typically means that it is open. The comment was in related to not being able to do a 'view source' to see how someone did something.

"The power of view source." -- 'View Source' really is powerful, one would also say 'View Source' is a driving force behind 'Open Source'.

"... army of minions ..." -- I love the words 'minions', 'lackeys', 'underlings'.

"Most advanced social platform out there." -- Bold statement by the Facebook guys. But fortune does tend to favor the bold.

"... webscale ..." -- First time I heard this was Jeff Bezos (CEO, Amazon). Another thing that sounded like an oxymoron. Because, isn't everything on the web, webscale? I mean I know he meant 'scaled to be able to handle the web traffic of Amazon, Flickr, etc.

"... programmable warehouse ..." -- This just seemed really cool. The idea of programming a warehouse.


I need to shutdown to conserve power.

Laterz.

(To better reflect my time spent studying Journalism, I will come back and accredit these quotes. I will need to check the schedule for that though and I just wanted to get a quick post up between sessions.)