I have always been self-taught. My motto: “The answer is out there somewhere, all I have to do is find it”.
But, try as I might, this philosophy utterly failed when I tried to figure out how to use Adobe’s data services.
I realized this year that I needed to get out of my office and dive into the mainstream in order to avoid the long learning cycles that I was going through. What better place than Adobe MAX, where they offered many labs and lectures and thousands of attendees with whom I might mingle?
Unfortunately, I arrived at this decision about two weeks from the start of the convention. And I was in the beginning phases of a monster project (see A Schlog through the trenches) and was trying to tie up loose ends of another major effort. And, I was having horrible headaches, presumably from the extra stress I was under. But, what the hell. I was tired of having excuses to delay my education. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!
I had already missed the early registration window so I paid full price for admission and added an pre-conference lab to boot. Yow!! Serious bucks there. I hope it’s worth it.
Now on to the plane/car. Flights were getting scarce, but I booked a commuter plane from PDX to LAX with a Hertz rent-a-car waiting for me when I arrived. I had hoped to use the refund from a ticket I’d cancelled earlier this year. And while they did honor the refund, it turned out to be about half the value of the original ticket after the “refund fee” was applied. Oh well… more dubloons down the ol’ tube.
Hotels in the area were even scarcer. I managed to book a room at the downtown $heraton. More on this later…
I then started filling out my schedule at the conference. Adobe created a neat web-app that facilitated registration to all of the labs and lectures they offered. Unfortunately, many of the ones I wanted were already full. I just signed up for the best mix I could find and moved on.
Since a few of the sessions were BYOL (bring your own laptop) labs, I realized I needed a new laptop. So, with only days left before the conference, I headed to Staples. There I found a pretty nice-lookin’ HP that had the required horsepower. No time to fuss, I just bought it and took it home to load it up with all of my development tools and current projects.
This was just a couple of weeks before the release of Windows 7, so I got Vista. This worried me, but I had no alternative considering the limited time frame. As it turned out, Vista was OK. It felt weird, but it didn’t crash every five minutes like I was led to believe.
I got everything ready the day I headed to the airport. The last-minute nature of this left me feeling like I’d forgotten something important. But, it was too late to worry about that as my wife was kissing me goodbye at the airport. Up , up and away!
The commuter plane was only 56 hours old, but things in the bathroom were already broken. Sheesh! But the flight was uneventful and we touched down on time in LA. The wait in line at Hertz seemed eternal as many customers felt obliged to tell their life story to the attendants. But I finally got my turn and just wanted the hell outta there. So, I asked no questions about the car they offered and just signed for the Mazda 5, which turned out to be a very nerdy family car that seated seven. I did not need this kind of car, but it actually was fun to drive and low-profile. Good enough.
I got to the hotel by merely pointing my car in the general direction of downtown and hoping for the best. Luck prevailed and I found the Sheraton with no circling or backtracking, and after paying the $500,000 per day parking fee (really $14 for guests) I flopped gratefully down in my room and took a nap.
After about an hour I got up and showered then headed down in search of Sushi. I found a nice spot right across the street named ‘Octopus’ where I got a couple of items and a beer. This helped my headache a little as I was beginning to relax. So, I headed back to my room to catch up on my work.
The labs and sessions had some source materials I needed to download, so I hooked into the room’s cable Internet connection (for an additional $14.95 per day !!##@!@#$!!) which was slow as molasses (apparently everyone else at the hotel was downloading porn movies).
At these speeds the many megabytes I needed to download would take all night! I gave up and decided to arrive early and install the software at the conference. I arrived a half hour ahead of time and found no one there to help me, so I waited til the start of the lab and there the facillitator gracefully installed all the needed stuff on my laptop and got me up to speed.
I was the only attendee who needed this kind of help as everyone else there already had their laptops running Tomcat and Flash Data Services and were familiar with developing in that environment. This wasn’t the last time I was to feel as if I were the dumbest guy there!
The lab was titled: Using Data Services to Power Flex Applications and was advertised as being for those with “a basic familiarity with Flex development”. But, I stumbled through the lab taking up most of the assistance of the speaker and his helpers along the way. I was overwhelmed by the speed of the presentation considering the amount of new stuff being covered. But by the end, I had a working app that basically was a standard CRUD personnel app using the TV show The Office characters as sample data. It automatically updated all clients when data was changed by any one client.
This is what I was hoping to learn at the conference. My Zilch game uses 1 second polling to keep all clients up to date. This design will bog down under high traffic (which luckily? I’ve never had on uZilch.com), so the techniques I learned could be directly applied to a real-world problem. I haven’t had time to do this yet, and the lessons I learned are fading away. But, the project is still there, on my laptop, for future reference should I ever get around to working on Zilch again.
This was just the pre-conference lab. The actual conference lay ahead, and I went back to my hotel room imagining what the next day would bring. Oddly, there was an adult entertainment convention being held at the same time at the LA Convention Center. I had imagined that I’d be greeted by a snickering, bespectacled, pocket-protected nerd with blushing tales of his foray to the ‘other side’. But, the boobs and dildos next door might just as well have been a thousand miles away. This conference was just too serious and demanding for anyone there to even notice that they had naughty neighbors just a building away.
But, it wasn’t all work. Adobe put together a couple of presentations at Nokia theater that were something like a cross between a rock concert and a mega-church service. I attended the general sessions which were emceed by Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer. With “Silence is the Enemy” thundering on the enormous PA, the Nokia theater was transformed into the concert mainstay “bowl of stars” as Kevin hit the stage. Except here, instead of Bic lighters, the stars were made from countless iPhones and Blackberries being held high as they recorded the event.
After a welcome speech by Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, and with no shortage of cheesy, but enjoyable, stage gimmicks, Lynch laid out Adobe’s latest achievements via the various program managers who gave mini-presentations on Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, Cold Fusion 9, LCDS, Air 2.0, and a new tool called Flash Catalyst. We also watched presentations from large organizations such as Major League Baseball and FedEx that demonstrated their innovative uses for Adobe technology.
Adam Mollenkoph of FedEx demonstrated a real-time map-based tracking system for their fleet that made me wonder why the FAA wasn’t doing this kind of thing for the air traffic controllers. With maps that contained shaded areas denoting predicted arrival times for selected vehicles augmented by a wide variety of additional displays and controls, this app looked like a gamer’s dream.
The fact that the sports establishment now considers Flash Player to be an adequate medium for broadcasting games surely confirms everyone’s belief that “push” Internet has become a mainstream alternative to existing television technologies.
One presentation from the US Postal Service used what Lynch called “Augmented Reality” to draw a semi-transparent shipping box around an object. This way, the user can place things they might want to ship in view of the computer’s video camera and see how they would fit into the selection of shipping containers offered by USPS. And rotating in three axes too! Pertty cool stuff.
And to add even more cool to the Augmented Reality theme, Lynch introduced rock star, John Mayer, whose website features an app that uses the computer’s webcam to (presumably) inject the user into a Mayer music video, or rather, John Mayer into the user’s world. If you have a webcam and a special icon from his latest CD, check it out. http://www.johnmayer.com/ar/
We were also treated to a preview of James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar; complete with 3-d glasses. I started out skeptical, but was soon eager to see the whole movie after being pulled into Avatar’s planet.
Here’s a photo of me and some other folks watching the preview…
I could go on about the keynote sessions, but you can actually watch them on Adobe TV. Here are the links:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-envision/max-2009-keynote-day-1/
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-envision/max-2009-keynote-day-2/
As much fun as the keynote sessions were, I was here for the labs and lectures. During the pre-conference lab, the instructor mentioned Cairngorm several times. From Wikipedia: Cairngorm is one of the primary open source frameworks for application architecture in Adobe Flex. He mentioned that there was a lab later on that gave an overview of Cairngorm and three other frameworks. Oh goody! This is what I needed to learn. I figured my laptop was up to speed from the previous lab and things would go much more smoothly this time.
How wrong I was! Nothing worked when I got started at the lab. So, the same assistants came over and helped me again. They’d get me past a particular issue and I would try to get the rest of it up and running. Except, every step of the way, something was wrong or missing. Back came the assistant. He would semi-patiently move or copy this or that here or there or edit some configuration file somewhere else while the lecture proceeded.
Somewhere near the end of the Cairngorm lecture, I think I got it working and caught up to the beginning of the lecture. There was no hope of catching up with the speaker and the rest of the class who were following along on their properly-configured laptops and I hadn’t even started getting my computer ready for the next three lectures.
I was outta there. Before I suffered the assistants any more to help with my setup, I left the room feeling embarassed and defeated. Plopping down on my hotel room bed with my headache raging, I wondered if I should have stuck it out. But, I had work to do for my clients.
During the week I was in LA, I worked late almost every night on these projects. The CEO of one company was just now visiting the Brazil branch and wanted to see Portuguese translations of their website while he was down there. The environmental consultant wanted his file exchange site to generate a zip file at the server for download from a Flex app. The animated greeting card investors were anxiously awaiting any news of progress on their complex Flex project.
Despite the crummy connection, I was able to make progress on all fronts. And subsequent lectures at the conference went much more smoothly. The presentations about the new features of Flex 4 (Flash Builder 4) were particularly interesting. The language made a sharp turn with this version and Flex programmers everywhere are going to have to make some significant changes to their coding styles.
Speaking of Flex programmers everywhere, Adobe MAX certainly delivered! One of my hopes was to meet some other Flex coders. But, when first faced with the lunch room tables, bustling with small groups intently talking about who knows what, I felt alone and intimidated. I was just some guy who showed up at this party and these were people who had been “in the fold” for years. They came in groups, sponsored by their employers. They were supposed to be there. Was I?
This sudden onset of shyness suprised me. But, the feeling was overwhelming. I slipped into an empty chair at a sparsely populated table and ate my lunch in silence hoping to hear a bit of conversation that I could relate to and perhaps would offer me a chance to chime in. Wow, Jr. High all over again.
Things were different at dinner, however, as I happeed upon the nice folks from Planet Bid, who welcomed me to their table and rescued me from my isolation. We wound up eating together for the rest of the conference and even though I don’t remember all the names, I do have fond memories of the smiling faces and lively talk that ensued.
After all, I’m very glad I attended Adobe MAX 2009. I plan to attend the 2010 conference, and I’ll be sure to register early and come prepared next time! See you there…