This is the final post of the Webstock 2010 series. It’s covering Friday of “conference proper”. The day started with a nice breakfast at Finc (not part of the official Webstock agenda though) and a way too cold auditorium in the Town Hall. But Internet was fixed again and it seemed as if most people were able to login to the Wifi again.

The Friday sessions:

Eric Ries – The Lean Startup

My personal highlight of Webstock 2010, very interesting and enlightening talk about startups and how to potentially avoid failure. A lot of Eric’s points make a lot of sense and I came across some of them myself doing work for startup-up type companies. He’s recently published a book titled “Startup Lessons Learned” (if it just was available as an .epub ebook – I would right away buy it).

Daniel Burka – Iterative Design Strategies

David worked on the design-side of things at Digg and Mozilla.org. He discussed how iterative design can drive communities, very interesting session (even for me coming from a back end point-of-view).

Amy Hoy – Shift+Cmd+R: Hard Refresh Your Design

Very entertaining and interesting session covering a variety of uncommon and “weird” stuff. Fun to watch!

Mike Davidson – When Your Idea Doesn’t Suck: How to stop working for clients and launch a startup

A good talk with a lot of truth in it. Mike presented without any slides and I noticed that quite a few people lost interest after a while. Very unfortunate though, because what he had to say about launching a startup, shareholder setups, acquisition, ideas etc was very interesting. I’m not quite sure why he asked for his session not to be blogged or tweeted about though. It’s a bit of wishful thinking at a web conference I suppose.

Thomas Fuchs – I Can’t Believe It’s not Flash!

Thomas’ session was interesting and he showed a lot of cool stuff one can do with JavaScript nowadays for instance animation (performing quite well), using WebGL etc. Really impressive and I hadn’t seen a lot of that stuff before. In good tradition he also had to punch Flash by providing some figures on Flash’s video performance vs HTML 5 video. As much as I agree that there are issues with Flash Video on OS X for a variety of reasons his 10% vs. 100% CPU load comparison was just purely FUD. Even now after the talk and discussions on Twitter and Ajaxian he hasn’t provided any sample video(s) and codecs he used to make his point.

Jeff Veen – How the Web Works and Mark Pesce – Dense and Thick

The closing session block was actually quite awesome. Both speakers talked about the past, present and future of the web – I guess for a lot of people in their early 20s, quite a few things of the past might have been new to them Also we got an interesting insight into how W3C committees work and make their decisions… The big next thing to come is supposedly AR but who knows when and where and in which flavour it’s going to take off.

All in all Webstock 2010 was very well worth my time and the money spent on the conference ticket. Same is true for the pre-conference workshops, keeping my feedback in consideration. On a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best I would give it an 8.5 – missing a 9 or better mainly because most of the content is not directly applicable and convertible (in)to my work. Leaving that (very personal situation) aside, Webstock should really be seen as a must for anyone working with/in/on the web in New Zealand. Seriously. Thanks a lot to all the people behind it – you’ve done a great job and I look forward to Webstock 2011.

This second part of my Webstock 2010 review briefly covers the conference sessions on Thursday and some other bits and pieces around it. Webstock 2010 was again held in Wellington’s Town Hall – the historic and classic style of the building really lends itself to an event like Webstock and if it was mine I wouldn’t move it anywhere else either. Most of the conference is run as a single stream of sessions, three of the slots break out into three separate streams.

So – we ticked off the venue, food was fine and vegetarian and other special dietary requirements were tucked away from the main food stations. The latter is particular important from my point of view as I strongly disklike it when carnivores do not “book” veggie food at events in advance and all of a sudden on the day prefer the (often limited) vegetarian option. Also – not to forget the tremendous amounts of Kapiti ice cream throughout the day (yay!) and free proper coffee provide by People’s coffee!

Some impressions from Thursday’s sessions:

Scott Thomas – Web design that grabs people

Scott talked about his role in the web team of the Obama campaign and explained how design decisions and experiments drove online collaboration and engaged a community of volunteers and supporters around Obama. Very interesting and a lot of insights into the structure of the Obama campaign web team.

Brian Fling – Brian does the Andrew Sisters

Brian’s message seem to have been hidden or invisible for parts of the audience. To be fair, his style of presentation was quite unusual and comprised a lot of talking about what he’s not going to talk about and I can understand why some people had some issues with that. I found his presentation quite entertaining to be honest – also his thoughts on monetizing mobile content appealed to me.

Lisa Herrod – Designing for Diversity – Inclusive Design & the User Experience

Lisa is well known in AU/NZ for good thoughts and a deep knowledge of accessibility and user experience. In her talk she raised the question why a lot of user experience consultants still ignore diversity and what needs to happen to change that. Not directly related to what I’m doing most of the time, but still very interesting knowledge to have.

John Resig – How jQuery Makes Hard Things Simple

Very good presentation (as somewhat expected after the brilliant workshop on Tuesday afternoon), partly based on some elements I already knew but John also covered a few things I hadn’t known before this talk.

Chris Shiflett – Security-Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behavior

Amazing talk, seriously amazing. Chris presented a lot of examples and observations how design drives human behaviour – both web- and RL-based, from Twitter and Facebook hacks to people’s behaviour on Japanese subway trains.

Shelley Bernstein – Fostering Personal Connection to Place

Shelley talked about how the Brooklyn Museum in New York fosters community and interacts with its visitors. Her presentation was another awesome peek into leveraging design, communities, experimenting and other typical “social network” features in an offline scenario.

Jeff Atwood – Stack Overflow: Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

Jeff’s presentation was very good! Lot’s of “lessons-learned-from-building-stack-overflow”-type of content discussed in his session. The session title actually really held what it had promised – how to build a social site for us nerdy developers – well done! (Both stackoverflow.com as well as the talk )

Regine deBatty – Please, don’t let it be interactive

Maybe it was because I was getting tired towards the end of the day, but I couldn’t really connect to Regine and her presentation.

Rives – The Word Wild Web

Yeah, well. Rives. Apparently he’s somewhat famous (I had never heard of him before Webstock) as an online poet. I think his presentation (well, rather “gig”) had some interesting and actually really funny elements, I personally didn’t really get some other bits and pieces of his on-stage show.

Last week Wellington’s IT and web crowd celebrated the annual Webstock week. You’d think that at the end of the day, Webstock is just another conference – but that would be quite of an understatement and completely miss the point. First of all, Webstock runs for pretty much a full week: Monday to Wednesday are filled with a bunch of 1/2-day or full-day workshops (to be booked and paid for on top of the conference) and Thursday and Friday provide two days of “conference proper”. Around all that a variety of community IT groups often hold meetings, there were pre-Webstock drinks, Thursday-night drinks and the Friday night ONYAs (with quite a few drinks, I assume) – There must be a pattern with that drinks thing

There’s something else that makes Webstock reasonably special compared to other web conferences: It’s a lot about inspiration, ideas and the future. You won’t find many talks with titles such as “Using framework X with technology Y in situations in which the development team just wants to work when the 29th of February falls on a Monday” but rather things like Jeff Atwood’s ”Building Social Software for the Anti-Social” or Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup“.

Webstock also comes with a bag (full with really cool stuff) – rumor says some people are just attending the conference to get the awesome bags each and every year After last year’s trading card game, some people were keen on having another game and so there was the Twitter-based Webstockbingo and a social challenge-/task-based Webstock Game. Both very interesting and it’s quite amazing that Kat Hardisty won the game the second year in a row!

Workshops

I’ve booked two of the pre-conferece workshops on Tuesday. Jeff Atwood’s “Getting started with ASP.NET MVC” and John Resig’s “Introduction to jQuery and jQuery UI“, both pretty much for the reason that they cover technologies that interested me for the one or the other reason and that 3.5 hrs of compressed information usually provide enough information and potentially inspiration to later on dig deeper. The workshops on Tuesday were organised very smoothly and without any obvious problems by the Webstock crew in Wellington’s Town Hall and the adjacent Michael Fowler Centre.

Jeff’s session covered ASP.NET MVC (mostly in version 1) and its integration in Visual Studio 2008. The idea of the workshop was to build parts of the NerdDinner.com application (available as a free walkthrough on Scott Gu’s site) and to explain/talk about some specifics along the way. Although there’s nothing wrong with that, Jeff didn’t have any slides along the workshop and the session was pretty much based on live coding. Again – there’s nothing wrong with that (and all participants were asked to have VS 2008 installed on their machines if they wanted to follow along), what I found a problem though was that due to his speed Jeff basically lost most of the participants (including myself) after 45-60 minutes (it was quite obvious by looking around and by comments made in the morning tea break). The presentation setup with having a second (non-mirrored) screen from where stuff was copied and pasted into the visible VS 2008 window didn’t help to actually follow along either. But hang on – not everything was bad: Jeff obviously knows his stuff very well and is a very good presenter and speaker. He was able to provide a lot of real-world experience with the ASP.NET MVC framework from their work on http://stackoverflow.com, so that there was def. quite a significant amount of added value on top of the rather straight forward tutorial walkthrough. I’d still have preferred him to have used something that’s not available as a free tutorial on the web – but that might be my personal expectation from attending a somewhat “commercial” workshop as well as from offering similar workshops on (different) technologies myself.

The afternoon session on jQuery and jQuery UI was of particular interest to me because one of my clients is going to move from a vast collection of JS/AJAX-frameworks and handcrafted JavaScript code to jQuery as their main JS framework for HTML-based front ends. Having John Resig, the author of the framework himself present it was another bonus. Due to some weird weather in the US, John just made it to Webstock and his workshop 1 hour before it actually was supposed to start (to make things worse his luggage was delayed as well). Nevertheless it was a great session covering a lot of content starting with the basics of jQuery, building complex expressions and modifying page content and structure as well as looking into some more advanced topic and new features of the jQuery 1.4(.2) release. The session was a very well balanced mixture of (interactive) slides to introduce concepts and hands-on exercises to try out features in a jQuery coding sandbox on John’s server (I love that idea).

Overall, I’m very happy with having attended both. Just to let everyone know – I’ve provided all this feedback (more detailed where due) right away after the workshops to the team around Mike and Tash (who run Webstock), don’t think this is a public bitching session behind people’s backs or something

Another quick regex: to perform a sitewide search/replace that replaces every “parameterExists” by “isDefined”, simply do a:

Search: parameterExists\(([^)]*)\)
Replace: isDefined(“\1″)

That saved me at least 2 hours

Currently, I’m migrating a CF5/Win project to CFMX9/Linux. Apart from the usual path issues, the one who programmed this app yeeears ago did not protect *any single* form- or url-variable inside CFQUERY against misuse or even SQL-Injection. Not one syntax check, no CFQUERYPARAM… *sigh*

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to perform a sitewide search/replace, so I have to open every single file containing CFQUERY tags. To get a list of all the files containing “<cfquery…”, I did a quick

grep -rli “\<cfquery ” > cfqueryfiles.txt

Then, I wrote two tiny regular expressions that make the manual replacing a lot faster:

Step 1: Strings => Varchar
Replace ‘#([^#]*)#’ by <cfqueryparam cfsqltype=”CF_SQL_VARCHAR” maxlength=”50″ value=”#\1#”>

Step 2: Numbers => Big
Replace #([^#]*)# by <cfqueryparam cfsqltype=”CF_SQL_BIGINT” value=”#\1#”>
(Careful! This replaces ANY variable, but does its job inside CFQUERY. Do NOT “replace all”.)

After that, you only have to set the correct sqltypes and/or maxlengths.

After the XMas break is now finally over and summer has arrived in Wellington, we’re starting the monthly meetings of the Flash Platform User Group again. Actually we were known as the Flex User Group but went through a bit of self-finding and re-branding and the outcome is a broader focus on the overall Flash Platform. That also includes Flash, AIR, Flash Catalyst and associated things like the Text Layout Framework or Stratus.

The next (and first meeting in 2010) will be held at Natcoll Design Technology in Wellington (thanks to Brett Taylor, who’s the head of department for Interactive Design and Web Development at Natcoll and helped a lot to set this up). Topics will be Stratus, Adobe’s peer-to-peer framework for RTMP communication and Skinning in Styling in Flex 4. Both will be 30 min-ish long introductory presentations, no previous knowledge of either topic will be required.

This is the agenda:

• Introduction in Stratus (Ross Phillips)
  Stratus: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/
• The basics of skinning and styling in Flex 4 (Kai Koenig)
  Flex 4: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

Date, Time, Address:

Tuesday, February 16 2010 – 5:30 pm for a 5:45 pm presentation start. Anticipated end at 6:45pm-ish.

Natcoll House
2/20 Kent Terrace
Wellington
New Zealand

If you’re attending, please make sure you register at our Eventbrite site: http://wellingtonflashplatformgroup.eventbrite.com

This is just a quick reminder that Adobe is running a series of Refresh events across Asia Pacific in February. Perth and Sydney are apparently booked out resp. very close to being booked out – but there are places left for Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland.

— snip —

Join Adobe in a dynamic live presentation to REFRESH your understanding of the most recent initiatives in the areas of content creation, collaboration and distribution. The Adobe team will showcase the recent announcements including the iPhone developments using the upcoming Flash Professional CS5 as well as showing you how you can build applications faster with Flash Catalyst, LiveCycle Mosaic ES2 and much more. You will also hear Adobe’s most recent announcements from Max 09 and be shown the latest software tools available from Adobe.

— snip —

Dates:

Perth – 11th February (full)
Brisbane – 16th February
Auckland – 18th February
Sydney – 23rd February
Melbourne – 25th February

Registration and agenda:

Auckland: https://events.adobe.co.uk/cgi-bin/event.cgi?eventid=9153&country=pa
Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney: https://events.adobe.co.uk/cgi-bin/event.cgi?eventid=9155&country=pa