On the Stre@m

Las Vegas - get us your money

We arrived here in Las Vegas Friday and for somebody that have never been here it is breathtaking. At first. After you stay a day you can just see that is as a friend of mine putted, “The Plastic City”, a giant money making machine. Of course that unless you are a gambling freak you will have some fun for that money.

However the Venetian Hotel we are staying here is a very impressive one, lavish decorations and great rooms.

MAX

Today was the registration process and the exhibit section was open. I’ve get the chance to see old friends from previous conferences and reconnect with them.

As the day 0 this is quite a slow one, no sessions today, just a welcome reception at the Venetian Pool later this evening.

Straight from the oven: Andrei presented just half an our ago in front of more then 2000 people, a sample on how Ajax can be integrated with Flex, both benefiting from the power of FDS - Flex Data Service.

A finance demo application had a chart embedded into the same page along with 4 Ajax components: stock ticker, news accordion, competitors stock ticker table and article details, everything updated in real time using server push technology.

And that is not all, the components can interact with each other through JavaScript. So if you click in the chart on one article indicator, the article summary from the accordion will be opened along with the detailed article under the chart.

And by the way, its Dragomir with an r

MAX has started early today and the general session in the morning was full of exciting things.

Sho Kuwamoto presented Flex Builder and he created with ease a small but working mp3 player in just 5 minutes.

Apollo was a true hit in my opinion. The way that it will bring the power of Flesh, Flex and Ajax into the desktop world is great. Apollo is a cross platform runtime for building desktop RIA’s. But check more about this at http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo/.

In the end the organizers presented the largest mobile device that runs Flesh:

This year I will be present at MAX 2006 that it will be held in Las Vegas :D.

Last time I was at MAX it was amazing and I’m looking forward to reconnect with people I know. So, see you there.

It’s 2:30 PM and I’m at the Community Pit. Only few are here as this last day of MAX is filled only with sessions.

We just had a “work” lunch with Randy from Macromedia. The discussions were so insightful as after an hour or so we found ourselves alone in the dining room.

I think the conference was a great success. A lot of people visit our booth (we will carry no promotional materials back home) and we made a lot of connections. We meet with customers and they were all satisfied with our products.

I meet here Kai Konig. He was a real help to me and to all of us as he give us some useful informations on how to become a Premier Partner (his company is one). First step will be to get some Macromedia certifications, so Lucian and I will start learning to get those certifications. Kai show us two very good books that help him in his study and with his recommendations we bought them.

Today is the second day of the conference. We got up early and arrived here at 7:30 for a short breakfast. Now we are all sitting at the community pit working on our laptops. I’m writing this blog and Alexandru is preparing his tonight session.

Yesterday the conference started late in the evening. We loose all our day preparing the booth, the folders and flayers and the product boxes. When the conference finally started a lot of people come to our booth. For the user groups managers we have prepared the boxed MX Kollection and wen the word got out a lot of them came to our booth an we almost finish all the boxes.

Other people came to our asking about the products. They were very interested in MX Kollection and a special atention was captured by KTML. We are all pleased the way first day presented. Now we are looking forward at the current day that is due to start in a short time.

Today we have gone to CF Underground.

The day started a little bit on the left foot as we found ourselves outside an empty Conference Centre. It seams that the CF Underground is not here. So we rush back to the hotel and connected to the Internet to find out that the CF Underground is held at Pan American Conference Centre :D.

We arrive at Pan Am CC in time to the first session: a discussion about Flex. The speaker Kai Konig is very prepared about the subject and the arguments in favour to use Flex are good. What I really like is that is not aggressive about this subject, he does not want to impose his point of view about Flex, more to this he is even recommending Flesh remoteing for some types of projects.

The second session is about Extreme Programming. It is presented by Michael Smith and Shlomy Gantz. The session is very dynamic and all the participants get involved in the discussion. At the end of a debate about pear programming in XP the common point of view is that is efficient but with some limitations as is unpractical to put two programmers to waste there time on common tasks. Other limitations refers to the nature of the involved programmers (as in their skills, ego, …).

I missed the following 2 hours of the conference but I got in time for Bogdan’s presentation about securing shop sites. After a slow start (due to the fact that probably everybody thought their own work was secure enough) the discussion picks up some speed as the auditorium get more scared as Bogdan goes deeper into the subject. Phrases like: “Can you do that? I didn’t know somebody can do that to a site.” are common and the session ends with a promise from Bogdan that will write a more detailed article about this subject.

After that Simon Horwith comes and entertain us with his session about design patterns and his unique presentation stile. He’s got humour, knowledge and we are all ears.

The day ends again on Bourbon Street. This time we are tired and after just a beer we return to the hotel.

After a day spent on shopping (we’ve got us some decent digital cameras) we head into the night again. With us is George Fox from Macromedia. He is for the second time in New Orleans so we ask him to be our guide. But the last time he was in New Orleans it was to many years ago so we took the guiding in our hands and head out to the Bourbon Street. Again :).

This time is even wilder then last time. More people on the street are making this outdoor party a big event. At any restaurant or bar there is a guy or girl in front of it luring you inside. We took the chances and enter one and have some (expensive) beers.

The party goes on on the street and the beads are thrown up and down in an almost continuous flow.

Me and Lucian part the team and we go to eat something. After that we return to the hotel being to tired to stay up any more.

This is our first night in New Orleans. Instead of hitting the bed we choose to take a walk into the French Quarter. New Orleans is a touristic city and here is the centre of it. There were a lot of people on the streets out walking just as were doing.

The Bourbon Street

At one crossroad somebody approaches and ask us for directions to the Bourbon Street. That reminds us that this street is an interested thing to visit so we decide to go.

The Bourbon Street its quite a view. It hits us just as we pass the corner. The street is closed for car traffic and a colourful gathering of tourists and locals is filling it. People dancing at balconies are throwing with plastic necklaceses to the people from the street and those from the street are throwing back others.

After we wander around for a half hour or so we decided to stop to a bar where a band is playing Jazz. And the Jazz was really good. So we join the crowd in applauding the band and let the beer to flow.

The Hotel

After the Jazz therapy we finally head back to the hotel to catch some sleep. It was long day.

Me, Alexandru, Bogdan and Lucian are going to MAX 2004.

We start this journey in Bucharest today at 7:00 AM. The first part of our trip took as CDG Paris. This was a short flight of only 3 hours. After 2 hours spent in Paris we took the flight to Cincinnati. This was a really long flight, 9 hours. This is the part of flying that I hate. It is quite uncomfortable and beside watching some movies there is no fun. After another hour and a half on the Cincinnati airport we embark on our last 2 hour flight to New Orleans. Arrived on Louis Armstrong airport on local time 5:30 PM.

The clock indicated a time difference of 10 hours but in fact the whole trip to New Orleans took 18 hours. We were all very tired when we reached the Riverside Hilton Hotel but with no intent on going to sleep.

More about this you will find also on Alexandru’s blog: http://www.interaktonline.com/blogs/alexandru/

To be continued..