Okay, so I kicked this one off a little later than usaul, but that's because I logged in the fullest day so far here at SXSW.  The official tally is 6 panels, 2 happy hours, and 1 wet party.  I'm a little under the weather this morning but that's due to the massive amount of stuff that I and my lovely girlfriend did and the rain storm that hit us last night.  Don't fret, however, we are taking it easy this morning and heading back down to the convention center to try and make a couple of more panels and keynotes on the last day of the Interactive portion of SXSW.  There's much to go over, so I'll try to make it condensed.

First off, we are very proud that we actually made a 9:30 session.  Due to the schedule plus daylight savings and such, we ended up missing some of the opening day panels.  The first one saw me hit up Jake Marsh, a developer that did ShopSavvy, talk about porting your mobile applications across multiple platforms.  With a comic book analogy, he described the plusses and minuses of each mobile platform.  What I came away with on this panel was that if you want to do multi-platform development then you should build for each platform instead of one consistent code base.   It will be much quicker to start from scratch as well.  Since each platform has its own UI style, you gotta build toward it.

The next panel say Dries Buytaert, the founder of the CMS Drupal, talk about how awesome Drupal was.  Seriously, half of the talk went over how lame it was to build content for the web.  The other half was Buytaert telling us that Drupal solves all of the problems.  I've rolled out Drupal to multiple clients.  I know how awesome it is.  I really didn't need examples of other site usage.  Someone did ask about Drupal 7 and it seems to improve on much of the drawbacks of Drupal.  We're talking usability, multiple database support, and other things.

I skipped over to the Courtyard next to hear a talk about open sourcing consulting models.  What I expected was strategy in selling open source to your clients.  What I got was strategy into open sourcing more than just your software.  Internal processes, hourly rates, and other items were talked about by Alexandra Samuel and how it helped their consulting company.   It was really engaging to think about open sourcing processes and focusing on execution.  Plus, due to the group talk nature of the panel, I got to hear how some consultants charge with open source software anyway.

Monday's keynote with Ev Williams of Twitter did not seem so exciting to me, so I skipped it.  I headed upstairs to hear a talk about pre and post production for game audio.  I have not been exposed to anything in the video game industry so this was my first stab.  I have a bunch of music software and to hear Alexandar Brandon talk about the latest game engines and process to mirror the game dev side of things was pretty cool.  He even suggest use source code control for audio files to help.  Apparently I need to check out Real Time Mixing for games as well too.

Next up saw an Objective-C crash course and demo.  I am not an iPhone developer so I had no clue how complicated the syntax was for iPhone development.  Joris Verbogt blew through some basic information on Objective-C as a language.   He went through it pretty fast and I'm fairly sure I got all of it down.  Then Verbogt showed off a demo.  After all of information and demoing, I still am unsure just how to develop for the iPhone.  Well, plus I need a Mac to do it.  The last panel of the day helped contrast between this and what I can do in terms of development.

The last panel of the day was a real treat.  Jonathan Stark of Stark Consulting went through a process that web developers could use to built almost native-like apps for the iPhone.  Stark first demoed jqTouch, which is a jQuery library designed to emulated the browsing behavior of the iPhone.  What does that mean?  It means the transitions, buttons, and animations on the iPhone can be used on a web browser.  Next up he talked about PhoneGap.  PhoneGap is a library of code used to setup an encapsulated web server as a native app.  You can drop your web code into an exposed www directory and build natives apps with only web technology.  Many oohs and ahhs from this one.  It was fantastic.

So after all of that, there was still some more stuff to do.  I popped into the Wired Magazine's mixer afterward to meet up with my girlfried.  There we had a nice conversation with a guy from the Nonprofit Technology Network.  He definately out does me in terms of passion.  Oh, I also won a pretty sweet schwag bag there.  I got a bunch of clothing stuff and an iPod Touch!  Looks like the schwag bucket will pay for the trip.  After a quick bite at Serrano's we headed to one of the must do parties for SXSW.

My girlfriend and I love the Found Footage Festival and when we heard they were throwing a party at SXSW, we were instantly sold.  So we headed out to Club Deville to be first in line for the festivities.  We met Nick and Joe there and even got their autographs on a crappy video they did!  They had a hard time setting up the projector for the rocks outside, but the rain that started pouring stopped that and pushed us indoors.  We stuck around for most of the party and headed back.  Nick and Joe were great in person and we're stoked about seeing them again in Lawrence.

The fourth day of SXSW was by far the best one so far.  I learned so much in new technology trends and techniques.  The fill of schwag is over capacity.  We actually got into parties and met one of our heroes in bad movie comedy.   This day reminded me just how awesome life can get.  Everything that I identify with in terms of life and career converges here in Austin.  It's not even half over and it's totally worth it.

The Songbird bird project kicked off in response to the closed sourced media players dominating the choices serious music fans could make.  In the spirit of Firefox, they developed (using Mozilla's rendering engine) a media player that also browses the web much like Firefox.  What that introduced were new channels of music discovery and collaboration.  It was a good idea to start with and we're now starting to see a solid base with which other services can build from Songbird.

This took forever on my 300,000+ catalog

Songbird still has some work left, however.  It seems the goal for the project is to get to the heavy music enthusiasts first and let it float on down to casual music fans.  Importing large libraries and working with them should be a top priority.  For each point release, it seems with my library, which tops 3 digits in gigabytes, Songbird struggles during the initial import and thereafter.  Yes it's a lot of media to work with but if they want to top my current use of Winamp, they need to resolve that real soon.

The other issues I've experienced are somewhat trivial but nagging nonetheless.  They dropped PPC support for the Mac after the 0.7 release, which hinders me because of the Macs I still have running around at home.  Songbird has issues switching between the main view and the mini player view.  Lastly, podcast support is absent in the 1.0 release.  The only, seriously the ONLY, reason I use iTunes is for the podcast support.  If Songbird can champion that, I'll abandon iTunes.

Not Only is Skreemr Integrated, But I Can Download Direct at the Bottom

There are some great things about Songbird that make it a contender in the media player market.  The one that most appeals to me is how it displays all media on the bottom of a web page you are browsing.  Say you are hitting up your favorite music blog.  Usually there's media floating around on the page and you have to scroll around to find it.  This feature collects all of the media at the bottom and allows you to work directly with the files.

Songbird also has some developmental and extensibility features that put it head and shoulders above the rest.  Around the 0.5 release they split out development of Songbird into four factions: Themes, Extensions, Web Development, and Core Development.  This provided a clear path for all different types of coders to contribute to the project.  The most exciting one to me is the Web Development portion because of the API they provide.  You can use the API to setup your own 'store' to sell music as opposed to the store that iTunes locks you into.  The other development factions mirrors that of the Firefox community and I think we all know how well that put Firefox ahead in terms of browser potential.

It's great to see Songbird hit 1.0 and I look forward to finally getting in there and digging around in the code.  Somebody needs to improve super large library performance.  I've downloaded the source and compiled it, also setting up the dev kit for extensions, but that's been in the days of TRAC as it now looks like to they switched to Deki Community Edition form Mindtouch.  Hello, Songbird, it's time we meet again, now that your finally out of your shell.

Yahoo! for me back in the day started out as the search engine to end all search engines.  Well, actually it was an index first before it became a search engine.  They competed with the likes of Alta Vista and came out on top.  When you're on top, the only thing you can do is expand your business.  And boy did Yahoo! ever.  They started spitting out products left and right.   I still use some of their products today.  Their mail and messenger application being among the set.

But with every neat and cool application that came out, there were some duds.  Their Groups community was cool but I never really took to it, even though I was active in a group for my Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class.  Yahoo! was the first to introduce the concept of a 'Profile' but it was always hard to find and never really consistent, which is the biggest problem with Yahoo! They branched out but could never keep things consistent across all of their properties.

I enjoy BrightKite thouroughly (follow me at http://brightkite.com/people/hokey) , and when Yahoo! came out with a competitor, Fire Eagle, I jumped in as soon as I could in the hopes of integrating that with my messenger profile and other areas of Yahoo!  But there was no integration at all.  This kind of fragmentation is what burned Rome down and I'm fairly certain that it also dropped Yahoo! down to where it is now.

I hope when Yahoo! finds a new CEO, I hope they start first with consolidating every property across Yahoo!  They are consistent in some places and they excel at those places.  Yahoo! Games is still very popular and the Fantasy Sports area is the best of its kind.  They are going to need some help, and they are taking a step in the right direction by implementing their Yahoo! Open Strategy.  Let's hope they turn it around.

As I was eyeballing the search results, IcedTea stuck out in my head.  I remembered over the summer an episode of FLOSS Weekly briefly touching upon IcedTead.  Dalibor Topic and Bruno Souza from OpenJDK were interviewed about IcedTea and the satus of OpenJDK altogether.  It was very nice to see a fully open sourced implementation of the Sun Java platform.

OpenJDK is an open sourced implementation the Java Platform, Standard Edition.  Sun just in 2006 decided to open source Java and this year some traction took hold.  IcedTea (and OpenJDK) is the first to pass the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and can claim to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation.  It showed up on Fedora but I forgot that it was on Ubuntu too.

I went the one liner route and installed IcedTea the quick and easy route:

hokey@tardis:~$ sudo apt-get install icedtea-java7-jdk

Which yielded me a bunch of other recommended packages, which I'll revisit later, but I was ready to hit the big 'Y':

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jre
Suggested packages:
binfmt-support icedtea-java7-demo icedtea-java7-source icedtea-java7-plugin sun-java6-fonts ttf-baekmuk ttf-unfonts ttf-unfonts-core
ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-arphic-uming
Recommended packages:
liblcms1 lesstif2 libgnome2-0 libgnomevfs2-0 libgconf2-4 libgl1-mesa-glx
The following NEW packages will be installed:
icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jdk icedtea-java7-jre
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 36.8MB of archives.
After unpacking 117MB of additional disk space will be used.

After installing the package a quick test verified its install:

hokey@tardis:~$ java -version
java version "1.7.0"
IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b21)
IcedTea Client VM (build 1.7.0-b21, mixed mode, sharing)

It's nice to get back to my Java roots using something completely open source and Java 6 compatible.  I've read up on a couple of things like JavaFX that I play around with and this is a good first step.  Plus, it's helping me dust some cobwebs that have been lurking in my head for a couple of years.  Who knows?  Once I get knuckle deep back into Java I might turn out some projects or maybe even something enterprise for headquaters.   At any rate, the Java mixes well with my morning coffee addiction and IcedTea mixes will with my afternoon green tea addiction.