I am going to be giving a talk on Web 2.0 for server-side programmers for the Java User Group of Sarasota on Wednesday January 16.  All are invited to join.   While some stuff may be more tech-y, I will be getting into some depth about what makes a good Web 2.0 app.  I have pasted the email invite below:
The first major advances in internet technologies were often tied to
the server side, such as the advancement of multi-tiered
architectures after the first wave of brochure sites grew stale. J2EE
and application servers combined with quicker database technology
made server-side programming an important skill, with the popular
model-view-controll er pattern allowing us to almost completely avoid
front-end work. Web 2.0 is a more complex phenomenon, with
advancements in both client- and server-side applications which can
appeal to software developers.

Ilana Davidi will define Web 2.0 in terms of technology, community,
and commerce, including why it takes so long to define. Ilana will
then detail why the related advancement of technologies such as CSS
and AJAX makes front-end (or end-to-end) programming more appealing
to us steadfast server-side programmers. Ilana will talk a bit about
what has happened on the server side to accommodate this wave of
change, as well as how the onset of community-centered sites can
benefit the professional programmer as well as the technically naïve
who get introduced to the web through sites such as myspace. This
presentation will be based on a paper Ilana co-wrote while at MIT
which is used as a Web 2.0 introductory paper in the Business of
Software class.
The paper can be found here:
http://rallenhome. com/essays/ essay4.html
About the Speaker

Ilana Davidi graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 with a degree
in English Literature and Creative Writing. She taught herself Java
(1.0.2) and several other languages while with her first company out
of college, a small technical consulting firm. She then took this
experience to CNN/Sports Illustrated where she led a successful ASP-
to-J2EE architecture conversion and several other projects. After
five years, she headed back to Boston where she worked for MITRE (a
defense firm) and a start-up in Cambridge while earning her Master’s
degree in Engineering and Management at MIT. Now armed with a degree
appropriate to her chosen profession and experience, she has started
her own technical consulting firm in Sarasota, Florida.

The event will be hosted by FCCI Insurance Group. FCCI located at
6300 University Pkwy, Sarasota, FL 34240, which is just east
of exit 213 off I75.

See our web site http://www.sunjug. org for more information and
directions.

Please RSVP to dave@sunjug. org if you plan on attending.

Technology, Technology Explanations, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

I attended an MIT alumni luncheon today at which RFID was discussed.  The presenter was very good, and admitted that the technology isn’t being used as much as it could be.

I have been hearing about RFID for a while now.  Basically,  RFID is a means of identifying an object (or being) often compared to a proactive bar code.  Rather than relying on people to scan bar codes, RFID transmitters can actively send radio signals.  The presenter today had an excellent example: he said that if a clothing store was to use RFIDs rather than bar codes, inventory could be taken by simply catching the signals from the different objects in the store.

An application currently in use is pet identification.  Pets can be injected with a tiny RFID tag that can help identify them if they are found and put in a pound that has access to RFID translators.  RFIDs can also be found in EZ passes and other highway toll devices.

The problem with RFID is that it’s expensive.  While bar codes are practically free, RFID’s can cost $.20-$.25 per tag.  This provides a large margin in the realm of something such as pants, but for the one-time injection into a pet, the technology is worth the price.

I’m not sure that RFID will ever succeed much more than it already has.   Unless these have a decline in price similar to hard drive capacity, the cost per item may prevent it from being used in every day situations which require multiple tags for lesser priced items.

Of course, this is just my opinion.  Perhaps over the next few years, the price will drop and more companies will be eager to adopt the technology that can help them control inventory, theft, and identification.

For  more information, see the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID”>Wikipedia entry</a>.

Technology | No Comments »

I love technology and always have. I began programming in BASIC when I was in elementary school, I have had websites since 1995, and I am an absolute sucker for new toys. It is a love that I have tried to share with friends and family to varying success. There was the Palm Pilot I bought for my sister back in 2000 that sat in a box until somebody told her what it was and how to work it (somebody other than myself, who just couldn’t get by the excitement of the technology). My parents’ TiVo sat in a box for two years until it was brought out briefly, attached to the TV, and killed by a lightning strike to the house.

The last couple of years have been amazing to me. All of a sudden, geekdom is cool. I went to Ulta, a cosmetics store, the day after Thanksgiving, and bought laptop desks for my husband and myself. Tech is so cool now that it is mixed in seamlessly with expensive facial treatments, Ralph Lauren and Gucci perfumes, and MAC cosmetics. Laptop cases are now available not only in feminine-style bags, but in pink feminine-style bags. Crazy, I tell you. Just crazy. I vividly remember searching high and low for something that was not to hideous in which to place a laptop only to arrive at a green backpack. But I digress.

The one aspect of new technology that has remained the same is the price factor. The latest and greatest is always the most expensive. As the new piece of technology progresses and becomes more efficient or smaller or smarter, the price comes down (generally speaking). The best known example of this is the microprocessor, whose price decrease and quality increase is immortalized in the theory of Moore’s Law.

So how do you know when to buy? As I noted earlier, I love new tech and like to play with the newest gadgets, but members of my family have not been quite as quick to accept their new toys. The way that I justify my purchases is to imagine the new toy as a rental. For example, a digital camera with 7.2 megapixels may be $500 this year, while perhaps next year I could get an 8.2 megapixel digital camera for $400. The bottom line for me is if I would be willing to rent my new toy for a year for 8 dollars a month and-this is important-for the time spent to get up to speed on all the new technology could do when mainstream media may not yet have begun to publicize its benefits.

My advice for shopping for a techy geek is to imagine this person with the new toy and if that person will truly enjoy the uniqueness of the object for the time being. For example, early adopters of the iPod who have not yet updated may still have to tinker with their brown-and-black screens, while later adopters (or repeat buyers) now get video. I still love my old iPod and still use it for what it was intended (remember when Steve Jobs told us all the iPod needed to do was play music? Because all it did then was play music? Ah, expectations….)

Be careful when purchasing geeky toys for those out of the “target market.” Some may find technology very intimidating, and may not want to play with it until it has been mainstreamed. We know who these people are. Some of us may try to change them, but technology preference just isn’t that easy to alter.

Therefore, it is important to know the latest technology, the person for whom you are shopping, and check out the techy sites for advice (such as reddit, Slashdot, Gizmodo, and ThinkGeek. That, and make sure you include a gift receipt with your persent.

Technology | No Comments »

There are many different ways to optimize web pages for search engine crawlers. For those that do not know what SEO is, it is the process of designing pages so that the search engines assign the page greater rank based on content. For example, if your site is about cats, you would want to mention cats several times throughout the pages.

A couple of basics:

1. Make sure the title of your page describes your site. The crawlers assign great value to title tags.
2. Do not use extraneous words in H1, H2, H3 (header) tags. Be succinct, to the point, and descriptive of the content.
3. Be careful about advertising. If you have too much in your pages, the crawlers may mark the site as spam.
4. Crawlers aren’t too fond of white text, or of text that is the same color as your background.

Things to think about:

1. Think about how you would want people to find your site. Back to the cat example, perhaps you are trying to market new cat toys. In this case, you would want to make sure that phrases related to the fragment “cat toys” appear in strong tags throughout your pages.
2. Search engine algorithms are always changing. Monitor your page rank and be ready to shift phrases or move advertising if your site is sinking.
3. Remember that it takes time to establish and increase page rank.  Your site could be perfectly optimized, but if it is a new site, the crawlers may take time to assign it the proper importance.

If you are interested in finding out more about SEO, the Wikipedia article is a great resource. If you still have questions, do not hesitate to email me.

Technology Explanations, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

I have been an avid reader of internet news since 1996. On my daily read, I start with my former employer first (CNN.com), then move on to “local” news (boston.com though I now reside in Sarasota), and the real local news (Boston Dirt Dogs). In recent years, I have added a few new news locations to my daily routine. They are all Web 2.0-ish type sites.

The first two are digg and reddit. For those unfamiliar with these sites, they are not news sites per se, but a conglomeration of web pages which normally feature current stories, pictures, or videos. Stories are voted up and down in importance by the users. It’s almost like a virtual water cooler; you swing by the water cooler, note what people are discussing, and hang out for opinions and information.

One of the aspects which differentiates these sites from news sites are the comments on each story. I prefer digg’s comments, as they are easier to read and follow. However, both sites offer the comment feature which is both entertaining and educational for discerning the public feeling on various topics. They also feature some social networking in that users can see what “friends” on the site have voted for or submitted. These community aspects often serve to clarify a story, refer connections to other stories, or to add more information as it becomes available.

As a result of all this voting, the selection of stories is extremely fluid. I cannot say what is on “today’s” front page of digg; rather, I must specify that it is the current page, at 9:43am, or 3:04pm. As users vote stories up and down, the order changes based on current popularity.

Of course, mixed in with current news and information are some of the more trifling details of today’s society. Witness this story, which appears on the current front page of reddit, which details how to fold a shirt.

I just learned that today digg is increasing its social networking capabilities in order to compete with sites such as Facebook. It should be interesting to see what they come up with and what additional communities are formed around various news topics and interest groups.

The other site I use for information is NetVibes. It basically assembles feeds into one page with beautiful graphics and very interesting capabilities. This is where I get most of my tech news, as there are automatic feeds for site such as TechCrunch and TechMeme, two of the more popular techie sites.

So while I still get much of my news from the “older” sites such as cnn.com or boston.com, many of the newer, slicker, Web 2.0 sites give it to me in a more personal and complete fashion.

Web 2.0 | No Comments »

MIT has been testing a new programming language designed at enticing the younger crowd into coding. My programming experience started when I was in elementary school with a book on BASIC my dad gave me in which I would “code” designs that would eventually print out something resembling an American flag, a house, or a dog.

In Nancy Leveson’s class on programming language, we often discussed how there was very few differences among the languages, whether they be procedural, object-oriented, or a loosely-classified “other.” However, in this case, it’s not so much the language as the perception of it.

There are still way too few female programmers. I remember my first week of freshman year at Dartmouth, walking into a large theatre-style-seating lecture hall to take a placement exam for computer science. Most of the seats in the hall were filled. I was the only female.

Since then, I’ve often considered why girls don’t go into programming. I think there are a variety of reasons for it. Perhaps two of the largest are the nerdy stigma that goes with it and that lack of a social quality. Face it; despite how many meetings or collaborations we might have, developers still sit in front of a computer most of the day (except for those doing the XP-team-programming thing).

I loved that this article pointed to the collaborative element of this language, that students could laugh and share a joke. The picture at the top of the article showed two girls laughing while sitting in front of a machine. So, while the BASIC I learned on was simple like Scratch, it did not have the collaborative, “fun” element this new language seems to have. While I do not think that this language will be the panacea for the gender disparity in programming-type jobs, I do think that people on the Scratch project are thinking in the right direction.

Computers are definitely no longer just accepted in our society, but rather a near-necessity of it. I am amazed by all of the stylish laptop cases and pink accessories after years of the boxy black Targus cases and accessories. I think that such simple movements toward overall acceptance can start putting more young girls in front of these machines, and hopefully coding on them.

Technology Diversity, Technology Explanations | No Comments »

The thesis I completed for my Master’s degree was on a Web 2.0 technology, and I frequently get asked by technical people and non-techies alike exactly what Web 2.0 is. Most folks know that Web 2.0 makes the old web look prettier and “slicker” and has something to do with community, but many are not sure of how to distinguish between the two.

Problem is that Web 2.0 isn’t exactly anything. It’s fuzzily many things. So here is my current analogy:
Web pre-2.0 : dinner at a friend’s house :: Web 2.0 : a potluck dinner

I like this analogy because it addresses the inherent fuzziness in trying to define something that is an evolution of its previous existence. First, I’ll explain the dinners, then try to relate them back to the different Web x.x’s.

When you go to a friend’s house for dinner, your friend makes dinner for you…most of the time. Maybe you brought over some brownies for dessert, and maybe he ordered in an appetizer from the local Indian place, but basically, he is presenting dinner.

When you go to a potluck dinner, everybody brings a dish (except those sneaky little lurkers who just show up and help themselves while contributing nothing). You probably would not have eaten 0l’ Peggy’s meatloaf had you just run into her on the street, but there is an inherent sense of trust at this location, so you help yourself to a large slice. You like Jerry’s mini-quiches so ask him for the recipe, which he readily gives you (unlike Lenny who encouraged you to eat all of his rice pilaf you like but would not tell you how it was concocted). You talk to Ann about her potato salad and end up making plans to play tennis in a week.

The Web pre-2.0 is very much like a friend’s for dinner. You are going to a specific place for a specific purpose. You used to go to your bank web site to check your account, just as you go to your friends to eat your dinner. Maybe as the web evolved, you began to pay bills there. This made it a two-way street: instead of just getting information, you were giving some back. This is kind of like you bringing a dessert to contribute to a dinner.

On to our potluck. Imagine a typical potluck dinner, maybe at a community center. You look around the room and see all kinds of different people. You wonder which food they bought. You see some people that look out of place or that you may not trust, but most people in the room have earned some kind of trust from you by sharing the communal purpose of a potluck. Some folks are there to see others, some are there to promote services (like the local injury lawyer), some are there to watch you.

Web 2.0 is defined by a communal atmosphere: instead of the company or host bringing the goodies, the community brings it. It is also defined by an atmosphere of trust; not absolute trust, but more trust than was perhaps exhibited before. For example, AJAX is a large part of the slickness of Web 2.0 interfaces. However, AJAX is little more than JavaScript made beautiful with stylesheets. Many people (myself included) used to have their browsers set to not allow JavaScript, as it could be used for unsavory purposes. However, as the Web community grows more trusting, more and more users are allowing JavaScript, trusting that those that wrote it will not be invading their desktops. (Yes, I am ignoring spyware concerns for today…one problem at a time, folks).

Lastly (because this is running a bit long), just imagine that the community dinner hosts have a thing for feng shui.  As you look around, there is little clutter; everything serves its purpose.  Some of the art work is a little sparse for you, others are just plain odd, such as those which feature intentionally misspelled words made pretty (e.g. quiqcliq =)).   When your friends have you over, they probably leave more clutter around.  Web 1.0-type sites were often filled with this type of clutter, while Web 2.0 sites tend to be cleaner, have more white space, and use more advanced tools to manipulate graphics and text in a smaller space.

(Originally published in my personal blog.) 

Technology Explanations, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

We will be updating this blog with content about Sarasota web design, development, and implementation, as well as various topics such as Web 2.0 technologies.  We will also feature discussions of knowledgeable technologists and tips on keeping computers virus- and spy-ware free.

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