Dave Landers

I just got back from a fun overnight with my son Paul and his friend Nick. Around Christmas, Paul decided we needed to do a “Cross Country Ski / Backpacking” overnighter. We had planned to go last week while I was on vacation, but we decided to wait due to our colds. So I took off a couple extra days from work and we headed out yesterday.

We decided to hit the Sourdough trail - an area we are familiar with (at least in the Summer). The forecast called for high winds along the Front Range, and snow in the mountains. I figured, due to the area where we were going, that we’d have one, both, or neither :).

We get to the trailhead, and it snowing lightly and somewhat windy. By “somewhat windy”, I mean that my estimate at the time was 60 MPH or more. That was confirmed today as I checked the Niwot Ridge data (a set of CU weather research stations). Their Saddle Site is the closet to where we camped (about 1.5 miles south), and it showed average wind speeds at around 50 MPH, and gusts in the 60-70 MPH range. One of their other stations registered a peak gust of around 106 MPH that morning.

Fortunately, once we were off the road and in the forrest, we didn’t experience much of the wind.

For the first mile of the trail, the snow was pretty poor - we walked about as much as we skied But south of the Beaver Bog TH the snow was pretty decent.

We made it to the junction of the Wapiti/Baptiste Ski Trails, (about another mile) and decided the location would be a good spot to make camp - the area seemed to be reasonably sheltered from the wind, and there was a good place where we could camp without worrying about snags or widow makers.

We set up camp and built a fire, intending to do a bit more skiing (without the backpacks) but it didn’t happen. Just a quiet afternoon and evening around the fire.

The trip back this morning was nice - more downhill than the trip in. Downhill is obviously easier, but for us novice cross-country skiers carrying backpacks it also proved to be occasionally exciting. But no one was injured, and we had a great time.

I hope to do things like this more often, it was fun.

It has been a great week - I’ve now got a lot of things to dig into more. There were things I learned directly from the sessions, and other stuff that I picked up outside the sessions themselves.

I need to try out Virtual Box to host Linux on my Mac.

I want to look at World Community Grid and maybe contribute to something useful rather than my iPhoto screensaver.

I wish I could find an excuse to build an iPhone application - there were several good iPhone development sessions this week. Looks like fun.

I have this proxy application that I wrote and have re-written several times to investigate various technologies. I have a MINA version, and so was interested in the MINA talk this week. After that talk, I think I will now have to re-write it again to wire up the MINA filters and handlers using Spring.

I need to play more with JMX to understand how to use it for configuring and monitoring. Maybe I’ll do this as part of that same MINA/Spring update.

Simon Phipps, talking about standards, asserted that standards should be about Substitutability not Interoperability. That is, if we concentrate on building a standard that lets us Substitute one thing for another we will have a more useful standard than when we focus on interop. I’m going to have to think about that one.

And on Monday morning, I plan to clear the whiteboard and grab the slides and my notes from Subbu’s REST talks - because I have a RESTful service API to build.

What a great week. I am educated, informed, inspired, reconnected … and tired.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit

In past years, at the Colorado Software Summit, we have taken up a collection and given some sort of “surprise” gift to the organizers: Wayne and Peggy.

We’re going to do something different this year. We recently lost one of our “family” - our dear friend dIon Gillard.

This year’s collection will be sent to the Melanoma Foundation (Austrailia) - hopefully we make it less likely that we loose another friend to this awful disease.

If you are here at the conference, find me or Kelvin and please make a donation.

Thanks.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit

More good sessions today, but the best was from my friend Subbu, who talked on Pragmatic REST.

Subbu gave a really great overview of REST - what is it, and how do you do it. This is especially going to help me as I am just starting a project to build a RESTful API for WebLogic Portal, so I have this timely reminder to serve as a guide - thanks, Subbu!

If any of you are interested in REST, I suggest you check out his blog and his slides from this conference (they should end up on the conference web site eventually, or Subbu said he would post them to his blog soon).

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, REST, softwaresummit