Day 1 of ISMAR ‘09 in the bag.

Lessons:

• Wow, this is a much smaller community than I envisioned.
• These folks are really passionate, smart and visionary.  I’d invite everyone of them over for dinner.
• In some ways the technology is ready for market, but the utility is still fuzzy.

Hats off to all the wonderful people that I met today.  You have welcomed me into this cadre of visionaries, and I’m looking forward to building the future, not just talking about it.

Kudos to the guys who get the press:

• Markus Tripp with Mobilizy (Wikitude)
• Dirk Groten (Layar)
• Chetan Damani (AcrossAir…Nearest Tube)

But the real congratulations go to the guys who have been at these for years, and whose technology is just coming into realization:

• Peter Meier with Metaio
• Daniel Wagner with Studierstube Tracker / Imagination.at (congratulations on your new baby, sorry to have missed you)
• Mark Billinghurst of HIT NZ

Finally, special mention goes to Ori Inbar and Robert Rice.  It was a bold move to bring together commercial organizations to begin to lay out a road map getting AR / Mobile AR to market.  I doubt it yielded your expected results, but the energy behind standardization was palatable.  Let’s move forward on the Consortium.  Great Idea.

Up early this morning.  Taking the next week off to attend the ISMAR 2009 (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) conference in Orlando.

I’m absolutely fascinated by this technology and it really inspires my imagination.

I have been a fan of Dr. Gates for years, as I’ve seen many of his programs on PBS.

Those who know me, know that my mother is Puerto Rican, yet through the interplay of genetics I resemble my Danish-lineage cousins more than my Puerto Rican cousins.  Working in Florida, with green eyes and only slightly olive skin, weekly I am confronted with racists who do not realize my heritage.  But those remarks are demographic.  Hardly ever do I hear any comments from people my age or younger.  Still, race and bigotry are real.

But in my opinion, that is not what was experienced by Mr. Gates.  Here is a link to the police report.  Read it, and come to your own opinion.  To me, this event is not about the bigotry and racism that unquestionably exist.  Rather, this event is about a man of privilege who used his race and connections, as a means to belittle others.  That is not the kind of honorable action, I would expect from his public persona!

There were witnesses to the event, and the police report indicates Mr. Gates' actions we confrontational and degrading.  The Police are here to protect us.  They give their lives to protect us.  And yes, sometimes they do stupid things.  But I feel Mr. Gates was acting like a bully.  I should congratulate him on demonstrating, not the story of race in America, but privilege in America; with his quote, “You don’t know who you are messing with…I’ll meet your momma outside.”

He's lost a fan, and set back those who experience true discrimination.

My family has always loved the outdoors, and especially the awe inspiring parts of the out doors.

On Friday, Andrea and I witnessed an amazing event.  The cell phone video, does not have the best resolution, but I was able to track down these pictures from the internet.  In the second picture, you’ll see a McDonalds across the street from the Yellow ‘PET’ Superstore sign.  Andrea and I were across the street from the McDonalds.

Like all SilverLight newbies, one of my first projects was an image carousel.

Step 1:  Make the images rotate.

Step 2:  Add some rounded corners to my images, via RectangleGeometry.RadiusX{Y} and Image.Clip

Step 3:  Let's add a shiny border...my brain totally page faults at this point.

In XAML it's pretty straight forward:

<Border BorderThickness="5" CornerRadius="10" BorderBrush="Black">
  <Image x:Name="doSomeCoolness"/>
</Border>

But, I'm a programmer damn it and I like to build all my stuff dynamically in code.

At first, I thought adding a border would be as simple as:

Notice there is no Image.Border property.  A careful look at the XAML will reveal the error of my ways.  The Border is not a Property of the Framework Object, the Border is the container of the Framework Object.  I was hoping Border would work something like an inverse .Clip.

My work around, and yes it sucks, was to treat Border as the Container object in all my calls, including the .Tick event which repositioned the Carousel in the ellipse.

Being an Ex-Microsoft, I know this is a hack, and I have a sticky feeling that I need to be thinking of my object as a Control Template.  But, I'm still a SilverLight newbie and this is about learning, and understanding through exploration.  I guess my next Blog Entry will be about Control Templates

Follow Ups:

@ryantherobot - Totally get the decorator bit, but I don't see it as appropriate for containment.  It would be like Margin also being a parent of the Framework Object.  To me at least, but thanks for the Tweet Back.

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)

I've been crazy busy for the last 45 days.  While I'm still committed to "living la vida start up", the market has me a bit freaked out; so I'm upping my steady contract work to accumulate some "just in case" capital.  With luck, six months from now, I'll be back to at least 50% of my time experimenting with technology.

Does that mean, I've turned into Al Bundy.  Hell no, I'm still me, and I still LOVE TECHNOLOGY.

Since I don't have a ton of time, here are the cool things that have captured my attention and imagination.

The Heterogenic Future and SilverLight

In my January 7th Post, I honestly felt that Flash was the future.  I picked up some ActionScript books at the library, and cracked open CSS3.  For all you programmers out there, take my advice and stop there.  Holy crap, Flash is a nightmare.  It just doesn't feel like a development environment.  I love the pervasiveness of their plug-in, but ActionScript is exactly that; a Script Language.  I know I'm old school, but I just don't get the Script Languages. 

So with my Adobe foray cut strikingly short, I felt pretty bummed for a few weeks.  Then I had some free time about two weeks ago, and I needed to do some animation work for the Jax EBikes catalogue.  I decided to crack open SilverLight.  I had my animation going in like 4 hours, and after about 3 days, I felt really at home in the environment.

SilverLight runs on Mac(s) and Windows Boxes, and it is the backend of NetFlicks' Streaming Video.  Thus, I think it's a safe bet that it can at least be a player over the medium and long term.  In the near term, I don't have a ton of use for SilverLight RIA(s), because the plug in is not ubiquitous, but I can definitely see it reaching critical mass.  That will be an awesome time for the Internet, because RIA(s) are fun as hell to write.

Jax EBikes

So I must be mental, but I just don't want to close Jax EBikes.  They are too much fun, and I want people to be able to see how they can be used to change our conceptions of transportation.  Sales suck.  Gas is cheap.  People are worried.  And its been a cold Winter.  It's not my bread and butter, the only thing is that it's having a negative impact on my relationship with Andrea.  NoTimeOff == StressAtHome.  Gotta figure out what to do.  I thought good Karma was supposed to make things easier, not harder.