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As ever, your co-hosts are John M. Willis and Coté. This week, we discuss:
- SIGCSE education conference – John was there to see Alice, but there was much more. I ask how people are ranking how important (or not) it is for The Kids to learn programming? John starts out referencing a McKinsey video from Eric Schmidt McKensey. Along these lines, a book I’ve been picking at recently, Born Digital, is a good overview of what “The Kids” are like re: technology, though I can’t stand to read through it.
- We comment on Google booths at conferences; they seem to be too much focused on recruiting vs. showing off their wares. That said, the Google booth at SIGCSE was handy for John: they showed off Summer of Code, now on Google App Engine.
- Azure (shipping later this year, Ballmer says) – John got the rundown from a Microsoft booth person. It’s a PaaS, at the moment, not elastic (but maybe when they go GA, some better stuff here). Architecture: when you put an application in, like Google AppEngine, they abstract the OS and file-system, but there’s BLOBs. Each process (or applications, at least) you run is in it’s own Hyper-V machine. It has also work(load) manager, that is, built in queueing.
- Was there any queue’ing/async/ parallel programming sessions? Are people talking about that at SIGCSE? Professors were debating focusing on teaching functional vs. procedural programming – whereas now the dominate thing is object oriented.
- Education people having problems setting up cloud-based apps, thinking like operations folks. Bringing cloud-knowledge to the university. John collected his “cloud for edu” recommendations in a recent post.
- Acquia announcements: “DAMP” installer, cloud-bases search with Apache Solr, and doing one-stop-shop cloud hosting (backed by Amazon EC2/S3/CDN). The BitRock based telemetry stuff is interesting as a leading indicator as well. Cloud: “Acquia also entered the hosting business today with the availability of cloud-based Drupal hosting, providing customers with a one-stop shop for Drupal hosting and enterprise-class support. Targeted at large scale sites seeking to scale Drupal to millions of users and page views, Acquia’s Drupal hosting delivers support for multiple server deployments, with high availability and failover support. Pricing is usage-based, offering large-scale websites with a cost-effective mechanism to grow their site to meet changing traffic demands.” Acquia has posted some (relatively) extensive roadmap info.
- TAG summit with Thomas Friedman
- Running SAP on IBM-crafted clouds – as John says in the piece covering it, “If you can do it with SAP, then you can do it with everything. I think that’s the statement they’re trying to make.”
- I recommend a piece on VDI from Brian Madden, who actually knows what’s going on in VDI land much more than our rambling selves.
- John goes over the new GroundWork execs (CEO & CFO). This prompts me to go over the way I advice startups when they’re looking for executives. See also Matt Asay’s interview.
Disclosure: IBM, Groundwork, Acquia, and Microsoft are clients.
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