Another 10 weeks spent at RIT and it’s beginning to snow. My grades are back already and I got 2 As, my first in a long time. The GPA could use them. Moving forward though, I have a big trip planned this Christmas to visit friends in Thailand and China. I have alot of planning left to do and I leave in less than a month. My classes for next quarter have been decided and I’m pretty read for them. For the immediate time, I have 2 weeks off from school and I am trying to made good use of that time.

With that all time, I’ve set a personal schedule for myself for the first week of break, to have a “project week” of sorts. Seven official days, from this previous Sunday to Saturday. I have an ad-hoc list that I’d like to share:

• Post a bunch of thoughts on my blog. Stuff has been building up, plenty of ideas this quarter, but no time to write. It’s taken years to get to this point, but I realize my goal of this blog is to share my ideas and opinions for others to take note of and possibly learn from. It’s harder than it sounds!
• Organize my files. Mainly computer files, but I’ve had some ideas for organizing that I’ve wanted to try.
• Update my resume! Always useful.
• Post some OpenGL code from my Computer Graphics class this quarter. See the sharing of ideas and knowledge. Even though I did terribly in the class, I enjoyed the exploratory part of the class, but I found out that CG involves lots of maths. I am quite terrible at math. Disappointing.
• Get some other personal coding done and make it public. This ties into the other stuff, setting up a public repository and cleaning up my code to be presentable. Also refactoring and trying new stuff in Python.
• READ! I bought about 20 books from Amazon this quarter that I have been flipping through. Now is the time to get a crack at them.

In the past 3 days, I’ve already taken a crack at the reading part, finishing about 6 books and staying up until 5am doing so. It fries my brain after a while, especially technical books, so you just have to switch topics pretty frequently. I’ve been sitting alone in my apartment for this, just focusing on learning and it’s been great so far. Hopefully this all pays off when I graduate!

Today, I learned quite a great deal about business and would like to share. I went to RIT’s annual Entrepreneur Conference, a business, serial entrepreneur, and startup focused conference featuring many local and non-so local business minded folks. Starting bright and early at 8AM (ugh) and going until around 3-4PM, there were 3 main lecture blocks, with a keynote in the middle from Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, a enterprise-focused software company in Silicon Valley. I attended a “Business 101″ panel, then “Valuation of Early Risk Technology” lecture, and closed with a quite interesting “Starting a Video Game Company” talk, which made it quite a busy day and impressed me quite a deal with my college. I wish they would pull off events of this quality more frequently! Anyways, let me enlighten you on everything except the video game talk, which I will save for part 2 and its own separate article!

Business 101

Three main principles of entrepreneurship are:

• having a market or an opportunity
• resources; money, technology, or IP
• a good management team; people

With your idea and these items, use your passion to make things happen. You must remain very devoted to your idea and your team. You cannot handle everything, but you should be able to trust and delegate stuff to your team. Find a mentor and advisory board to review your situation with monthly.

One of the surprising ideas that was brought up was how the current US economic downtown was a good thing for business. People with cash are willing to invest it in new and different methods, along with being able to get talented people for cheap rates. You need a plan to get to market, but with angel investors and new communities today, it’s far easier to find someone willing to invest than previously.

Valuation of Early Risk Tech

To be honest, this talk was a bit out of my league. Featuring Ted Hagelin, a professor from Syracuse University, he went deep into the economics and logistics of measuring value. He had made complaints about the USPTO, stemming from the 6 years it took him to get a patent on his method of valuing tech. It was a foreign area for me, but I able to salvage a bit from his talk.

Keynote

The keynote talk was the highlight of my day, from Ross Mayfield, mentioned above. He gave a broad overview of web 2.0, the technologies it has presented to the public, and how his company uses them to generate value in companies. He had a very open way of talking, with the ability to split the divide between the know-it-all nerd and the unfamiliar person quite well. During my time out in Silicon Valley, I found a very sharp disparity between those who know every single VIP in the Valley and those outside the Valley who could care less. It’s very easy in Silicon Valley to get wrapped up in grand ideas and have your thoughts supported by those around you, when no one else cares… He also presented some very good stories from taking risks with his business, that others would shy away from. He mentioned finding a CEO through a blog post and LinkedIn, and publicly documenting the process. Being open and accepting help from customers to generate value seemed to be the main trend from web 2.0.

Overall, a very well done conference with lots to learn from and quite an impressive show from RIT. It was a bit more formal than a Barcamp, but still informal enough that you could ask questions during a presentation, a format which I really enjoy. Keep following me for Part 2, where I will discuss the video game industry, an industry that I’m quite passionate about!

I was updating my Facebook profile tonight and wanted to fill in the “Favorite Music” section with some real data from iTunes, considering I listen to 99% of my music through iTunes, my iPod, or iPhone, which means all of my stats get tracked through iTunes. Creating a Smart Playlist in iTunes of my most played music would be adequate, but I don’t know of a way to that data out of iTunes without copying and pasting, a boring and time waste experience, so I turned to Perl.

A friend of mine, Drew, maintains a set of Perl scripts on CPAN to parse and help analyze your iTunes library XML file, aptly called Mac-iTunes-Library.

I installed the package via CPAN:

install 'Mac::iTunes::Library'

Then coded up up a script to pull the top 50 artists based on the number of tracks. Assuming I listen to these tracks, it’s probably a good statistic that I like this artist.

#!/usr/bin/env perl                                                         
use strict;                                                                 
use warnings;                                                               
 
use Mac::iTunes::Library;                                                   
use Mac::iTunes::Library::XML;                                              
 
#full filesystem url of your itunes xml file
my $library = Mac::iTunes::Library::XML->parse('iTunes Music Library.xml');
#hash of <Artist, numTracks>
my %artists = $library->artist();
my @sortedArtists = ();
my $count = 0;
my $artist;
 
#sort function
sub numerically {
        $artists{$b} <=> $artists{$a};
}
 
#sort artists by the number of tracks, then grab the top 50
for my $artist (sort numerically (keys %artists)) {
    if( $count < 50) {
        push(@sortedArtists, $artist);
    }
    $count++;
}
 
#Now take the top 50 artists sorted by number of tracks,
#and sort alphabetically, and print
foreach $artist (sort(@sortedArtists)) {
    print "$artist, ";
}
 
print "\n";

Now, I’m a beginner with Perl, but from a quick parse of the results, there are still some case-sensitivity issues that I’m looking into; “Boards of Canada” and “Boards Of Canada” are seperate artists, but that’s also a problem with iTunes not caring much about case either when saving data. With some minor formatting to the output, you should be rewarded with a list something like this:

311, Aphex Twin, Armin Van Buuren, BT, Bear McCreary, Beck, Cake, DJ Miko & Mini Me, Daft Punk, Deep Forest, Depeche Mode, Dieselboy, Eels, Eminem, Foo Fighters, Frank Klepacki, Hybrid, Incubus, Infected Mushroom, Jack Johnson, Johnny Cash, Juno Reactor, Korn, Machinae Supremacy, Massive Attack, Metallica, Moby, Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Orbital, Pink Floyd, Placebo, Prodigy, Queen, Queens of the Stone Age, Radiohead, Rammstein, Scooter, Stabbing Westward, System of a Down, The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, The Offspring, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Strokes, Tiesto, Weezer, Yo La Tengo, Yoko Kanno

Hurray data!

It was a great day Saturday at Wordcamp, meeting so many interesting people, fostering some new ideas, and learn quite a lot. I’ve used wordpress now as my default blogging software for a few years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to get in touch with the community first hand, to see whose really behind the software. As my first Wordcamp, I had high expectations, and I wasn’t let down!

Early Morning

I showed up to the Mission Bay Center around 9am and was pretty amazed, it was my first time over by SOMA. Lots of apartment buildings and construction going on, that area is going to be amazingly once it’s all completed. I checked in and found out that talks had already started! The breakfast food was delicious, with bagels, fruit, and Peet’s coffee. There were 2 conference rooms, upstairs and downstairs, which were the User Track and Developer Track respectively. After looking at the entire schedule, I settled on most of the developer talks. The majority of the talks were only 20-30 minutes long, which was a bit disappointing. Not enough time to dig into anything really. My highlight of the morning talks was on LOLCats from Ben Huh. Ben gave a very straightforward talk about the viral nature of LOLCats and presented things in a serious matter, which I was surprised about considering the nature of his content. I also enjoyed the talk on Microformats from Tantek Celik. Microformats have caught my interest since Kevin Marks demoed them at Google IO, I hope they continue to gain interest, I think they have a lot of potential.

Lunch and Afternoon

Buffet style BBQ with macaroni and chicken, vegetarians be damned! Long lines at first, but they subsided quickly. Another meal done well. I headed into more talks and was quite happy to hear Nginx mentioned by Chris Lea. Nginx is a Russian developed webserver that is substantially faster than Apache or Lighttpd, but due to be Russian, it’s always been hard as hell to find docs for it in English. From what I heard, the situation has improved now, so maybe it’s time to switch back to Nginx now! jQuery was demoed, the Wordpress APIs were shown, and BuddyPress, a Facebook-like version of Wordpress was shown, to be public by end of the year.

I found there was a very distinct difference between users and developers, I could tell which side people were on immediately. Users just created content and have no clue about anything else. I applaud them for pushing forward and having a passion, someone needs to poke the developers to be productive. One of the other interesting aspects with the crowd was the rampant use of flickr and twitter. Everyone in the room was twittering nonstop. I would post a picture to flickr, mention it on twitter, and watch it appear on 8 laptop screens instantly. It was a unique social experience.

One other cool thing were several tattoo of wordpress that were lying around. They asked us to apply them and mentioned prizes. I added the tattoo to my foot and then ended up winning a WP Moleskin notepad! Very cool contest and prize.

WP Tattoo

WP Moleskin

Evening

Things died down by 6pm, but not before a performance by the SEO Rapper aka Chuck Lewis and it was awesome. I wandered around for a bit and then wound up early at the after-party at Pete’s Tavern with some other folks from the day. We chatted about the iphone, blogging, and tech stuff in general until 9pm when the open bar hit! After that, bourbon warmed my belly and I mingled for the rest of night.

It was a well run event with plenty of volunteers and good food always within reach. Good talks and good company all around. Matt Mullenweg was the informal moderator of the entire event and was always hanging around the edges of the room. From here, I will try to get more involved in the wordpress community and contribute to wordpress development. Hopefully, I can attend again next year!

As mentioned, I attended Defcon 16 this weekend in Las Vegas and had an excellent time! Defcon is a computer security and general hacking convention. Vegas provides an excellent background for a pretty technical and semi-serious event. It took place in the Rivera Hotel, which is quite old and busted hotel, but it works fine for a bunch of nerds that just want to drink and hack all day!

Thursday

We arrived around 6PM in LAS and checked into our room pretty quickly, just dropping off our things and then heading out to dinner at the Treasure Island hotel. Walking around outside in the Vegas heat is interesting, it’s like a hot sauna or something, but the dry heat isn’t that bad for short periods of time. We continued partying and enjoyed the night someplace, I don’t even remember.

Friday

I woke up around 10 or 11am and showered and headed down to the first day of talks. Plenty of good info and interested people. The rooms and talks were crowded, but well managed. The goons, people in redshirts running the event, took charge when needed and herded people properly because even for the all smart people there, we all become stupid in a crowd. I attended talks until 5pmish, then we headed out to dinner someplace I forget, then went to a party at the Hard Rock Cafe around 7pm. Getting drunk and realized it’s only 8pm is such a weird Vegas moment. We hit up a few more parties all around, there are just so many, it’s so fun to have them all be free pretty much. It was a late night and I ended up sleeping at the Treasure Island hotel somehow too! I find when I’m drunk, I love to ramble about how awesome wordpress is.

Saturday

Didn’t wake up until noon and after pampering, headed to more talks by 2pm. I attended the EFF panel, which was informing people about a bunch of MIT kids received an injunction over a talk they were going to give, my friend Drew has more info. It was interesting to get the info first hand and hear people chatting about throughout the conference. Talks ended around 6pm and we headed to the Star Trek Experience for warp core breaches and really good dinner, which is surprising for a place like that. The Star Trek yearly convention was also going on at the Hilton surprisingly, it was cool to see the other nerds wandering around in full costumes. The people dressed as Klingon’s were fully in character and quite impressive.

I attended a few talks Sunday morning 10am talks before we headed to airport early and just hung out for a bit. There are around 3,000 slot machines in the airport, you can gamble constantly. Overall for the conference, it was an awesome time to meet so many cool people interested in learning and sharing together. I had attended Google IO a few months back, which is more of a programmer and web development gathering and the overall themes were quite different. IO was all about building new things, imagining what is possible and how to accomplish it. Defcon is more like “stop doing it that way, you’re doing it all wrong” and being very technical and thorough about knowledge. Just a different way of doing things and it was interesting to get that perspective. I have to go back next year!