Thanks, JVA!
The JVA Symposium on Friday was awesome. The opening ceremonies on Thursday night were pretty interesting. The Bulgarian Ambassador to the United States was kind of clueless about everthing, but there were some other good speakers. Amy Burkes spoke on the legal battle for the owner of the first computer. John Gustafson talked about how they reconstructed the ABC and talked about how Atanasoff was, essentially, brilliant. He was right, too. Apparently, Atanasoff had the vision for unicode in the future so that all alphabets could be repesented. Hence, the use of binary numbers. Gordon Bell, from Microsoft, also spoke. He said that he was thankful that the patent for the computer had never happened. That was the epitome of irony right there. He also brought a video of Atanasoff speaking, so I got to see Atanasoff talk about his computer, which was absolutely amazing. I never thought I would see that, regardless of the fact that Atanasoff lived until 1997 the idea of him being on video never occured to me.
Friday morning, I went to an amazing talk by James Hendler on the semantic web. The whole RDF vision for the web sounds like it’s going to make it a better place to work in. I’m excited for mass deployment. There was an interesting talk from a data miner in the afternoon about artificial intelligence and data mining. I met up with Ryan Gerdes after that and we listened to IBM’s global outlook talk. The best part of that was that apparently processors are approaching power consumption on the order of nuclear reactors (or so he said). In the afternoon there was a pretty cool talk about wearable computing and Raghu Ramakrishnan did a data mining talk that was absolutely hilarious. His presentation claimed that databases are sexy and that they make their owners sexy. I was proud to own a database.
This week I start the first milestone for my video poker project. It’s a chat application, so it should be pretty fun to write. Hopefully all of the remoting in .NET will be friendly and I won’t want to cry or anything. I guess I shall see.