When you last heard from me I was about to wing my way to Las Vegas to attend MAX. Some weeks have passed and I'm still in MAX mode. Currently I'm in Singapore touring as a speaker with MAX Asia. I flew in from Taipei on Sunday, and after a brief visit home to remind my daughters what I look like (tired) I'll be in Seoul for a lighting visit next week.
The best thing about travelling is meeting people, and the last few weeks have been no exception. It started soon after touching down in LA on Friday morning. I mentioned in my previous post that I was going to drop by Mojave Airport on my way to Las Vegas, which has been a hub of everything worth doing in aerospace engineering for the last several decades. This I did, expecting to see no more than some tails sticking up over a fence. I shortly discovered to my incredulity that my visit coincided (through complete serendipity) exactly with the 20th anniversary of the Voyager round-the-world-unrefueled flight, and found myself hanging out with the original Voyager volunteers and their families for three days. Having followed the exploits of Burt and Dick Rutan, the Rutan Aircraft Factory, Voyager, Scaled Composites and Spaceship One since I was 10 or so this was like falling into a book for me, and an experience I will not forget. Everyone made me feel very welcome - what a great bunch of people!
I have to say that after Mojave I was worried that MAX might turn out to be a bit of an anti-climax, but it was just as good in it's own way. Being based in Sydney there are a lot of people I've known for years who I've never met face to face. I managed to rectify this situation over the next few days of the conference, catching up with the sorts of people that... well I'd expect to be rightly accused of name dropping if I listed them here - you know who you are! Again, lots of nice people and many interesting discussions I hope to continue online and at future conferences. I think I am going to need to make more frequent appearances at US based conferences in the future - even in this bre... I mean connected age there's no substitute for a good face-to-face, hand-waving geek-out to get to know someone. There was a good turn out of Australians and New Zealanders there this year; hopefully it's the start of a trend.
The conference content has been very well covered elsewhere, but I could sum it up in one word - opportunity. Almost every session triggered a torrential downpour of ideas in my head, and I'm sure this was true for all of the attendees (although my personal low pressure system might have been intensified by the bag of chocolate-coated coffee beans I bought in the Grand Canal shops - in my altered state I've probably confused some Americans who were previously pretty sure that Australia was an English speaking country). I had the feeling that if I tried taking on every idea that came up I'd wind up spread out like some wispy morning ground mist, and probably also get a headache, so my aim then and since has been to prioritise and focus on a few of these ideas.
Luckily I've had some time to do this while clocking up air miles and trying not to think about my lower back (I don't think the airline realises that no matter how much they torture the people back in live-sheep-export class, some of us are just not going to be able to pay $13,000 for a business return ticket). I prioritised and focused my way to Taipei last Thursday for the first of the MAX Asia conferences, just in time for the Adobe China team to take the speakers out to a famous dumpling restaurant for dinner. I'm used to pretty good Chinese food in Sydney but these dumplings are now the dumplings I will rate other dumplings by - they were excellent.
My session was titled "Architecting the World's Largest Flex Application". This was unfortunate as I had discovered in Las Vegas that it was at best the world's second largest Flex application, thanks to Dorado and their rather excellent ChannelMaster 4 project. At least when I pointed this out in Taipei no-one left the room, in fact for a first run of a presentation it went very well. I demonstrated the AFR Access application developed by our client the Frame Group, which seemed to get an appreciative response. The central section of the presentation is a ground-up, first principals look at the model view controller pattern and the problem it addresses, which I follow with a brief look at the Cairngorm framework and some points about how things pan out in the real world as opposed to your typical sample framework application. This is the session I'll be repeating tomorrow in Singapore.
I spent Saturday in Taipei. This was my first visit to Taiwan and I was pleasantly surprised, nothing like the "Blade Runner" images I'd heard about from some people (If you want really crazy traffic try some parts of Shanghai or Saigon). I visited Taipei 101, the world's tallest building, which was right next to the hotel. It also had the world's fastest elevator, built by Toshiba, and a nice mall as malls go nearer ground level. The afternoon was taken up with a visit to the National Palace Museum, which contains all the treasures from the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. It really is worth a visit, almost everything is incredibly old and stunningly beautiful - I almost wanted to take up pottery on the spot. I was particularly fascinated by the bronze castings, I've read a bit about the history of metals and the Chinese were thousands of years ahead of us all when it came to alloying and casting technology. By the way, if you're a conspiracy theorist forget the "aliens built the pyramids" stuff; instead try "how the hell did anyone ever work out that tin and copper make bronze given that there are no sources of these ores even remotely near each other - at least on this planet"?
On Saturday evening I went out with John Koch from Adobe Developer Relations and Charles from Shou-Nao Technologies. Charles runs the local user group and does a lot for the Mandarin speaking Flash and Flex community around Asia. We went to a BBQ restaurant where we met some more user group people - again a very friendly bunch. After dinner we moved to a pub, which promised live music; this turned out to be the first gig for a rock/blues band made up of expat Americans. The pub was crowded with their friends and there was smoke everywhere, which I found a bit tough, but it was different. One of the user group people (Becky or Michelle, sorry I mixed your business cards up) showed me a Flash Lite 2.0 game she created - it was a manga style graphics dating game (beautifully drawn, all done in Flash) in which you had to do exactly the right thing over the course of a week to successfully date the girl. Because all the descriptions and answers were in Chinese an effort was made to translate for me, which was fun but in the end fruitless as (a) my notion of chivalry didn't quite line up with the answers and (b) Chinese speaking men find this game almost impossible anyway!
The language gap in the Asian developer community has been the topic of several discussions with local developers and Adobe staff over the last week. Plans are afoot to get translation done for "key" blog and forum posts, but there are still many details to work out. BTW, I know the Google translate pod on our blog is at best amusing and at worst a living slur on the skills of human translators everywhere - I'll take it off soon.
Singapore has been fun so far. The hotel room in the Grand Hyatt is excellent and I've been able to catch up with a fair amount of work. The first day's sessions are about to finish so I'd better head down there and see what's happening. I'll let you know how the second presentation and Seoul go in a later post.
Cheers,
Robin
