HOW IT WORKS:You and a team (up to three people) develop a business idea from scratch over a single weekend to win cash prizes.

WHEN:February 24 – February 26

WHY:

• Develop a business idea from inception
• Show off your programming talent
• Meet potential employers and aspiring entrepreneurs
• Develop your resume

Format in brief:
Up to 10 UCLA Anderson students will give a 1-minute pitch of their business idea to a group of developers at the Developer Contest kickoff on Friday. After the developers have heard all 10 pitches, they will then vote for the idea that they want to develop that weekend.

After the vote, the pitching Anderson student who received the most votes will have 20-30 minutes to answer Q&A with the developers about the idea and go into further detail. The developers may form teams of up to 3 members, with the option of selecting an Anderson student as a consultant.

The developer teams are given the weekend to develop a prototype and to prepare a presentation of their final product. Sunday evening each developer team will present to a board of judges. The winning team/developer will be selected by the judges and will receive cash and/or other prizes.

UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095

MORE INFORMATION AND RSVP ONLINE: http://bit.ly/EAdevContest

1. If you are not familiar with Urdu phonetic keyboard, the quickest way is to use Google Transliterate http://www.google.com/transliterate/Urdu

2. Urdu keyboard is quite easy to learn. If you want native support of Urdu in your operating system, follow the steps according to your OS.

• Urdu Keyboard installation instructions for MAC
• Urdu Keyboard installation instructions for PC

Since I use both MAC and PC for native urdu support, I have tried and tested both the mechanisms and they work just fine.

3. If you are using transliteration, you would copy and paste the Urdu text into your favorite twitter / blogging client. Not all clients support unicode; tweetdeck didn’t use to but twitter.com does support Unicode.

Happy tweeting / blogging.

Last but not least, one of the attendees brought up an excellent question of how to handle HIPAA and PCI compliant data in the cloud. To the best of my knowledge, based on my last conversations at the cloud summit in LA, the best approach is to do a hybrid cloud implementation i.e. public cloud CDN Style for the public facing sites while keep the sensetive data in-house where your internal data center is PCI/HIPAA compliant. Feel free to check with Lynn since she has been following this area closely.

Thanks to the great audience including celebrities like Jeremy Clark . Special thanks to Art Villa and Janet Chung for the speaking opportunity. For links and code sample, please see my previous talk.

The well written and organized book is divided into eight chapters which discuss design patterns, reference models and architecture artifacts. The web 2.0 patterns discussed in the book includes Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Collaborative Tagging (folksonomy), Synchronized Web, SaaS (cloud computing), Persistent Rights Management, Mashup, Rich User Experience, Participation/Collaboration, Asynchronous Particle Update, ,Semantic Web Grounding and Structured Information. This categorization helps distinguish salient features of a web 2.0 architecture and help define what richness actually means in a rich internet application.
If you have been working in the field long enough, the meme map on page # 63 will help skimming through chapter 3 (which contains web 2.0 example sites) so you can get to the core of the book. Chapters 4 to 7 discuss specific patterns for web 2.0, models, and reference architectures. As mentioned in the book’s title as well as title of this review, “web 2.0 architectures” is focused on big picture architectural overview of the Web 2.0. Even though it’s not a 10000 ft. abstract overview whitepaper, it also does not converse nitty gritty details of building a 2.0 app using jquery and node.js. This text is about concepts, models, reference architectures and common recurring themes in web 2.0 sites. It does not concern itself with specific technologies and implementation details but rather talk about the common paradigm. Therefore, if you are considering it as a cookbook/recipes book for web 2.0 applications, you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you are a web engineer / architect or a technologist interested in the underlying design patterns and attributes of web 2.0, this book is for you.

As discussed, AppFabric 1.1 can be downloaded from here which introduces read-through and write-behind provider support, graceful shutdown, domain account support, new ASP.NET session state and output caching providers, compression and multiple cache client application configuration sections to the existing appfabric feature-set. The sample app can be downloaded from here. CacheWebAppSample.

Links

• AppFabric Home @ Microsoft
• Caching Algorithms
• Installing, Configuring and Using Windows Server AppFabric and the “Velocity” Memory Cache in 10 minutes
• Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook
• AppFabric Cache Feature Comparisons
• Velocity vs. HA Velocity
• Windows Server AppFabric Introduction
• AppFabric Client API
• Windows Server AppFabric  Learning Center

Hearing this, Stephen Soong, a friend and avid sci-fi reader made his own list and promised to let me borrow from his sci-fi collection.  Here is Stephen’s list.

Sports

• The Game, Ken Dryden
• Moneyball, Michael Lewis
• The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons
• Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam
• Once a Runner, John L. Parker

Adventure

• Annapurna, Maurice Herzog

Science

• Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, Patricia Duffy
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
• The Panda’s Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould
• Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan

Religion

• The Old Testament
• The New Testament

Chinese Classics

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), Luo Guanzhong
• The Water Margin (水滸傳), Shi Nai’an
• Journey to the West (西遊記), Wu Cheng’en
• The Deer and the Cauldron (鹿鼎記), Louis Cha

English Classics

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
• Call of the Wild, Jack London
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• Watership Down, Richard Adams

Sci-Fi

• I Robot, Isaac Asimov

Fantasy

• A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin
• Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
• Mistborn Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson
• Legend of Drizzt, R.A. Salvatore

Graphic Novels

• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

History

• Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Other Non-Fiction

• Freakanomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Other Fiction

• Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• The Stand, Stephen King

Try it out. http://projecteuler.net/

The Speakers Include Peldi from Balsamiq, Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg, Rob Walling, author of Start Small, Stay Small, Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator, Mike Taber of Single Founder and many others…

Anyone launching a startup with no outside funding who wants to hang out with and learn from 128 of today’s leading founders and entrepreneurs.

I have heard great feedback from attendees. So if you can, go!

I would like to thank every one who made it possible; including my partner in crime Richard Trinh for his tireless efforts and consistent help, Green Dot Corporation  for it’s constant support and sponsorship of the user group and to all our members who make this wonderful user group possible, month after month. This award is for all of you.

I’ll be presenting on AppFabric; Being a technical editor for an upcoming book on AppFabric, it’s a great opportunity for me to test out the specific interests around this area. Following is the abstract.

Would you like to learn about high availability, scalability and distributed cache management using Microsoft platform without getting all cloudy? Windows Server AppFabric is a set of application services focused on improving the performance and management of Web, Composite, and Enterprise applications. AppFabric provides a highly scalable in-memory application cache for all types of data. With the caching features of AppFabric you get Scalable in-memory, distributed cache for any serializable data, Seamless integration with ASP.NET, High availability and dynamic scale-out of cluster nodes, Optional local cache with eviction policies and cache change subscriptions and notifications.

In this demo-centric session, we will cover end-to-end implementation of a web solution using AppFabric for caching and session management. Intended audience include web developers who want to build high performance applications leveraging web programming techniques (e.g.ASP.NET, MVC, RESTful services, etc) and enterprise developers who create service oriented middle tier applications using .NET.

Please do try to come, it’s a great event for developers to get together and learn about new (and existing) technologies from their peers.