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Tulsa TechFest is this week, Thursday and Friday October 9th and 10th.

Two cans of food or two dollars gets you in each day (donated to charities in either case). There are a ton of interesting speakers and topics planned (click here to access the complete agenda).

I’m speaking on the Synthesys Platform and especially its Java API in a talk entitled “Hacking the Meaning in Human Communication” on Thursday afternoon at 2:30PM in the Java track.

The abstract for my talk is below.

Most text is not structured to help you find critical concepts and connections. Important knowledge is often buried deep in the text in mounds of irrelevant data. And unfortunately, keyword search, topical filtering, and tagging technologies don’t solve this problem because they require you to know what you’re searching for in advance.

The Synthesys Platform, however, helps you find unexpected, critical knowledge hidden in your data. Synthesys takes unstructured text as input, uses entity extraction with strong semantic relationship analysis to operate on the input, and then outputs abstracted knowledge objects. You can then use these objects (people, places, connections, etc.) to understand and analyze what’s important.

The Synthesys Platform is available both as a hosted service exposed via REST and a downloadable engine with SDK and Java API. This session introduces the Synthesys Platform including its core engine and SDK, then dives into using the APIs to build synthetic applications.

Watch my blog and Twitter stream (search for ‘tulsatechfest’) for live updates from the conference. Hope to see you there!

Tulsa TechFest is returning for its third year, and I’ve been asked to speak.

My talk on “Hacking the Meaning in Human Communication” is a part of the Java track, though it contains REST Web programming as well as Java API info and examples.

What is TechFest? In the words of the organizers:

• TechFest is a technical conference with currently the broadest topics in the United States, maybe the world. Covering everything enterprise architecture, software/web development, databases, project management, data security and this year for the first time - graphic/web design.
• It’s primary focus is to provide training/teaching sessions that are immediately benefical to the broadest range of IT professionals in their day-to-day jobs. Over 60 national/international speakers and 90 to 120 75 minute sessions.
• A charitable non-profit event organized by Tulsa area volunteers.
• In 2006, it started as a one day event on Saturday, October 14th, 2006, attracting over 360+ attendees.
• In 2007, we listened to everyone’s feedback and had phenominal success with over 660+ attendees on Friday, October 19th, 2007, and over 460+ on Saturday, October 20th, 2007.
• Since our first event, many other communities have been following our example by hosting their own TechFest events: VancouverTechFest, HoustonTechFest, DallasTechFest, AlbertaTechFest and IndyTechFest.

Information on speakers, agenda, etc. is being updated now on the Tulsa TechFest 2008 site. You can also follow Tulsa TechFest on Twitter for updates.

More to come as we approach October. And if you’re in the region, please do plan to attend. Hope to see you there!

I received the following from Nokia and wanted to pass it along to anyone interested in open source and mobile development. (Some of the links added by me.)

Nokia invites all open source developers (Linux, C, C++, Python) for a fun filled Mobile Open Source Developer Day in San Francisco, organized alongside LinuxWorld held in Moscone Center in early August.

In this event we will show you how to develop open source applications for S60 smart phones — The World’s Biggest Smart Phone Community. We will tell you about new business opportunities, provide latest technical updates, and also give some technical training for open source development on mobile devices. You will hear from industry experts on topics like Python, Qt , Open C++, STL, and Maemo.

We want to keep the event as interactive as possible.You can suggest your own topic and we can talk about that in detail with you. If you want to start building your own open source applications for mobile devices, bring your laptop with you, as we will provide you all the necessary tools along with step by step instructions on developing and porting an existing open source application.

Prizes will be distributed throughout the event –including Nokia N95 - 8GB smart phones and N800 Internet tablets.

The Event is Free for all developers and as a courtesy for attending this event we are giving a one-day free pass to LinuxWorld.

So hurry up and register yourself as seats for the open source workshop and passes for Linux World are limited.

Date –> 06th Aug 2008
Time –>9:30 am – 4:00 pm
Location –> Moscone Center South Hall, 747 Howard street San Francisco, CA. East Mezzanine Level, Room 222
Register today by going to: http://mktools.forum.nokia.com/invitation/opensourcegoesmobile

Jeremy Gossett has posted a fab-o interview he did with our co-colleague Matthew Russell.

In it, Matthew talks about Dojo, how he started writing for O’Reilly, his upcoming OSCON talk on using Dojo’s GFX graphics project, and other things.

If you are involved with Web development, especially Ajax, check out the interview and Matthew’s book. Recommended.

Congrats to my colleague Matthew Russell on the publication of his new O’Reilly book, “Dojo: The Definitive Guide“.

Recommended!

• Wordpress turns 5 today, wow! http://tinyurl.com/5j57pr #
• Good recommendations on proper design for mobile users http://tinyurl.com/67fwsx #

• Calais is getting more interesting with tools like Tagaroo http://tinyurl.com/6eol8f #

• Tim Bray writes about a very RESTful JavaOne http://tinyurl.com/6f522a #

• ETech presentations and papers are being posted online at: http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/schedule/proceedings/ #
• ETech coverage roundup from Tim O’Reilly: http://tinyurl.com/2p2nmd #

• O’Reilly 2007 programming languages data are out http://tinyurl.com/36863d #

• Decent introduction to the Comet architecture, very useful for event-driven Web apps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) #
• Comet Daily post by Andrew Betts on overcomplexity http://tinyurl.com/2vjbog #

• Kevin Kelly’s excellent "Better Than Free" is highly recommended http://tinyurl.com/2pacvr #

• Tim O’Reilly makes very good observations on Google Social Graph API http://tinyurl.com/26r77q #

• Today’s the 5th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew of seven: http://tinyurl.com/2u43kg #
• Google’s new Social Graph API http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/ #
• TechCrunch on Goog Social Graph API http://tinyurl.com/2pwe5t #

• Yearly backup time is necessary, but no fun..maybe redundant, offsite hard drives are in order for 2008? #
• @guykawasaki, my fav sports site is obvious, but very useful: http://sports.yahoo.com #
• Make has outdone itself with Graffiti Research Lab Vienna: Laser tagging buildings http://tinyurl.com/2537tl #

Reader comments to Tim O’Reilly’s recent “History, Digitized and Abridged” Radar post are spot-on in noting that digitizing old books, films, and related content are illustrating just how much media was previously dying a slow death out of mind of most people.

Take, for example, my alma mater’s wonderful History of Science Collection. It contains amazing tomes dating back to the 15th century. Its copies of rare works of Copernicus and Galileo are particularly impressive. An autographed copy of Galileo’s “Sidereus nuncius“, the first scientific treatise based on observations made through a telescope, for example. Who knew a collection of world class scientific manuscripts such as this existed in Norman, Oklahoma?

The answer until recently: Not many people. Even most OU students weren’t aware of it when I was there as an undergraduate in the 90s. Thankfully I accidentally bumped into its existence and was able to visit, but for all those that haven’t heard of it, digitization project may prove just the ticket to raise it to their attention.

OU is now digitizing images from rare and historically important materials and posting the images online for free. Click here to browse through previously posted imagery.

Not find images of something you’re looking for? You can ask to have them scanned in here. (Of course you have to know what you’re asking for, and thankfully they’ve provided instructions for searching the catalog of available materials, though if you’re not affiliated with the university you may need to contact someone for assistance.) One can even subscribe to a RSS feed to receive updates when new images of particular value or broad interest are posted. Click here to grab the RSS feed.

While this particular image scanning effort is not the same as a word-for-word transcription into text and therefore doesn’t offer all the searchability and indexing that one might like, it’s a start. A baby step, but a baby step in the right direction, and a great way to share the wealth of humanity’s book-based knowledge. I hope to see OU go much farther and scan entire books, even better if they’re scanned as images and their contents captured into searchable, linkable text, too.

BTW, if you’re ever in the central Oklahoma area, you should really try to visit the Collection. For me, an engineer and history buff, it was an amazing experience.

Yahoo! Pipes launched last night, opening up an interesting new Unix pipes-like capability for mixing, processing, and using feeds. According to Y!, Pipes allow one to “rewire the web” (their words) by combining, filtering, sorting, truncating, translating, geocoding, etc. user defined feeds. Click here to try out Pipes yourself.

(Note that as I type this the site is overwhelmed with traffic and returning the error message “Our Pipes are clogged! We’ve called the plumbers!”)

O’Reilly published an introduction and overview of the promise of pipes, followed by additional Radar posts providing a technical overview and short deconstruction of one of the example Y! pipes.

Tim O’Reilly started his introduction with high praise indeed:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet

A lot of possibilities for consuming pipes.yahoo output come to mind. And I find the use of a visual metaphor for indicating user intent very interesting: It’s not new by any means, but nonetheless another informative example of how we can think about empowering users to orchestrate complex operations through simple indications.

It must be asked: Is Senator Ted Stevens a mad genius?

Replace “tubes” with “pipes” and you be the judge…

OK, OK, so he’s not Einstein Jr. But wouldn’t it have been great if Y! had named their new Pipes service “Yahoo! Tubes”?

I would love to see tubes.yahoo.com link to a humorous version of Pipes!

There have been a lot of so-so and a few really great articles on iPhone in the week since it was launched. What follows are my favorite blog posts, articles, and videos covering iPhone in week one.

David Pogue published an early first pass in his “Some Hands-On Time With the iPhone” after spending about an hour hands-on with an iPhone prototype the day Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced it at MacWorld. He followed that up with answers to a wide variety of reader questions in “The Ultimate iPhone FAQ” and “The Ultimate iPhone FAQ list, Part 2“.

Time covered iPhone’s development with “Apple’s New Calling: The iPhone“. Doubt after reading that one that Jobs is a bit paranoid? Read Fortune’s piece on “How Apple kept its iPhone secrets” to assuage yourself of that misgiving. Bogus prototypes to mislead employees and disguised software to hide the interface from development partners. You name it, and Jobs and company probably did it to keep iPhone hush hush the last couple of years. Good thing or bad thing, you be the judge.

What about the negatives of the device itself?

Lack of third generation wireless (3G) has been picked at by Nokians and others. Read my take in “WiFi is more important than HSDPA for early iPhone success“, which was picked for the Carnival of the Mobilists carnival #58.

Alan Reiter did a great job slicing and dicing the (lack of) imaging capabilities in his “Apple iPhone might be revolutionary, but definitely not for wireless imaging“. 2 MPix cellcam support, average at best. No flash or lens cover, argh. No video, OMG! One of my biggest disappointments with the first iPhone model.

And that leads naturally to my other really big disappointment: Lack of developer support.

As Jobs put it to the New York Times:

We define everything that is on the phone

Oh Steve, does your hubris have no end? Wait, I guess it doesn’t, as NYT reports Jobs continued with:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

What about the hundreds of millions of Java ME handsets running mobile apps, Steve? Don’t most of those devices work on a regular basis? Would the mobile Java ecosystem have been possible if it’d been “a more controlled environment”? No way. Open wins in the end.

If you agree, consider signing the iPhone Third-Party Application Support Petition and blog your take far and wide.

Looking for more reasons to dislike iPhone? Check out “10 Ways the Nokia N800 is Better Than Apple’s iPhone“. Or if you’re just looking for more about iPhone and don’t know where to start, visit “All Things iPhone” for a running commentary of what’s known, unknown, and speculated.

Perhaps Stephen Colbert summed up our first week love-hate relationship with iPhone best in giving Apple a “double wag of the finger” while stating:

You can count me out as a customer, until you send me one for free

Watch the video for the true word from week one:

Only one week in, and it’s already been an interesting ride!

ZDNet reported late yesterday that Sun has picked the GPL license for Java code.

Bravo! It’s taken many years and lobbying by many good people within and outside of Sun, but hopefully this is a case of better late than never. Discussion will rage about the choice of license, but whatever shakes out, I’m very happy to see JDK code finally out in the open (and Java ME here, Java EE here).

The bar is raised. Now let’s all get cracking on The Next Big Thing.