• At Tulsa TechFest Day 1, morning keynote by Chris Bernard, Microsoft User Experience Evangelist; click here for slides #
• Standing room only at the TechFest morning keynote #
• Stunning revelation from Microsoft keynote: “We need to think about scale”. Wow. #
• Bernard: “UX is about making choices”; developers need to “be everywhere” #
• Bernard is pushing Silverlight, XAML, and designer-oriented tools #
• Bernard: “How people feel is the new black”#
• Bernard’s blog http://chrisbernard.blogs.com #
• Jayson Street’s waiting to start his “Google to Pwnag3 in 60 Minutes” session http://twitpic.com/faew #
• Jayson Street’s “fun job” http://stratagem-one.com #
• Street’s talk TOC http://twitpic.com/fah9 #
• Street: Back Track 4 will be a Debian distribution http://tinyurl.com/3dg2zs #
• Street can’t get his Windows movie to play… #
• Street: “Hackers love complexity” (speaking of FoxNews.com and Fox.com using different OSes and web servers) #
• Street shows Firefox hacking extensions, using Netcraft.com and SamSpade.org #
• Street: OSVDB is an invaluable tool for sysadmins and defenders #
• Street: “Microsoft provided us with a hacking tool, tftp.exe. Lovely!” #
• Street’s presentation is at http://f0rb1dd3n.com/s1s/WP/ #
• Coming up after lunch in Track 1: Chris Koenig, Microsoft Evangelist, on Silverlight style http://twitpic.com/fb0l #
• Tim Elrod’s “Reverse Engineering Security Patches”: Most RE hackers use IDA Pro #
• Elrod talks very well of Metasploit, as did Street #
• Elrod shows how to reverse engineer a QuickTime RTSP vulnerability #
• Elrod uses VMWare Fusion extensively during his QuickTime RTSP exploit #
• Koenig’s Silverlight talk is sparsely attended and a bit of a snoozer http://twitpic.com/fbig #
• My “Hacking the Meaning in Human Communication” talk went well, two or three possible new partners #
• Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent and former Microsoftie, keynoting about the importance of talking *with*, not *at*, customers #
• Howard: “Search has to become much, much smarter”. Talk to Digital Reasoning, Rob! http://twitpic.com/fce0 #
• Howard: “Webkinz is brainwashing our children”. Love it! http://twitpic.com/fcgc #
• Howard demoing Telligent’s Harvest Reporting Server analytics tool #
• Overheard during Zune giveaway: “What’s that?”. Answer: “Like an iPod” #
• Tulsa TechFest suggestion for next year: Seriously streamline the giveaways at the end of each day (madness and mayhem and 45 minutes to get through them on Day 1 this year) #

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!

Watch it (possibly again) via Hulu. (Weird aside: When I launched it in Hulu, it was “brought to me with limited commercial interruption by Hungry-Man“…bizarro world!):

SNL had their own take on the debate, of course:

What a day for a 500th post to my blog. Given all that’s going on in Washington, I think I’ll keep it short and to the point:

500! Whoo hoo! Now back to worrying about economic doom and gloom and all of that good stuff…