On the second day of this years SXSW Interactive I went to see the following panels:
- 10:00 AM Even Faster Web Sites (Steve Souders – Google)
- 11:30 AM More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries (John Resig – Mozilla Corporation, Andrew Dupont – Prototype JavaScript Framework, Nate Koechley – Yahoo!, Becky Gibson – IBM, Dojo)
- 03:30 PM From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small (Jeffrey Zeldman – Happy Cog Studios, Roger Black – Roger Black Studio, Kristina Halvorson – Brain Traffic, Whitney Hess – Freelancer)
- 05:00 PM Building Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools (CC Chapman – The Advance Guard, Julie Haddon – The Marketing Farm, Saul Colt – FreshBooks, Loic Le Meur – Seesmic)
Steve Souders’ talk was, as always, very interesting and brought some apsects to my attention that never crossed my mind. He considers his 14 rules as “old school” and moves on to other aspects of front end optimization. Did you know that having insline script(s) follow stylesheets is bad? I didn’t until his talk. Looking forward to his new book “Even Faster Websites”, which will be published in June 2009.
The two afternoon panels were also inspiring but didn’t really hold new information but rather confirmed things I heard, read or knew before.
After dropping off our bags at the hotel, Peter and I went to T.G.I. Fridays for dinner and then on to the official opening party.
After a 20 hour trip across the Atlantic, some beer at the Roux and a short night’s sleep, I was ready for the crazy geek fest.
As usual the first day was a good start to get into the right mood for SXSW interactive. Together with Colleen and Peter I started the day with standing in line to pick up our badges. After that, we went for a nice breakfast at “The Hideout”. Having taco for breakfast sounded kinda strange at first (especially for a German), but it was really delicious.
Next was the WaSP ILG lunch at the Moonshine. Good food and great company. What else do you need?
At 3.30 Peter and I went to our first panel at SXSW 2009: Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design) by Paul Annett form Clearleft. He showed some really awesome and inspiring experiments and real life examples of creative CSS usage. Hope, he’ll have his slides online soon.
I know it’s still a few days away. But since I started getting all set up for crossing the Atlantic, heading to the awesome SXSW Interactive once more, I thought, I’d share my excitement with you. You’ll find my intended schedule at sched.org
It’ll be my third trip to SXSW after 2006 (after which I took a trip north to Alaska to attend a friend’s wedding) and 2008.
This year I’ll be traveling with Peter Prochaska, a friend and awesome PHP developer.
Looking forward to a mind-boggling conference and meeting inspiring people.
If you’re also going to SXSWi, drop me a line here or follow me on Twitter @migrosch.
After enjoying the christmas holidays, I decided to give my MacBook Pro a clean install, to get rid of some software residue. In the course of this clean install, I also switched from EasyEclipse to Eclipse 3.4 with PHP Development Tools and Web Tools. Since most of my project files are managed via SVN, I wanted to grab the latest versions from the repository… and bummer… I got the message “Unable to load default SVN Client”. After some unsuccessful tinkering with Eclipse and Subversion, along came Google and pointed me to a solution (Getting Subclipse to Work in Gandymede (Eclipse 3.4)). I’m now up and running again at full speed, thanks to Google and Greg Jastrab at SmartLogic Solutions. You saved my day.
After being a bit frustrated with the performance of Parallels on my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM), I gave VMware Fusion a try last week. At first glance its performance footprint on the host system didn’t seem as heavy as the one from Parallels Desktop for Mac. Of course switching between host and guest system is always a tedious task for he machine. With Parallels I often observed that some of the applications running on the host system stalled, showing me the colorful beach ball of death. This can get really annoying.
After a while, I observed a similar behavior even with Fusion and I got more frustrated, wanting to throw the whole machine out the window, or maybe throwing Windows out the machine (I can’t remember). Anyway, to make the long story short, I stumbled across Sun’s VirtualBox, which is Open Source and just love it. Its footprint on the host performance is almost imperceptible. It boots Windows XP Profession in 1 Minute! Of course VirtualBox is not as feature laden as Parallels or Fusion. But I need the system mainly for browser tests (don’t we all love Internet Explorer?) and some applications that only run on Windows, so I don’t need features like 3D graphic acceleration, Coherence etc. That’s why VirtualBox is now my first choice when it comes to virtualization solutions for the Mac.
Thank you Sun!