Lauren Cooney's Blog

Why Should I Twitter? Clue me in!

I signed up for Twitter quite awhile ago (to grab the user name "laurencooney") but I rarely use it. Recently I've had a lot of people (well, about 20) add me as someone they are following on Twitter. I'm not quite sure why, but I'm willing to take a stab at Twittering if someone can give me some good reasons to why I should use it... I get the part about following conversations, or asking questions that you need answered at that moment, and it *seems* like it might be convenient...

Can someone clue me in? Am I missing something here? I feel like the last person invited to the biggest party of the year... help! :) /LC

You Know You've Been Traveling Too Much When...

.... you roll out of bed in the morning, thinking you're late, and grumbling about how the hotel operator forgot to give you your wake-up call... only to realize that you're in your own bed, in your own house, oh, and it's a different time zone - you're up 3 hours too early. And the worst part? There's no room service waffles/coffee on the way.

I got back from NYC late last night, mainly due to delays in flights from high winds, and sore from flying coach (yes, my whole management team does Coach travel, FYI - we save money!).

This weekend I'm working on reworking our Info 2.0 website - hopefully we'll have it refreshed by next Friday. We're getting closer to announcements (yay!) so time to get this rolling.

Hope you all have a great weekend... /LC

Info 2.0 API Strategy: Presentation with David Boloker

This week I'm in New York City - on Monday I attended and presented at Mashery's "Business of API's" Conference at the Yale Club, and Tuesday I presented with Mark Heid at AjaxWorld on Info 2.0.

It's been a great week so far - from getting stuck in the middle of the largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the WORLD (which was actually pretty darn fun - pics to come) to chatting with the folks from Nexaweb and Appcelerator today at AjaxWorld, all who have pretty interesting (and perhaps complimentary, in some ways) solutions. I'll have more about AjaxWorld a bit later, but I wanted to give you guys the presentation that David and I delivered to about 200 folks at the Mashery conference on Monday.

In summary, we discussed Info 2.0's API strategy and delivered an overview of some of our current plans in the works. Our engineering teams put some great thought into this - essentially the history of it is that a few years ago when we started building out this product, our guys recognized that it's pretty difficult to access disparate enterprise systems, so we built our product around the APP (or Atom Pub, from what I hear the "new lingo" is) so folks could access our API to build plugins to their systems (if we didn't offer it in the product). So, we're Atom based, we've got a slew of programming interfaces, and we focus on REST. We're offering up several connectors, to DB2 (given), Oracle, MySQL; we have an excel plugin we're working on, and there are more coming. It's only a short time now until we get the beta out there, and I've got lots more to talk about - so stay tuned here for further info.

Enough of me jabbering - check out the deck below, and let me know what you think. Open for questions... Oh, and this is my first time using SlideShare too, so let me know how it works for you./LC

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SMash donated to OpenAjax Alliance

For those of you who haven't heard, we announced SMash yesterday (secure mashup technology), and donated it to the OpenAjax Alliance. The net-net of SMash is that it allows information from different sources to communicate with each other, but the sources are kept separate to prevent the spread of malicious code. It essentially keeps code and data from each of the sources separated while allowing controlled sharing of data through a secure communication channel - easing worries about security when building mashup apps.

(a) This is a very cool technology, and I'm excited about that but...

(b) I am *really* happy that this landed in the OpenAjax Alliance. I always like to see good technology being used and adopted by the community, and I think this especially makes sense for OpenAjax, as this is a great fit - essentially enabling safer client side cross-domain access to multiple sites - allowing for easier, secure mixing of different technologies. Let's just say it will help a lot of devs sleep better at night knowing their stuff is secure :)

This is exciting too, as we head into AjaxWorld next week in NYC. I'll be there talking about Info 2.0, as will David Boloker, Mark Heid, and Dan Gisolfi - and a few others from IBM. And if you're in NYC early, David and I will also be speaking at the Mashery.com API conference - so swing on by...

/LC

The Rest of the Visit to China: Info 2.0, PureXML, and Beijing Research Labs

I got back from a great, but very, very busy trip to China last Friday. The trip looked something like this:

• Saturday Night: Lauren gets to Beijing, suffers through a little bit of jetlag and a police station
• Sunday: Sightseeing at Ming Tombs, Forbidden City, Great Wall; Sunday night: work prep for Monday
• Monday: Work in the AM, Dinner with Jing Wei (IBM China technical guru) and a partner; Phone calls until midnight
• Tuesday: Meet with Peter Cheng (www.huihoo.org) for breakfast, PureXML event in the AM/early PM; Flight to Seoul, South Korea in the PM; arrive at The Shilla at 10pm
• Wednesday: Meeting with IBM South Korea folks, customer event, return to hotel at 7pm; phone calls until 10pm
• Thursday: Return to Beijing, More work based on what we'd learned from those meetings
• Friday: Pack up (which was no small task, let me tell you) and head to IBM Beijing Research Labs. Afternoon - hour cab ride through backstreets of Beijing (super cool, btw) and back to the airport.

Here's a pic of Mark presenting in Seoul for one of our customer events.

And here's a pic of the IBM Beijing Research Labs team:

I'll be following up shortly with slides from the PureXML event, but for now, check out more info on PureXML here. Also, here's a link to some demos. PureXML is a cool, relatively new technology (featured with DB2 9) that handles XML as a new type of data that is stored differently than relational data, so it can be quickly integrated and therefore speeds app development, search performance, and also allows for both SQL and XQuery to query XML data. Check it out... it's pretty kick-ass stuff./LC

My Adventures at the Chinese Police Station...

Thursday afternoon I was on the phone with one of my colleagues and joking around about how it was funny that IBM was allowing me to go to China (my first time) because I'd end up arrested or something of the sort. Little did I know less than 48 hours later, that I would actually be at the Chinese Police station in Beijing...

After a LONG 13 hour flight from San Francisco, I arrived in Beijing. After going through customs and hitting the baggage claim, I had my bags nicely stacked on a cart and I was off to find someone to write down, in Chinese, the name of my hotel (so I could give it to the cab driver to get me there). At the Beijing airport, there are a variety of different counters you can go to if you want to request a car to your hotel. I was investigating prices at a few different counters (I was having difficulty finding the cab stand and wasn't having very much luck finding anyone who spoke English - much less understood mine), when a man approached me and said that he could give me a car for 300CNY, which was about 200CNY less than what I had been offered at the other counters. He also spoke English, which was a definite plus, and was dressed in a suit and tie (which was more formal than the other folks). So, I agreed and followed him up to the second floor of the airport. There, he handed me off to a second man who took my luggage and led me to a car.

Now, at this point, I have to admit I got a bit suspicious... I mean, why was I going to another floor of the airport when the car services were all located on the first floor? And, the car that we were about to load my luggage into was unmarked... but I figured, "Hey, it's China. They've got major repercussions here for illegal activities. Nothing is going to happen... "

As my luggage starts to get put into the trunk of this VW Jetta, 3 men run over to us, grabbing my luggage out of the trunk, grabbing me by my arm, and yelling at the man by the car in Chinese. At this point, I got worried. They put my bags back on my cart, and started leading us by the arm back into the airport and back to the elevator to the first floor. They're all wearing blue coats, but they're windbreakers, and they have no noticeable logos or anything on them. So here I am, in Beijing, with some man grabbing MY luggage from me, and telling me to follow him (someone I don't even know) through the airport, all while he's yelling at ME. And the "cab driver" was trying to pull on my arm too. Now, I don't play that way. And if there's one thing I don't like it's someone who I don't know pulling me in some direction and telling me what to do when I don't even know who the hell they are.

So I stop in my tracks, and shout, "Hey, you listen here. Stop. I want my luggage back, and I want to know who the hell you are and where you're trying to take me. And I want to know NOW!"

All 4 men (including the driver, who was still with us), stopped dead in their tracks. I mean, let me tell you, I was PISSED. And I don't get that way that often. I just wanted to get to my hotel, get some food, and figure out what time zone I was in. Now, I doubt that anyone understood me, but they did get that I was pretty damn mad. So one of the men comes up to me, shows me this fake looking laminated badge that says, "Police," and says, "We go police station."

At this point, I realize that they probably are the police, and this driver guy was trying to rip me off by getting me to pay 300CNY for a ride that by cab was much cheaper. And to be honest, I was fine being ripped off. I thought that *was* probably the case when this guy approached me, but I just wanted to get to my hotel so I really didn't care. I couldn't find the cab station, and I didn't want to pay 500CNY for a hotel car, and this stuff happens at all airports. But that said, it is China. So, it's probably more illegal than it is in other countries.

So, we hit the police station right outside the Beijing airport, where they sit me down, get my passport, and then I write down in English what happened (And yes, at some point there, the man who was my "driver" disappeared behind two very secure looking doors)... Then they thank me, show me to a cab, and and the one policeman who speaks some English says, "You a nice American. You funny too." Great. No comment there.

Lesson learned? Yep. Don't screw around with the black market when in China and near major public places such as the airport. Unless that is, you want to see what a real Chinese police station looks like. Oh, and no - they wouldn't let me take any pictures. Yes, I did try. :) /LC