It's getting a little bit easier to recount just what exactly happened on this tech-infused first half of SXSW 2011 in Austin, Texas. I'm beginning to feel more caught up and am ready to share the joy and wonder that is collaborating with tech and creatives. Sunday saw no rest for me as I hit up the more tech friendly type talks and avoided the gloss that was overreaching trend-philosophy. It was the calm before the storm that was Monday. I'm glad I survived it well.

First up was my contender for best panel of SXSW 2011. In 'One Codebase, Endless Possibilities, Real HTML5 Hacking,' I got a taste of some real world usage of rolling out the same code for tons of different platforms. Of course it was HTML 5 based, but what was presented to me was a strategy that made switching between platforms super simple. I believe the only hard part was sym-linking items to the same codebase. Backend wizardry aside, the use of PhoneGap and it's beta online builder turned me on enough to sign up and give it a whirl. I don't own a Mac so this will give me a path to build for iOS I previously didn't have.

Next up again is a front runner for panel of the year. I saw Paul Lemere's panel last year and it totally blew me away. The Echo Nest's veteran platform guy was back this year but his path led him down the fun road that is visualizing music data. I didn't know that others tried to map music taste on paper before the advent of computers. Paul took us from that beginning to his demo of what a music visualization application can do today. I taped this on my Kodak PlaySport and will post it up there when it's done. It's so awesome.

Next up was a couple of Microsoft guys talking about the 'Future of Touch User Interface Design.' This was another great panel. It gave me the time to actually think about how a person interacts with a computer. Their big beef was that most touch development tends to lean on what we've used in the past for computer interaction. They want to make computers talk our language instead of training us to speak computer language. Lot's of cool videos and ideas were presented and it will definitely help me think more deeply about interface when design my next mobile application.

Finally, for the talks, I punished myself even further with 'Embracing NoSQL - Your First Cassandra Project'. It was a 2 hour workshop but I only stayed as long to get an idea of Cassandra, since their setup required us to use Macs with Ruby on Rails installed. The talk was informative and it gave me a sense of how columns and keyspaces are used within Cassandra. I've yet to find a reason to use this technology but now I know when and how to use it.

That was it for the day talks, the night life lived up to its expectation as well. Fist up was the Buzz Out Loud party at the Cedar Street Courtyard. I subscribed to the podcast since I got my Palm Pre and was happy to see the guys kick it live. After walking away with some schwag and an upclose look at Felicia Day, my lovely girlfriend and I hit up the Computer Blip Blop Bullshit Party II hosted by the Found Footage Festival. It was 10 times better than last year and we're excited to check out those guys in Kansas City at the Record Bar in April. Also, check out The Black and White Years, they will blow your heads off.

Okay, so I kicked this one off a little later than usaul, but that's because I logged in the fullest day so far here at SXSW.  The official tally is 6 panels, 2 happy hours, and 1 wet party.  I'm a little under the weather this morning but that's due to the massive amount of stuff that I and my lovely girlfriend did and the rain storm that hit us last night.  Don't fret, however, we are taking it easy this morning and heading back down to the convention center to try and make a couple of more panels and keynotes on the last day of the Interactive portion of SXSW.  There's much to go over, so I'll try to make it condensed.

First off, we are very proud that we actually made a 9:30 session.  Due to the schedule plus daylight savings and such, we ended up missing some of the opening day panels.  The first one saw me hit up Jake Marsh, a developer that did ShopSavvy, talk about porting your mobile applications across multiple platforms.  With a comic book analogy, he described the plusses and minuses of each mobile platform.  What I came away with on this panel was that if you want to do multi-platform development then you should build for each platform instead of one consistent code base.   It will be much quicker to start from scratch as well.  Since each platform has its own UI style, you gotta build toward it.

The next panel say Dries Buytaert, the founder of the CMS Drupal, talk about how awesome Drupal was.  Seriously, half of the talk went over how lame it was to build content for the web.  The other half was Buytaert telling us that Drupal solves all of the problems.  I've rolled out Drupal to multiple clients.  I know how awesome it is.  I really didn't need examples of other site usage.  Someone did ask about Drupal 7 and it seems to improve on much of the drawbacks of Drupal.  We're talking usability, multiple database support, and other things.

I skipped over to the Courtyard next to hear a talk about open sourcing consulting models.  What I expected was strategy in selling open source to your clients.  What I got was strategy into open sourcing more than just your software.  Internal processes, hourly rates, and other items were talked about by Alexandra Samuel and how it helped their consulting company.   It was really engaging to think about open sourcing processes and focusing on execution.  Plus, due to the group talk nature of the panel, I got to hear how some consultants charge with open source software anyway.

Monday's keynote with Ev Williams of Twitter did not seem so exciting to me, so I skipped it.  I headed upstairs to hear a talk about pre and post production for game audio.  I have not been exposed to anything in the video game industry so this was my first stab.  I have a bunch of music software and to hear Alexandar Brandon talk about the latest game engines and process to mirror the game dev side of things was pretty cool.  He even suggest use source code control for audio files to help.  Apparently I need to check out Real Time Mixing for games as well too.

Next up saw an Objective-C crash course and demo.  I am not an iPhone developer so I had no clue how complicated the syntax was for iPhone development.  Joris Verbogt blew through some basic information on Objective-C as a language.   He went through it pretty fast and I'm fairly sure I got all of it down.  Then Verbogt showed off a demo.  After all of information and demoing, I still am unsure just how to develop for the iPhone.  Well, plus I need a Mac to do it.  The last panel of the day helped contrast between this and what I can do in terms of development.

The last panel of the day was a real treat.  Jonathan Stark of Stark Consulting went through a process that web developers could use to built almost native-like apps for the iPhone.  Stark first demoed jqTouch, which is a jQuery library designed to emulated the browsing behavior of the iPhone.  What does that mean?  It means the transitions, buttons, and animations on the iPhone can be used on a web browser.  Next up he talked about PhoneGap.  PhoneGap is a library of code used to setup an encapsulated web server as a native app.  You can drop your web code into an exposed www directory and build natives apps with only web technology.  Many oohs and ahhs from this one.  It was fantastic.

So after all of that, there was still some more stuff to do.  I popped into the Wired Magazine's mixer afterward to meet up with my girlfried.  There we had a nice conversation with a guy from the Nonprofit Technology Network.  He definately out does me in terms of passion.  Oh, I also won a pretty sweet schwag bag there.  I got a bunch of clothing stuff and an iPod Touch!  Looks like the schwag bucket will pay for the trip.  After a quick bite at Serrano's we headed to one of the must do parties for SXSW.

My girlfriend and I love the Found Footage Festival and when we heard they were throwing a party at SXSW, we were instantly sold.  So we headed out to Club Deville to be first in line for the festivities.  We met Nick and Joe there and even got their autographs on a crappy video they did!  They had a hard time setting up the projector for the rocks outside, but the rain that started pouring stopped that and pushed us indoors.  We stuck around for most of the party and headed back.  Nick and Joe were great in person and we're stoked about seeing them again in Lawrence.

The fourth day of SXSW was by far the best one so far.  I learned so much in new technology trends and techniques.  The fill of schwag is over capacity.  We actually got into parties and met one of our heroes in bad movie comedy.   This day reminded me just how awesome life can get.  Everything that I identify with in terms of life and career converges here in Austin.  It's not even half over and it's totally worth it.

Before I rolled out the relaunch, I spent a good month trying to figure out the right kind of development environment for tools the I had available.  I have three laptops but all of the batteries are toast and the motherboard on one of them has gone the way of the dodo.  I convinced myself to develop exclusively off of a big ole Western Digital 80 GB Passport USB external drive.  First step done.  After doing some research I decided on XAMMP to drive my environment.  It was nice but there were some issues.

My real focus for this development environment setup was to be able to plug in the hard drive and code directly off of it.  I work off of multiple platforms at home and at the office.  Almost all of the apps do not have a single application to launch.  I already run some portable apps that support clients in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors, like KeePass.  XAMMP advertised clients for each platform so I decided to give it a try.

XAMMP is a fully integrated web application development server.  The purpose of XAMMP is to roll out a fully workable, out of the box *AMP stack.  The packages include an Apache2 server, PHP version 4 or 5, MySQL 5, and a torrent of management utilities and open soruce libraries/modules.  There are some differences between platforms for the package set, however.  The beauty behind it is that you can pick and choose what you want and start work within minutes.

At first, I wanted to setup all of the platform packages on the flash drive.  Due to the desire for cleanliness on the drive, however, I tried to install the software locally on all of my workstations.  Most of my time is spent on these machines anyway.  Linux was the easiest to turn out, mainly because it just dropped everything into the '/opt' directory.  I could change the doc and database links and move forward from there.  Windows was also a snap as I could modify configuration and turn services on and off with the included XAMMP control panel.  The Mac OS X client was not so easy.

The installer package for the Mac does not allow for choice.  It scans you computer to see if it's okay to run on and then drops it straight to the Applications folder.  The folder it installs to is not entirely encapsulated.  When the configuration points to the database files on the flash drive,  the service will crash upon startup.  I've already been exposed to issues on lock file management on Mac OS X Server, and the workaround didn't work for this issue.  The Apple puts the lock file in a directory other than the MySQL default setup.  When I symbolically linked the lock file, the database would start up.  This was not working with XAMMP.

After spending some small time here and there for about two weeks on it, I ended up just letting it go.  Attempts to find out on their forums page led me nowhere.  Also in my research on this topic, I discovered a Portable Apps version of Xammp but it is Windows only.  Not much help there.  Maybe one day the devs on the project will look for better portable support.  Until then, I'm focusing on version management and working off my lil server in my apartment.

I'm still coming to terms with getting distracted on small setup roadblocks.  I really didn't need to waste the time figuring this out when what I really needed to do was to turn out this blog and other projects.  Struggling with Xammp taught me that sometimes the perfect environment will trickle down from actually working on things first rather than focusing on a perfect setup for work that hasn't started yet.  Plus it's alot more fun when you actually have projects in progress instead of dreaming of working on projects.