2010 Talks (Next)

2003

April: Tech Con (sponsors Microsoft, OTC, Richard Hale Shaw Group, Stout Systems, SRT Solutions)

Wednesday, April 23, 2007, 9:00 am to 8:00 pm

At SPARK, 330 East Liberty, Downtown Ann Arbor

2004

August: Data Transformation Services (DTS) with Phil Huhn

Wednesday, August 4th, 2004, 6:00 pm

At IT Zone, 330 East Liberty, Downtown Ann Arbor

This seminar is a tutorial on DTS or Data Transformation Services. DTS is a component of Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Manager. In this seminar, Phil will development a simple DTS package, of loading a text file into a SQL database. This tutorial will help one toward the completion of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 System Administration certification. Even more important, it will help one in their day to day work of transferring and transforming application data.

About the Presenter

Phil is currently working with a small research group at U of M, where one of his jobs is helping the accountants navigate the University's Peoplesoft implementation. Recently, Phil successfully implemented a purchased package that shadows the University's accounting. He has interfaced the shadow accounting system with General Ledger, Vouchers, Payroll, Vendors, Project Grants, Personnel and more. Most, monthly imports are through DTS.

At his former job, the lion share of his work was a Y2K conversion from Platinum for DOS to ERA for SQL Server. ERA is a mid-sized integrated accounting, manufacturing and distribution system by Epicor. The conversion was via Data Junction, BCP (Bulk Copy), Integration Manager (by First Edge), custom stored procedures and various Perl scripts.

2007

March: Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) with VBS and C# with Phil Huhn

Wednesday, March 5, 2007, 6:00 pm

At SPARK, 330 East Liberty, Downtown Ann Arbor

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is deeply integrated into the Windows environment. WMI allows one to programmatically monitor and manage your hardware, software and O/S.

This seminar is a WMI tutorial. The seminar is meant for both administrators and programmers, but with a slant toward administrators of small shops. In this seminar, Phil will attempt to bring everyone up to speed on WMI and culminate with examples and discussion of WMI in a work environment.

About the Presenter

Phil has been a programmer for more than 20 years and is currently a programmer/analyst/administrator at the University of Michigan. He is working with a small research group with an Active Directory of around 200 hundred Windows computers.

September: Estimating FPGA 64-bit Floating Point Performance with Date Strenski

Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 6:00 pm

At SPARK, 330 East Liberty, Downtown Ann Arbor

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have gain in popularity for High Performance Computing (HPC) over the past several years. They have proven to be great for accelerating calculations that can handle reduced precision, but the question is how do they stack up against 64-bit HPC type applications. This talk will give the audience a basic understanding of the architecture of the Xilinx Virtec-4 and Virtex-5 FPGA chips, give examples of how they are integrated into HPC systems, and walk through a process to estimate the FPGA 64-bit performance.

About the Presenter

Dave Strenski is an Application Analyst for Cray Inc., which designs and manufactures high performance computers. Prior to Cray, Dave held a variety of technical positions at several computer and research organizations. Dave holds degrees in Land Surveying, Civil and Mechanical Engineering. His publications include works in the areas of parallel computing, numerical consistency, genomic data searching algorithms, other computer related topics, and was issued a patent on a meshing algorithm for threaded fasteners. As a hobby, Dave plays with solar power, and helped design and install the photovoltaics system at the Ypsilanti Food Cooperative.

October: Turbo Gears with Mark Ramm

Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

TurboGears is part of a new generation of web development frameworks designed to make development of database-driven, Ajax-enabled web applications easier. The discussion will cover:

• 1. How well designed frameworks can increase productivity, maintainability, and generally make web application development more fun.

  2. How Ajax is integrated into the core of TurboGears, and how you can use it to make your web applications more dynamic and easier to use.

  3. I'll also compare TurboGears to some other popular web development environments, so you can better evaluate when TurboGears might be the right tool for the job.

About the Presenter

Mark Ramm is the author of the forthcomming "Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears." He is IT Manager for Humantech, Inc. Over the years, he has programmed Web applications in a wide range of technologies, including Python, TurboGears, CGI, Perl, PHP, ASP, Java Struts, and Ruby on Rails. He has written for Linux Magazine and various online publications, and maintains an IT Management blog at http://compoundthinking.com.

November: Apple's New Leopard OS with John Hickey

Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

The Ann Arbor Computer Society invites you to attend our next tech update. Our presenter from Apple will be John Hickey, a Senior Systems Engineer with Apple, Inc. In this seminar Mr. Hickey will present Apple's next generation operating system (Leopard). In addition he will share details about Apple's new products that have been recently announced - including the new iMac and iPods. As a separate topic we will also look at Apple's server offering: Leopard Server.

About the Presenter

John has expertise in enterprise design and deployment strategies. He also has a strong background working with security in enterprises. Prior to working at Apple, John worked in both Academic and Administrative computing services for private universities in the midwest. John now serves higher education customers in Michigan. His other interests include hiking, camping, college sports and photography.

December: Ubuntu Linux with Kevin DuBois

Wednesday, December 5, 2007, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

Linux is making great strides onto the desktop operating system market with advancements that make it easier than ever to switch from Windows or Mac. In my speech, I'll be illustrating some of the new features Ubuntu Linux has incorporated in its latest release, 7.10, "Gutsy Gibbon." Some of these features include a revamped graphical installer and LiveCD, the first GUI configuration tools for some parts of the system, as well as a basic 3-D accelerated desktop environment. Furthermore, I will demonstrate Compiz Fusion, an open-source, 3-D window manager that provides eye candy for the Linux user that rivals what is found on Mac's OS X. I will also briefly demonstrate some open source alternatives that can be used as replacements for some commonly-used Windows or Mac media utilities and productivity tools. Lastly, I'll dive a little under the hood of the latest stable Linux kernel, 2.6.23, to talk about some of the improvements and alterations made to the heart of the Linux operating systems, like the new Completely Fair Process Scheduler that allocates processor time more effectively for pressing, real-time computations, as well as the burgeoning number of device drivers that are included in a standard kernel.

About the Presenter

Kevin DuBois is currently an undergraduate computer engineering student at the University of Michigan. He works part time for a local Ann Arbor streaming television startup called Zattoo. Kevin has been an advocate and user of open source for two or three years now, since high school. Kevin is a member of the Michigan Ubuntu Loco team, and is currently focusing on aiding the developers of a 3-D window manager called Compiz Fusion, and the media player, VLC.

2008

March: So You Want To Be A Consultant? with John Stout

Wednesday, March 6, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

Is it possible to survive today's computer industry as an independent contracting consultant? We'll discuss real world business essentials such as: How do you evaluate technologies for their future potential? How do you get new customers? How do you effectively promote what you can do? What should you charge for your services and how to you make sure you get paid? What laws, regulations, business practices do you need to know? How do you turn consulting into a ongoing, prosperous career? Even if you aren’t going to be computer industry consultant, this talk also has lots of information you can use to help make your career choices.

About the Presenter

John W. Stout is the founder and president of Stout Systems, an Ann Arbor-based software development and technology talent search firm whose motto is "Consider It Done". John has both a consulting and software development background over a nearly 30-year career, and he is a featured speaker at industry events.

April: An Introduction to Boo and DSL with Jay R. Wren

Wednesday, April 2, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

DSL shwee ess ell. Isn’t this a Digital Subscriber Line? Domain Specific Languages get all the lip service and none of the implementation or use. Real world DSLs are hard work. Boo makes it much easier. Just what does it take to make a DSL with Boo? Why would I use Boo instead of that Ruby thing I keep hearing about? You might get some answers here.

About the Presenter

About Jay R. Wren... Currently Jay is an independent contractor working on Windows Forms applications for tuning embedded software control modules for a US auto manufacturer. Jay spends his free time writing more software, baking, and watching far too much television. Jay's blog is at http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/

May: Ubuntu 8.04 and Developing w/Mono with Jorge Castro

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

Ubuntu 8.04 was released and includes some excellent new features for developing software.

June: PostgreSQL 8.3 and Beyond with Aaron Thul

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

There's lots of exciting things happening the world of relational databases in the Open source world. Aaron Thul will show some of the awesome new features in PostgreSQL 8.3, which was released on Feb 4th.

July: An Introduction to Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing with Chris G. Sellers

Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

EC2 (http://www.amazonaws.com/) is a buzzword cloud computing model. Amazon hosts servers running Linux that allow you to fire off virtual systems quickly and easily and you pay per hour. This model has taken the hosting industry and added a whole new aspect to it; creating a rich and easy environment for developers to stand up servers to test their applications quickly and easily, and then tear them down when not needed, saving ongoing costs.

Why use EC2? What about backups? Can I run Windows? Can I see it in action? Stop by and get some answers and ask your own questions.

About the Presenter

About Chris G. Sellers... Currently Chris is the Lead Internet Engineer working at NITLE (http://www.nitle.org), a non-profit higher education partner organization based out of Ann Arbor and Georgetown, Tx. Chris's background and experience ranges from hosting engineering to desktop and technical staff management. Chris spends much of his spare time fixing up his house and trying to stay active in the Ann Arbor community.

August: Using Ruby to Create Domain-Specific Languages with Eric Ivancich

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are tailored to solve a particular problem. They're designed around a domain, focusing on abstractions specific to that domain, which makes them distinct from general purpose languages. Specifications written in a DSL can often be read, understood, and verified as correct by a domain expert who is not a programmer. And sometime DSLs are designed around the goal of enabling domain experts to write their own specifications.

In this talk we will look at the features of Ruby that lend themselves to the creation of domain-specific languaes, some expample DSLs, and examples of the underlying Ruby code.

October: Agile Software Development with Scrum with John Fohrman

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

This session will present:

• • defining Agile, Scrum and the relationship of the two

  • essentials of the Scrum methodology

  • advantages and benefits of Scrum

  • how and when to use Scrum

  • a comparison to other methodologies

  • a case study of one of the presenter’s Scrum-based projects

About the Presenter

John Fohrman, Certified Scrum Master, is a Senior Software Engineering Consultant and Project Manager with Stout Systems. (www.stoutsystems.com). Since 1992, John has managed and developed numerous projects for organizations ranging from start-ups to the State of Michigan, the City of Detroit and two-thirds of the Big Three.

November: Faking the Type System: Implementations in interfaces and non-existent types with Bill Wagner

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008, 6:00 pm

At SRT Solutions, 206 South Fifth Ave, Downtown Ann Arbor

Extension methods provide a mechanism for C# developers to define behavior in interfaces. You can define an interface with minimal capabilities and then create a set of extension methods defined on that interface to extend its capabilities. In particular, you can add behavior instead of just defining an API.

You’ll probably use a number of constructed generic types in your application. You’ll create specific collection types: List<int>, Dictionary<EmployeeID, Employee>, and many other collections. The purpose of creating these collections is that your application has a specific need for a collection of a certain type and you want to have specific behavior defined for those specific constructed types. To implement that functionality in a low-impact way, you can create a set of extension methods on specific constructed types.

About the Presenter

With more than 20 years experience in software design and engineering, Bill Wagner has led the design on many successful engineering and enterprise Microsoft Windows products and adapted legacy systems for Windows.

In 2000, he started using .NET and now spends his time facilitating the adoption of .NET in clients’ product and enterprise development. Knowledgeable in all .NET areas, Bill’s principal strengths include the C# language, the core framework, Smart Clients, and Service Oriented Architecture and design.

December: Software needs in an Entrepreneurship environment with George Azrak

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

George Azrak will be speaking about the type of software help needed in an entrepreneurship environment, outsourcing the safe way and how the Computer Community in Ann Arbor can help make Michigan a better place to be an entrepreneur.

About the Presenter

Mr. Azrak is the founder of the Azrak Group, an IT Architecture consulting company focusing on design, improvement, integration initiatives using technology tools. Special focus is on Bio-Banking and life science research solutions.

Mr. Azrak began his career as an IT professional in 1978. He has a strong track of leadership with a variety of companies and industries, including Asterand as the General Manager and CIO, Domino’s Pizza as a Senior VP of IT and Advantage Computing as a Chief Software Engineer. Mr. Azrak’s expertise involves managing software development and providing solutions for clinical data collection, ERP systems, Supply Chain Management, data warehousing, business intelligence, financial reporting and electronic commerce.

Mr. Azrak is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a Masters in Computer Engineering and a Professional Engineering Degree.

2009

August: Real-time Monitoring of Solar Power with Dave Strenski and Nik Estep

Wednesday, August 05th, 2009 · 6:00 PM at Atomic Object

A group in Ypsilanti has been working on installing solar photovoltaic systems within the City. As part of this activity, a website (SolarYpsi.com) was developed along with a method for reading the utility meters that measure the power coming into the building (inflow), power being generated by the photovoltaic system (gen), and any excess power exported back to the utility grid (outflow). Dave and Nik will review the basics of how a solar photovoltaic installations works, the details of how we're able to read the utility meters, post the inforamtion to a website and generate real time graphs of the power.

About the Presenters

Dave Strenski is an Application Analyst for Cray Inc., which designs and manufactures high performance computers. Prior to Cray, Dave held a variety of technical positions at several computer and research organizations. Dave holds degrees in Land Surveying, Civil and Mechanical Engineering. His publications include works in the areas of parallel computing, numerical consistency, genomic data searching algorithms, reconfigurable computing, and other computer related topics, and was issued a patent on a meshing algorithm for threaded fasteners. As a hobby, Dave plays with solar power, and helped design and install photovoltaics systems in Ypsilanti and the website SolarYpsi.com.

Nik Estep is a computer science student at Eastern Michigan University. He works part time for the Tarigma Corporation in Columbus, OH and studies under an Dr. William Sverdlik through an Undergraduate Research Fellowship sponsored by Dell Computers. The research work is on a website to extractively summarize text to better assist those with reading disabilities (http://treads.emich.edu). In his spare time he works on the SolarYpsi.com website.

September: Creative Commons Licensing with Greg Rossmeier

Wednesday, September 02th, 2009 · 6:00 PM at Atomic Object

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. The tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” Greg will show how CC licenses enable new methods of collaboration in areas such as Education and how Free/Open Source Software plays an important role in all of it.

http://creativecommons.org http://open.umich.edu

About the Presenter

Greg currently works part time for Creative Commons as a Community Assistant liaising with the Free Open Source Software community. His time is spent enabling developers to learn about and implement Creative Commons metadata support in FOSS applications. Greg also works part time with the Open.Michigan project at the University of Michigan where he manages student workers to create Open Education Resources that are put online available for all to use and remix. Additionally, he is working to make it easier for the community of users of Open Educational Resources to make contributions. And thankfully, Greg has completed his Masters of Science in Information from the University of Michigan.

October: Aggregating Dissimilar Data Types with Dean Keith

Wednesday, October 06th, 2009 · 6:00 PM at Atomic Object

Keith has developed a product for storing dissimiliar data in a variety of relational databases. The product is called Bean Counter, and he will be giving a demonstration of the software as well as answering questions on storing data and meta data in a variety of relational databases. Hopefully, the talk will help inform and illuminate powerful data aggregation and search technologies.

About the Presenter

Studying at the University of Michigan in CCS and ECE in the late 1970s, Dean Keith is a co-inventor of Datura's technology and its president. Previously, Dean was the CTO and a co-founder of the EDSA-Micro Corporation, a maker of electrical power engineering software.

November: Introduction to Business Intelligence with Phil Huhn

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 · 6:00 PM at Atomic Object

This talk is a change from our normal venue and comprises a unique selection of 10 minutes "lightening talks" on

• • Intelligence Overview

  • SSIS

  • SSAS 2005

  • MDX

  • SSRS 2005

  • Excel 2007

About the Presenter

Phil has been a programmer for more than 25 years. In 2008, he was a programmer/consultant at the University of Michigan working with ITS (formerly MAIS) on the M-Reports project. M-Reports is a web reporting portal, implemneting ITS's first Business Intelligence application.

December: Apple's New Cat with David Pugh

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 · 6:00 PM at Atomic Object

Discussions on new MacOSX and Apple hardware and Software.

About the Presenter

Dave Pugh is an Apple Systems Engineer for higher education in Michigan. Prior to joining Apple, Dave worked for the University of Michigan for five years as the lead Mac OS X administrator for the College of LS&A. He helped write four books about Mac OS X system administration, and has been a speaker at five recent Macworld Conferences. Although he comes from a UNIX and telecom background, he has used Macs since 1993. A techie at heart, he enjoys scuba diving, downhill skiing, camping, and flying when not in front of a computer.

2010 Talks (Next)