Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Mix06 is a strange hybrid of a conference, in a strange strange place. It's in a huge three dimensional maze of corridors somewhere behind the fake Italian skies of the Venetian hotel's interior Grand Canal. We walk in as the city wakes up, along strangely manicured streets and past theme hotels that flash bright neon in the morning light.

Despite all that, there's a lot to learn here. I've been to sessions on designing AJAX applications that scale to millions of users, on working with new design tools, and a fascinating panel on the future of Internet Explorer. In between we've had interesting conversations with old and new Microsoft and Web 2.0 contacts, and spent a fascinating evening talking digital identity with Kim Cameron and a whole crowd of folk from all sides of the identity problem (I have to say, I still think of it as implementing zero knowledge cryptography properly).

I also had a good sit down chat with Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb about the delights of Atlas and doing AJAX on ASP.NET 2.0. I think I need to get some ASP.NET web space and have a good play. I'm half wondering about building a site for the ASP.NET tutorials I wrote for Web Developer magazine that will never see the light of day.

Lots more to learn over the next couple of days, and then it's off down to Dallas for another conference. Any pointers to things to see or do while there? Paging sclerotic_rings...

A mosaic made from a Flickr photoset of our trip into Death Valley...

1. Sunset at the Artist Palette, 2. To the vanishing point, 3. Sunset at the Artist Palette, 4. The Artist Palette, 5. The Artists, 6. Salt not Snow, 7. Salt Crystals In The Wild, 8. The view from Zabriskie Point, 9. Zabriskie Point Convolutions, 10. Let's Off Road!, 11. Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, 12. Entering Death Valley, 13. Storm in the desert, 14. From the Vanishing Point, 15. Desert Rainbow, 16. Bullet the blue sky, 17. Desert Clouds, 18. Roadtrip Transport