The iphonedevcamp.org is at the end of July and is only $50. It’s mostly developer centered, but it’s a great way to learn to become an iphone developer. Here are some quick steps you can take to be able to write iphone apps in less than 31 days, for less than $100, and less than 60 hours of effort. The only requirement is that you have a mac.

1) Buy the following book: http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-Action-Introduction-Web-Development/dp/193398886X ($26) and go through the exercises in chapters 10-19 ( 30 hrs)

2) Sign up at iphonedevcamp.org ($50), (includes tons of food and beer for an entire weekend)

3) Attend dev camp and develop your own app (24 hrs)

Update 7/2/2009:

Now Google App Engine supports Java, which was at the top of a lot of developers’s wish lists.

Original Post:

The cloud hype is maxed out. Every company is rolling out their cloud initiative. Every analyst thinks the cloud is the future. Every developer wants to add the cloud to their resume. Every CIO wants to be leveraging the cloud to save money.

However, nobody really knows what the cloud is. Just like in the late 1990’s, when everyone was a web service expert but nobody had the same technical definition of what a web service was. I’ve used Amazon’s cloud, which gives developers a virtual machine login and also a special way to store data. I’ve used the Google cloud, which gives developers a way to deploy web apps with Python. I’ve used the Slicehost/Rackspace cloud, which is like the Amazon cloud, but cheaper and without the data storage. My employer, Sun Microsystems, is rolling out a cloud API that will define a different kind of cloud. If the cloud is the future, shouldn’t we first agree on what it is?

If I could define what the cloud should be, I would say that it should be a place where I can deploy any application written in any language with any IDE. I should have the freedom to make it available to anyone on the internet or make it securely available only to my corporate intranet. It should be infinitely scalable (which is impossible, but should be scalable to the point that a well written application could keep growing to support hundreds of thousands of users.) I want to be able to pay for storage, bandwidth, processing, and memory units with no minimum and be able to scale up and down instantaneously by moving a dial on a website up and down. I want to receive an email when any of the parameters I’m paying for reach 90% capacity so I can scale up and down. I want to have easy integration with content delivery networks like Akamai.

Divergence can mean many different things in hardware and software.  I look at it from the point of view of a software developer.  To me, divergence is measured by the amount of work to get software to run for as many users as possible.

In browsers over the years, divergence has meant fine tune javascript, learn HTML bugs on different renderers, and put up with corporate competitive sabotage over Flash and Java applet supports.  These challenges still exist to an extent, but the situation is much better.   Today, if you stay away from writing I.E. specific functionality, Firefox, Safari, and I.E. handle HTML, javascript, flash, and even the new Java applets similarly.

On the desktop, divergence has basically meant porting between Mac and Windows.  With the advent of Ajax and more featureful web apps, there are just fewer instances when you want to write a desktop client in the first place.  The increased conformity among browsers has helped.  Also, when Apple switched to Intel chips, tools like VMWare make it so if users really want to run an Windows app with their Mac, they have no problems.  I’ve had my Mac for about a year now and have only used VMWare once.

While divergence has diminished on the browser and desktop, the mobile landscape is the next frontier… and it is a big mess.  Java ME for a time helped minimize porting between mobile platforms, but developers still had to adjust their apps to all the different form factors and the whims of the carriers that arbitrarily restricted various API’s.  Now that Java ME is more or less slowing down and Sun is turning its attention to Java FX, Java ME is becoming less relevant in mobile.  The new app stores announced are great, but to reach the full capabilities of each phone, developers have to pretty much to a completely rewrite of each application.  I try to stay on top of development options for iPhone, R.I.M. BlackBerry, and Symbian, but the task is daunting.  I’ve been watching the work of the Symbian foundation.  Symbian currently runs on 50% of new smart phones.  I’m hoping that now that they are open source, their share can grow and eventually become the de facto standard for mobile developers.

I like the World Baseball Classic a lot more than I thought I would.  It seems to be catching on abroad more than in the United States.  I think there are just way too many sports in the US and there’s no room for another tournament.  It is smart though to do it in between the Superbowl and March Madness in order to minimize competition from other Major U.S. sports.

I guess I’m interested because there are enough strong countries so as to make the tournament worth watching.  In addition, the poorer teams have enough talent to knock off the big boys (ie. Netherlands beating the Dominican Republic.)  I don’t have the same rooting interest as when I root for Brazil in the World Cup, but with a few more WBC’s creating rivalries, I might start caring a lot more in the results.

Two aspects of the tournament are totally stupid in my opinion.

1. Why is it every three years.  That is just weird, and it will make everyone forget when it is.  Every other major tournament that is not annual is every four years ( World Cup, Summer Olympics, and Winter Olympics.)
2. The pitch limit just makes the tournament seem inferior to MLB.  Players should be devoted enough to get in shape a month earlier on WBC years so that they can play with the same level of effort as the regular season.

We checked out the Charles Schultz museum this past weekend and had a nice time.

The place was packed.  Being that it’s one of the few indoor activities in the North Bay when it’s raining, it wasn’t a huge surprise.  But Vicky got me thinking about something. She was wondering if future generations would understand this museum. Every couple of weeks or so, news comes out that another major newspaper is closing.  Subscriptions are sinking to new lows, and there are too many free ways to get news online.  Additionally, online news outlets just don’t dedicate a lot of space or prominence to comics.  Will comics die with newspapers?  Sadly, yes. Will Charles Schultz be forgotten sooner than he deserves because of this? I think so.

My whole career rides the wave of technical progress, but it’s sometimes sad to see what gets left behind.

Of course, a more serious question is who is going to pay the in depth journalists when all the newspapers die.  My prediction is that profitable blogs like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos will fill the space and have money to deliver what is not considered serious journalism more efficiently and in a new way.  In this age of environmental consciousness (at least in California), one angle I don’t hear very often is how much more earth friendly it is to get news online as opposed to in a physical newspaper.

My initial flurry of posts never really happened. My excuse is that I set up the blog and didn’t write down the password, so I couldn’t post. But that’s obviously a pretty lame excuse since it was not so hard to reset the password. So the real reasons I abandoned my new blog are laziness, sleep deprivation from having a newborn, and the fact that I start too many initiatives than I can possibly maintain.

If I had been posting for the last couple of months, I would have talked a lot about my new baby girl Abby! She is absolutely beautiful. I know all parents say that, even if their babies are not so great looking, but I truly think that Abby is one of the most beautiful babies I’ve ever seen. However, I do realize that I may not be the most objective observer. For the first couple of weeks of her life, I would agree with anyone that would mention how pretty she was. I finally realized that the more polite response is supposed to be “Thank You.” It’s funny how you more or less forget manners when it comes to compliments about your baby.

After about two weeks, we have been pretty courageous about taking her all over the place. It started with quick shopping trips. But then we took a whirlwind tour of California to show her off to all our family and friends within 500 miles!

I really am not good at determining whether a baby looks like either parent. Many people are saying that Abby’s eyes look like mine. I guess I should be proud, but I think everyone is a lot better off if she looks more like her mother than her father. For the first two or three weeks, the most prevalent personality trait I noticed in Abby is her seriousness. Until she learned how to smile, she always wore a very serious frown on her face. I am not exaggerating in saying that we’re up to about 1000 pictures of her already. A big reason for that is the fact that we keep taking pictures trying to get the right facial expression. At first, we were hoping for a big smile, but eventually we settled for any neutral expression. My father in law made a prediction that she would become a school principal because of her seriousness. This has all changed now that she’s a couple of months old. Though she still sports a killer frown now and then, she smiles quite a bit now, especially when her mother is holding her.

It is truly amazing how babies bond with their mothers. Obviously you hear stories to that effect, but you can’t really realized the extent of it until experiencing it first hand. Abby’s disposition magically changes as soon as she hears Vicky’s voice or feels her touch. I can now soothe her most of the time when I pick her up, but not nearly as effectively as Vicky can.

It doesn’t look like Tiger has what it takes to come from behind today and win the Masters. Right now he’s in second place six strokes behind headed to the eighteenth tea at Augusta.

Ordinarily, one would think that golf would be boring to watch on TV. You can’t see the ball off the club, the action is slow, you can’t really see the landscape in two dimensions. What makes it fun is observing the players deal with pressure. I think that’s why I love watching the majors, but would not think of watching a regular PGA tour event. There’s something about watching people trying to perform difficult physical feats in the most pressure packed moments of their lives.

It’s about time I set up a blog, so let me introduce myself. It all started at a hospital in Rio de Janeiro just as man was about to land on the moon. Felippe Bartholo joined the world and soon became an avid soccer fan. OK, I know you’re bored, let me skip about 40 years, I’ll write my memoirs in some other forum.

I’m now expecting my first baby in about a month! That, together with the fact that my step sister just found a secret book written by my father before he passed away, is the primary reason why I was inspired to finally start a blog. My father’s book, which is a mixture of his memoirs and a fictional politial satire, was such a gift to me, that I hope my daughter can get a chance to enjoy my writings when she’s older.

My wife Vicky has been a complete champion during the pregnancy. We’ve been married for 11 years. She has been fanatical about a healthy diet, enough but not too much exercise, maintaining a low stress environment, taking all the right vitamins, and all the other things so important during pregnacy. She has one more week of work (as a Program Manager at Cisco Systems) and will then take four months off.

We’ve been taking the usual baby classes, to the tune of sixteen hours of instructions. We’ve contracted with a Doula to help with the birthing process. We’ve arranged for our parents, who live far away, to come and spend the first four months of the baby’s life with us to help. We’ve read books, received volumes of advice from all our friends, and also discussed our philosophy over the world’s biggest problems and how we will raise our daughter. We have a name picked out that we both really like, but are keeping it secret. We’ve arranged for day care, and also have a backup plan and a second backup plan. If you think we’re little neurotic, I think you may be right. We’ve done all we can to prepare, but I’m pretty sure the real learning will only start once we bring the baby home.

I currently work at Sun Microsystems as a Project Manager and Software Engineer. While Vicky has stayed at the same company for over a decade, I’ve moved around a lot. Sun, however, has been a theme in my career, as this is my fourth stint at the company, and I often worked with Sun as a partner in various capacities while employed by other companies. My focus has been Java and Web technologies.