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Stay connected with us; let’s share and pick each others’ brains.

One Step Closer to the Future

With today’s technology we can perform a plethora of tasks in a single bound. Watch your favorite programs on your computer, play video games on your phone, even video chat with friends using the televisions, post on Twitter, Facebook, and You Tube, with a single click. This, my friend, is only the beginning.

Today, CBS and the Associated Press announced a huge triumph, accomplished by none other than IBM. According to the article, IBM researchers have come a step closer to creating a computer chip that mimics the way the human brain functions.

“The company announced Thursday that it has built two prototype chips that it says process data more like how humans digest information than the chips that now power PCs and supercomputers. The prototypes offer further evidence of the growing importance of “parallel processing,” or computers doing multiple tasks simultaneously. That is important for rendering graphics and crunching large amounts of data.”

While this is a magnificent progression, scientists estimate it will be nearly a decade or longer before these prototypes are used in everyday technologies. At the moment, the chips are steering a simulated car through a maze, or playing Pong in a laboratory in San Francisco.

Nevertheless, we cannot help but ask ourselves, will this be all the chips are used for?  Has the SciFi channel taught us nothing?  Will the machines understand, with great power comes great responsibility? Who knows what such technology will emerge through the next decade as!  Mwahahaha!

Proud to Sponsor KCDC

This Saturday marks the third annual Kansas City Developer Conference at Johnson County Community College, and we are proud to be a silver sponsor.

Check out the day’s procession of events below. To register, visit http://kcdc.info/schedule/ and click on the button in the right column.

KCDC Schedule

• Keynote – Matt Cavallari

9:15am-10:15am

• Overview of Agile Approaches – Martin Olson
• Learn MVVM Basics – Kevin Griffin
• Architecting Applications the Microsoft Way – Clint Edmonson
• TDD techniques – George Westwater
• Reporting in SharePoint 2010 with TFS 2010 and SQL Reporting Services 2008 – Bringing it all together – Karthik Venkataraman
• SQL Injection and XSS: How they work and how to stop them – Rob Kraft
• Exploring Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET – Steve Bohlen

10:30am-11:30am

• Values to Value – A Values Based Introduction to Scrum/Agile – James Pekham
• The Low-Hanging Fruit of HTML5 – James Eggers
• Real World, Large Scale Applications Using S#arp Architecture and ASP.NET MVC – Geoffrey Smith
• Getting It Right With BDD – Wes Garrison
• MongoDB – Brian Wigfield
• Windows Phone and Windows Azure – Mike Benkovich
• Exploring Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET (cont.)– Steve Bohlen

11:30am-12:30pm

• Lunch

12:30pm-1:30pm

• Scrumbut and Fragile – Mark Randolph
• Javascript for the .Net Developer — Brian Moon
• The Case for CQRS and Event Sourcing – Tyrone Groves
• Mocks in Testing – Phil Ledgerwood
• Building webapps for the Cloud with Python and Google App Engine – Juan Gomez
• Programming for Windows Azure – Leslie Koorhan

1:45pm-2:45pm

• Guerrilla Kanban – Troy Tuttle
• What’s New In Silverlight 5 – Kevin Grossnicklaus
• Building Distributed and Scaleable Architectures – George Westwater
• Unit Testing Patterns and Anti-Patterns – Steve Bohlen
• Moose:  A new ORM for Node.js – Douglas Martin
• MonoTouch/MonoDroid with Data Services – Patrick Leikhus
• Silverlight with RIA Services – Yair Segal

3:00pm-4:00pm

• Story Points & Sizing Explained – Frank Rios
• jQuery – Getting Started – Shawn Mehaffie
• How Ruby is Making Me a Stronger C# Developer, and a Better Man – Darren Cauthon
• Dependency Injection for Dummies – Phil Ledgerwood
• FREE as in BEER!!! Manage Your Packages w/NuGet – Rob Reynolds
• Scala Development in an Existing Java Development Team – Sean Griffin
• Silverlight with RIA Services (cont.) – Yair Segal

4:15pm-5:15pm

• Mercurial: Tales from the Trenches – Russell Ball
• Script#: Javascripting with C# – Sky Morey
• The Little Wonders of .NET – James Hare
• Paradoxes and Ironies of Testing – Mark Randolph
• Writing Faster SQL Faster – Bill Graziano
• Startup Tips and Tricks: Getting s Small IT Shop Off The Ground – Kevin Grossnicklaus

5:30pm-6:00pm

• Closing Ceremonies

http://kcdc.info/

France to Outlaw Hash Passwords

You know the extremely frustrating mash-up of letters and numbers you have to enter when you’re trying to log in to your online accounts?

While they may be annoying when asked to complete time after time, they actually do serve a function. When you “hash” a password, you’re turning it into a string of hexadecimal characters in a one way conversion. Meaning when you create a password on a site they hash it and store the hash. Then next time you log in, they hash the password you entered and compare that to information stored in the database. If the hashes match, you typed in the right password.

Hashing is good for security because it’s practically impossible to reverse engineer the hash to get the password. It’s a one way only encryption. That’s why most password resets don’t send you your old password. They don’t know it and can’t get it.

The French government has placed a law requiring a large group of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to log its users’ information for one year, and must be handed over to authorities if and when asked. According to the BBC, this information includes “users’ full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. Police, the fraud office, customs, tax and social security bodies will all have the right of access.”

This might be all well and good for the French, but over 20 international firms including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Dailymotion are in disagreement and involved in a legal challenge with the French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC).

Let’s just hope this policy doesn’t become the norm in the U.S.

Get Ready for Ultra High-Speed Broadband, Kansas City

Today on Google’s official blog, the multi-national public corporation declared it has selected Kansas City, KS to be the recipient of their ultra high-speed network.

Last year Google announced this new project – “to provide a community with Internet access more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have today” – in an attempt to make the web better for users. Reportedly, nearly 1,100 cities “felt the need for speed” and responded to the project.

“In selecting a city, our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations. We’ve found this in Kansas City. We’ll be working closely with local organizations including the Kauffman Foundation, KCNext and the University of Kansas Medical Center to help develop the gigabit applications of the future.”

But what does this development mean for Kansas City as the transformation from traditional broadband to ultra high-speed fiber optic connections? Will the city explode as the epicenter for all things IT?

We’re excited to see what the future brings.

The Next Step in Technical Evolution

This afternoon as I skimmed Reddit for blog topic ideas, I came across an entry entitled,
“I can not be the only one who feels that we are going to experience some pretty crazy changes in our lifetime (As if we haven’t already…)?” The writer, feeling as if technology is about to explode beyond our wildest dreams, confronted his fellow Redditors with this day-dreamer question.

One responder mentioned he liked to play what he called “The Thirty Years Window,” a game in which the player picks a point in history, imagines someone at the age of 20 during that time, and thinks about all the technological advances that person would have seen for the next thirty years.

“For example, my father told me how when he was a kid, the sound of an airplane would cause adults to run outside and look skyward in hopes of seeing the amazing new flying machines they’d heard rumors of. He told me that story as we watched the live video of Apollo 11, the first manned landing on the moon.”

Well kids, welcome to the next technological advance of your lifetime. As The New York Times reports, our mobile phones will soon be standing in for all the plastic in our wallets.

But some are resisting this technological advance in what the New York Times refers to as a behind-the-scenes battle.

“Mobile phone carriers, banks, credit card issuers, payment networks and technology companies are all vying to control these wallets. But first, they need to sort out what role each will play and how each will get paid.

The stakes are enormous because small, hidden fees that are generated every time consumers swipe their cards add up to tens of billions of dollars annually in the United States alone.”

But such is the way of the revolution. The new technology is embraced while the old is abandoned, and the money previously invested in older technologies will go to building and supporting the new. Without it, we would never evolve, and where would that get us?

Introducing YourTriCom.com

We can’t always help every person who comes to us looking for an IT job. In the past, we’d collect their information and keep them informed should a position arise that would be a good fit.

Now, along with this process, we can direct those candidates to our new career portal solely dedicated to people actively seeking new employment – YourTriCom.com.

This portal will be a one-stop-shop for those who need help finding new employment. Now, every person TriCom can’t fit into one of our current needs will have a place to go and have access to over 1000 different job boards, weekly free job-seeker webinars, videos, a web-library full of articles on job hunting, as well as have a free, comprehensive, and personal resume review.

TriCom’s “very unscientific but interesting” I.T. trends survey for the Kansas City marketplace:

Here are the “take-aways” from January’s “Trends” survey:

Male dominated?

Still tough out there!

• 17% of the responders were currently unemployed, 60% were in full time employees, 21% were either in contract or contract-for-hire engagements, and 2.5% were part-time employees.

Higher Ed Degree’s the norm

• 76% of the responders had a Bachelor’s degree equivalent or higher

A mixed bag when it comes to “certifications”

• 46% of the total number of responders had some form of certification within Information Technology. The most common certification being that of a Microsoft Certified Professional (21%), followed by some form of Network-related certifications at 13%, MCSE at 11% and PMP certified responders were 9% of the total group.

Most in K.C. are working in the private sector

Still A LOT of “fluidity” in the I.T. marketplace

• Only 60% of responders were in the SAME job a year before, 40% in a different job than one year prior
• Most answered “how long in current job” question in MONTHS – only 6% responded in “years”

“SHOW ME THE MONEY!”

• 38% of responders are making the same as last year
• 62% are making different money – and 64% of those folks are making more money than last year, 36% are making less money than last year
• Median income of responders who were employed was $75k – $80k

Happy?

Note – 99% of the unemployed responders either skipped this question entirely or answered “extremely dissatisfied” (for obvious reasons). Almost all of those answering “Extremely dissatisfied” were unemployed responders.

How likely are you to leave your current job?

Over half of responders indicated they are at least likely, if not very or extremely likely to leave their current position in the next year.

To find more results from our survey, click here.

A Christmas Concert by iPad

Anyone showing up at Northpoint Community Church this holiday season expecting to see a traditional Christmas concert would have been a bit disconcerted when all the musicians pulled out iPads.

Does this spell the end of live music as we know it? Not so much. The music is still very live. However, the use of actual instruments is replaced by iPads, iPhones and the like to produce a more electronic sounding version of traditional Christmas carols.

Cool right? You know it!

But what if this trend is so cool that it is adopted worldwide and musicians invest in iPads with apps that can synthesize the sounds of real instruments, all with using a single piece of hardware?

While this method can provide a sense of being able to play music to those who may have no musical talent whatsoever, it has the possibility of wiping out classical training all together if adopted for a lengthy amount of time. I’m not talking about a year or two of “Hey, this is cool,” – I’m talking about the possible evolution of music from traditional training on instruments in strings, brass, wind and percussion to the adoption of fast-paced musical applications on a tablet or other device.

We live in a world where information and updates are constantly at our fingertips, therefore we are constantly using smarter and smarter technologies. But I can’t help but wonder if these smarter technologies are giving us the opportunity to be lazy, to not learn the skills and abilities we might have learned if this technology weren’t in place.

Hopefully the art and skill of music doesn’t go the way of the ability to memorize and recall roadways without the aid of a GPS service.

IT Trends Survey

Survey Monkey

What would you be interested to know about the changing IT market?

In the coming months, we at TriCom are attempting to obtain more detailed information about IT industries and positions, directly from the mouths of those waste-deep in technology fields.

Soon this short IT Trends Survey will be distributed to IT professionals in the mid-west, focusing on the Kansas City, Wichita, and Minneapolis areas in order to get a fair market evaluation.

Not in our mailing list? No worries – we’ll also post a link to the survey on our blog, our Facebook page, and on Twitter. After we collect and analyze the information, the results report will be sent to our participants.

Want to know if your job is up to snuff? Be sure to fill out our survey.