Monday’s Incidentals

It took me a while to discover Cypress Street Marketplace, about the only place within Caesers Palace that you can get a meal at a decent price. It's like a bit better quality version of the food court you would find in most major shopping malls. It's also got the Java Joint, which I visit regularly. As with last year's conference, the coffee served with the conference supplied meals is mediocre and the cups are hardly large enough for a coffee addict like me.

Speaking of lunches, the ones served at the conference are typical. Rather small and not a whole lot of choices. Still, I don't have it near as bad as folks like Steve Katz. Steve (and a number of other conference attendees) are Orthodox Jews. Steve was sitting next to me when they delivered his kosher meal. It looked like a rather old airline meal. I loaned Steve my van (I drove to the conference) so he could run out and get a real meal.

Breakfast is pretty much the same high-carb stuff, although there were yogurts and fruits available.

The Sybase reception Sunday night and the sponsor reception Monday night had great food, but either not enough or it wasn't coming fast enough. Often the tables were empty for a while, followed by a rush and a long line when it was finally replenished.

Monday’s Sessions

I didn't make my AM session (Modeling with PowerDesigner 11) because I was making last minute changes to the presentation for my own session in the afternoon.

I did manange to catch most of Dave Fish's afternoon session "Up Close with PowerBuilder 10.5". There was quite a lot of feedback on the new features being developed. I was somewhat concerned about the few number of audience members that we actually participating the in the beta. The more people that participate, and the sooner they get involved and provide feedback, the better the end result will be.

Then came my own session "SOA with PowerBuilder/EAServer". It was well attended (I had one of the smaller rooms, but it was full) and from the people I talked to later it seems to have gone over well.

Monday’s Opening Keynote

TechWave was opened this year by the illusionist Rick Thomas. His grand finale illusion involved a number of volunteers from the audience.



John Chen indicated that this year's TechWave set recent records for attendance (1500) and sponsors.

So much for the gameshow…

We (TeamSybase) got our clocks cleaned by the Sybase folks. We thought we might have a chance with categories like Sun, HP, Oracle, Big Blue, etc. Turns out Sun was about the solar system, HP was about Harry Potter, Oracle about the Matrix and Big Blue about the ocean.

The audience seemed to enjoy it, particularly those that won prizes. For our own efforts, we received rubber chickens....

Test your Sybase Knowledge Gameshow

Pompeian Ballroom in the Palace Tower around 3:30 on Sunday the 21st.

Four TeamSybase members (Millard Brown, Terry Voth, Mike Nicewarner and myself) will do battle against a team from Sybase employees. Each team will take turns answering multiple choice questions off a Jeopardy style game board. The questions will be about 50% Sybase engineering related and the rest from other walks of life. There will be two rounds with a tie-breaker question just in case.

The audience will have handhelds and play along. They will have a chance to win some cool prizes (30 GB iPods, PSP's and Optic Nerve Sunglasses are up for grabs) at the end of each round (so to the audience it is really two games).

Jonathan Baker (Sybase) is the emcee and "impartial" judge

Track historical Amazon rankings

Something you may not be interested in unless you're an author, but it's possible to use the Amazon web services API to track the ranking of items on Amazon over time. The folks at TitleZ have made their implementation of it available. The following is the report for the PowerBuilder 9 books from SAMS.

Problems with Word after installing PD 11

In case anybody else has run into this, this is from a newsgroup posting from "Seth S." about how to overcome issues with Word after PD11 is installed. The problem is that Word loads the PowerDesigner plug-in by default (everytime you use Word), not just when PowerDesigner needs it. For me it's been a real issue because I use Word as the editor for Outlook, so it keeps getting loaded when I'm in Outlook as well.

One minor correction. That key shows up for me under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, not HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as the newsgroup post indicated.

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The workaround is to change the LoadBehavior of the DLL in Word

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOfficeWordAddinsWordToRqm11.Connect]
"LoadBehavior"=dword:00000002

LoadBehavior should be set to '3' and you must set it to '2'. After that Ms Word will not load the DLL anymore.

NOTE: The add-in remains listed in the Global Template and Add-in box and the contextual menu named 'requirements' is still on the menu. These things will be address in the cr 376227.

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