In this episode, Ryan and I talk with SAP's Craig Cmehil about the upcoming SAP Hacker Night at SAP TechEd. Naturally, we spend a lot of time talking about RIAs in the SAP world and community as well. The news is slim this week.

Here's the show run-down:

• Craig RIA Hacker Night - Craig gives and overview and preview.
• I then ask Craig to tell us how RIAs fit into - and show-up - in the SAP world. We go over some examples of how RIAs are used in the SAP world.
• Ryan then asks about the speed of RIA adoption in SAP technologies.
• Check out the new Netflix app on the XBox. Beyond just browsing movies, you can have "parties" and watch movies with friends. Coté doesn't know what to make of this, but it's an interesting consumer RIA, connected thing. Like a VCR with an IP address.
• Augmented reality watch - Yelp app, and another iPhone app Craig spotted.
• Capgemini using Adobe Catalyst for RAD development.
• Apple Tablet rumors.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft.

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This week John and I discuss several things:

• John calls in from the Atlanta Open Coffee Club. Roam, Business Cafe and Meeting Center.
• Amazon VPC - John doesn't like the whole railing against "private clouds" slant. See Coté's advice to other cloud vendors.
• John has more to report on "cloud brokers."
• newScale Service Catalog demo, with the VMWare.
• "Circling the wagon" and Econobonics.
• John gives us a new take on VDI.
• Cray bought some company.
• Surgient getting into private cloud automation stuff
• Next week is VMworld, RedHat Summit
• NoSQL East, Oct 28th to 30th. Anyone got some select * from kiss_my_ass?
• Rob England on COBIT - looks interesting.
• Rackspace Cloud Tools - a catalog of stuff running on an using Rackspace.

Disclosure: see RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.

In this episode, we're joined again by Andrew Shafer to talk about Agile Infrastructure (or "Agile Operations" as some folks call it).

• The in problems in IT that cause us to start wanting Agile Infrastructure. The high-level problem is enabling change (that works) more often: configuration drift, intentional complexity, walls of confusion everywhere, hero-driven incentives. Israel also mentions the theory that you have to change up your incentive structures often so that people don't get locked into incentive-driven thinking vs. "doing the right thing," so to speak.
• Leading us into the practices, Israel asks Andrew about including the operations folks in the Agile team, just as you do developers, QA, documentation, and so on. This gets into a discussion on "fractal teams." We then get into other practices and technologies that help with Agile Infrastructure:
• Version control - getting beyond .bak files. You need some kind of version control system. What do you put in there? All your configuration files, to start with. Perhaps your scripts next. Puppet and other tools can help do more. The tools, really, can be the same as used in development: git, subversion, CVS, and so on. In fact, Andrew says you should really use whatever development is using for consistency.
• Always ship trunk
• "Dark launches" - staging the release of features to test back-end tasks before exposing it to the user, and then finally giving the user access to the new system. This lets you test out the impact of the "background" tasks in the production system of new features without exposing it to users.
• An over-arching theme here is to reduce the fixed cost of deployment, trying to get it to zero as much as possible.
• Some other practices: test-driven infr, deploy early/deploy often, tagging everything with who/what/when, time synchronizing, and a few more.

This week, Ryan and I are joined by (hopefully soon to be come regular) guest co-host Mike Downey, 3 weeks into his new job as a Silverlight Evangelist and with a wicked mic. We open up talking about the RIA usage Mike saw in the field during 6 months as an independent consultant, and then go over some of the highlights from the RIA world since last we talked:

• What has Mike been seeing in the field? More emphasis on UX for behind-the-firewall applications.
• I also ask Mike what kind of software development process he saw these folks using.
• Both Ryan and I circle around the question of "selling UX" in corporations, asking around that topic several times. Mike has several interesting observations from the field that he shares.
• NBC football in 720p HD via Silverlight. Mike tells us what functionality will be in there: very DVR-centric.
  
• SXSW panel proposals - Ryan has an interesting one on "beyond mice and keyboards," Coté has a panel on HTML5, and Ryan rounds up other interesting looking ones. It's a lot of help if you got vote for and/or leave comments on these: then they might get picked!
• Seadragon.com - Deep Zoom on your own. Here's a door at a Chiang Mai temple - not a mega-high resolution photo (2048 x 3072, 6.3 megapixels), but fun nonetheless.
  
• RockMelt browser - stealthy startup working on a new "browser." Is this a Facebook browser, or a sort of Compuserve/AOL walled-web thing?

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.

In this episode, John and I spend a lot of time horsing off, but we talk about some on-topic things as well:

• The most important news of the week: John has an iPhone. (And yes, Wal-mart does sell the iPhone.)
• Lower Amazon prices - John details this. The Deli case. No word on the Deli, but there is Memo Jokes.
• How do you setup a Windows box, esp. virtualization. John says ESXi, the free VMWare client.
• SpringSource and cloud foundry - deploying and managing Java apps in public clouds.
• Last episode, John had commented on the valuation for other Little 4 types in light of the SpringSource price. Zenoss' Mark Hinkle got back to John on this topic.
• We get into enterprise/corporate uses of PaaS - using Heroku and EngineYard as proxy for thinking about how Azure and Java in the clouds might pan out for corporate developers vs. IT staff.
• While the quick and easy approach is awesome, I ask John to recount some IT disasters he's seen when there's not enough IT process and too much "quick and easy" think.
• What's up with devopsdays? In Belgium Oct 30 - 31st - John will present there on the Ubuntu elastic cloud with Chef. From this Patrick Dubous guy. Maikin Piss!
• itSMF Fusion conference - Sep. 20-23rd in Dallas. Is that anything? Agenda looks nice and ITIL-y. Mike Walker in Atlanta runs the ATL itSMF.
• "Cloud Brokers" and extradition free countries - but seriously, John explains this idea of "cloud brokers."

Disclosure: Zenoss, IBM, Microsoft, SpringSource, and others mentioned are clients.

In episode 50 (!), John and I discuss:

• mil-oss
• John's new job with Canonical, also an advisor for OpsCode/Chef
• John's cloud talk at mil-oss going over what's available for, you know, cloud computing.
• Coté indulges himself in repeating all the brilliant things he said at the open source management panel at OpenSourceWorld.
• VMWare buys SpringSource - see Stephen O'Grady's and my own takes on it.

Better show notes soon...

Disclosure: SpringSource is a client, as is Canonical. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.