Today I went to the VMware vSeminar Series for 2011, which was held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. This is the second vSeminar I've attended, so I had a basic idea of how the event would unfold and who the usual suspects (vendors) would be.

All and all, it was a good day, though they could have done more demos -- any demos really. The only ones we got to see, were pre-recorded videos, which is better than nothing, but it says to me that VMware are not confident that their products will be able to shine when shown live.


The two things that I was interesting to hear about at the event was VMware View/ThinApp, which I first saw at last year's vSeminar. I thought it was interesting and said to myself, I'll have to keep an eye on this product. They showed off a little bit of View but nothing on ThinApp, except for publishing web apps, which in reality, is a bit meh.


Finding out about vSphere 5 was cool, though VMware, if you need over 15 minutes and 10 page document to describe your licensing structure, then there is something really wrong with your model.


There was an illustration showing Steve Jobs in front of an iMac, which made me very intrigued and when an off the cuff remark was made that vSphere 5 now support Apple's OS X -- I nearly fell off my chair. At the end of the day, they were going to have a Q&A session using questions asked via twitter (#vss2011) or SMS. I asked two questions about OS X -- neither of which got answered. That was pretty disappointing since they was only about 4 other questions asked. I guess they didn't know.


Later on, it turned out they demoed OS X running on VMware -- but, it was just an Apple XServe (defunct product) running ESX. That's great, but not what anyone wants. We all want to be able to run OS X on a PC ESX server. Since vSphere 5 isn't out yet, only time will tell.

It's the Annual Chilli Festival in Sawtell, NSW -- so the Too Hot Crew roadtrip it to sample the best Aussie Hot sauces and other related chilli products, as well as take in the wonderful Australian scenery.

In this special episode, Dale and Phil (The Two Hot Crew) try The Chilli Factory's Scorpion Strike (15 out of 10) made from Trinidad Scorpion "Butch T" (The Guinness Book of Record's Hottest Chilli) -- we only had a small amount but boy it was really tasty and then it just got hotter and hotter.

This time Dale and Phil (The Two Hot Crew) review a hot sauce that's not commercially available, it is only available from Symposium Cafe, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. They'd heard that one person said their ears were ringing and that it would give Blair's Megadeath sauce a run for it's money. Check the video and find out.

Today is the first day of WWDC 2011 in San Francisco, USA. It is also the day of the inaugural Steve Jobs keynote presentation to the Apple developers, industry press and the world.

They started off with Lion and showed off 10 new features such as Mission Control, which is Spaces on steroids, LaunchPad bringing iOS icons to the Mac and other applications that take advantage of multi-gestures. There is now auto-save and version control for documents, AirDrop so you can easily share files on LANs (presumably not heavily firewalled ones) and it's priced at $29.99 USD. Outstanding. Especially when compared with Microsoft's Windows 7 at $319.99 USD.

Lion Server wasn't mentioned in the keynote, but I've found that it will be available in July as well for the low price of $49.99 USD. I don't think you want me to compare that to Windows Server 2008 at a price tag of several thousand of dollars. I'll be looking forward to getting my hands on this update in the coming months.

Then came iOS's turn with 10 features such as the much needed Notification's system overhaul, iMessage, which is basically a text messaging chat system for iOS devices only, the huge news of Wifi Syncing (more on that later), Reminders system negating the need for all those Todo apps, Twitter integration, which I felt they spent more time on than needed, Camera is now accessibly when locked and best of all ... it's available to developers today. In fact, it's currently installing on my iPhone 4.

Lastly, Jobs took the stage to talk about iCloud and admitted that "How can you trust the people who did MobileMe ?" ... well I think he answered that when he announced the release of 9 iCloud products such as iTunes in the Cloud, all purchases will be sync-ed wirelessly with all devices, PhotoStream, which is the same but for Photos, Documents in the Cloud, you get the picture, but also 5GB of data backup in the cloud, which doesn't include your music, apps or photos.

I've briefly tested the Wifi syncing and it seems to work just fine. It's still syncing a lot of my apps at present and it was great to see all my apps restored back in the same locations and folders. The notification system on first launch asks for your location and from that it updates a live weather and stock widget. It also enabled me to find out about an important email I hadn't seen yet and a twitter response. Very cool.

So, a huge range of new products and features for the OS X community, which is great, though I was a little disappointed there was nothing about speech technology or the iPhone 5. My guess is both of these will come at an event later in the year. Only time will tell ... but this week if you're a developer at WWDC -- it's all about the sessions. Personally, I would definitely get along to the sessions on the iCloud API.

Dale and Phil (The Two Hot Crew) have uploaded their third chilli adventure with Nando's Extra Extra Hot (Black Label) Sauce ... does it live up to it's name ? Watch and find out ....