Say the word “silicon” and chances are, you’ll think of technology. After all, silicon’s relationship to tech – it’s part of what makes transistors and chips – has been part of popular culture for decades, from the “Silicon chip inside her head” opening line from the Boomtown Rats’ song I Don’t Like Mondays to “Silicon Valley” as the nickname for the suburban expanse between San Francisco and San Jose.

Silicon is only part of the equation, however. The chips that drive our computers, mobile phones and assorted electronica are actually a “layer cake” consisting not only of silicon, but also oxide and metal.

There’s also the matter of key non-chip components like capacitors, which momentarily store an electrical charge. They’re made of thin layers of conductive metal separated by a thin layer of insulator. We use their “buffering” capabilities to smooth out “spiky” electrical currents, filter through signal interference, pick out a specific frequency from a spectrum of them and other “cleaning up” operations.

One of the metals used in the manufacture of capacitors is tantalum, which you can extract from a metal ore called coltan, whose name is short for “columbite-tantalite”. About 20% of the world’s supply of tantalum comes from Congo, and proceeds of from the sale of coltan are how their warlords – the scum driving the world’s most vicious conflict, and who’ve turned the country into the rape capital of the world – are bankrolled.

Nichloas Kristof of the New York Times wrote about metals like tantalum purchased from Congo – conflict metals – in an op-ed yesterday:

I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”

Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.

He also points to the Enough Project’s latest video, which used humour and a reference to the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” TV commercials to draw the public’s attention to conflict metals and to encourage them to contact electronics manufacturers and ask them to be more vigilant when sourcing components:

The Enough Project says that auditing component supply chains at the smelters to see whether the metal was sources from “clean” places like Australia or Canada instead of lining the pockets of Congolese warlords would add about one cent to the price of a cellphone, and that this figure originates from within the industry. I’d happily pay a thousand times that for each of my devices – a mere ten bucks – to ensure that I wasn’t bankrolling rape and murder.

I’ll close this post with the closing paragraph from Kristof’s op-ed:

We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

GovCamp in Toronto!

First came GovCamp in Ottawa (May 31st – June 1st), and now GovCamp is coming to Toronto! GovCamp is an “Open Government” or “Goverment 2.0” unconference with these two goals:

1. For governments to become more open, transparent, participatory, innovative, efficient and effective
2. For citizens to become more connected to each other around their civic passions in the place they call home

GovCamp Toronto will take place on the evening of Thursday, June 17th and will be an evening where all sorts of people, from private citizens to government officials to representatives of publicly-funded organizations will get together to talk about the intersection of:

• Government transformation
• Social networking software
• Participatory approaches to public engagement
• Open data
• Public service renewal

Is GovCamp the sort of thing you should attend? It is if you’re one of the following:

• A municipal, provincial or federal public servant or a public sector agency employee with an interest in these topics
• A thought leader looking to share and connect with this community
• A member of the community of developers, advocates and practitioners in public engagement, government communications, technology, open data, open government or "Gov 2.0"

Who’ll Be There?

Few people know more about setting up “Government 2.0” unconferences than Toronto’s favourite high-tech policy wonk Mark Kuznicki, and we’re very fortunate to have him as GovCamp Toronto’s MC and facilitator. Mark has been behind a number of similar unconferences, including ChangeCamp, TransitCamp and Metronauts.

There will be a number of special guests including:

• David Eaves, Public Policy Entrepreneur, Open Government Activist and Collaboration Expert
• Dave Wallace, Chief Information Officer, City of Toronto
• Steven Green, Director of Marketing & Communications, Cabinet Office, Government of Ontario
• Chris Moore, Chief Information Officer, City of Edmonton
• Peter MacLeod, Principal, MASSLBP
• Alison Loat, Executive Director, Samara

GovCamp Toronto will be hosted by:

• Omar Rashid, Public Sector, Microsoft Canada
• Julia Stowell, Interoperability Lead, Microsoft Canada

Where, When and What’s Happening

GovCamp Toronto’s venue is nice and also quite central: the Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge Street, just north of Bloor).

Here’s the agenda:

There are a number of ways to participate:

• You can host a conversation. The conversations at GovCamp Toronto are created by you. We are looking for up to 20 hosts to help convene small group conversations on a variety of topics related to our theme. If you’ve got an idea for a conversation topic, propose one using the online form.
• You can demo your web or mobile application. We’re looking for up to 6 web or mobile app demos that show the value of open public data, demonstrate what is possible in open government, or demonstrate real world application of social tools inside government. If you’ve built such an app, propose a demo using the online form.
• You can join the conversation. You can either:
  • Attend in person – registration is free, and you can register to attend online.
  • Follow the online conversation on Twitter: just look for the #GovCamp hashtag.

Find Out More About GovCamp

There’s lot of information, ideas and reportage from the recent GovCamp in Ottawa at the GovCamp site – be sure to check it out!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s a great movie which takes the audio from a presentation by Dan Pink based on the research for his latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and augments it with video of a whiteboard cartoonist illustrating what Pink is talking about. I have no idea how long it took to film the illustration sequences, but I love the end result – I think it makes for better internet viewing of a presentation than simply watching a video of the presenter on the podium, even when accompanied by slides.

The movie covers the part of Pink’s presentation that talks about an experiment to determine whether higher pay led to better performance. The results:

• For turnkey, mechanical, just-follow-the-instructions tasks, larger rewards do lead to better performance.
• For tasks that call for cognitive skills, conceptual and creative thinking — even at a rudimentary level — larger rewards did the opposite: they led to poorer performance.

The sort of work we do calls for cognitive crunching certainly falls into the latter category – as Andy “Pragmatic Programmer” Hunt says, making software is one of the hardest thing humans do.

Money is a motivator, but when it comes to people who do the sort of work we do, it requires more than just money to motivation. Pink’s recommendation is to pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money, but thinking about their work instead. Once you’ve done that, there are three factors that lead to better satisfaction and performance:

1. Autonomy: The desire to be self-directed, to direct our own lives
2. Mastery: The urge to get better at stuff
3. Purpose: The reason we do something

In the end, what Pink suggests is that if we treat people not like “smaller, better-smelling horses” with carrot-and-stick incentives but like people and set up the appropriate motivations, we’ll make our work and the world a little bit better.

If you enjoyed this portion of Pink’s presentation and want to see the whole 40-ish minutes, I present it below. Enjoy!

If Pink’s name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve heard of his other books, A Whole New Mind and the manga career guide Johnny Bunko.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s Mesh week here in Toronto! Today, the developer-and-creative-focused MeshU conference takes place, followed tomorrow and Wednesday by the social-media-and-marketing focused Mesh conference. I’ll be in the audience at MeshU, and tending the Microsoft lounge (and the cocktail parties) at Mesh. If you’re attending, please say “hi!”

In the spirit of Mesh, I present Social Media Revolution 2, the follow-up to last year’s Social Media Revolution video, produced by the people behind the book Socialnomics (written by Erik Qualman, who blogs here). Whether you’re looking for little facts and statistics for a presentation, need some infotainment to get the week started or both, this video is for you!

(Want to feel old? The music track for the video is Fatboy Slim’s Right Here Right Now, which is from the album You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, which is 12 years old. Yowch.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

  Creative Commons Photo by the Poissant Family.

Open Government / Government 2.0

The intersection of the internet and politics has given rise to many things, including the concept often referred to as “Open Government” or “Government 2.0”. To borrow a couple of lines from Mark Kuznicki’s keynote at ChangeCamp Toronto, its goals are twofold:

1. For governments to become more open, transparent, participatory, innovative, efficient and effective
2. For citizens to become more connected to each other around their civic passions in the place they call home

Events like ChangeCamp, TransitCamp and Metronauts – unconferences where ordinary citizens, government officials and representatives of organizations that receive public funding meet to exchange ideas – have been happening across Canada. At these events, people have thought about, discussed and built new relationships with their local governments, often through the use of technology.

Most of these events focused on a local community, municipality or occasionally, a province, but none of them have had a discussion at the federal level. Could this be done at a broader level?

GovCamp: May 31 – June 1 in Ottawa

That’s where GovCamp comes in. It’s an “Open Government”/”Government 2.0” discussion where the topics will be centred around Canada as a whole, the interactions between cities and provinces, and how our provincial and federal governments can help cultivate the growth and prosperity of Canadians and their vibrant communities.

John Weigelt, Microsoft Canada’s National Technology Officer, is putting together this event, which takes place on Monday, May 31st and Tuesday, June 1st in Ottawa. It’ll be a gathering of local citizens, public sector employees, service delivery leaders and policy people with an interest in having a conversation about engaging citizens and businesses and making government at all levels more open, responsive and efficient. It won’t be a trade show or product-oriented discussion; instead, it will be a workshop-style unconference where participants establish the agenda and explore the themes that they care most about.

GovCamp is being hosted by CIPS – the Canadian Association for Information Technology Professionals – and sponsored by Microsoft Canada on behalf of the community.

Who’s Coming to GovCamp?

In putting GovCamp together, we’re reaching out to a number organizations and communities including:

• Industry Canada
• The Treasury Board Secretariat
• Public Works and Government Services
• Public Safety Canada
• The Information Commissioner of Canada
• The Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner
• Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada
• The City of Ottawa
• Open Government and ChangeCamp community leaders

Who is GovCamp For?

This event is for:

• IT People –Technology is one way that governments are transforming how they deliver services externally and internally. Technology people are needed to explore the art of the possible for these new services. Mash-ups, Open Data, social media are but a few of the possible areas for discussion.
• Policy People – We need you in the conversation so that you can share your expertise on the realm of the possible from a policy perspective. Privacy, Security, Access to Information, Information Management are all key considerations for successful government transformation.  Come share your knowledge on how to make these policies enable new services.
• Government Services leaders – Ultimately, government delivers value through the many services that are provided. GovCamp is about exploring the realm of the possible for service to individuals, services to businesses and services to other departments. Your voice is essential to inform the community and to guide those ideas that the community may have for you!
• Community – We are fortunate that there’s a passionate and creative community with vibrant ideas about how they can help create a closer connection between governments, individuals, businesses and even among government itself. Your participation at the Canada Gov Camp will provide you with a venue to share your great ideas and, if all goes well, interact with some of the people that can take your idea further.

How Much, and Where do I Register?

Registration for GovCamp is free! To register, visit the registration page.

GovCamp will be held at the University of Ottawa, in a location to be determined.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

When I was young, I used to cringe when adults made clumsy, if well-intentioned, attempts to speak in what they thought was “youthful slang” in order to make a connection with us.

Now that I’m one of those adults, I can’t tell for sure whether the message in this poster (which I saw in the Toronto subway yesterday) comes across to today’s net/text-speaking youth as clever or clumsy. I’m torn – should my reaction be LOL or WTF?

(And is it me, or does the expression on the guy’s face say BRB?)

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Ah, student life. While waiting to do a presentation at Fanshawe College in London, I had a quick student lunch, pictured below:

Damir and I have been touring all over the country over the past couple of weeks for EnergizeIT. Two weeks ago, we were in Kelowna and Victoria, last week we were in London and Kitchener/Waterloo and this week, we’ll be in Fredericton and Moncton. We’re “Team Rover”, one of three teams visiting 20 cities, large and small, across Canada, with John Bristowe and Rodney Buike making up “Team West” and Christian Beauclair and Rick Claus comprising “Team East”.

EnergizeIT’s main presentations are about what’s possible with the Microsoft platform, with a focus on those parts that lots of people use to help them get work done and make their businesses go: Visual Studio 2010, Azure, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. In those presentations, we’re demoing these tools and technologies in action with live code and live data, and yes, we’re promoting Microsoft stuff.

In addition to the main presentations, we’ve been doing academic visits, which are quite different. They’re about helping students make the transition from school to the working world. In these presentations, I make very little mention of Microsoft, leaving it just to:

• Hey, I work for Microsoft!
• A quick story about how I landed my job at Microsoft
• At the very end, I point them to a couple of sites:
  • DreamSpark, where Microsoft offers a lot of free developer software to students
  • Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s international student programming competition
  • Our blogs, Canadian Developer Connection and IT Pro Connection

The academic presentation focuses on the sorts of things that one should do to have a career in technology that’s rewarding in every sense of the word. The core message is that you, the student about to enter the working world, are in charge of your own future, and that in this industry and time, there’s a lot you can do to shape it.

Each of the teams has been working from a presentation created by Qixing Zheng, who used to be with the Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelism team and has since gone on to join the Windows User Experience group, but we’ve been pretty free to add our own twists to it. Our team’s version features a lot of interesting stuff, including:

• The story of my first client meeting, which was a disaster
• The importance of an online presence of some sort
• How to get experience when you’re not yet in the working world
• The value of “soft skills”
• Why operating on just your “left brain” isn’t going cut it anymore
• Ideas from a number of books, including:
  • The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
  • The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Negotiating for Dummies by Michael and Mimi Donaldson
  • Celebrating Failure by Ralph Heath

So far, Damir and I have done presentations at:

• Camosun College in Victoria
• Douglas College in Vancouver
• Fanshawe College in London
• Conestoga College in Waterloo

and we’re going to present next week here in Toronto at:

• Humber College
• Centennial College

I’d love to do these visits to universities as well as colleges, but the EnergizeIT tour takes place just as universities are going into final exams. I hope that TechDays, which happens from September through December (fall semester in universities) gives us a chance to present at universities across Canada, including my beloved alma mater, Queen’s.

I enjoy doing presentations of all sorts, but I have to admit that there’s a special place in my heart for presenting to students. It’s partly because students are a fun crowd to present to, and partly because there’s the notion of me – of all people, given my checkered academic history – standing at a college or university lectern, presenting ideas to students is rather funny. I love doing the academic visits, and I still have trouble believing that I’m getting paid to do something that’s this much fun.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

You’ve heard the stories about people choosing terribly obvious passwords for their various computer accounts, such as “password” and “12345”, but what are the other ones? In his book, Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, Mark Burnett compiled the most common easy-to-crack passwords, most of which are ordinary words or key sequences that are easy to type on a QWERTY keyboard. I’m amused by some of the pop culture-based passwords, such as “Rush2112”, “8675309” and the X-Files inspired “TrustNo1”.

Someone else — I don’t who who did it — decided to turn that list into the hand-lettered poster shown above. You can click it to see it at a larger size.

In addition to being a good list showing the sort of password you shouldn’t use, it’s also a great name generator. You could take two random items from the list to create new character names for a Metal Gear game (“Tomcat Eagle1” makes just about as much sense as “Solid Snake” or “Sniper Wolf”) or any three to come up with the name of your band or prison softball team (“Bigdick Magnum Juice”).

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Maybe it’s me, but I think that this setup is asking for Murphy’s Law to attack when you least expect it. However, if you’re short a laptop bag and have a hooded sweatshirt handy, this hack might work for you:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that the need to have arguments in public and win popular support is an unintended consequence of social networking services. I think that things like Twitter and Facebook make it easier and that they vastly expand the reach of an argument, but that we’ve had that urge to have flamewars long before the internet.

Here’s a data point for my thesis: a placard from 1839 that wouldn’t seem out of place on any online debate, aside from the dated language.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

A New Windows for the Phone

Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Some quick notes from the video:

• There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
  • Back
  • Windows (the “Start” button)
  • Search
• The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
• The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
  • You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
• A browser with:
  • Snappy performance
  • Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
  • Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
  • Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
  • Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
  • Multiple tabs
• The “People Hub”
  • Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
  • Provides a live feed of your contacts
• Context-sensitive search:
  • Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
  • Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
    • Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
    • In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
    • A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
    • In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
• Email:
  • Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
  • A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
  • Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
• Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
• Calendar:
  • Support for both work and personal calendars
• ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
• User-customizable UI colour schemes
• The “Pictures Hub”
  • Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
  • Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
  • What’s New: New photos from your social networks
  • Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
  • Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
• Music and Video
  • History: Most recently played music and videos
  • New: New music and videos added since the last sync
  • Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
• The “Me” tile
  • Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
  • Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
• The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
• There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
• Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

Can you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

We’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Every Thursday in March and April, my co-worker John Bristowe and I will host the Ignite Your Coding webcast series. Each hour-long webcast will feature a guest speaker selected from the bright lights in software development. John and I will start off by asking them about their views on the industry and how to thrive in an era of great technological, business and social change, and then it’ll be your turn to ask the questions.

The theme of the webcast series is “staying on top of change”. I can’t deny hat there’s a certain thrill to the changes in this still-very-new industry (remember, the formal definition of “computable” isn’t even a hundred years old, and some of the pioneers, like C.A.R. Hoare, are still alive). They can also be overwhelming. All the guests on the show have ideas about how to cope with the ongoing changes, how to make the most of your career and life as a developer and intriguing stories about their life “in the trenches”.

John and I started getting interviewees for the show by drafting a list of “dream guests” and then inviting them to speak. John’s pretty well-established in the .NET world, so he went after people that Microsoft developers would know well. I’ve spent more time in the world outside Microsoft development, so I was assigned to invite people often seen in those spheres. We ended up with a great and varied set of guests, some you might have expected and some who might surprise you. We think that you’ll enjoy the webcast and find it both entertaining and informative, whether you eat, breathe and sleep Visual Studio, dream in TextMate or stand on the front lines in the Emacs/vi holy war.

All you have to do to catch the live Ignite Your Coding webcasts is register for the ones you want (see below). We’ll record them all, so if you can’t catch the live shows, you can at least listen to them later.

Here are the guests and the dates:

Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning (Andy Hunt)

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Composable Applications FTW (Glenn Block)

Glenn Block is an industry expert who has broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Typically, developers of client applications face a number of challenges. One of the more common challenges is to build applications in a way that allows its various parts & pieces to be interchanged quickly and seamlessly. In this conversation, Glenn Block will provide guidance on how to structure your applications in such a way that will facilitate this capability.

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Essence versus Ceremony (Jeremy Miller)

Jeremy Miller is no stranger to the developer community of .NET. He is the author of StructureMap and the forthcoming StoryTeller, as well as being a major contributor to FubuMVC and Fluent NHibernate. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll discuss a wide range of topics; including how newer OSS efforts in the developer community of .NET are trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and much more!

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt (David Laribee)

David Laribee is currently an Agile Coach at VersionOne. Technical debt refers to the costs associated with byzantine dependencies and sloppy code. Technical debt is a drag. It can kill productivity, making maintenance annoying, difficult, or, in some cases, impossible. In this one-hour webcast, David will provide us with some advice for “paying back technical debt” with agile techniques.

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Scalability and Performance for All (Richard Campbell)

Richard Campbell knows a thing or two about scalability and performance, having designed and built applications for over 30 years with a number of leading North American organizations. He’s also taken that knowledge and applied it at his company Strangeloop, which builds an appliance that specializes in website acceleration. In this webcast, Richard will help us navigate the world of scalability and performance and how developers need to think differently when building applications for the future.

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

State of the .NET Developer Nation (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is a household name to nearly every developer of .NET worldwide. From his deeply-informative blog to his engaging podcast, Scott is well known for his expertise and insights that he shares willingly with the broader community of .NET. In this webcast, we’ll talk to Scott about the state of the developer nation of .NET; a “what’s hot and what’s not” with developers of .NET today. We’ll also chat with Scott about his role at Microsoft and tips on staying on top of your game as a developer in the industry today.

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock (Jeff Atwood)

Jeff Atwood writes the popular developer blog Coding Horror, created and helps run the Stack Overflow and Server Fault and SuperUser community Q&A sites and co-hosts the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky. With a schedule like this and a one-year-old, he somehow stills finds the time to keep his Rock Band skills finely honed. Join us as we chat with Jeff in a one-hour webcast where we talk about the Stack Overflow phenomenon, how Coding Horror grew to become one of the most-read developer blogs and career strategies in the post-desktop age.

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

A Chat with “Uncle Bob” Martin (Robert C. Martin)

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

To find out more about the Ignite Your Coding webcast series, visit the Ignite Your Coding page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the second in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010, the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from NSFW, a keynote given by my friend Pete Forde, partner at Unspace and one of the bright lights of Toronto’s tech scene.

My notes appear below. Pete’s posted his slides, notes and URLs online; be sure to check them out.

Introduction

“This talk is going to be adult,” began Pete. “If you can’t handle it, you should probably leave. I’ll buy you a Dasani afterwards.”

• I’m a partner at Unspace
  • It’s a company where I decided to bet the farm on Rails, a platform I like
  • We’ve done unusual things, like hold a job fair where local Ruby programmers could show off their work
  • We’ve built software projects for the UN
  • Every project we take on has a lot of heart
  • We don’t want to work with anyone who isn’t super-excited to be there
• I’m a software developer, have been for a long time
• But deep down, I want to be a designer
  • I have no formal training — I can’t draw; I can’t paint
  • I see life as a series of carefully-executed series of five year plans
  • I dropped out of high school 20 minutes before the final exam; I told the principal that I didn’t want him to take credit for future success
    • I don’t recommend this; it’s probably not repeatable, not even by me
• You – as engineering and computer science students –- are better educated than me
  • “You probably know math and stuff”
• In the past, I was a punk, and many other things
  • I’ve been a musician
  • I’ve also been a zine publisher
  • I’ve tried on a lot of things to see if the shoe fits
  • I’ve had an interesting run
• When I get to the end of 5 years of doing something, I review what I’ve done
  • I’ve had 5 years of doing software at Unspace – what now?

On Pete

• My dad’s an engineer, and as such, is a perfectionist
  • Engineers are by and large pedantic control freaks — and that’s okay, we need you to be that way!
• I’ve discovered that I’m a starter, not a finisher
• This tendency has put me at odds with my family and I used to feel really guilty about it
• Now I realize is that you need to play to your strengths — recognize that you have an instinct, and harness it!
• Is what you’re doing against the grain?
  • "There’s no time like the present to get your life on track"
  • "I could have saved myself a lot of time if I could talk to my present-day self"
• As a starter but not a finisher, I realized that I had to recruit doers, people who could take my ideas and run with them
  • Some of these projects will succeed
  • Some will fail…but they’ll fail grandly
  • I’ve got lots of things on the go
  • Am I arrogant? I see it as audacious
  • Seth Godin said: “If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader."
• I am an introvert
  • See the article in The Atlantic, Caring for Your Introvert
  • So what am I doing onstage?
  • People who appear practiced onstage look that way because they are practiced

On Success

• Steve Jobs says: “Find what you love”
  • People confuse “successful” with “happy”
  • Are you putting your life on hold to go and make your paycheque?
  • I’m convinced that many financially successful people are unhappy and bitte
• Malcom Gladwell’s The Sure Thing
  • It paints a different picture from the one we see in the media of the entrepreneur as daring, as a “cowboy”
  • Entrepreneurs who became empire builders turned out be highly risk-averse
  • Their success comes from seeing opportunities in arbitrage and taking advantage of them
  • Consider John Paulson:
    • His hedge fund made money shorting America’s economy
    • He bought shorts on subprime mortgages
  • These men are predatory entrepreneurs in my opinion
  • Do they really need billions?
  • Maybe they don’t do it for evil – perhaps it might be for the thrill
• Don’t want to model himself after these people
  • There’s a line written by Seth Tobocman, who wrote the comic book World War 3: "You don’t have to fuck people over to survive."
  • My twist on that is "You don’t have to fuck yourself over to be successful."
• Who would I rather model myself after? Steve Jobs
  • He said: “Good business makes for good art”
• Another good bit of advice comes from Andy Warhol: “Think rich, look poor.”
• On Being an Artist
  • There used to be a harsh disciplinary division between technology and art and it’s reflected in code and art
  • Different now in the era of Rails
  • I like holding parties and inviting all sorts of people: if you put interesting people together from all walks of life, you’ve got a catalyst for change in your living room
  • The lines are blurring: we’re all artists now
• Consider these guys
  • Ronald Tackmann, escape artist
    • "He hates being free"
  • Blane Nordahl, Silver thief
    • "The Mr. Belvedere of silver theft"
  • Both really good, treated their work like artistry

On Starting Up

• How Unspace came to be
  • It started 5 years ago with 2 friends in 170 square feet of space
  • “There wasn’t enough room to lie down and make a snow angel”
  • Everything that happened in those first years was "path of least resistance"
  • We had this weird notion that Unspace would be worth nothing and function as a quasi-legal organization whose reason for being was so that we could write off tech toy purchases
• We got lucky: Two founding partners — moved on to other things
  • One of them has since moved on, regrettably, to Ashley Madison
  • Choosing partners was important decision
• Optimism springs eternal among entrepreneurs: there’s always that feeling that nothing can go wrong
• Daniel Tenier says: “Partnerships suck”
  • It’s important to make your agreements explicit
  • Don’t be afraid to discuss bad stuff
  • Write everything down
  • You can’t make it work at all costs – you need to know when to walk away
  • Try to get to the bottom of questions like "What’s your definition of success?" Of failure? What’s the sunset clause? What’s the shotgun clause?
  • If you absolutely don’t need a partner, go it yourself (I myself, since I’m not a finisher, need a partner)
  • Look up what Chris Dixon has written about founder vesting

On Products

• Most consulting companies start as product companies that were broke
• Consulting is “kind of like a drug” — it keeps the fix coming

On Customer Development

• You need to read Steven Gary Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• The ideas in this book led to the feeling in venture circles that customer development is a good thing
• If you’re starting a company that sells things to people, read it!

Leadership

• Seth Godin says this of leadership: It’s about painting a picture of the future for other people and then leading them to it
• Back in 2004, things went terribly wrong
• I partnered with my friend Ryan, and it lasted a month
• I had “lots of partners” – it was hard to get things done
• Having a captain is good
• In addition to being a “time-and-materials” company, we also started holding events
  • We instituted Rails Pub Nite, a monthly event that created a sense on community and gets regular attendance
    • Opposite of a user group: no agenda
    • It’s the "smartest thing we’ve ever done as a company"
    • At the time, “people making a living off Ruby you could count on both hands”
    • One of the raisons d’etre of Rails Pub Nite was to create meaningful competition
    • We went so much farther ahead by giving it the generic name Rails Pub Nite as opposed to Unspace Pub Nite
    • What we wanted to do was not create a feeling of participating in a corporate social experience
    • It was successful: Rails Pub Nite’s mailing list has 450 people, and every Pub Nite gets 40 – 50 attendees, and not just Ruby programmers, but also Java, .NET and PHP

Building Your Team

• Another benefit of Rails Pub Nite is that it lets us meet all the smart people first
• We have a “non-traditional fit test”
• I feel that 8 – 14 people is perfect size for company
• I’m tired of working for small companies that grew to large companies that started to suck
• I’d rather have 3 companies with 12 people than 1 with 40 people

On Guilt

• I have no high school education — how am I building projects for the UN?
• It’s why sometimes, I feel like a fraud
• Many people have this feeling; it’s called “Impostor Syndrome”
• I feel like living embodiment of "fake it until you make it"
• Refactoring makes me feel like a fraud
• It’s the "Embarrassing Pattern": after looking over my code, it seems that I could replace a lot of it with existing stuff and patterns
• “Your entire codebase can be abstracted away”
• "I just spent a month writing 40 lines of code"
• You have to recognize that it happens

On Getting Ahead

• Read Derek Sivers’ (he’s the guy who created CDBaby and later sold it) article, There’s No Speed Limit
• He says that “the standard pace is for chumps”
• To get ahead, you have to push yourself beyond what you think your limits are
• We can do whatever we want, as fast as we want

Adventure

• Learning Giles Bowkett’s story through his RubyFringe presentation completely changed my life
  • [Joey’s note: really, you should watch the video of this presentation, even if you never ever plan to write a single line of Ruby in your life. It’s inspiring.]
• It was all about leading a life less ordinary
• In our line of work, we create things that didn’t exist before
• When someone who doesn’t know how to create things is put in charge of people who do, it’s bad
  • I believe that Giles called them "Weasel-brained muppetfuckers"
• Giles quotes Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship”
• My advice on dating websites: "Don’t make them"

On Marketing

• I’ve mentioned Seth Godin many times already
• Sometimes his books have 3 pages of insight buried in 100 pages – I supposed it’s a case of “The Devil’s in the details”
• Read The Dip, skip Tribes
• In Tribes, Godin says that people don’t believe what you tell them, sometimes believe what their friends tell them and always believe the stories they tell themselves.
• So give people stories they can tell themselves

On Ideas

• Dr. Edwin Land: Invented instant photography – Polaroid
• Polaroid was thought of as dead until enthusiasts like Florian Kaps bought the Polaroid factory and now they’re bringing Polaroid film back to the market
• I wanted to bring him to FutureRuby, but he was too busy changing the world
• Another person to watch: Kacie Kinzer, the creator of Tweenbots
• Also watch: Neil Gershenfeld
  • He builds fablabs
  • He’s building them in places so low-tech that they don’t even have electricity
  • Get involved with the MIT "Bits and Atoms" program
• Another person to read about: William Kamkwamba (see The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind)
  • [Joey’s note: Watch his presentation at TED!]

Grand Visions for the Future

• Disney wanted EPCOT to be a utopian city, a city of the future, but bureaucracy got in the way
• Jacque Fresco: 93-year-old chronic inventor — a radical revolutionary
  • He designs amazing future habitat buildings
  • He has a whole compound of bubble domes in Venus, Florida
  • See the movie Future by Design
  • He’s 93 — "You know what that implies"

On Being Happy

• Listen up!
• Once again, a Steve Jobs quote: "Your time is limited. "
• Look at Jessica Hische, who’s obsessed with type and makes beautiful things
  • She followed her passion, and now she’s an internationally sought-after type artist
  • She recently said: “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This is the first of a series of notes that I took while attending CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, which took place last week in Montreal. CUSEC is the biggest conference held by and for university students interested in software development. True to the Canadian techies punching well above their weight class (a great tradition started by Alexander Graham Bell), CUSEC manages to pull in big-name and up-and-coming speakers who’ve given talks that have outshined those I’ve seen an thousand-dollar-plus conferences.

The first keynote was given by Matt Knox, who has probably distributed more Scheme runtimes than anyone else in the world (and this is a larger number than you might think), which he did in the name of putting adware on millions of machines. He’s since come to his senses and seems quite contrite.

His presentation, On Weakness, is about his life on the Dark Side and the lessons he gleaned from it. It’s based on his talk, Crimes Against Humanity, Writ Small, which he gave at FutureRuby last year, but it was good to see it again, and its message is probably even more valuable to students. My notes (which I polished for comprehensibility) and photos from his session appear below:

An Evil Job

• How many of you are:
  • Technical, as opposed to business or arts students?
  • Engineering students?
  • Programmers?
  • Evil?
• That’s what this talk is about
• One way to describe one of my former jobs is doing “Windows hijinks with Scheme”
• During my time with that job, I released many scheme runtimes
• Aaron Swartz – I think it was at a Y Combinator startup camp – said this of me: "He uses Scheme for evil!"
• It was more than just Scheme – I was writing stuff that had alternately “hard” (statically-typed languages) and “soft” (dynamically-typed languages) layers
• I was in the adware business, which is like walking into a big monkey knife fight…
• …except I was using a death ray! (Scheme == death ray, C == knife)
• I started with good intentions, in the business of building spam filters
• Business wasn’t so hit, and I ran out of money
• My job search failed, but luckily, a job went looking for me
• I was so pleased with being found that I  forgot to talk salary
• I showed up for the interview and at the end, was invited to work for them
• I did terribly when it came time to discuss what I would be paid
  • I didn’t research the New York City job market and cost of living
  • I asked for $40K
  • When I saw the look of shock of the guy’s face, I thought that I had asked for too much
  • Start reducing what I asked for; luckily he stopped me
• We want you to come in an analyze our distribution chain, they said
• It turned out to be an adware company:
  • Bought people’s “digital tchochkes” or mini-apps, such as screensavers
  • They had realized that there’s no lower bound for how cheesy something can be and still be a big seller on the internet
  • They took these mini-apps and gave them away online for free, bundled with software that gives you "special offers" from time to time
• Some of these bundled apps turned out to be worms
  • So the company had me write software to remove any worms from a system and added them to the bundle
  • So now we were bundling my anti-malware along with their adware
  • I felt like "an assassin working for the mob, but killing terrorists". The mob were bad, but the terrorists were worse
  • "Awesome! I can probably keep up with Norton…it’ll be great!"
  • And for a while, the best way to eradicate worms your system was to install their adware with my anti-malware bundled with it
• Low-level coding is dangerously seductive
  • In the beginning, it’s "like getting kicked in the face over and over again by buffer overruns"
  • But then it becomes fascinating
• I wanted to do it in Scheme, but that would require embedding a Scheme interpreter
  • Such an interpreter would have to fit into a single TCP/IP packet (about 64K)
  • Scheme is great. For any superlative — “best performance”, “smallest app”, and so on – there are usually two contenders: some other language, and Scheme.
  • I managed to squeeze a Scheme interpreter down to 19K
• My success with killing the worms led to a new request: In addition to your all this malware on other machines, why not eliminate all the competitor’s adware?
  • Now I felt like “an assassin for the mob, killing other mobsters”. Not as noble.
• Then the next request came: How about keeping our software from being killed…by anything? (including Norton)
  • The only way to uninstall the adware was to use the uninstaller, which came with it
  • I initially viewed this as "a really interesting technical problem"
• All this was made possible by a couple of Windows quirks…
  • CreateRemoteThread
    • This basically says to a process: "Hey, process! Execute this code as part of yourself, and you’ll think it’s awesome."
    • This lets you have code executing even though a process isn’t running
    • You don’t even need threads – you can hook interrupts
  • Scheduler
    • You can have a process tell the scheduler that it needs to do a do-over — "I’m not done yet, I need more time", and the scheduler will grant that time
    • You can tell even Windows that a process is so important that if it fails, it needs to protect the user by presenting a blue screen
• Windows is interesting from a purely archaeological perspective
  • Consider that all strings in Windows are 16-bit unicode, which means that nulls can be embedded in strings
  • But C strings, which is what’s used in the underlying DOS, are null-terminated and therefore can’t contain nulls
  • Interesting effects when moving null-containing strings between these layers

What Drives People to Take Up Evil Jobs?

• Aftermath of my working at the adware company:
  • Company got sued for $190 billion (by Elliot Spitzer!)
  • I was the first employee at the company — everyone else was a contractor
• I left the company with these questions:
  • "Whut happen?"
  • "Is this who I am?"
• Some jobs pay lots of money, but it’s hard to transition out of them
• Will I be stuck in adware for the rest of my life?
• There are some historical precedents:
  • Albert Speer
    • A promising architect who liked soaring buildings
    • He hooked up with rising politicians with the same aesthetic sense, one of whom was Hitler
    • He started with creating buildings, but then became the Nazis’ chief logistics guy
    • Later, a leader of the U.S. Air Force said that had he been aware of Speer’s involvement as the Nazi’s chief logistics guy, he would’ve dedicated an entire wing of the Air Force exclusively to killing him
    • It’s been suggested that Speer prolonged the war by a year or two by running the German forces more efficiently
  • Manhattan Project staff
• But I didn’t want anecdotes…I wanted science!
  • There’s a scientific study of otherwise good people doing evil things: the Milgram Experiment
    • How many people would go all the way?
    • 1% of the population is psychotic – it was hypothesized that the number of people who’d go all the way would be similar
    • Instead, 70% did
    • Results replicatable with people from all walks of life
    • Women, it turned out, “went evil” in a slightly greater proportion than the men
    • "Most human evil lives here"
• Read The Black Book of Communism
• For a more mundane example of blind obedience to authority leading to evil, see "The strip search McDonald’s prank call"
  • In the prank, the prankster calls a McDonald’s, gets an employee on the line and says “I’m a police officer. We have reason to believe that there is a thief in your restaurant and we need you to take them into the back and hold them until we arrive.”
  • They provide a description vague enough so that someone in the restaurant will match it
  • Once coralled in the back, the prankster starts giving orders to torture and/or humiliate the customer, and many employees have complied
• So what does this mean?
  • The human brain has a remote root exploit in 70% of the installed base
• "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." — Steven Weinberg
  • Nope. Just authority.
• There is hope: people who were subjects of the Milgram experiments turned out to be better at resisting authoritative coercion

The Power of Communication

• Math: "There are only three reasonable numbers: 0, 1 and infinity"
• When Robert Andrews Millikan did his oil drop experiments to determine the charge on an electron, he initially got the value wrong by 30 – 40%
  • People who repeated the experiment or conducted similar experiments with results close to Millikan’s erroneous number published their results
  • People who did so but got the correct value – which did not match Millikan’s value – didn;t publish, worried that they’d done something wrong, since their numbers didn’t agree with the number published by the authority on the subject
• The world pre-blogs was so different from this world
  • Very first open source project: Oxford English Dictionary
    • Done via mail
  • Ever wondered where the term "flying off the handle" comes from?
    • It’s from sword-making – until they figured out the process of making swords as one-piece, with hand-friendly stuff wrapped around the base so you could hold them, swords often flew off their handles in battle
    • It took 900 years to evolve swords to one piece
• Not everything has been solved, but it’s easier today
• Rails is such a solution
  • It’s a series of incremental improvements
  • Can you out-Rails Rails?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’ve taken a psychology course or have leafed through a user experience book, you’ve probably come across a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Dan Zambonini of the web development shop Box UK took some inspiration from it and wrote an article titled Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For. In it, he writes:

As customers, we have a finite number of needs that we’re willing to fulfill by parting with our hard-earned cash. If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.

He breaks down people’s needs into the following categories, with an explanation of each one:

• Time: Convenience, Efficiency, Immediacy
• Scarcity
• Comfort
• Esteem: Id, Desirability, Self-Image, Ego
• Belonging: Relationships, Sex, Affection
• Survival: Health, Safety, Wellbeing
• Financial Security: Wealth, Success, Career
• Entertainment: Emotion, Experiences
• Intellectual Stimulation: Creativity, Learning, Expression

He also looks at how much people are willing to have different needs fulfilled. For example, people are willing to pay geometrically increasing prices for increasing comfort. Consider the 15x price difference between “cattle class” and first-class tickets on an airplane (even though both depart and arrive at the same times), or the 27x price difference between a bargain-basement pillow and a down-filled one:

Entertainment, on the other hand, is a different beast. According to Zambonini, across the wide array of entertainment options from games for their mobile phones to vacations in the tropics, people are willing to pay the same rate: $5 an hour…

He categorized the top 100 U.S. sites by the needs he listed — here’s how they break down:

Naturally, such categorization is subjective and had to be drastically simplified, with each site being slotted into a single category. Sites about food were put into the “survival” category, even though a top 100 site on food would probably cover things like gourmet food and wine, which could arguably be put into the “entertainment”, “comfort” and even “esteem” categories.

He closes the article with a series of questions that you should ask about your application, such as “Does my app allow the user to do something more quickly?”, “Does my app allow the user to express their creativity?”, “Does my app provide entertainment for the user?” and so on. Your should be able to answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, and better still, you should be able to explain why.

Links

• Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For
• Better Than Free: In it, Kevin Kelly “discusses the concept of ‘Generatives’: non-copyable qualities that retain value in a digital age.”
• Wikipedia page for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Follow Dan Zambonini on Twitter

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The T-shirt of the day at Tee Fury is sure to be a big hit fans of Star Trek and classic games. It’s the “Spock, Paper, Scissors” shirt:

Here’s a closer look at the design:

The shirt sells for US$9 plus shipping. It comes in two versions:

• Men’s: Slate blue, in sizes S, M, L, XL and XXL
• Women’s: Powder blue, in sizes S, M, L, XL

If you want it, you’ve got until the end of the day today (Monday, January 4th) to place an order. Once the day ends, Tee Fury will retire the design from production.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

All work and no play makes Joey a dull developer, which is why even though we make sure that TechDays is chock-full of content that developers and IT pros can use in their day-to-day work and stay on top of their tech, we also like to have a little fun. For example, in the video above, I interview local developer and well-coiffed gentleman D’Arcy Lussier about the possibility that he might don the Mexican wrestling outfit (he’s our answer to Strong Bad) and whether you can still be stylin’ whilst wearing Microsoft logowear, contrary to what Vancouver’s most notorious cage-fighting-and-coding arbiter of style says.

By the way, I’d like to thank D’Arcy for taking over my track TechDays, Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, track at the last minute while I took over the Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track. D’Arcy, you are truly worthy commanding the Orange Shirts – I salute you with the finest hair-care products on a flaming sword!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she does with all with the energetic bounce that is her stock in trade. She considers technology evangelism and outreach not just part of her job, but part of her life. She has hundreds of blog subscribers, Facebook followers and LinkedIn contacts, and her Twitter followers number in the thousands. Despite all her public appearances, blog entries, and vast social network, she’s still an introvert.

There’s a reason the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has endured: it’s true (so true, in fact, that Malcolm Gladwell has done quite well for himself telling stories based on this particular nugget of wisdom). Wonderful things arise from opportunities, opportunities often come from connections and the some of the best connections are “weak ties”: those casual acquaintances who exist slightly outside our regular circles and who thus have information that we might otherwise never acquire. For a madly-grinning accordion-playing extrovert like Yours Truly, gathering weak ties is quite easy, and I’ve parleyed many a weak tie into an opportunity.

But what if you’re not an extrovert? Can introverts make the connections that can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead? The answer is yes, by playing to introversion’s strengths, taking advantage of some tools and following the steps in Sacha’s presentation, The Shy Connector, which I’ve included below:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The New Yorker’s Hallowe’en Cover

I make sure to keep an eye on how technology pops up in mainstream non-geek culture because it’s a good way to gauge the techno-cultural zeitgeist and see how technologies are being received by the public at large. As techies, we’re all too happy to be early adopters and are willing to put up with usability problems, annoyances and extra work just to have the latest and greatest gear for its own sake. We have a tendency to forget that many non-techies don’t adopt technologies while they’re still new and need a techie mindset to use; they’ wait until technologies evolve to the point where the benefits outweigh the annoyances.

The current issue of The New Yorker has a Hallowe’en-themed cover that hints at how much smartphones have worked their way into everyday people’s lives:

Here’s a closeup:

(I’ll bet that at least one of you went out Saturday night trick-or-treating and checked your smartphone.)

The practical upshot of all this: the mobile platform is in your future. It’s the one that people take everywhere and it’s growing in power in leaps and bounds the way desktop (and later, laptop) computers did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

WinMoDevCamp

Speaking of mobile platforms, we’re holding a full-day workshop on Windows Phone development called WinMoDevCamp Toronto next Wednesday, November 11th  from noon to 9 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga offices (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It’s free of charge and your chance to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone.

• For more information about WinMoDevCamp, see my earlier WinMoDevCamp article.
• To register for WinMoDevCamp (remember, it’s free!), visit the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.