It’s Back!

Developer Night in Canada is back! It’s a podcast featuring interviews with Canadians who make software, from all parts of the industry (yup, not just the Microsoft world), working all over the world, talking all about what they do and the projects they’re working on. It’s hosted by Yours Truly and my co-worker and fellow Developer Evangelist at Microsoft Canada, John Bristowe.

Developer Night in Canada is a bare-bones podcast. It’s just me and John talking with whomever we’re interviewing, just having an unscripted conversation with as little editing as possible.

Interview with Joel Semeniuk

In this episode, John and I talk with Joel Semeniuk, founder and Chief Envisioning Officer of Imaginet Resources, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Canada. We talk about all sorts of things, including his work in healthcare technology, kanban, Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, Telerik and travelling.

Joel is a Microsoft Regional Director. RDs (as they;re often called) aren’t Microsoft employees, but independent developers, architects, trainers, and other professionals who provide a vital link between Microsoft and the developer community. You see RDs doing things like helping companies and individuals get the most out of Microsoft developer tools, writing books, articles and websites on developing on Microsoft’s platforms and making presentations, teaching courses and meeting up with developers face-to face. Without the help of RDs like Joel, my job is considerably more difficult – I’m glad that people like him are out there.

Some quick facts about Joel:

• Has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba
• Spent the last twelve years providing educational, development, and infrastructure consulting services to customers throughout North America
• Specializes in helping organizations improve their software development and information technology practices
• Has probably forgotten more about Team Foundation Server (and its predecessor Team System) than I will ever learn

Here’s the MP3 – it’s just under 25MB and runs 53 minutes, 58 seconds (you can left click to listen now, or right click to “Save as”).

Here’s Linux creator Linus Torvalds, taking a break from the Japan Linux Symposium to pose at a store where Windows 7 was on sale:

[Thanks to Stefan Arentz for pointing me to the picture!]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Photo by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

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

Fo’shizzle my Ballizle: on tonight’s episode of CBC’s news show The Hour, “Strombo”’s interviewing an unlikely pair: the CEO of the company for whom I work, Steve Ballmer, and Snoop Dogg. Alas, they’re taping the segments separately, so there’s no chance of Ballmer and Snoop doing a rap duet called Win and Juice.

The Hour airs on CBC tonight at 11 p.m. Eastern.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the features at the TechDays cross-country conference is the “Ask the Experts” booth, which is staffed all day by speakers (when they aren’t speaking, naturally) and other local tech experts. They’re there to answer attendee questions about Microsoft tools and technologies, tech trends, the industry in general, the local job scene and so on.

While riffling through the photos I shot over the past couple of weeks, I found these ones I took when I passed the “Ask the Experts” booth at TechDays Toronto and saw the trio of Sean Kearney, Steve Syfuhs and Mitch Garvis. I took one look at them, said “Uh-oh, Trouble Incorporated!”, and snapped these pics. I thought you might enjoy them:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As I write this, we’re getting into the final session of TechDays Toronto, which in my track – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform – features SharePoint guru Reza Alirezaei doing his presentation, Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint.

If you ask me the question “What is SharePoint?”, I’d most likely give you a description that sounds like this:

Here’s a more accurate description of what SharePoint is:

Reza’s session takes a look at another aspect of SharePoint: as a platform on which you can build and deploy custom web services that other clients can call upon.

Once his session’s done, TechDays Toronto will wrap up and then the tear-down process begins.

Next stop: Halifax on November 2nd and 3rd!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Right now (at the time of this writing) at the Toronto edition of the TechDays cross-Canada conference, in the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, is Bruce Johnson – “the speaker so nice, we put him on twice!” – talking to the audience about Building RESTful Applications Using WCF.

REST – as in REpresentational State Transfer – while a big thing for a lot of developers, is still only gaining traction in the Microsoft world, in which a lot of resource access is done with SOAP. Since Microsoft is more about interoperability these days, it’s important to get developers building on the Microsoft platform up to speed with REST and different ways to build RESTful services using Microsoft technologies, whether it’s ASP.NET MVC or Bruce’s area of expertise, WCF, Windows Communications Foundation.

Bruce is playing to a full room, which is a good sign – it’s good to see developers interested in learning new things!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This morning’s sessions in TechDays’ Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform focuses on both the ASP.NET MVC web app framework and recommended object-oriented programming practices, namely the Model-View-Controller pattern with Colin Bowern’s presentation earlier this morning and now (at the time of this writing) the SOLID principles in Bruce Johnson’s session, SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications.

Assless Chaps + Twitter = Business Opportunity

You might remember Bruce from the “Assless Chaps” story. The story can be summarized in the three tweets shown below.

First came Bruce’s response to my article about CodeCamp back in April, in which I forgot to mention the session he was doing:

I tweeted him back and then decided to throw in a jokey reply:

My thinking was: Hey, this is a conference of Microsoft developers! Yes, they’re a bright and talented bunch, and I like them, but they’re an older, corporate, more buttoned-down crowd. They’d never go for renaming a session from “Data Binding” to “Data Bondage”.

But Bruce and the Toronto Code Camp organizers surprised me – he changed the name of his session very quickly:

And since he responded to my challenge, I had to fulfill my end of the bargain:

The “Assless Chaps” story doesn’t end there. Yesterday, while we were hanging out by the Windows 7 lounge and the “Assless Chaps” story came up. Bruce told me that our conversation on Twitter about the assless chaps actually landed his company, ObjectSharp, some business. A local developer got curious as to what the “assless chaps” business was all about in Bruce’s and my conversation on Twitter and the ensuing conversation got them talking about ObjectSharp’s services, which in turn became a contract.

The moral of the story: there’s actual business value in Twitter and assless chaps. I may have to go buy a pair (I rented the ones pictured above).

There’s a tamer version of this story in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s Day 2 of TechDays Toronto! and after a hearty breakfast, we’re kicking off the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track – my track, and thus to my mind the best one – with Colin Bowen doing his presentation, Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which takes a look at the new web development framework, ASP.NET MVC. If you’ve done development with Rails, Django, CakePHP or Catalyst, you should find ASP.NET MVC familiar.

If you’d like to learn more about ASP.NET MVC programming, the best place to get started is chapter one of the “Gang of Foreheads” book, a.k.a. Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, which I covered in the article The Best “Chapter One” I’ve Ever Read. This particular chapter walks you  through the construction of an entire site using ASP>NET MVC – NerdDinner.com – from start to finish.

You can get a free copy of chapter one of the Gang of Foreheads book [14 MB PDF] – er, I mean Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 – which is more than enough book to get you started.

Want the source code for NerdDinner.com? Not a problem – it’s an open source project on Codeplex released under the MS-PL license (and yeah, it’s Open Source Initiative-approved!).

Want to learn more about building applications using ASP.NET MVC? Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.

The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework, and Anthony added it to his presentation.

The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:

• Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
• Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
• Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
• Explorer Browser Control
• Shell property system
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
• Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs — (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
• Sensor Platform APIs
• Extended Linguistic Services APIs
• Power Management APIs
• Application Restart and Recovery APIs
• Network List Manager APIs
• Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
• Shell Search API support
• Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
• Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
• Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs

Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As I write this, we’re well into Day 1, Session 2 of the Toronto edition of the TechDays Canada conference, and ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin is doing his presentation, Expression Blend for Developers.

Since Expression Blend is a UI building tool that is separate from Visual Studio, it’s typically seen as a tool for designers rather than developers. However, as Barry pointed out in his presentation, the division between designers and developers isn’t so simple, especially here in Canada, where developers often wear many hats, including that of UI designer. Besides, UI design isn’t just a bit of flourish you add to a software project at the end – it’s something you’ve got to consider from the very beginning.

Expression Blend makes the development of front ends, whether Silverlight or WPF, a great deal easier. You can do in minutes with Blend what might take hours in Visual Studio, driving yourself insane with XAML editing.

Watch this space in the coming weeks – I’m going to be writing articles on Expression Blend and using it to build rich internet user interfaces for Silverlight.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Yeah, that’s about right:

And better yet, it’s available as a T-shirt!

[Found via Kevin Kelly.]

In his latest Daring Fireball blog entry, So Dan Lyons Called, John Gruber does a great job giving Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons a much-deserved pimp-slapping. It’s a fun-to-read response to Lyon’s article on the Fake Steve Jobs blog titled Dear Gruber: You’ve Been Pwned, in which Lyons, writing as a fictionalized Steve Jobs, takes great glee in the fact that Gruber got the story wrong – he wrote that AT&T killed the Google Voice app for the iPhone, after which it was revealed that it was Apple all along.

While Gruber got the story wrong, he did something very admirable and honourable: he very clearly and plainly admitted it, without weasel-words, and even went to the trouble of analyzing where we went wrong – openly, on his blog. It’s going to happen to all of us who blog about technology news, and especially when it’s news about an organization that’s as notoriously tight-lipped as Apple: sooner or later, you’re going to report something that’s not true, and the best policy, as mom always said, is honesty.

Even when Gruber makes seat-of-the-pants predictions, as he often does before big “Stevenotes” when it seems that Apple is about to announce something new, he tends to be more right than wrong, and that’s one of the reasons I read Daring Fireball.

In the article, Gruber does a good job of reminding us of where Dan Lyons is coming from – remember, he writes for Newsweek, which is a pretty sad substitute for Time, where the preferred style of reportage was described to me by a friend of mine who wrote for them as “sustained obviousness”. Yes, it’s all ad hominem-y. but it’s entertaining and filled with lots of truth. Besides, I’ve made my feelings clear about Mr. “Fake Steve Jobs” in my article titled Fake Steve Jobs is a Dick.

I come away from reading Daring Fireball articles knowing more than before, even when Gruber is operating in Smug Apple Fanboy mode. He’s great at “reading the tea leaves” where Apple is concerned, and there’s plenty of food for thought. The ideas, analysis and pointers in Daring Fireball make it a worthwhile read for me, even though I work for The Empire and he cheers for the Rebel Scum. On the other hand, the Fake Steve Jobs blog is just Dan Lyons doing a Steve Jobs impression with the dials turned up to eleven. There’s the occasional tidbit that’s amusing, but for the most part, there isn’t much meat there. If Daring Fireball is The Daily Show, Fake Steve Jobs bounces between being Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment and the Royal Canadian Air Farce.

(For those of you who haven’t seen the Royal Canadian Air Farce, consider yourself very, very lucky.)

The Early Bird Price is Going Away Soon

The $299 early bird pricing for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver and Toronto stops will vanish after Monday, August 31st. From September 1st onward, if you want to catch TechDays in Vancouver (Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th) and Toronto (Tuesday, September 29th – Wednesday, September 30th), you’ll have to pay the full price of $599. Why pay double when you don’t have to?

The TechDays Formula

Continuing with this article’s theme of using pictograms to explain things, here’s TechDays in a nutshell, pictorial-style:

 We take presentation sessions that cover getting the most out of current and new Microsoft tools and technologies from big conferences like TechEd, which are typically held in a large city in the southern United States, at a large convention centre, near large hotels and will set you back a couple “large” for registration, transportation and accommodation. TechDays 2009 features over 40 sessions split into these tracks:

• Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform
• Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Windows Client
• Servers, Security and Management
• Communications and Collaboration

We update that content where necessary and find local speakers to present it. We pick out speakers who are either well-versed in the session topic or who are simply bright techies with a thirst for knowledge, a knack for presenting and who have been meaning to get well-versed in that topic. Whenever possible, we try to get someone who lives in the area of the conference city, because TechDays isn’t just about spreading knowledge; it’s also about helping developers make connections with their peers nearby.

We also set up extra events and goodies. Attendees get a one-year subscription to TechNet, which alone is worth more than the price of the early bird registration and gets you access to all kinds of goodies including Windows 7. There’s also all the content from the TechEd conference. You also get the learning kit DVD packed with goodies to help you get the most out of Microsoft’s tools and tech. We’re throwing in some discount codes for books. We’ll also be announcing surprise events in your city – watch this space for details!

And last but not least, don’t underestimate the job-and-employee-seeking opportunities that a gathering like TechDays provides. Events like TechDays are where opportunities happen!

All This for $299

And don’t forget, that’s $299 Canadian, for content from conferences that cost 7 times as much. And with extra goodies such as a TechNet subscription (which costs more than the early bird fee and gets you Windows 7) thrown in. Plus a chance to meet up with your peers as well as us evangelists, whom you should think of as “your people on the inside”. It’s a great deal, and it’s going away after next Monday, so sign up now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Chances are, as a reader of this blog, people ask you to explain Twitter to them. If that’s the case you might find this video in which Ben Stiller explains Twitter to Mickey Rooney amusing:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Photo courtesy of "ejc".

A Little Bit About _why

If you were to walk up to someone and utter the seemingly meaningless phrase “Chunky bacon!” and get a smile rather than a look a bewilderment, you could probably mark that person down as a Ruby programmer. That strange two-word combination is seared in the minds of those who have read what is probably the most whimsical programming language book in existence, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. The book is one of the strange and beautiful Ruby-related works created by the enigmatic programmer, musician, artist, comic illustrator and wag known only as why the lucky stiff, or _why for short.

_why’s contributions to the world of Ruby programming are many. In addition to the (Poignant) Guide, some of his goodies that I’ve made use of are:

• Camping, an incredibly tiny Ruby web application framework
• Hackety Hack, a “coder’s starter kit” for Ruby, meant to bring back the spirit of experimentation of those days when the BASIC programming language was built into every home computer
• Hpricot, a parser that’s great at scraping HTML and even parsing XML
• Redcloth, a library that implements the Textile markup language
• Shoes, a desktop UI toolkit
• Syck, a YAML library

_why made it a point to reveal as little about himself as possible, and most of us were happy to indulge him. Most people were happy to simply know and address him as “why”, and in the community, it was a point of etiquette to not try and dig too deeply.

_why Vanishes from the Net

Yesterday, _why’s presence vanished from the web. The places online where you could find him have been taken down. These included:

• His Twitter account
• His Github account
• His old blog at whytheluckystiff.net
• Hackety.org, his last active blog
• The (Poignant) Guide site
• The Shoes site
• The Try Ruby site

John Resig has written a lovely “eulogy” for _why, and while I think it’s premature to say that he’s gone forever, it’s still nice to see a nice tribute to him. My favourite part of the eulogy is where John likens _why’s works to a sand mandala:

Sand mandalas are incredibly intricate works of art that take many people many days to construct. They’re very expressive, but fragile, works of art.

After a mandala has been constructed – and displayed – it is ceremoniously deconstructed – which is meant "to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life."

_why’s entire online presence and code was presented in the sand mandala that was ‘_why’. The person behind ‘_why’ simply decided to move on and close that portion of his life.

I hope that _why’s disappearance is a brief hiatus. The Ruby world – hey, the programming world, the art world, the music world too – just isn’t the same without him.

Finding _why’s Stuff

There’s only one problem with _why’s deletion of his online presence: a number of people have come to depend on his works, particularly his code. The (Poignant) Guide is downloadable from Scribd, and I figure that if it hasn’t happened already, someone will start a Github repository of his code. There’s also Facebook group called Missing why the lucky stiff — let’s hope it doesn’t get all maudlin and support-group-y.

Last but not least, there’s programmer Leah Culver, who commissioned a tattoo from _why:

In Closing

I’ll finish with my favourite tweet from _why, which I blogged about a year ago:

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

Silicon Alley Insider states the obvious – at least it’s obvious to Macintosh fans: John Gruber is King of the Apple Geeks.

On the off chance that you hadn’t heard of John before, he’s the one-man force behind Daring Fireball, one of the must-read sites for fans, followers – and yes, even evangelists for the competition — of Apple. He’s been writing the blog since the summer of 2002 and over time has acquired a legion of readers that includes higher-ups at Apple, Inc. His recent article about how Ninjawords, an iPhone dictionary and the latest app to get rejected by Apple’s Kafkaesque approval process was not just spot-on; it also got linked to by a large number of influential tech sites and managed to garner a response from Apple senior VP Phil Schiller, which he published as a follow-up article.

As with any site created by an Apple True Believer, Daring Fireball devotes a number of electrons to taking on The Empire, the most recent set being Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline, a long but interesting (and also much-linked-to) article on the company’s current state and the challenges it faces. Whereas  lesser, more rabid fanboys — Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted, I’m lookin’ right at you – would’ve been content to prematurely dance on the company’s grave, John enumerates the company’s missteps with solid reasoning and soberly (well, mostly soberly – hey, I’m not going to deny him his little bit of glee on behalf of his team). Even when he’s pummelling the organization for whom I work, I have to credit him for going beyond mere tribalism and penning some of the best-thought-out tech articles on the web today.

Why do I read him?

• For starters, he’s good. I’m working on becoming one of the web’s best writers, and it pays to learn from the pros.
• It’s also partly out of habit; I was a Mac user prior to my hire as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist.
• It’s also my job. I do both Microsoft and its customers a disservice by not looking (and learning) outside Microsoft’s walls, especially since I was hired for my outsider’s perspective.
• It helps me with my job. His blog is practically a laundry list of things I need to focus on.

Here’s a question for which I can’t easily come up with an answer: is there a Jon Gruber analogue in the Windows world? If not an analogue, any close approximations? Let me know in the comments.

This article also appears in Coffee and Code.

Today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal has an article about the Tragedy of the Commons being played out at coffee shops in New York: No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users.

This excerpt captures the general gist of the article:

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables — nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours — and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

"You don’t want to discourage it, it’s a wonderful tradition," says Naidre’s [a coffee shop in Brooklyn] owner Janice Pullicino, 53 years old. A former partner in a computer-graphics business, Ms. Pullicino insists she loves technology and hates to limit its use. But when she realized that people with laptops were taking up seats and driving away the more lucrative lunch crowd, she put up the sign. Last fall, she covered up some of the outlets, describing that as a "cost-cutting measure" to save electricity.

The conflict between cafe owners and laptop users is nothing new. Back in 2005, the New York Times ran an article titled Some Cafe Owners Pull the Plug on Lingering Wi-Fi Users, and the complaints on both sides don’t sound all that different from those made in the Wall Street Journal article.

The difference, it would appear, is the recession. Rising unemployment means more people hanging out in cafes with their laptops, and the downturn is making cafe owners nervous about “squatters” who use up space and electricity while contributing little back in return. One cafe owner in the article talked about how some ultra-parsimonious customers were bringing in their own food; others brought their own teabags and made use of the free hot water offered at the cafe.

The Cafe Tradition

It may seem that cafe-as-workplace is a new phenomenon, but that’s not so. They’ve been places where customers have done work since their debut in the 1650s. Here’s how the Norton Anthology of English Literature describes the early coffeehouses of London:

The first London coffeehouse opened in 1652. Though Charles II later tried to suppress them as "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers," the public flocked to them. By 1739 there were 551 coffeehouses in London, including meeting places for Tories and Whigs, people of fashion and haberdashers, wits and clergymen, merchants and lawyers, booksellers and authors, stockjobbers and artists, doctors and undertakers — and politicians of every kind. According to one French visitor, the Abbé Prévost, coffeehouses, "where you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government," were the "seats of English liberty."

The Economist also wrote about coffeehouses in an article comparing them to the internet:

The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today’s websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint. They were outlets for a stream of newsletters, pamphlets, advertising free-sheets and broadsides. Depending on the interests of their customers, some coffee-houses displayed commodity prices, share prices and shipping lists, whereas others provided foreign newsletters filled with coffee-house gossip from abroad.

Rumours, news and gossip were also carried between coffee-houses by their patrons, and sometimes runners would flit from one coffee-house to another within a particular city to report major events such as the outbreak of a war or the death of a head of state. Coffee-houses were centres of scientific education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation and, sometimes, political fermentation. Collectively, Europe’s interconnected web of coffee-houses formed the internet of the Enlightenment era.

Then, as now, they functioned as what sociologists like to call “Third Places”: places that are neither home (the “First Place”) nor work (the “Second Place”), but  a place that functions a community gathering place where broader, and often more creative social interactions happen. Cafes, community centres, churches, pubs in the U.K., town squares, open-air basketball courts, the parking lots of 7-11s and hackerspaces like Toronto’s HacklabTO are all third places.

Perhaps it’s the North American approach. People lingered in cafes before the laptop era, and before the rise of coffee chains like Starbucks, which are as ubiquitous as hamburger chains. Benjamin Hoff wrote about both in The Tao of Pooh:

In China, there is the Teahouse. In France, there is the Sidewalk Cafe. Practically every civilized country in the world has some sort of equivalent–a place where people can go to eat, relax, and talk things over without worrying about what time it is, and without having to leave as soon as the food is eaten. In China, for example, the Teahouse is a real social institution. Throughout the day, families, neighbors, and friends drop in for tea and light food. They stay as long as they like. Discussions may last for hours. It would be a bit strange to call the Teahouse the nonexclusive neighborhood social club; such terms are too Western. But that can roughly describe part of the function, at least from our rather compartmentalized point of view. "You’re important. Relax and enjoy yourself." That’s the message of the Teahouse.

What’s the message of the Hamburger Stand? Quite obviously, it’s: "You don’t count; hurry up."

(The hamburger stand message isn’t limited to hamburger stands anymore, and it’s not simply implied either: many branches of Tim Hortons actually have signs announcing a twenty-minute limit on seating.)

If cafes are going to discourage laptop use, are they also going to discourage other kinds of work or lingering? Students have used cafes as places to do homework or hold study groups long before laptops, and there’s also the time-honoured tradition of enjoying a book with a cup of coffee at the local coffeehouse. Or is the laptop (symbolic of work) and the act of plugging into an outlet (a symbol that some might interpret as being a leech) the only mark of a good-for-nothing customer?

Some Ideas

The first thing to remember is not think of it as the cafe owners declaring war on their customers. Cafe owners are in business to make a living, and they do this by selling their wares. If you’re going to hang out at a cafe for a long time, “pay the rent”! They offer their seats and tables in the understanding that you’ll buy something. My rule of thumb is to buy something regularly while you’re there – at least a large cup of coffee every hour.

Cafes that serve lunch or dinner and have large “rushes” should consider disallowing laptop use during those periods. It’s an approach that Panera, a sandwich-and-coffee chain that caters to the freelance and mobile worker crowd, uses. They very clearly state the rules on signs on the table, and from what I can tell, it works.

Know your cafe. Just as different restaurants and bars expect different kinds of clientele and behaviour, so do different places that sell coffee. Some places are perfunctory coffee dispensers, where they expect you to get your coffee and then get the hell out. Others encourage conversation, or are date-y places. The trick for the mobile worker is to find a place that encourages (or at least doesn’t shoo away) laptops. Cafes in neighbourhoods near startups and other “creative class” workplaces tend to be most tolerant. as are places that cater to students.

Know the people at the cafe. Working out of a cafe is so much better when you have a relationship with the owners and employees. It fosters understanding and makes it more likely that you won’t get the boot. You might even make some new friends. Hey, you might even start a relationship, but speaking from personal experience, I must tell you that it’s not without its risks.

Finally, remember that it’s possible to write customer-ready software at a cafe. I wrote good chunks of some of my best software at a cafe, as did the guys from Delicious Monster.

The final speaker at last weekend’s FutureRuby conference was Jesse Hirsh, a Toronto-based internet consultant, researcher and “talking head” on CBC Newsworld and CBC Radio. As stated on the “About” page on his site, “his passion is for educating people on the potential benefits and perils of technology.”

His presentation, Fighting the Imperial Californian Ideology, was one of the less technical talks of the conference, whose topics ran the gamut from the expected – Ruby programming, programming languages and programming techniques – to topics you might not expect, such as nutrition for nerds, George Orwell and political languages, music and politics. In the end, it was all about building the future.

Here are the notes I took during Jesse’s presentation. I took the original notes and simply turned them into full English sentences and added context and links where necessary.

The Notes

• Books that influenced this talk include:
  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which plays with a lot of ideas for a single novel, including:
    • The overlap of technology and philosophy
    • Ancient history and the near future (as seen from circa 1990)
    • The concept of ideologies being viral
  • Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin, which looks at the role that San Francisco has played in the American Empire
• I spent my life studying Pax Americana and have noted how Californian ideology affects us all
• The latest version of Californian ideology comes from techies and technophiles:
  • …starting with Stewart Brand
  • and the going to Kevin Kelly
  • and now Chris Anderson
• This presentation is about how Californian ideology affects us all

• “California”, as we consider it, has its beginnings in 1846
  • The United States government sent surveyors down to Mexican territory and California in search of gold
  • Minerals and mines are important to empires – there was never any successful empire that wasn’t in control of its own mines
  • In 1846, the U.S. declared war on Mexico to acquire California
  • 1849 marked the beginning of the Gold Rush
• We need to understand the term “Gold Rush” as it applies to people to work on the internet
• The dot-com boom of the late 1990s has often been referred to as a new gold rush, and there are parallels
• Both featured the wealthy and powerful destroying the environment

• The events of 1849 had many effects:
  • It created an elite whose wealth was based on mining that ruled San Francisco
  • It revolutionized the mining industry, with inventions such as the mineshaft
  • The mineshaft in turn affected cities:
    • At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the concept of the mineshaft was inverted and the skyscraper was born
    • Offices in skyscrapers take mining principles and apply them to human labour
    • In skyscrapers, instead of mining the earth, you mine people
  • It created William Randolph Hearst

    
    

    • Hearst was from a family whose wealth had come about from mining; he was a child of the ‘49ers
    • Hearst mines are responsible for large amounts of environmental devastation:
      • 8 out of 10 “Superfund Sites” that are too expensive to clean up
      • Many environmentally devastated mine in Latin America
    • In addition to the deleterious effects of its mines, Hearst is also responsible for The Spanish-American War, a conflict “engineered by Hearst“
      • The sinking of the U.S.S. Maine [the “False Flag Conspiracy Hypothesis”]
      • The takeover of the Philippines
    • The prohibition of marijuana was also engineered by Hearst
      • Hearst owned many wood pulp-based paper mills
      • The production of paper using hemp was cheaper and was a threat to his business
• California is the provider of armaments for the First and Second World Wars
  • Berkeley and Stanford were schools that provided brains for the military
• California is the home of BALCO – the Bay Area Lab Cooperative – who are responsible for the designer steroids tainting Olympic and professional sports today

• The Californian ideology represents an elite community
• There is a perception among its practitioners that the world is theirs for the taking
• The ideology highlights a past that has been swept into myth
  • That past includes a “Frontier ethos”, and the frontier was not a place for fairness
• The ideology came about around the time of the oil crisis of the 1970s, which is also when the dollar was de-linked from the gold standard and the U.S.’ influence was beginning to wane
• It was formalized by Brand, Kelly and the global business network
• It is a techno-utopian vision spread through publications like Mondo 2000 and later, Wired
• Kelly’s critiques sold a false mythology of a frontier where anyone can create a business plan
• This mythology is that of a biological techno-utopia, a hive:
  • Problem: there are many worker bees, but only one queen bee
• It is a means by which the ruling class maintain their power
• The idea of the Long Tail is a meme within the California ideology
  • It’s meant to engender complacency about being in the lower ranks
  • In the Long Tail, it’s more of the same: a lucky few get all the cheese

• The latest manifesto is Free
  • It’s fundamentally wrong
  • It’s not the “free” part that’s wrong
    • “Free” is disruptive
    • It’s part of the social-centric desire for freedom
  • I went to the recent Free Summit held by TechDirt’s Mike Masnick, where Chris Anderson gave two keynotes
    • Why did it take us 15 – 20 years of online economic business models cause us to realize how important social relations are important? The Communists have been saying this for years
    • We are just realizing the value of social capital
    • What’s missing is the political economy of Free
  • I agree with a large portion of Free, except for one: its ethic of waste
    • Waste is the central ethic of Free
    • The thesis: Now that bandwidth, processor cycles and disk space are abundant, we must waste it. Only through waste will be we innovate
    • The problem is that “waste is an ethic that has fucked us up royally”

• The counter to the waste ethic is “How do we make more with less?”
  • That is the revolutionary potential of the internet
• This counter is revolutionary and anti-ideological
• “In the 21st century, there’s just culture”
• It involves holism, which is “a flip on relativism”:
  • “I’m going to take the best shit available and integrate it into a coherent vision”
• Society is reaching a tipping point where all the stuff we techies do is mainstream:
  • Twitter: trending topics on Twitter are determining what CNN covers
  • Local crime: these days, news reports on local crime always include some element of internet-based activity (e.g. “The Craigslist Killer”)
• We are:
  • Bowing to masters we don’t need (California)
  • Following business models based on cultures we don’t live in (once again, California)
  • Up against the California ideology, which professes freedom but delivers slavery
• We need to:
  • Become community activists
  • Help the next generation of AOLamers
    • Remember when AOL joined the ‘net? Suddenly there was a flood of newbies and lamers “and the whole internet went to shit”
    • “Most of the people using the net are fucking idiots”
• How do we, as the people who can create the tools, places and concepts, quickly get lamers into the metaverse of Snow Crash? It has a lot of positives:
  • Universality: Everywhere, and accessible to everyone
  • Geography: As a virtual reality environment, it provided waypoints and neighbourhoods for different purposes
  • Space: Another byproduct of its virtual reality nature – it gave a sense of place as an means of organization, vs. the “cloud of shit” of our own internet
  • We can create these neighbourhoods for people
• There is a big problem with "doing whatever is best for business”
  • The free market “fucked us in the last year”
  • Who can you trust?
    • The people you know
    • As a techie and participant in RubyFringe, you’re already doing it; just be conscious of it
    • None of this is new
    • It’s not about ideology, but practice
    • What we think of as the nation-state is done
    • Think of the city-state instead
    • Think of (and participate in) the cities you live in
• The struggle for human rights continues. Which side are you on?

Discussion

FutureRuby attendee Pat Allan shares his thoughts on this presentation on his blog, Freelancing Gods, in his article titled FutureRuby and Californian Conflict.

At CUSEC 2009, some of the attendees attempted to psychoanalyze the speakers out of concern for what seemed to be obsessions. The IRC backchannel during my presentation expressed concern for what they believed to be my fixation on butts, what with mentioning the movie Deliverance and showing the “Bottle Rocket in the Butt” video from my blog entry Assrockets and Opportunities.

Other speakers had their own obsessions. Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman’s twin obsessions were with the level of lighting in the room and his “Four Freedoms” ethics. Pownce lead developer/co-founder and now Six Apart developer Leah Culver (who was on the conference’s other end of the scruffy/slinky spectrum) was obsessed about getting a tattoo based on designs created by the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff (or _why for short). Leah somehow managed to contact _why – who is notoriously J.D. Salinger-esque in his reclusiveness – to commission him to create some tattoo designs, which she showed me at the CUSEC speaker dinner last Thursday night.

A message on Twitter from _why has confirmed that she did indeed get the tattoo. Here’s a close-up:

The blank word bubble above the cartoon character is there to let her fill it in with whatever she feels like having it say for the day.

“Late binding for tattoos!” I said, regretting that uber-nerdy statement mere moments later.