My friend (and former officemate!) Cory Doctorow is launching his latest novel, Makers, tonight at the Toronto Public Library at 239 College Street (east of Spadina). The fun happens in the Merrill Collection room, located on the third floor at 7 p.m. tonight. Cory will be doing a reading, taking questions and signing books. There will be books for sale at the event courtesy of our local science fiction and fantasy bookstore, Bakka Phoenix.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.

Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.

Then things get really interesting.

It should be noted that while 3-D printers of the sort in Cory’s novel are still the stuff of science fiction, simpler versions exist today. In fact, at the Hacklab, where I spend many a working day, we’ve got a MakerBot Industries “Cupcake” 3-D printer that can “print” plastic objects.

Here’s what the Cupcake looks like:

A computer connected to the Cupcake controls it. The big loop of plastic to the upper left of the machine is the material from which objects are printed. Here’s a closer look at its internals:

We have a small gallery of objects that were created using the Cupcake:

If you’d like one of your own, the fine folks at Makerbot Industries would be more than happy to sell you a kit.

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

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.

[Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.]

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

I was 10 years old when Space Invaders came out, so this photo brings back happy memories:

Click the photo to see it on its original page.

Yeah, that’s about right:

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

[Found via Kevin Kelly.]

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

1. Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
2. Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
3. Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
4. Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
5. The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs,  LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found.  But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada.  Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Anthony Suarez suggested a possible upside to Disney’s purchase of Marvel: there’s potential for a really interesting sequel to the game Kingdom Hearts.

My spider-sense is tingling, and not in a good way: Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment (yup, that Marvel, as in Spider-Man, the X-Men and so on) for $4 billion in stock, acquiring the rights to all their characters. Soon we’ll see the cast of High School Musical as the newest young mutants to join Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and a Marvel Team-Up featuring Spider-Man and the Jonas Brothers.

I feel like this:

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

Two things we need to bring back into style: go-go boots and multi-coloured keyboards.

What happens when a girl from a l33t family brings a n00b boy home to meet her parents?

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

Welcome to the second installment of The Unofficial FutureRuby Guide to Toronto! This is a series of articles aimed at showing out-of-town attendees of the upcoming FutureRuby conference around our fine city. (It’s useful even if you’re not planning on attending the conference).

In case you missed the previous installment, it’s here:

• What’s That Smell?

You might find last year’s Toronto guide for RubyFringe attendees useful as well:

If you were at last year’s FailCamp, you might remember the best story of FAIL of the evening, which involved warming up some “body lube” in the microwave oven for a little too long, after which hilarity ensued.

Here’s how Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, the originators of FailCamp, describe their vision of the event:

We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

FailCamp returns next Thursday, July 9th and once again, it’s the warm-up act for Unspace’s Ruby programmer conference (going by the name “FutureRuby” this year), which takes place on the weekend of July 10th through 12th. Just like last year, FailCamp will once again provide a forum for you to share your greatest and most pathetic stories of FAIL, and hopefully how that failure taught you some important lessons and made you a better, wiser, more-careful-with-the-lube person.

Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.

Once again, I will be hosting FailCamp. I’ll start the evening with a couple of stories of failure, including a couple of Keyboard Cat-worthy ones of my own, after which I’ll open up the floor to you, the audience, to share your own stories of FAIL. Once we’re all thoroughly embarrassed, DJ Barbi will spin the wheels of steel and we’ll dance our shame away.

There are some tickets left as of this writing:

• For FutureRuby attendees, there are 4 free tickets to FailCamp remaining.
• For those of you who are not attending FutureRuby but would like to catch FailCamp, there are 19 “Pay What You Can” tickets left.

If you want ‘em, go to the FailCamp registration page and get them before they disappear!

My one-slide summary of how things went terribly wrong in the movie Deliverance
(The link leads to the “Squeal like a pig” scene from the movie – you might not want to watch at work).

FailCamp will take place at the Queen City Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands (Algonquin Island, to be precise). Your printed ticket stub is good for a free ferry ride from the Toronto docks to the Yacht Club, where we’ll have some finger food, the Yacht club’s kitchen and cash bar will be open, and the evening should be full of surprises.

What better way to close an article about FailCamp than the Keyboard Cat video starring “Pinky, Pet of the Week”?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever is a new puzzle site aimed at programmers in the same vein as web-based puzzle challenges such as notpron, Rankk and Python Challenge. Created by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg, “TDPE” consists of a sequence of 30 web pages, each one with a puzzle that when solved will take you to the next one. Each puzzle provides the necessary hints to solve it, although some of the hints are tucked away in not-so-obvious places. Some puzzles can be solved with a little programming skill, some require a little knowledge of computer programming theory (although a little Binging will do) and some can be solved with a little logic and lateral thinking.

Jeff has offered a prize to the first fifteen people who complete the The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever (only those who complete it will know how to prove it). Judging from the Twitter account for “TDPE” and tweets with the #TDPE hashtag, not all the prizes have been claimed yet.

I managed to power through the first 29 puzzles while watching Ghostbusters on TV yesterday, but the very last one has me stumped. As others who’ve been flummoxed by this problem have said on Twitter, I’m sure I’m overthinking it.

Can you beat the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever? I’m sure you can, but you might want to do it after work. Let me know how you’re doing in the comments!

I think we’ve got an early contender for the title of “Weirdest Videogame of 2009”: Muscle March for the Nintendo Wii. As if the game weren’t weird enough, the trailer below ramps up the weirdness by presenting it in that oh-so-Japanese style with epilepsy-inducing jump-cuts and a hyper-enthusiastic Japanese TV announcer:

[Found via Waxy.org.]

Another internet meme made the big time today – today’s edition of CNN’s “American Morning” ended with anchor Kiran Chetry announcing that they would be “played out” by “Keyboard Cat”. In case you haven’t yet seen them, Keyboard Cat videos all follow the same formula:

• They all have the name “Play Him/Her Out, Keyboard Cat”
• They begin with a segment in which someone humiliates or hurts himself or herself
• They cut to a strange video featuring a cat playing a tune on a cheesy home keyboard

This is my favourite Keyboard Cat video, in which a guy learns an important lesson in nunchuk safety:

This one, featuring a guy whose parents are trying to convince him that it’s bad idea to broadcast his meltdown online, is a close second:

And now, we can find out about the origin of Keyboard Cat and how he turned into an internet meme, thanks to this story in the Los Angeles Times.

This afternoon, I’m going to be at what I consider to be one of Accordion City’s best toy stores: Function 13 (156 Augusta Avenue), a place in Kensington Market that is part tech store, part art shop and part gallery.

I’ll be there for It’s Alive!, an open house featuring the work of Sheridan College’s Interactive Multimedia program. The event is open to all, and judging from some of the stuff I’ve seen on display at Function 13 and from Sheridan, it should be pretty interesting.

Woot! has a pretty sweet deal on refurbed XBox 360s: $140 for a refurbished model with 20GB hard drive and HDMI output. The package comes with all the stuff shown above. If you want it, get it now, because this deal isn’t likely to last very long!

Don’t get the joke? Know Your Meme does a fine job explaining the XZIBIT “Yo Dawg” meme in this article as well in the video shown below.