After Shit Silicon Valley Says comes Shit Programmers Say. There’s a swear word at the end, so if you’re at an office that doesn’t tolerate salty language, make like the programmers in the video and switch to headphones!

Thanks to Andy Baio at Waxy.org for the find!

This article also appears in the Shopify Developer Blog.

I guess this is a lesson to people who make long-form ads with only music and no voice-over: someone’s going to take your ad and add their own, just like the YouTube user known as “Raboneable”, who did just that with the ad for Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Watch the video above and enjoy the lulz.

In case you never saw the original, here it is:

Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.

The painting is titled This Painting is Not Available in Your Country and was created by Paul Mutant (2010, acrylic on canvas, 12” by 10”). You can see more in Paul Mutant’s Flickr photostream.

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

From a textbook on learning Spanish:

Found via Reddit. Click the picture to see it at full size.

The text:

To ask what people do for a living

¿A qué se dedica el señor Machado?

What does Mr. Machado do?

To respond

Es programador. Sabe diseñar páginas Web mejor que nadie.

He is a programmer. He knows how to design web pages better than anyone.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Found via The High Definite.

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

These stickers are posted above the urinals and toilets in the men’s rooms at Vancouver Convention Centre:

Also: That thing in the urinal that looks like a big mint? It’s not a big mint.

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

A hilarious worst-case scenario involving Facebook and a job interview. Contains some weird adult situations, which is why it’s so funny:

Found via Gizmodo.

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

I’ve heard the back-and-forth debate about whether you should write your phone app as a native app or as a web app more times that I care to recall, but it’s never been done as well as Jason Alderman and Matthias Shapiro do it…rap battle style!

Here’s the pre-recorded version:

and in true 8 Mile style, here they are doing it live at the last Ignite Salt Lake:

By the bye, if you’re building stuff for WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone, you really should be reading Matthias’ blog, Designer Silverlight. I’ve already bookmarked it, and so should you!

And for the truly nerdcore, here are the lyrics:

Jason:
You bought three coding books for reading on your Kindle,
They never got read, the whole deal is a swindle,
Pony annual fees for app sales, then they tax it,
I’m telling you man, that app store is a racket!
You are MUCH better off with HTML–
The web page markup that I know you know well–
The latest spec lets you store data on phones
Even when offline, but the browser phones home!
Your iPhone, Android, Palm, soon Blackberry:
Local data storage! SQL! it’s no worry!

Matthias:
Cross platform apps are a real seduction
But you give up your form, and most of your function
And your app, it hobbles in the passing lane
Like a one-legged zombie but with far less brains
Running your crap on the web, no performance
Mine is greased lightning, you run like a tortoise
You don’t understand the mental model users are adopting
They don’t want to hit the web, they want one-stop shopping
Here’s how you make an application fun
Turn it on, do your thing, turn it off and you’re done

Jason:
When the iPhone came out, sure the browser was slow,
But the new smartphones? half a gigahertz or mo’
That’s faster than the box on which your mom does her taxes
Pretty snappy–WinME!–, but now it’s like molasses
In praxis? I already write scripts, it’s easy
Better than compiling native code till my teeth bleed
Time that I saved, I put in media queries,
add UserAgent switch statement, stylesheets fear me!
Custom chrome, each phone? Modus operandi.
Willy Wonka’s schooled by my custom eye candy!

Matthias:
Did that school teach usability cause I think you missed it
With apps for devices the use is holistic
Gotta look act like you belong, not draw their attention
Like a steam punker crashing an Avatar convention
Use is more than just Chrome and colors, look at navigation
Modern users look for standard gestures, menus, animations,
And what about the richness of movement & location
Do you want to surf the web or record your whole vacation?
When I tilt your web app, it’s just stuck in a groove
With my purely native code I can bust a move.

Jason:
But that’ll only improve–heck, web apps get location
And if the case came where I needed acceleration
I’d wrap my web app in the library Phonegap–

Matthias:
Excuses, excuses, You’re giving mobile a bum rap
Try adding 3D to your list of what apps do
Or write a game that’s not scrabble, chess or sudoku
And you know CSS competes with OpenGL
Like a cub scout against 10 marines with a 50 cal
Boom! 3D mushroom cloud filling the room
Now go back your text adventure version of Doom

Jason:
Sure games make money, but think of their use,
They’re casual, waiting in line at Jamba Juice,
You’re making the mistake of the hardcore PSP,
When a simple DS meets the goal just as easily
Heavy duty third-dimension graphics drain the life
Of your battery, more than the scripts I’m paid to write.
But, hey, if you want 3-D page flip transitions,
Perspective transforms of element positions,
Web apps can do that, CSS has you covered,
To your Mel Gibson, C-S-S is Danny Glover!
(I’m too old for this!)

Matthias:
CSS animations, are you out of your gourd?
That’s a terrible sin in the eyes of the web lord.
Every time I bring up something hard
You just dance around it, pulling out your library card
Or some spec or framework only halfway done
As if javascript and CSS are rainbows and fun
Look, there’s only one way that this thing can go
Build your web apps for free or jump into the cash flow
Advertising won’t help you survive
But just one little iFart can get you set for life
No app store, no eyeballs, no business plan.
Making just enough dough to pay the rent on your trash can
I hate to play the role of Scrooge McDuck
But without a good market you’re pretty much… well, you know

Jason:
Trash can? Your app waits in limbo for a month,
You’re stuck eating ramen, watching reruns of Monk.
Your funk? Only lifted if the app store approves it
And we both know the king of the process is ruthless!
The truth is, even if it does get approved
There’s a chance that your make-it-rich dream comes unglued
When a bug in your app that slipped through the process
Makes users hate it, they leave lots of comments,
And you fix it real quick, test patches and submit it
But it still takes a month, so your app gets attritted
From all the top ten lists, losing all worth,
It’s a digital coaster, like "Battlefield Earth"!
My apps sell anywhere, and update on the fly.
You can’t have your cake OR eat it, ’cause the cake is a lie.

Thanks to John Bristowe for finding this!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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

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.

Nice phone, shame about the name.

As I quipped in an earlier post, the name “Windows Phone 7 Series” is a bit long, and suggests that the people who do Microsoft’s branding get paid by the syllable. This is the sort of left-brain-lopsided mindset that has produced names like “Windows Server 2008 R2”.

My fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe pointed me to this Joy of Tech comic which attempts to ratiocinate the etymology of this unwieldy appellation:

For those of you who are fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are some lovely “behind the scenes” shots of the cast and crew on the TrekCore site. I’ve posted a couple of my favourites here.

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

How’d I miss this video? At TechDays Winnipeg, Dylan Smith of ANVIL Digital (and speaker in the “Fundamentals” track), showed me this it’s-funny-because-it’s-true video that’s been around since May that looks at the vexing expectations that clients have of vendors in IT and the creative industries:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It could be turning into a meme! Hot on the heels of my How Fanboys See Operating Systems post, which got a good deal of attention on Reddit and other link-sharing sites came Ruby Inside’s How Programming Language Fanboys See Each Other’s Languages, and now there’s How Microsoft Language Fanboys See Each Other’s Languages…

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The guys at Ruby Inside have taken the idea of from the graphic in my How Fanboys See Operating Systems article and run with it in a post titled How Programming Language Fanboys See Each Others’ Languages:

I’m not sure what’s going in the square depicting how C fanboys see Java…

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

Truth be told, I’d wish I’d come up with this list myself:

There, I Fixed It is a hilarious photoblog that catalogs kludges, jury rigs and hastily-improvised duct-tape repairs and modifications to everyday objects. The photos below are a sample of some of the quick fixes shown on the site, each one somewhere on the spectrum spanning “clever and thrifty” to “cheap, shoddy and frightening”:

(Regarding the photo in the right column, second one from the bottom – the piece of paper attached to the pencil sticking out of the computer says “Pull to turn on”. It’s a jury-rigged replacement for the power switch.)

Sloppy work like this isn’t limited to the physical world. I’ve seen (and okay, sometimes I’ve written) code that could’ve been a candidate for There, I Fixed It, and chances are you have too:

• Some of my hacks were a little more elegant and useful in the long-term, as long as you weren’t going to be too fussy about aesthetics. They were the software equivalent of the CD-ROM drive installed below the car radio and attached to it with a cable with 1/8” stereo jacks. They weren’t pretty, but they were solid, reasonably maintainable and viable in the long term.
• Others were terrible kludges that were originally intended to be temporary solutions that forgotten and lived much longer than they should have. They were like fixes shown in the two photos on the bottom (the hasty bridge repair and the car exhaust held together with zip-ties).
• I’ve also copped out by glossing over bad user interface design with some explanatory text or dialog box instead of actually correcting the design. This is not unlike labelling a doorknob “hard to open” or a hastily-improvised switch “pull to turn on”.

Be sure to check out There, I Fixed It. They’ve had some pretty hilarious pictures lately, and perhaps it’ll inspire (or shame) you to eschew the quick fix or kludge in favour of putting some time and thought into writing better code and building better user interfaces.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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.