Update: Newsy have put together a piece summarizing the tech news’ reaction to the Samsung Galaxy Note ad. It’s at the end of this article – check it out!

Even if you missed the big game, you can still catch the Superbowl ad for the Samsung Galaxy Note. Directed by Bobby Farrelly (one of the Farrelly Brothers, creators of high-larious films like Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and unfortunately, the upcoming Three Stooges Movie), it’s a continuation of the series of ads that poke fun at Apple fandom. It opens with a scenes from lineups outside Apple stores. The bored Apple fanatics are tethered to their white earbuds and awaiting their next gift from the gods when one of them sees a passer-by with a Samsung Galaxy Note.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa – what is that?” he asks.

“Here,” says the passer-by, walking towards soon-to-be-ex-Apple-worshipper. “It’s the new Samsung Galaxy Note.”

Then comes the kicker: “It’s got a pen?” That’s right: it’s bringing back the stylus, the very thing that iOS devices put out of style.

After that, the Apple fans break free of their self-imposed imprisonment in line – a line that Samsung probably wishes they had – and partying, powered by The Darkness’ hit I Believe in a Thing Called Love – ensues.

It’s a little hard to tell from the ad, but the Galaxy Note is bigger than your standard phone; in fact, it’s bigger than even the biggest of the notoriously oversized Samsung phones. Size-wise, it’s in Newton territory: smaller than a tablet, a tad too big to fit into most pockets. Perhaps they’re also trying to bring cargo pants back:

Photo from TechInferno.

I’m reminded of this promotional photo, where Sony tried to convince you of how portable their smallest VAIO was:

It sits somewhere in the “Zone of Suck” from my 2009 article, Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck (I’m going to have to revise the graphic to include tablets as well as the Galaxy Note):

As for what it’s like to use the device, consider this review in TechInferno. The reviewer loves the Galaxy Note and says he’s never going back to an iOS device, but he damns it with his faint praise:

• “Is the Galaxy Note as smooth as an iOS device? Not really, it still has the android signature stuttering when you scroll and the occasional semi-freeze here and there.”
• “Is the Galaxy Note built as good as the latest iPhone? No, it is not, I think that a fair comparison would be to equal it to the build quality of the 3G/3Gs versions of the iPhone.”
• “Sure you can expect some hiccups here and there, not everything is so custom tailored to the device and to bring it to full functionality you need to invest some effort but in my personal opinion this phone is worth it.”
• “Who I would NOT recommend this device to:
  • People expect the device to “just work”
  • Women or men with small hands
  • People who like to operate the phone with one hand only.”

You know what they say about guys with big phones…

• “Build quality is very good and the device feels solid in the hand although iPhone 4 build feels better.”
• “Out of the box with all options at their defaults the device will eat through the 2500mA/h battery in less than 10 hours of normal usage.”
• “The stylus needs a fair amount of pressure to operate, otherwise it doesn’t work.”
• “I still haven’t found a keyboard that matches the precision of the iPhone, i can’t type as fast but maybe it’s a matter of getting used to it?”
• “I keep accidentally pushing the Back or the Menu buttons especially in landscape mode when trying to type/interact with the screen – a big design flaw.”
• “Expect surprised looks from people around when you put it to your ear to talk. It really does look a bit ridiculous, almost like holding an iPad to your ear.”

• “The text to speech compared to Siri is awful.”
• “Keep in mind that Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Note is around the corner and is expected to fix a lot of issues listed here and introduce lots of neat features.” That, and the Lord Jesus Christ is due back any day now, so look busy!

I think I’ll be sticking with my iPhone 4S and iPad 2 a little while longer, thanks.

Update

Newsy’s got a good piece summarizing the tech press’ and pundits’ reaction to the Galaxy Note ad. Check it out!

At Twitter, The Future is You! is a funny recruiting video. It reminds me of Microsoft’s internal training videos.

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

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:

The Urban Dictionary definition of "wat" is "the only proper response to something that makes absolutely no sense". The concept of wat is covered a little more completely on its page in Know Your Meme.

"Wat" is also the title of a funny demo of Ruby and JavaScript oddities presented by Gary Bernhardt at CodeMash 2012, a rather unlikely tech conference — it takes place in Sandusky, Ohio, in Ohio’s largest indoor waterpark. (If you just said "wat" right now, you’ve used the word correctly.)

In the video, you see this classic wat bit about undefined variables and assignment in Ruby:

You’ll also marvel at the way JavaScript treats (array + array) vs. (array + object) vs. (object + array) vs. (object + object):

Watch the video, and wait for that final slide, which is pure, hilarious wat!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

HTML5/CSS guru, prolific webcaster and blogger, banjo player and all-round International Man of Mystery Chris Coyier is one of my fellow BarCamp Tour members and a friend of Shopify. He joined our friends at Wufoo, makers of web forms par excellence, who have since been acquired by SurveyMonkey.

If you get the chance to catch Chris at one of the upcoming BarCamps on the BarCamp Tour, do it! He’s a great presenter with lots of teach and an entertaining style in which to teach it. You can get a taste of a Chris Coyier presentation at CSS Tricks, where his 101st screencast, Let’s Suck at Github Together, walks you through Github with very little pain.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

No Escape is a short film set in the world of Portal, and it’s seven very well-done minutes.

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.

(Well, it’s two English guys surrounded by tech gear and a psychedelic background. The interior of the TARDIS came to mind.)

The Windows Phone 7 Jump Start is the first of a number of free online courses on WP7 programming led by Microsoft MVPs, and you can jump in right now! Presented by Andy Wigley and Rob Miles, the Jump Start is made up of 12 50-minute videos for a total of ten hours’ worth of training, covering development of both Silverlight- and XNA-based apps as well as advanced topics such as the WP7 application lifecycle, launchers, choosers, isolated storage, taking advantage of the dialer, camera and contacts, and networking. There’s even a section on bringing your app over to the Marketplace. It’s all online, free and ready for you to dive in!

The videos in the course are:

1. Introduction
2. Building a Silverlight Application, Part 1
3. Building a Silverlight Application, Part 2
4. Building Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform
5. Building XNA Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform, Part 1
6. Building XNA Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform, Part 2
7. Advanced Application Development, Part 1
8. Advanced Application Development, Part 2
9. Advanced Application Development, Part 3
10. Marketing Your Windows Phone 7 Application
11. Working with Media
12. Final Silverlight Topics and Wrap-Up

You can watch the videos on their pages (Silverlight required) or download them in WMA, WMV and MP4 formats for offline viewing.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod (MP4), MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Here’s what’s up on the latest edition of This Week on Channel 9, the summary of the most interesting videos and news on Microsoft’s Channel 9 site:

• Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone: A white paper covering how to get the most out of your Silverlight-based WP7 apps.
• Compiled Experience’s Windows Phone 7 Tutorials. Apps Amuck is a site that covers building 31 little applications for the iPhone; Compiled Experience author Nigel Sampson does the same for WP7.
• An easy way to skin the Silverlight Toolkit Charting controls to work on Windows Phone 7 by David Anson.
• Windows Phone Pivot and Panorama controls
• “Tilt" content control for Windows Phone 7
• How to configure WCF services to accept large data
• SQL Cop – think FXCop for your database, it looks at bad table design, fragmented indexes, issues with data types and more.
• HTML 5 IntelliSense in Visual Studio
• How to Use Unity Container with ASP.NET MVC
• Versioning issues with C# 4 optional parameters
• Visual Studio LightSwitch – Beyond the Basics

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you haven’t tried the latest Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, get your hands on it now! This one’s got new goodies like a new SVG engine, the “Chakra” JavaScript engine now integrated into the browser instead of a separate object called via COM, better Acid3 (95/100) and WebKit SunSpider scores.

Channel 9 has posted some videos on this newest version of IE9, and I thought I’d share them here:

A Look at the New IE Test Drive Samples

This video (2 minutes, 43 seconds in length) shows off some of the new demo apps on the IE Test Drive page that show off the benefits of IE9’s hardware acceleration. Rob Mauceri, Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer, narrates.

Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

A Look at SVG in IE9

SVG is short for "Scalable Vector Graphics", whose specification is an open standard and supported by all major modern web browsers, including IE9. This video (4 minutes, 36 seconds in length) shows how you can take advantage of SVG and the fact that it’s hardware-accelerated in IE9. Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager for Internet Explorer, does the presentation.

Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

IE9 Rocks HTML5 Audio Support

IE Beatz is a drum machine app written JavaScript, SVG and HTML 5 audio to demonstrate the combined power of HTML 5 and IE9. This video (6 minutes, 4 seconds) features IE Beatz’ creator, Josh Rose of the IE9 team, explaining his creation and showing some of the underlying code.

Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Another week, another This Week on Channel 9 (TWC9), Microsoft’s regular webcast showing the past week’s highlight on Channel 9, where Microsofties talk about what they’re working on or what they’re thinking, unfiltered by the marketing or PR departments. Regular co-host Dan Fernandez is joined this week by Larry Larsen as they talk about:

• WebMatrix, as presented by Simon Calvert and Scott Hunter
• Scott Guthrie’s detailed tutorial on WebMatrix Beta (skip down to part about creating a site with custom code)
• WebMatrix Samples and eBook
• How the Razor parser works, as explained by Andrew Nurse
• Silverlight Media Framework 2.0 released
• Setting up and configuring AppFabric memory cache in 10 minutes
• Removing dead tracks from iTunes using C#
• SharpKeys, the open source keyboard remapper
• PowerGUI: Add IntelliSense support for PowerShell using this Visual Studio Extension, via Greg Duncan
• How you can configure VS to debug MSBuild files: Part 1 and Part 2

The co-hosts’ picks of the week are:

• Larry’s pick: Building “God’s Own Machine”, a computer that scores 7.9 on the Windows Experience Index
• Dan’s pick: A robot that can fetch and even open beers

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Once again, it’s time for another installment of This Week on Channel 9 (or TWC9 for short), Microsoft’s regular video webcast featuring Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller, who provide entertaining and informative coverage of the news of the week for the .NET developer community.

In this episode, Dan and Brian cover:

• IIS Express: A mix between the simplicity of the Visual Studio built-in Web development server and full IIS
• SQL Compact Edition 4: A lightweight database for Web sites that can be XCopy installed
• Silverlight Pivot Viewer: Now Available!
• The MSDN site gets redesigned
• XAML Formatting: For the first time in a long time, Dan and Brian agree (and so do I): you should break every attribute onto its own line for readability
• WPF Inspector & Snoop: Two handy tools for WPF development
• The .NET Micro Framework Team puts .NET Micro Framework on a bicycle
• The BCL Team proposes adding .zip file support to System.IO. Give them feedback on their API!
• JSON Data Visualizer: A Code Project project to see visualize results from JSON services like Facebook
• PEX for Fun: use PEX to automatically solve puzzles
• Phone7 Action Pack: Open source set of utilities for Windows Phone 7 development

The episode also features Dan’s and Brian’s picks of the week:

• Dan had two picks this week:
  • The Archivist: An application that lets you save and store Tweets over time for later analysis, tracking, review, whatever! And it’s open source!
  • Pivot for Netflix instant view movies: Steve Marx has an overview of how it was made
• Brian’s pick: Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data & Hands-on Labs

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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.

By now, you’ve probably seen my article covering the new, faster, even more standards-compliant Platform Preview 3 of Internet Explorer 9. From hardware acceleration to a speed-boosted JavaScript engine with support for new ECMAScript 5 language features to support for SVG, <audio>, <video> and <canvas> tags, IE9 is shaping up to be a great browser for an open web.

Before there were Microsoft blogs (such as Canadian Developer Connection), there was Channel 9, Microsoft’s community site run by Microsoft employees. Like Microsoft blogs, Channel 9 gives you unfiltered access to the people building stuff at The Empire, all outside the control of the marketing and PR departments. Channel 9 features a lot of videos – there are times when they post several videos in a day – featuring developer news and training, training kits and courses, discussion forums and wikis for various Microsoft tools and technologies. If you’re a .NET developer or just curious about what’s going on the in the .NET world, you should check out Channel 9 and see what’s happening.

Channel 9 posted a number of videos covering the new features in the third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve gathered them all into this blog article – enjoy!

A Look at the New IE9 Demos

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

This video shows some of the sample apps living on the IE Test Drive site in action. It covers the following demos:

• IMDb Video Panorama
• Web Fonts
• FishIE Tank
• Amazon Shelf
• Mr. Potato Gun

<canvas> and FishIE Tank

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Here’s a closer look at the FishIE Tank demo and how it makes use of <canvas> to draw up to thousands of animated, moving, scaling fish sprites.

<canvas> and Amazon.com

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Another <canvas> demo: Amazon Shelf. This one ties into Amazon’s data to create a virtual bookshelf that lets you browse Amazon’s catalogue of books.

<video> and IMDb Video Panorama

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

The IE9 team showed a preview of support for the <video> tag, and with Platform Preview 3, you can try it out for yourself. In this video, you see how it’s used to build the IMDb Video Panorama demo.

ECMAScript 5 and the Tile Game

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

There are lots of boring ways to show of ECMAScript 5’s new array methods in action, but why not show them off with a fun game? In addition to the new JavaScript goodies, the ECMAScript 5 Game demo also shows off:

• HTML5 <video> and <audio>
• CSS3 multiple backgrounds
• HTML5 local storage (first made available in IE8)
• DOM Level 3 events
• <window.getComputedStyle()>

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Earlier this week, I was asked to make a short video that would be shown during a round table discussion on a hot topic: HTML5 vs. proprietary rich internet app technologies, such as Flash and Silverlight. My video was supposed to take the “RIAs complement HTML” side of the debate, while someone else would produce a video taking the “HTML5 trumps RIAs” side.

My own personal belief is that HTML5 – actually the stack of HTML5, CSS3 and Java/ECMAScript – has closed the interactivity gap between the web and desktop apps and will continue to close it. However, for the time being, there are still cases where HTML5 just can’t cut it – for various reasons, such as performance, browser compatibility or designer-friendliness – and that’s where RIAs shine. Hence I found it rather easy to put together an amusing little video titled HTML5 and RIAs: Friends with Benefits (5:47, YouTube).

I did the production work on Tuesday afternoon and evening using the following tools:

• LifeChat LX-3000 headset as my microphone
• Audacity to record and edit the audio
• Fireworks to edit the pictures
• Camtasia Studio to build and produce the video
• Silvetta piano accordion for the music

Enjoy the video!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The business of helping out with the NerdTrain, the Make Web Not War conference, associated activities and participating in a team offsite meeting has kept me a busier than I expected to be – in fact, this has been my first chance to post a blog entry! Stories and pictures are forthcoming, but in the meantime, enjoy this video that explains what I’ve been working on for the past couple of days.

As I write this, the chaos typically associated with getting a conference set up has subsided and I hope to squeeze in a couple of posts later today as well as tomorrow.

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.

You’ve probably read the news already, so I’ll cut right to the chase: earlier today, Internet Explorer’s big kahuna Dean Hachamovitch made an announcement about Internet Explorer 9 support for HTML5 video in Blogging Windows:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

(And in case you were wondering, the WebM format — also announced earlier today — uses the VP8 codec.)

If you want to take an early version of IE9 for a spin, visit the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive site and download the latest preview (as of this writing, it’s Platform Preview 2).

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.