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This page from an old issue of Mondo 2000 (think of a late ’80s/early ’90s gene-splice of Wired magazine, High Times and Omni, and you’ll get a general idea of what it was like) shows what the 1992 idea of cyberpunk was. It gets posted over and over again on Reddit’s “Cyberpunk” subreddit (much to their chagrin), but it’s been ages since I’ve seen it — the last time was in the original magazine — so I thought I’d post it here.

The R.U. in the title of the photo spread is a tip of the hat to R. U. Sirius, Mondo 2000′s editor.

Most of the gear in the photo — the cameras and scanners, audio recorders and playback devices, the encrypted communication tools, and even much of the functionality provided by the old-school PowerBook — could easily be replaced by a single present-day smartphone. You have to keep in mind that 1992 was a time before browsers, when surfing the net was something few people did (and they did it on Gopher or Usenet), when 14.4kHz modems were blazing fast, email addresses were rarities (I had one — 3jmd2@queensu.ca), and a household without a computer wasn’t a strange and rare thing.

In case you were wondering, the PowerBook 180’s specs were:

• Processor: Motorola 68030 running at 33MHz (that’s right, megahertz, not gigahertz)
• Cache: 0.5K L1 cache, no L2 cache
• RAM: 4MB (Once again, megabytes, not gigabytes) on the motherboard, expandable to 14MB
• Display: Maximum resolution of 832 by 624, 512K VRAM
• Operating system: Came with System 7.1; the latest Macintosh OS that supported it was System 7.6.1; here’s a video of a PowerBook 180 booting up this OS

While many of the tools in the pictorial have changed shape or have been amalgamated into newer devices, the following have remained more or less the same (at least in appearance and functionality) and would still be recognizable to a cyberpunk from 20 years ago:

• The laptop: Still a design that folds shut, and still based on the Dynabook concept. Sure, they’re thinner and have way more processing, memory and networking capabilities, but a person from 1992 would still recognize a 2013 laptop.
• Voltmeter: Aside from a couple of convenience features and being pretty much all digital these days, multimeters from 2013 look pretty much like multimeters from 1992.
• Laser pointers: Perhaps a little smaller these days, but still mostly used to entertain cats or annoy humans.
• Torque wrenches: More of them come with the nice rubberized grips these days, but otherwise they’re the same.
• Shotgun microphones: Aside from packaging, they’re pretty much the same.
• Black clothing: The classics never change.
• Metal briefcase: Still in use today. The coolest use at the moment: as a housing for a portable Bitcoin miner, pictured below at this year’s Defcon:

Before I return you to 2013, one more blast from the past: the trailer for the 1995 film based on the William Gibson short story of the same name, Johnny Mnemonic. Enjoy!

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

If you were to go to the site of local user experience design heroes Jet Cooper today, you’d see that they’ve just been acquired by Shopify. Congrats to Satish and all!

The news is in several places, including:

• TechCrunch
• Financial Post
• Ottawa Citizen
• TechVibes
• ITBusiness.ca
• Ottawa Business Journal

This company:

• They make the ecommerce platform that makes it easy for anybody to open and run an online shop.
• In the past 7 years, over 60,000 online shops have been created with Shopify, moving over 13 million orders and accounting for over 2 billion dollars in sales.
• Here are a few big names with Shopify-powered shops: Amnesty International, Austin City Limits, Beck, Bon Jovi, CBGB, the CHIVERY, Epic Meal Time, Evernote, 50 Cent, Foo Fighters, GitHub, Hooters, LMFAO, Lollapalooza, Penny Arcade, Tesla Motors, Tori Amos, and xkcd.
• Profit magazine called Shopify the smartest company in Canada, Fast Company named them one of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies, and here’s how ThinkEcommerce ranks them against their competition:

They’re looking for a couple of good people to fill a couple of job positions:

in this city:

Here’s one of the positions…

There are more details about the PR Manager position on Shopify’s “jobs” site, but here’s the general gist:

• The ideal candidate is probably doing one of the following in his/her current job:
  • Managing PR, communications, or media at a tech company.
  • Working at a PR firm, primarliy with tech clients.
  • Journalism, with a fair bit of media outreach.
• To do well in this job, you have to have a solid understanding of, and at least a few contacts in, tech and business media. This job is about putting Shopify’s best foot forward on TV (think tech business news segments on cable news), national newspapers with a tech business bent (think New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), national magazines with a focus on tech, business, and entrepreneurship (think Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc.), and tech-meets-business sites (think Mashable, TechCrunch, The Next Web).
• Whoever gets this job will effectively be a one-person PR firm, doing all sorts of things from planning global PR campaigns to doing media relations to creating supporting promotional materials to working with the product team to measuring the impact of various PR initiatives.

…and here’s the other one:

There are more details about the Social Media Manager position on Shopify’s “jobs” site, but I can sum it up for you:

• The ideal candidate should have:
  • A solid grasp of how social media works, and how it can be used to get more people open Shopify shops, make Shopify shopowners happy, and boost Shopify’s online reputation.
  • A presence on the “usual suspects” of social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter at the very least, with Google+ and Pinterest as nice-to-haves. It’ll help if you have a decent Klout score, say like mine.
  • Enough graphic arts skill to create images to be used in social media campaigns.
• The major goals of this position is to make more Shopify users, and to keep the existing Shopify users happy — all through social media. Doing this will also require measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Whoever gets this job will effectively be a one-person social media machine, doing all sorts of things from planning global social media campaigns to maintaining Shopify’s presence on various social media platforms to actively monitoring social media channels for mentions of Shopify and responding when necessary, and building trust.

At Shopify, they equip everyone with a nice set of really cool gear to get their work done:

The picture above shows the gear that was waiting for me at my desk on my first day at the job. I’m sure they’ve updated what comes as “Shopify standard issue”, and I’m sure it’s fantastic.

…and you get to work in a fun, stimulating environment instead of a joyless, soul-killing, joyless cubicle farm…

These are all photos of the mothership in Ottawa, but they’ve gone to great lengths to make the Toronto office a great place to work as well. Much of the credit goes to Chief Culture Officer Daniel Weinand, whose job is to keep Shopify feeling like a fun place, even as it grows from scrappy startup into established middle-sized company.

Better still, you’ll be working in an industry that’s only getting started, and growing like gangbusters!

Ecommerce used to be a nichey “early adopter” sort of thing, but not anymore! It’s harder and harder to find someone who hasn’t ordered something online, and with ecommerce growing at twice the rate of regular bricks-and-mortar retail and still less than 10% of all retail (that’s still something on the order of $50 billion every quarter).

Does this sound like the kind of place where you’d like to work?

So how can you get yourself one of these jobs?

You’re going to have to do more than just fill out the application form and submit a resume. Having a resume puts you in the not-so-elite group known as “everybody”:

Shopify sets itself apart, and you’re going to have to do the same:

One successful applicant created a Shopify shop as his application, “selling” himself and also proving that he understood the product:

Hint, hint: If you’re applying for the PR Manager position, perhaps you should put together a press kit about yourself. If you’re applying for the Social Media Manager position, perhaps you might want to start a social media campaign to explain why you’re the best candidate. You might want to make use of this hashtag:

Do you know who Shopify’s competition are? You might want to look that up.

Hint, hint: There’s a graphic near the beginning of the article that might help!

“Draw the fucking owl” is a mantra at Shopify. If you’re applying to work there, make sure you’ve internalized the comic below, and be ready to explain how you’d draw the owl if you landed the job:

Make sure you touch base with Mark Hayes, marketing and PR guy at Shopify, and tell him Joey sent you.

He’s mark.hayes@shopify.com and @allsop8184 on Twitter. Try and strike a balance between being creative in how reach out to him and not wasting his time!

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

Music Hack Day is coming to Toronto on Saturday, August 10th and Sunday, August 11th! An event that’s taken place in many cities all over the world, Music Hack Day is when people with different skills and talents — programmers, musicians, designers and artists, to name a few — get together to brainstorm and quickly build prototypes of interesting musical creations. It’s happening here, and it’s free!

Here’s what their registration site says:

Music Hack Day is a hacking session in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + mobile + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related.

This is the first time that Music Hack Day has come to Toronto! We’re calling on all programmers, designers and artists to come and help us build the future of music.

Music Hack Day has been a great way to demonstrate the creativity around music that comes from the tech community, fostering cross-platform and cross-device innovation.

What’s It Like?

Music Hack Day is whatever the participants (everyone who attends is a participant — there are no spectators) make it out to be. The best way to get a feel for what it’s like is to look at some past Music Hack Days in other cities.

Creative Commons photo by Thomas Bonte. Click to see the source.

Music Hack Day London took place in their Facebook office in November 2012. Some of the goodies that were created in the 24 allotted hours were:

• Barbertron: A software-based audio processor that turns a solo voice into a barbershop quartet.
• Theremin.js: A JavaScript-powered Theremin that uses your computer’s webcam as its sensor.
• Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere: What happens when you mash-up Google Maps and I’ve Been Everywhere (it’s not his song, but his version’s probably the best-known)? This.

Creative Commons photo by Duncan Geere. Click to see the source.

Music Hack Day Stockholm happened in January. Here are a couple of interesting projects from that event:

• Super Mutroid: A Metroid-themed platform-jumper videogame that generates levels based on the music you give it; you jump over and duck under obstacles to the beat.
• The Sampler Formerly Known as Magnum Infinity takes a folder of MP3s, looks for samples with a reasonably pure pitch and assembles those samples into a musical instrument.
• Joggify is a mobile exercise music app that plays music at regular speed while you keep jogging, but slows it down as you slow down and slack off. Stop jogging, and the music stops completely.

Creative Commons photo by “grossvogel”. Click to see the source.

Music Hack Day Reykjavik gave the world:

• Droplocker: Lets you stream MP3 stored in your Dropbox and play them through Spotify.
• Glovesynth: A glove-controlled synthesizer.
• Daft Hanger: An amusing project that takes a Raspberry Pi, a MaKey MaKey and coat hangers to let you customize your very own version of Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster Stronger:

Here are some goodies from Music Hack Day Boston:

Specklesounds is a sound generator based on Specklesense hardware.

Bohemian Rhapsichord takes snippets from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and turns them into a full-screen sample playing instrument. Get your hands on a big-ass toucscreen start jamming!

And then there’s Drinkify. Tell it what you’re listening to, and it’ll suggest a cocktail.

There’s been at least one Music Hack Day project that became a full-on commercially-available product: Arpeggionome!

Okay, I’m Sold. What’s Up with Music Hack Day Toronto?

Music Hack Day Toronto is being put together by Toronto Ruby development shop (and excellent putter-together of amazing conferences) Unspace, along with Soundcloud, Rdio and The Echo Nest. It’ll take place at the Glass Factory, located at 99 Sudbury Street (nearest major intersection is Queen and Dufferin).

Here’s the official description of the event, taken from their “About” page:

Mission

• To fast prototype and create brand new music apps (web, mobile or physical) in just24hrs.
• To bring together the music industry and the developer community.
• To highlight and showcase the platforms and API’s of companies working in and around music tech.
• To foster cross-platform and cross-device innovation.

Overview

• Taken place in 17 cities in different countries: London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, San Francisco, Stockholm, Barcelona, Cannes, New York City, Denver, Philadelphia, Paris, Vienna, Reykjavík, Edinburgh, Sydney & Montreal.
• Over 1.200 people taken part including developers and invited members of press/music industry.
• Over 60 companies officially involved and associated with Music Hack Day.
• Over 200 apps built during Music Hack Days, some of them launched commercially.

The sponsors and API providers for the event are:

• Soundcloud: Online audio hosting and distribution.
• Rdio: Music streaming service with a big-ass linrary.
• The Echo Nest: A powerful music search engine that lets you search for songs by artist, similar artist, who’s hot, tempo, key and lots of other criteria.
• Semantria: Text analytics and sentiment analysis. If you didn’t know that the Kinks’ song Lola was a bout a dude (I’ve met such people), Senatria will tell you.
• GigaTools: An API for search for who’s having a live gig, where, and when.
• LyricFind: A song lyrics search engine, powered by a lot of agreements with music publishers.

I Can’t Make This Event, But You Should Go!

An event like this — one that mixes music, technology, and the chance to hang out with old and new friends — has my name written all over it, but alas, I’m going to be out of town. I may be missing out, but that means you shouldn’t. If you’ve been dying to work on a music+tech project, go sign up for Music Hack Day Toronto! And once again, it’s free-as-in-beer!

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

Jennifer Dewalt is on a mission: to learn to how to code. She’s doing it by building a web application and then posting it online, every day, over 180 days. Day 1 was on April 1st this year, and on that day, her assignment was to make the home page for her learn-to-code project. Since then, she’s gone on to make web applications of increasing complexity, from a dice game (day 12) to Pong (day 47) to a weather app (day 49) to a commenting system (day 75) to an animated terms of service (day 99) to a game where you get to shoot flying strips of bacon (day 115).

She could’ve signed up for a course or “boot camp” — there are no shortage of these things in San Francisco, where she’s based — but she instead to Yoda’s advice to “do, or do not”. She made sure that she’d set aside enough money to live on while teaching herself programming full-time, then set out to create a small web application every day, using each assignment as an opportunity to learn something new. She set the following rules for herself:

1. Build a different website every day for 180 consecutive days.
2. Every website must be accompanied by a blog post.
3. Any code I write must be made publicly available on GitHub (open source) so that everyone can see it.

Her project recently became one of the most-discussed topics on Hacker News for the week. In the discussion, Derek “CD Baby” Sivers posted this comment:

There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that’s very appropriate here:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.

Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Advance congratulations to Jennifer. This is amazing.

Simply put, Jennifer’s taking the old adage, “practice makes perfect”, and putting it into practice. I think it’s time to borrow a trick from her book.

He’s back! Damian Conway, Perl’s answer to Steve Irwin (Australian, engaging presenter, doer of things you probably shouldn’t do), is coming back to Toronto to stretch your understanding of programming by pushing its paradigms to ridiculous lengths while entertaining you at the same time with talks that are:

• One-third deep programming talk,
• One-third showmanship, and
• One-third eating a Guatemalan Insanity Pepper and tripping balls in a fever dream.

Whether he’s taking about the goodies that are (someday) going into Perl 6 (the Duke Nukem Forever of programming languages) or how quantum superpositioning can find its way into everyday programming tasks, he’s always got something interesting to say, and he’s often left me with a whole new way of looking at code. It doesn’t matter whether you use Perl or not — I’ve made a career out of keeping as far away from it as possible — if you’re into programming, Damian’s presentations are for you!

Damian demonstrates Aikido on a brave and handsome volunteer (me) at one of his talks.

He’s got two talks taking place in Toronto in early August…

Fun With Dead Languages

• When: Tuesday, August 6th at 7:00 p.m. (doors open at 6:45)
• Where: Mozilla’s Toronto offices — 366 Adelaide Street West (just east of Spadina), suite 500
• How much?: Free!

Here’s the abstract:

Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in several unrelated programming languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you’ll also discover what’s wrong with modern CS education, why programmers shouldn’t frequent casinos, the power of Thor’s Law, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, how to use the three shells, state machines on steroids, programming without variables or subroutines, a cheap and eco-friendly alternative for distributed persistent computation, what the Romans used instead of braces, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, and the price of fish.

I’m told that this is going to be a really off-the-wall talk — completely inspired, completely insane. It’s an updated version of a talk he gave here seven years ago (and it was great) in which he takes the audience on a grand tour of all sorts of programming languages, while bunny-hopping back and forth over the fineline between genius and bat-shit insanity. No matter what language you prefer, you’re going to love this talk.

A Few of My Favourite Things / Sex and Violence: Social and Technical Lessons from the Perl 6 Project

• When: Thursday, August 8th at 7:00 p.m. (doors open at 6:45)
• Where: Bahen Centre for IT, University of Toronto, 40 St. George Street (just north of College), room BA-1160
• How much?: Free!

Two talks! Here’s the abstract for the first:

Up-scoping context, the lexical-hints hash,
Padwalking my vars, programmable fail cache,
Subpattern regexes matching source strings,
These are a few of my favorite things.

User-definable keyword conversions,
Perl Parsing Interface, table inversions,
Tools that make Perl even more amazing
These are a few of my favorite things

When the bug bites,
When syntax stings,
When I’m being bad:
I simply deploy all my favorite things
Then I can write code that’s mad.

And here’s the abstract for the second:

In June 2000, Larry Wall announced a new four-month Open Source development effort: the reinvention of Perl. In this keynote, Damian Conway will unfold the twisting and sordid tale of what happened over the next ten years of the project, highlighting the sexy new language that has been created, the extreme violence that was sometimes necessary to make it happen, and the dozen or so harsh-but-invaluable lessons that the development team learned along the way.

Donations, Please!

Richard Dice has been organizing Damian’s presentations in Toronto for the past dozen or so years (thanks, dude!), and he’s always kept them free-as-in-beer. But while Damian is easy, he isn’t cheap! Things like a plane ticket, roughly a week of hotel rooms, and meals and other incidentals while he is here cost money. If you’d like to help out, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up with Richard.

And Finally, a Little Bad Touch…

Here’s a little Damian in action at OSCON 2011’s “Ignite” presentation, in which he does more damage to The Bloodhound Gang’s The Bad Touch than I ever did on accordion:

GitHub’s been on a hiring streak lately, first with fellow ex-Shopifolk Joshua Wehner, and now with Reg Braithwaite (and a lot of other folks, but I don’t know much about them). Reg is often called upon to explain tricky concepts, so his new position on the documentation team, where he’ll be improving GitHub’s Help, is going to be a blessing to a lot of programmers out there. Congrats, Reg!