Global Nerdy

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!

Once again, I’m on vacation — with the same lovely lady as last time, even! — and will return with regular postings on Monday, July 8th.

Here’s a little promo that Pete Ashton found in the Yellow Pages. It explains two ways to get their app: via QR code or typing in an URL. Guess which one is simpler:

Click the photo to see the full-size original.

Pete calls it “the most damning piece of anti-QR code copy ever”, and I think he’s got a point. At the very least, you shouldn’t use a QR code when a simple, easy-to-remember URL is available.

Again, I remind you:

It’s funny because it’s true:

Found via Glenn Cameron.

Apple’s been working hard on iOS 7 and its developer tools over the past little while, and the result is a couple of new versions of their beta software:

• iOS 7 Beta 2, which includes bug fixes and iPad support, and
• Xcode 5 Developer Preview 2: the latest edition of the upcoming version of Xcode, Apple’s IDE.

In this article, we’ll show you how to get both.

Getting iOS 7 Beta 2 the Easy Way (if it’s already on your iPhone / iPod Touch)

If you have the first beta on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can get it the easy way: the built-in Software Update. Fire up Settings, choose General, and then choose Software Update. You should see a screen that looks like this:

Tap the Download and Install button to do just that, and follow the screen prompts.

Getting iOS 7 Beta 2 the Hard Way (if your iPhone / iPod Touch doesn’t have iOS 7 beta on it, or if you’re installing on an iPad)

Getting the Package

Point your browser at the iOS Dev Center. If you’re properly registered in the iOS Developer Program, you should have the options of looking at resources for iOS 6.1 and iOS 7. Naturally, you should select iOS 7 SDK beta, after which the page should look like the screen capture below:

You can click on the Downloads link under the Resources for iOS 7 beta heading, or simply scroll down. Either way, you’ll end up in the same place, where you’ll see this:

Download the one that’s appropriate for your iDevice. I’ve included direct links to the available packages below:

• iPad (4th generation Model A1458)
• iPad (4th generation Model A1459)
• iPad (4th generation Model A1460)
• iPad mini (Model A1432)
• iPad mini (Model A1454)
• iPad mini (Model A1455)
• iPad Wi-Fi (3rd generation)
• iPad Wi-Fi + Cellular (model for ATT)
• iPad Wi-Fi + Cellular (model for Verizon)
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi (Rev A)
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G (GSM)
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G (CDMA)
• iPhone 5 (Model A1428)
• iPhone 5 (Model A1429)
• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4 (GSM Rev A)
• iPhone 4 (GSM)
• iPhone 4 (CDMA)
• iPod touch (5th generation)

Installing the Package

The file that you’re downloading is a disk image. Double-click it to mount the image. You should see one file that looks something like this:

Connect your iDevice via USB to your Mac and start up iTunes. Let the sync complete. Click the iPhone or iPad button near the upper right-hand corner of the iTunes window:

The iTunes window should look something like this:

If you haven’t done so already, back up your iPhone.

And now, the important part of the process. I’m going to spell this out in large text:

While holding down the option or alt key on your keyboard, click the Restore iPhone… button. This allows you to choose a specific file to use when restoring your iPhone or iPod Touch. Choose the .ipsw file contained within the disk image you just mounted.

(That’s how you get iOS 7 on your iPhone or iPod Touch at this early point in the game: you’re restoring it from an image that has iOS 7 on it.)

Once you’ve done that, the uploading and installing process will take about 10 to 15 minutes. Your iPhone or iPod Touch will reboot once or twice during this time.

Getting Xcode 5 Developer Preview 2 and the iOS 7 Beta 2 SDK

If you want to develop for iOS 7 Beta 2, you’ll need the latest version of Xcode 5 and the iOS 7 Beta 2 SDK. Here’s how you get it:

Point your browser at the iOS Dev Center. If you’re properly registered in the iOS Developer Program, you should have the options of looking at resources for iOS 6.1 and iOS 7. Naturally, you should select iOS 7 SDK beta, after which the page should look like the screen capture below:

You can click on the Downloads link under the Resources for iOS 7 beta heading, or simply scroll down. Either way, you’ll end up in the same place, where you’ll see this:

Click the Xcode 5 and iOS 7 SDK beta 2 link to start the download. It’s a .dmg file that’s about 1.7 GB in size, and when double-clicked, mounts a disk image and opens the window shown in the screen capture below:

It’s a straight-forward drag-the-app-to-the-Applications-folder-alias install, and you’re done!