For your convenience and weekend viewing, here are videos for the recent Apple iPhone 5, Amazon Kindle Family and Nokia Lumia 920 announcements, all in one place. Enjoy!
Last night, I got this message from RT Lechow via Facebook:
“I no tech lunch” over the past few months was because I decided to go on summer vacation. Now that summer vacation’s over and I’m back at work making mobile software, it’s time to revive the monthly tech lunch. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the return of…
…the Toronto Techie Dim Sum! Here are the details:
- Where:Sky Dragon restaurant, on the top floor of Dragon City mall (southwest corner of Dundas and Spadina).
- When: Wednesday, September 19th, from noon until about 1:30 p.m.. Sometimes we get really deep into a conversational topic.
- How much: We split the bill evenly, and no matter how much we’ve managed to gorge ourselves, I’ve never seen it go higher that $12 a person.
- Why: Because I love doing the community-building thing and want to catch up with all of you.
As always, this is just a lunch gathering of Toronto-area people who either work in tech, hang out with people who work in tech, or who just simply like tech and techies. There’s no agenda, no set topics, no presentations – just good people, good conversation and good (and inexpensive) food.
Once again, you don’t have to be a developer to attend! If you take part in the activity of writing software, building web sites or cobbling together technologies, or if you just like hanging out with the very nice people who comprise Toronto’s active and vibrant tech scene, you’re more than welcome to join us for lunch!
If you’re on Facebook and want to join us for lunch, please visit the event’s Facebook page and RSVP.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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What the iPhone 20 Might Look Like
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Meanwhile, at Microsoft…
…they’re holding the Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Eastern/UTC-4 today, Wednesday, September 12th, 2012.
That’s right: they’re holding it at about the same time as the iPhone 5 keynote scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. Eastern/UTC-4. There’s a fine line between chutzpah and masochism, and the folks at Redmond are downing a 40 of malt liquor and driving a Big Wheel all over it.
Microsoft announced the date for this event before Apple announced the date for theirs. Still, the Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch is an online event (not counting the “studio audience”) and could’ve easily been moved. I suppose that Microsoft weighed their options and thought “either we move the event and tacitly admit that Apple is now controlling our schedule or we keep the date and hope that our audience cares more about developer tools than the new iPhone and iOS and prefer a live-streamed video of our launch over liveblogs of the Apple event”.
The silver lining in the double-booking is that the iPhone event is drawing away enough people to guarantee that the video feed of the Visual Studio launch’s streaming video is smooth as silk.
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Target Market Acquired!
This photo reminds of a time when I was working at Microsoft and rather dismayed that the big Indigo bookstore at the Eaton Centre filed all the Windows 7 books under “Computing for Seniors” and all the iOS books under “New and Hot”.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
If you’re like me and have finally decided to see what all the Node.js fuss is all about, The Node Beginner Book by Manuel Kiessling is a great jumping-off point. In a set of programming exercises that take up barely half an afternoon (and that includes doing some deliberately slow reading and additional noodling with the code), the book provides a quick and easy introduction to building a simple web app with Node. It can’t possibly hope to cover everything with 69 pages of actual text, but if you’re reasonably competent with JavaScript and have at least a little web programming experience, you’ll find this book a pleasant, fun and quick introduction.
The Node Beginner Book is licenced under Creative Commons and is available to read free-as-in-beer online. If you’d like the book in an ereader format, it’s available in a nice bundle with Hands-On Node.js by Pedro Teixeira — an introduction to Node.js and an API reference — for as little as $9.99. You set the price (the minimum is $9.99), and you get both books in PDF, .epub and .mobi formats. Even though my finances have been drained by almost half a year’s funemployment, I decided to support the authors and send ten bucks their way. So far, it’s proven to be money well spent.
Links
- The Node Beginner Book by Manuel Kiessling
- Hands-On Node.js by Pedro Teixeira
- The Node Beginner Book / Hands-On Node.js Bundle
- Reviews of The Node Beginner Book:
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Shit Apple Fanatics Say
Scott Rose does a wonderful job playing a perfectly face-punchable Apple fanboy stereotype in this video, Shit Apple Fanatics Say, Part 1. Some of my favourite lines are:
- “You get what you pay for!” (Actually quite true, as proven by a few gadgets I have, including a crappy Android tablet I bought at a charity auction.)
- “Nobody needs Flash!”
- “Nobody needs a Blu-Ray drive!”
- “No, they love working eighteen-hour days. It’s part of their culture.“
- “Nobody needs to add RAM!”
- “Nobody needs removable batteries!”
- “Gestures! Gestures! GESTURES!”
- “Just stick with [iTools | .Mac | MobileMe | iCloud]; Apple’s gonna fix it.”