Global Nerdy

Creative Commons photo by Christopher Sessums. Click to see the original.

There’s no time like holiday downtime to go noodle with technologies you’ve been meaning to try out. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break from all the parties, family gatherings and the madness and crowds of Boxing-Day-and-beyond shopping. At the same time, I’m not a fan of completely vegging out in front of the TV. My own downtime plans – asides from catching up on some reading (I’m currently digging the the Oishinbo series of cooking manga) and playing the new Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty – include doing some noodling with Azure.

On the whole, Azure is pretty simple to use. As far as coding is concerned, there really aren’t too many differences between having your application run on Azure and having it run on a regular server. Naturally, setup and deployment are a little different, and the Azure team have worked hard on making it as simple as possible, and the latest Azure portal UI is the result. Still, it’s a new technology and new turf for a lot of people, and it’s easy to get lost.

If you’re working with Azure and find yourself “lost in the cloud”, we can help! Are you stuck at some point in the deployment process? Having trouble setting up a SQL Azure database? Don’t know where to start? We can help – email us at cdnazure@microsoft.com and we’ll help you get up and running!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

There’s a Coffee and Code in Calgary on Thursday, December 16th! We’ll be at the Second Cup at 607 8th Avenue SW from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.:

Join us and talk about Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, the industry in general or anything else you like!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Humble Indie Bundle 2 is the second edition of a collection of indie games that run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Last year, the Humble Indie Bundle features World of Goo and other games; this year, the Humble Indie Bundle contains these DRM-free games:

• Braid
• Cortex Command
• Machinarium
• Osmos
• Revenge of the Titans (a new title, launching exclusively inside the bundle)

Purchased separately, these games would sell for a total of USD$85, but for a limited time, you get to set the price and determine where the money goes! That’s right, you determine how much you spend, and how you divide the money among the developers of the games, the EFF and the Child’s Play charity. Great games for the holidays for great causes!

For more, check out the Humble Indie Bundle 2 trailer:

Get Humble Indie Bundle 2 and play some great indie games (and perhaps even get some inspiration for your own Windows Phone 7 games)!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In case you missed Saturday’s AzureFest – ObjectSharp’s Windows Azure deployment clinic held at Microsoft Canada HQ – you’re in luck. ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin and Cory Fowler have put together a set of videos that go through what they covered on Saturday, so you too can have all that AzureFesty goodness in the comfort of your own office, home or café.

In the current set of videos, they cover:

1. Signing up for the introductory Windows Azure Offer
2. Deploying a web application package to Azure via the Azure Portal
3. Cleaning up after yourself and tearing down an existing Azure web deployment

They’ll be posting a set of videos shortly covering:

• Deploying a SQL database to Azure
• Installing Azure Tools for Visual Studio and the SDK
• Deploying ASP.NET applications to Azure from within Visual Studio

Do This Azure Deployment Exercise, Get $25 for Your Dev User Group!

Microsoft Canada is extending its special offer to members of user groups: deploy an app to Azure and send us a screenshot, and we’ll give $25 to the developer user group of your choice. There’s a set of step-by-step instructions on Barry’s blog.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Vincent Diamante. Click to see the original.

Worth reading: The New Yorker has a profile of Nintendo’s greatest asset, game creator and the man behind Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto.

An excerpt:

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs. It is also a prototype, an analogue, and an apology—an illuminating and propitious way to consider his games, or, for that matter, anyone else’s. It flatters a vacant-eyed kid with a joystick (to say nothing of the grownups who have bought it for him or sold it to him) to think of himself, spiritually, as an intrepid spelunker. The cave, certainly, is an occasion for easy irony: the man who has perhaps done more than any other person to entice generations of children to spend their playtime indoors, in front of a video screen, happened to develop his peculiar talent while playing outdoors, at whatever amusements or mischief he could muster. Of course, no one in the first wave of video-game designers could have learned the craft by playing video games, since video games didn’t exist until people like Miyamoto invented them. Still, there may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind.

Read the rest of the article here.

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