Cracked asked its readers to show them what the world would look like if everything in it was made by The Empire. Of the images they submitted. the one below is my favourite – I’ve joked in front of audiences that we make too many versions of Windows and am anxiously awaiting the release of Windows 7 Tartar Control Edition:
What, no “Can of Peas Ultimate” and “Can of Peas Team System”?
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
If you’re in Quebec City, we’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code tomorrow! IT Pro Advisor Pierre Roman provides the details below:
Salut tout le monde,
Rick Claus, Joël Quimper et moi-même serons au Cosmos sur Grande Allée à Québec demain matin de 9:00am a 11 :30am pour un « Coffee & Code ».
Le concept du « Coffee & Code » est de promouvoir les connections avec la communauté des professionnels en Informatique. Ce, à l’aide d’un endroit public, d’une bonne tasse de café et d’un environnent agréable. Nous nous installerons dans l’entrée et nous serons disponible pour jaser de sujets quelconques.
Donc, si tu es intéressé, tu as le temps pour une pause, viens nous voir… Il me fera plaisir de te payer un café.
Les “Coffee & Code” étaient originalement réservés aux développeurs mais nous nous sommes rendus à l’évidence que le concept est bon et les résultats sont remarquables et c’est maintenant ouvert à tous. Tu veras bien.
A demain!
Here’s a presentation that’s worth watching, regardless of what operating system you use: it’s Bryan Lunduke’s presentation from Linux Fest Northwest – a Linux conference for “Rebel Scum” deep in the heart of The Empire — and it’s titled Linux Sucks, in which he talks about what needs to be fixed in desktop Linux. His Linux laptop helped prove the point at the beginning of the presentation by stubbornly refusing to display anything on the projector and requiring some guy to noodle with the X configs:
(By the bye, hooking up multiple monitors to a Windows 7 machine is dirt easy. The Windows-P key combo toggles between main monitor-only, other monitor-only, mirrored and “extend desktop” modes. The “Linux laptops and projectors” problem is a common one; I remember gently poking presenters at CUSEC trying to get their Linux laptops to display on the projector with “If you were running Win 7, you’d be done by now.”)
I think that this is an important presentation for developers to watch, whether they develop for Windows or the Esteemed Competition, because all operating systems suck, and it’s our job as developers to make them suck less. Linux on the desktop has all sorts of problems because it’s a free-for-all run but a rag-tag fleet of development shops, but Windows has its own problems stemming from all sorts of things, such as having to maintain some kind of backward compatibility for the sake of enterprise installations at Fortune 500 companies.
The lesson to take from this video should be that we should forget the rah-rah boosterism, take a good hard look at the platforms for which we build, and do what we can to make them better. The best platform advocacy is to make the platform suck less.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
When I got into web development, I considered myself a latecomer to the game, and that was in 1999. In the five years I’d been working professionally as a developer, my apps were strictly desktop – multimedia CD-ROM stuff done in Director (then a product of Macromedia) and business productivity apps written in pre-.NET VB and Java-a-la-JBuilder.
The company with whom I’d landed a contract had a contrarian tech lead. It seemed that the web app world was building their stuff on Linux, Perl and MySQL, and this guy was all about BSD, Python and PostgreSQL. In 1999 terms, he was a freak even amongst the freaks.
I had a pretty full schedule that summer, followed by a one-week vacation at Burning Man, followed by the start of my contract at this new company. The tech lead wanted me to be ready to do some coding on my first day in, so I brought a copy of O’Reilly’s Learning Python along with my laptop to Black Rock Desert, hoping to squeeze in some hacking time at the big desert bacchanal. Luckily, Burning Man is pretty mellow during the day, and in an additional stroke of luck, the neighbouring camp was sharing AC power from their “eggbeater” windmill. I learned Python by writing sample apps in an extremely distracting environment, and because of that, I fell quite in love with the language. Any language that you can learn while naked people playing the tuba on unicycles are circling you has to be a good one.
That’s why I’m glad to see that implementations like IronPython exist, and that they tie into things like the .NET framework and Silverlight. IronPython’s performance is quite close to standard Python, and I use it along with IronRuby as my scripting language for automating tasks and doing little “housekeeping” things on my systems. I’m not using IronPython to the degree that Michael Foord is – he’s using it for full-on .NET applications instead of C# or VB! Scott Hanselman talks with him about working with IronPython as his primary development language in the latest edition of his Hanselminutes podcast.
As an added bonus, the blog entry for the podcast has a special limited-time coupon code that will save you 40% off the price of Manning Publications’ IronPython in Action (which Foord co-wrote), and the discount applies to both the dead-tree and PDF versions of the book. At 40% off, the PDF version is a mere USD$16.50 (CAD$20.14 at the time of this writing).
I’ll admit it: I like typing out the phrase “assless chaps”. Here are a couple more photos of me showing off said assless chaps in the speaker’s room at Saturday’s Toronto Code Camp (which I wrote about in this post).
Here I am holding up the assless chaps prior to donning them:
…and here I am modelling them for the nerd paparazzi:
If you’re near Toronto’s downtown Chinatown area, drop by Sky Dragon restaurant (top floor of Dragon City mall on the southwest corner of Spadina and Dundas) for Developer Lunch today! Kristan “Krispy” Uccelo has been organizing this series of lunches for the past year as a way for local developers to get together and make connections over a tasty dim sum lunch. I’ll be there, along with the other programmers, from 12:00 noon to 1:30 p.m.. If you don’t spot an obvious-looking table of nerds, ask the hosts for the back room; that’s where we’ll be.
Creative Commons photo by 416style.
If you’re in the Ottawa area and want to sharpen your .NET development skills and meet other .NET developers, you’ll want to come to the Ottawa Code Camp taking this place this Saturday at Algonquin College. The Code Camp will feature three tracks, spanning twelve sessions in the agenda:
For details about the sessions and when they’ll take place, see Ottawa Code Camp’s Sessions and Agenda pages.
Like the other Code Camps, the Ottawa Code Camp is an event organized by and for the developer community, and registration is free – all you have to do is sign up to attend. Whether you’re an experienced .NET developer or just curious about Microsoft’s developer tools and tech, you should be at Ottawa Code Camp!
