What happens when Toronto geeks decide to throw a party on short notice to raise money for the local food bank, using Twitter to put forth the initial idea and as a way to publicize the event? HoHoTO happens, and 600 people show up and over CAD$20,000 gets raised!
To find out more, go read my article on the HoHoTO on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
I had my first look at the next version of Windows – Windows 7 – at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in October, a week after I joined the company. By the powers vested in me as a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, I got my paws on an installer for a recent beta edition and a spare machine – a Dell Latitude D830 with a 2GHz Core Duo processor and 4GB RAM — on which to take the new operating system for a test run.
The installation of the Windows 7 beta went considerably better than my experience installing the Windows Vista beta back in 2006: this time, it worked.
Over the next little while, I’m going to spend some time – perhaps a day a week – doing actual daily work on the Windows 7 machine in order to really experience it. It’ll also give me a chance to try out some “developing for Windows 7” example code. I’ll post my observations here on Global Nerdy – at least as much as the non-disclosure rules allow.
Thinking of doing some baking for someone with a Wii? How about cookies shaped like “Rabbids”?
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Hot on the heels of the release of Python 3.0 (a.k.a. “Python 3000”) comes the release of IronPython 2.0, the .NET implementation of the Python programming language. Some quick facts about IronPython:
If you want to get your paws on IronPython 2.0, head on over to its page on Microsoft’s CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site, where you can download the IronPython 2.0 installer and code samples.
I’ll be posting IronPython tutorials and sample code…watch this space!
I haven’t been posting much this week because I’ve been pouring heart, soul and brain cells into my first presentation at a Microsoft conference – TechDays 2008 in Calgary — which happens at 1 p.m. Mountain Time today. My regular posting should resume tomorrow or Friday at the latest.
The Empire’s still got some money to throw around, so every speaker gets two official button-down dress shirts with logos, one for each day of the conference. I have to admit I never thought I’d seen the day when I’d be wearing one of these:
My friend and co-worker John Bristowe keeps singing the “Damien” choir music from the The Omen every time I run into him with this shirt on.
Gojko Adzic points to this photo taken at QCon San Francisco 2008 by John Grae. It’s a slide featuring YAGNI, the Development Assistant, the programmer’s answer to “Clippit”, a.k.a. “Clippy”:
Photo by John Grae.
Click the photo to see its Flickr page.
YAGNI, short for “You Aren’t Gonna Need It” is a development maxim that suggests to programmers that they shouldn’t add features or functionality to applications that aren’t necessary at the moment, but might be in the future. YAGNI has the DRY (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”) Principle has a cousin and among its ancestors are Occam’s Razor and the KISS Principle (as in “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and not “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night (and Party Every Day”).
YAGNI, the Development Assistant comes from Bunk and Rambling, a blog by Darren Smith, where he put it forth as an IDE feature request back in May 2006, when he wrote:
While pair programming helps you to write high quality code in an efficient manner there are times that a pair of programmers will end up going off on a tangent and working on something that ultimately ends up not being necessary. To counter the unbridled enthusiasm that usually causes this to occur I give you Yagni, the Development Assistant.
YAGNI is meant for developers who believe strongly in test-driven development, so here’s how it would hypothetically pop up if you tried to create a class and started entering non-test methods first:
I’ll leave it to other people to argue over whether or not you always have to have unit tests.
Here’s another notice from YAGNI:
And finally, what I feel is YAGNI’s most important message – a warning that you’re in danger of embarking on a long, “let’s reinvent the wheel” project:
Since YAGNI’s not likely to appear in any IDE soon, you, your pair programming partner or whoever does code reviews with you will have to play its role for the foreseeable future.
If there’s an Andre 3000 and a Python 3000,
why not a Guido 3000?
(This photo originally appeared in this entry.)
Python 3000, or Python 3.0 as it’s officially known, is out! If you want to get your paws on it right now, here’s its download page.
Python BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) and Google employee (Python’s his “50% project”) Guido van Rossum makes it very clear in What’s New in Python 3.0 that this is the first-ever intentionally backwards-incompatible Python and features more changes that in a typical Python release. Although this is the sort of thing that usually invites screams from anguished developers, I’m cool with it; although if found Python to be a very pleasurable language to work in, there’s a fair bit of junk that’s accumulated as both the language and the programming scene have evolved. Guido says: “after digesting the changes, you’ll find that Python really hasn’t changed all that much – by and large, we’re mostly fixing well-known annoyances and warts, and removing a lot of old cruft.” Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility to move forward.
I’m hoping to noodle with Python 3000 during the Christmas downtime, but if Python is your bread and butter, I suggest you start looking at the new version ASAP. They’re changes a-plenty that you might stumble on, but as Andre 3000 might say, “It’s all hood.”