“In the past, Grand Theft Auto has been severely criticized for being too violent,” says Conan O’Brien. “Well, the new version — I got it yesterday and was playing with it — it’s been toned down a lot. I’m not sure it’s better…”

I got a number of books for free this past week:

• Head First PMP - When my friend Leigh Honeywell heard that I was taking a project management course later this month, she told me that she got this book for free at a conference and had no use for it. So she gave this book to me, and I’ll be reading it so that when the course comes around — it’s May 21st through 23rd — I’ll be at least familiar with the material.

And four books from Apress, courtesy of Julie Miller:

• Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More
• PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition
• Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP
• Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

I’ll be reading them this month and posting my reviews here in Global Nerdy. Watch this space!

Click the comic to see it at full size.

A couple of articles have already appeared in response to Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle. I do a quick review of them in this article. Read on for more…

Pictured below are two photos:

1. The mockup of an International Space Station module at Leicester’s National Space Centre, and
2. The reality — a photo taken a week ago aboard the actual International Space Station.

Click the photo to see it at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I think it’s a pretty apt visual metaphor for the difference between your application’s design and the actual implementation.

Screenshot from an example app written using the upcoming MVC franework for ASP.NET.
Ruby has Rails, Python has Django and Turbo Gears and PHP has Symfony, Cake and the Zend Framework. Where is the MVC framework for ASP.NET? Scott “ScottGu” Guthrie has an answer…
Two weeks ago I blogged about a new MVC (Model View Controller) [...]

Here’s a little graphic inspiration to help you with your customers:
Image courtesy of The Triumph of Bullshit.

Here’s something pointed out by a guy on Reddit, who took his cue from an entry in the French blog Zorgloob: take a look what happens when you enter sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy (as in French president Nicolas Sarkozy) into Google Translate and select a French-to-English translation:

Here’s some other input that yields interesting output:

sarkozy is [...]

Tim “Ongoing” Bray’s Take
Tim Bray posted a blog entry on what drives adoption of a language in which he included some tables such as the only below:

Flawed
Founders
Polished
Successors

Procedural
FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/1
C

Object-Oriented
C++
Java

Higher-Level
Perl, TCL
Python, Ruby

This table of his should inspire a monkey knife fight on a number of blogs:

Flawed
Founders
Polished
Successors

Web-Centric
WebObjects, ColdFusion, ASP.Net, Struts, etc.,
etc., etc., PHP
Rails

Here’s an interesting one. What [...]

You’ve probably heard of Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows. They’re bypassing the record industry, and you can buy it directly from them, either as an audio CD or as downloaded MP3s. For those of you who have downloaded or ripped the album, here’s the album art for your enhanced listening enjoyment!*
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi [...]

In Paul Graham’s latest essay — Why to Move to a Startup Hub (I don’t know why, but the title sounds a little “English as She is Spoke”, doesn’t it?) — he explains his reasons for stating that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley. This is in spite of the fact [...]

Click the photo to see the Flickr photoset.
For the curious, there’s a Flickr photoset with pics from Saturday’s “Furries vs. Klingons” bowling competition in Atlanta.
Someone at the National Review suggested that the event might be the death knell of Western Civilization, but it’s really no sillier than a great deal of the activities that the [...]

I live in Toronto, a city where a lot of movie filming takes place (recently, our Yonge Street has been standing in for New York’s Harlem in the upcoming Incredible Hulk movie). There’s always a movie shoot going on — you can tell by the pylons with the location company’s logo and the row of [...]

Seems Like Old Times
Back in December 2005, I wrote a blog article talking about the blog shooting war between Java and Ruby advocates that erupted over which approach was better: the one taken by Java with java.util.list or the one taken by Ruby with the Array class.
It’s interesting to see that nearly two years later, [...]

Creative Computing, November 1981
One bit of old computer literature that I’ve managed to hang onto over the years is the November 1981 issue of Creative Computing magazine, which billed itself as “The #1 magazine of computer applications and software” and was one of the first computer magazines on the market.

One of the stories in that [...]

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, the Rails Envy guys, have made their mark on the web programming community through their amusing videos in which they take Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” TV ad format and use it to poke fun at other programming languages and frameworks in the name of Ruby on Rails [...]

…you either kept a phone list, a Rolodex or if you were really on the cutting edge, you used one of these:
Click the image to see it at full size.Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Share your love for the Helvetica typeface with the Helvetica shirt! For the purist, there’s the version set in Helvetica:

Those of you who like challenging people or separating the typeface players from the wannabes might prefer the version in Arial:

Into making ironic statements via t-shirts? The Cooper Black version is the one for you:

And if [...]

I’m experiencing some server issues with my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century right now. I’m currently in the process of trying to get a server upgrade and hope to have the ol’ blog up and running soon.

I had my first real-life encounter with the OLPC XO at the CommandN 100th episode party last Thursday. Mike Fletcher, whom I consider to be Toronto’s Python go-to guy, is contributing to the OLPC effort and brought the his to the party.
Its look is reminiscent of my beloved first Apple laptop, the original “clamshell” iBook, [...]