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FailCamp: One Week Away!

FailCamp poster, featuring Sean Connery in his role as "Zed" from "Zardoz"

If you were at last year’s FailCamp, you might remember the best story of FAIL of the evening, which involved warming up some “body lube” in the microwave oven for a little too long, after which hilarity ensued.

Here’s how Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, the originators of FailCamp, describe their vision of the event:

We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

FailCamp returns next Thursday, July 9th and once again, it’s the warm-up act for Unspace’s Ruby programmer conference (going by the name “FutureRuby” this year), which takes place on the weekend of July 10th through 12th. Just like last year, FailCamp will once again provide a forum for you to share your greatest and most pathetic stories of FAIL, and hopefully how that failure taught you some important lessons and made you a better, wiser, more-careful-with-the-lube person.

joey_presenting_at_failcamp_1Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.

Once again, I will be hosting FailCamp. I’ll start the evening with a couple of stories of failure, including a couple of Keyboard Cat-worthy ones of my own, after which I’ll open up the floor to you, the audience, to share your own stories of FAIL. Once we’re all thoroughly embarrassed, DJ Barbi will spin the wheels of steel and we’ll dance our shame away.

There are some tickets left as of this writing:

  • For FutureRuby attendees, there are 4 free tickets to FailCamp remaining.
  • For those of you who are not attending FutureRuby but would like to catch FailCamp, there are 19 “Pay What You Can” tickets left.

If you want ‘em, go to the FailCamp registration page and get them before they disappear!

joey_presenting_at_failcamp_2My one-slide summary of how things went terribly wrong in the movie Deliverance
(The link leads to the “Squeal like a pig” scene from the movie – you might not want to watch at work).

FailCamp will take place at the Queen City Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands (Algonquin Island, to be precise). Your printed ticket stub is good for a free ferry ride from the Toronto docks to the Yacht Club, where we’ll have some finger food, the Yacht club’s kitchen and cash bar will be open, and the evening should be full of surprises.

What better way to close an article about FailCamp than the Keyboard Cat video starring “Pinky, Pet of the Week”?

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Silverlight on the Silver Screen: One Week Away!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

You’ve got to hand it to ObjectSharp: when they do a parody, they pull out all the stops:

"Silverlight on the Silver Screen" "Star Wars" parody poster

Next Thursday, June 9th – exactly one week from today — ObjectSharp will host Silverlight on the Silver Screen, a presentation on the upcoming revision of Silverlight, Silverlight 3, along with Expression Blend, SketchFlow, Windows 7’s touch technology, Microsoft Office SharePoint System (MOSS), Visual Studio 2010 and Team System. They’ll cover all sorts of things, including:

  • How to design user interactions with SketchFlow
  • Integrating rich applications using SharePoint and Visual Studio Team System
  • Building rich line-of-business applications with Silverlight and .NET RIA Services
  • Tying together rich media and advertising with the Microsoft platform
  • Touch tech with Windows 7 and WPF

There’ll be something for you, no matter which of the “Three Ds” – designer, developer or decision-maker – you are!

Silverlight on the Silver Screen will take place at the Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond Street West, just west of  John) on Thursday, July 9th from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m..

Registration is free – all you have to do is visit the Silverlight on the Silver Screen registration page to sign up. I’ll see you there!

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31 Days of Silverlight

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

July 2009 calendar showing each date as a Silverlight logo

31 Days of SIlverlight is a series of blog posts posted through the month of July by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg (yes, the same guy behind the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever, which was covered in the previous post).

For each day in July 2009, Jeff will post a fairly in-depth article on his blog covering some aspect of Silverlight development. He says that they’ll be “100- to 300-level in difficulty” (introductory to upper-intermediate) and will provide enough information for someone new to Silverlight could start from scratch building the examples.

So far, he’s posted two articles, both with plenty of examples and downloadable source code:

  1. Mouse Events in Silverlight
  2. Silverlight Screen Transitions

These first two articles are packed with information; with them alone, a Silverlight newbie should be able to build a HyperCard-like application or “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style game without much trouble. At this rate, by the time July is over, there’ll be enough material published in the series to make a decent book or course. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of 31 Days of Silverlight!

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The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Montage of images from the "Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever" site

The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever is a new puzzle site aimed at programmers in the same vein as web-based puzzle challenges such as notpron, Rankk and Python Challenge. Created by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg, “TDPE” consists of a sequence of 30 web pages, each one with a puzzle that when solved will take you to the next one. Each puzzle provides the necessary hints to solve it, although some of the hints are tucked away in not-so-obvious places. Some puzzles can be solved with a little programming skill, some require a little knowledge of computer programming theory (although a little Binging will do) and some can be solved with a little logic and lateral thinking.

Jeff has offered a prize to the first fifteen people who complete the The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever (only those who complete it will know how to prove it). Judging from the Twitter account for “TDPE” and tweets with the #TDPE hashtag, not all the prizes have been claimed yet.

I managed to power through the first 29 puzzles while watching Ghostbusters on TV yesterday, but the very last one has me stumped. As others who’ve been flummoxed by this problem have said on Twitter, I’m sure I’m overthinking it.

Can you beat the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever? I’m sure you can, but you might want to do it after work. Let me know how you’re doing in the comments!

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Happy Canada Day!

Canadian flagCreative Commons picture courtesy of Rene Erhardt.

Happy Canada Day! Have a safe and fun holiday, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

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Guelph Coffee and Code Tonight!

Small glass coffee cup

There’s a Guelph Coffee and Code taking place tonight at the Albion Hotel. Cory Fowler has the details at the Coffee and Code blog.

[Creative Commons photo courtesy of “macinate”.]

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Ottawa IT Community Awards Night Tonight

Ottawa IT Community logoThe Ottawa IT Community Awards Night takes place tonight (Tuesday, June 30th), and if you want to attend, you’ve got until 4 p.m. to register!

It’s hosted by these four groups:

The event will honour the partners and members of the groups who helped make 2008/2009 another great season for developers, IT pros and DBAs. It’ll have free food, some great competition and draws for prizes,

It takes place at the Yuk Yuk’s in downtown Ottawa (292 Elgin Street, under Hooley’s) and runs from 6:00 p.m. until about 9:00 p.m.. If you’d like to attend, you need to register.