Here’s a laptop case designed by designer Rainer Spehl that should work for the techie who wants to mix a little F. Scott Fitzgerald with his William Gibson. Designed for the 15” MacBook Pro, it’s made of wood and features a leather lining and a magnetic latch. I couldn’t find a price anywhere, but it’s probably safe to assume it’s going to be pricey.
Just as Boy Scouts earn merit badges for accomplishments in some area of study, now we geeky types can earn Nerd Merit Badges for nerdy accomplishments. The first in the series is now available: it’s “Open Source Contributor”, pictured below:
(In case you don’t recognize the image on the badge, it’s the “Octocat”, the mascot for the GitHub source code repository service.)
The badges sell for USD$3.99 and I assume that they’re working on the honour system – that is, the assumption that you’ll only order the badges you’ve earned. More badges are on the way; the best way to stay informed is to follow them on Twitter.
This story originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.
CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, takes place next week in Montreal, from Thursday, January 22nd through Saturday, January 24th. It’s the only software development conference I’m aware of that’s specifically aimed at students, and like the best conferences I’ve attended, it’s put together by computer science and software engineering students who are passionate about software.
They’ve managed to snag some big names to speak; past guests include Tim Bray, Dave “Pragmatic Programmer” Thomas, Kent “Extreme Programming” Beck, Zed Shaw, Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood and Kathy “Creating Passionate Users” Sierra. This year, they’ve got an interesting set of speakers, including Leah Culver, former lead developer of Pownce and now working at Six Apart, and Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation.
Here’s the abstract for my presentation, which takes place on Friday at 4:30:
Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist’s Story
You’ll spend anywhere from a third to half (or more) of your waking life at work, so why not enjoy it? That’s the philosophy of Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joey deVilla, who’s had fun while paying the rent. He’ll talk about his career path, which includes coding in cafes, getting hired through your blog, learning Python at Burning Man, messy office romances, go-go dancing, leading an office coup against his manager, interviewing at a porn company and using his accordion to make a Microsoft Vice President run away in fear. There will be stories, career advice and yes, a rock and roll accordion number or two.
I’ll be flying into Montreal Thursday afternoon, so the first event I’ll be able to catch is the pub night at BENELUX at 9 that evening. If you’re attending – and it’s dirt cheap at the early-bird price of CAD$60 – I’d love to meet you! As the guy carrying a red accordion, I’ll be quite easy to spot, and I’d be more than happy to chat.
This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.
Next week’s a travel week for me and a fair number of the Developer & Platform Evangelism team. On Wednesday, January 21st and Thursday, January 22nd, we’ll be at TechDays Canada Vancouver, the last leg of our cross-Canada tour where we show Microsoft developers how to best make use of today’s Microsoft tech and development tools. I myself will be do the Deep Dive into ASP.NET AJAX presentation (I’ll post a little more about this tomorrow) on Wednesday, and on Thursday, I fly to…
…Montreal, where I’ll be attending CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, where I’ll be giving a presentation titled Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist’s Story. CUSEC runs from Thursday, January 22nd through Saturday, January 24th. Once again, I’ll post a little more about this presentation tomorrow.
If you’d like to catch up with me at either of these cities, get in touch with me! Send me an email, message me at Twitter, or give me a ring on my mobile (416-948-6447). I’ll be staying in Vancouver at the Fairmont Waterfront on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and in Montreal at the Omni Mont-Royal (the conference hotel) from Thursday through Saturday nights.
[Vancouver Convention Centre photo by Footloosiety; Montreal skyline photo by Anirudh Koul. Both photos are licensed for reuse, commercial use and remixing under Creative Commons.]
Believe it or not, the photo below hasn’t been Photoshopped:
The guy who took the photo says:
The cheap CMOS sensor of an iPhone does not expose the whole thing at once, it scans from left to right. If you take a picture of something that moves very fast (like an airplane prop) you can get some crazy pictures out of it since each column represents a slightly different time.
This oddball-but-cool effect is reminiscent of some of the distortions you see with scanner photography (for some examples, see this page).
Maybe it’s time to pull out those camera phones and start snapping pics of oscillating or rotating objects!
This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.
The Device/Desktop Opportunity got a number of comments, both in the “Comments” section and sent directly to me via email. First, I’d like to say “please keep those comments coming!” One of my intentions was to start some discussion.
I got a number of comments whose essence was “Why don’t the users simply use a photo editing tool and bring their photos down to the right size and DPI themselves, then copy them to the device?” To a geek, this suggestion sounds very sensible; in fact, I did just that to confirm what I thought the application that came with the device did.
The problem is that most users don’t see it that way. A commenter named Joshua summed it up nicely when he wrote:
I think we geeks, being somewhat more familiar with the tools than the problems, find it relatively easy to tweak an existing tool to do the job, than to “suffer” with Yet Another Not-Quite-Adequate Problem-X-Solving Tool.
Conversely, non-geek users don’t want to have to be bothered with all that hoo-hah. They see the task as moving the pictures from their camera or computer to the device. Do they really have to learn about some other program and fiddle with their photos to do just that? Weren’t computers supposed to make their lives easier?
This isn’t laziness or pride in ignorance on the part of non-geeks. It’s just that they have different interests and priorities than we developers do. To put yourself in their shoes, think of how most of us would make spaghetti: probably with store-bought dried pasta, canned sauce and pre-grated cheese. Now imaging how chef Gordon Ramsay would scream at you in a stream of put-downs and curse words for doing so. In his mind, he’s justified; in your mind, he’s being an elitist jerk who just doesn’t get the fact that you just want some spaghetti.
In the same comment, Joshua also talked about an interesting idea: putting the necessary desktop/device interface software right on the device. He wrote that the Flip Mino camcorder (which looks like a pretty fun device; Toronto-based photoblogger Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of it) comes with the necessary software for Windows and Mac stored within it.
Last week, while having a late-night post-party snack with a couple of Toronto-based tech entrepreneurs — Facebook Cookbook author Jay Goldman and CommandN co-host Will Pate – we got to talking about sites that were successful in spite of their “pretty crappy” visual design. The site that got the discussion rolling was the dating site and Canadian ASP.NET success story Plenty of Fish (for a good general intro, see this New York Times article). From there, a number of examples came up, including Craigslist and a popular IIS-based site that lets you search for and book cheap airfare and travel packages. These sites all do their jobs quite well, but if you showed them to a web designer, you’d see a conniption fit within seconds.
“Travel sites all search the same data,” said Jay, “and many of them are running on the same back-end. They just use different design templates. Maybe people think that [the cheap-looking but successful travel site] gives you cheaper deals because they look cheap.”
He may have a point. Part of Craiglist’s charm is its stripped-down, not-even-trying-to-look-good design. Does that design send users the same subtle message in the same way that the no-frills “anti-design” of “big box” discount stores sends to their customers? It may be something to think about if you’re building a customer-facing site for a business whose main selling point is low prices or saving its customers money.
In the Coding Horror article If You Don’t Change the UI, Nobody Notices, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point: if you want users to notice changes you’ve made to the functionality or back end of an application, they should be mirrored by appropriate corresponding changes to the front end or user interface. Along the way, he points to a Raymond Chen article I’d never seen before. As much as I view Raymond with the highest esteem – he’s probably forgotten more about coding that I’ll ever learn — at a certain point in his article, I did a facepalm. Can you guess when that point was?
Even though this organization gives me a nice paycheque every two weeks for evangelizing:
…I still found today’s xkcd comic on the Windows 7 beta release funny:
Click the comic to see it on its original page.
The alt text for the comic does say "Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it’s quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all."
By the bye, don’t quote me on this but I hear tell that the next Ubuntu release will do nothing but show Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond forming a sexy “Eiffel Tower” (see this post for an explanation) with Linus Torvalds in the middle. I’m just sayin’.
