Over at Kevin Kelly’s blog, The Technium, there’s a video of an amusing interview on Conan O’Brien where comedian Louis CK talks about how we take today’s technology and the way it improves our lives for granted. Kelly describes it as "a cartoon version of a more serious argument that we become blind to progress".
This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.
Yesterday’s Toronto Coffee and Code took place at Le Gourmand, a Parisian-style cafe near the Queen West/Spadina intersection, at the nexus of Chinatown, the funky boutique district and “clubland”. The neighbourhood is peppered of warehouses converted to offices that house a lot of “creative class” and geek offices. The area is a prime location for a Coffee and Code, and you can bet that I’ll host some more there.
The Coffee and Code took place immediately after another geek gathering, the Toronto Developer Lunch, a gathering of local geeks and techies for dim sum and conversation. A number of us went straight from the lunch to Le Gourmand.
This time, a couple of my fellow Microsofties joined me: Rodney Buike, IT Pro Evangelist, and David Crow, Startup Evangelist. Rodney brought some “I’m a PC” stickers with him and handed them out; even one of the Mac owners in the group even asked for a sticker!
At peak, there were ten other people, making our grand total a lucky 13.
Among the many conversation topics:
- ASP.NET MVC. I’ve been working my way through the “alpha” edition of Apress’ book, Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, and have been enjoying it. We talked about the differences between ActiveRecord and LINQ to SQL – while ActiveRecord made ORM dirt-easy, LINQ to SQL offers some additional expressive power.
- David Crow and I talked about SQL Server, which is a bit of a change from our days in the open source world, where we’d typically use MySQL. SQL Server takes some getting used to after years of MySQL, but it’s a damned good database.
- The Lost and Damned, Grand Theft Auto IV’s downloadable new chapter, which may be the first game to feature male full frontal nudity.
- Windows Mobile development. I showed a dumb little “Hello World” application running in both the emulator on my machine and on my Palm Treo Pro. It’s part of my project to create a series of blog articles on writing apps for Windows Mobile phones and devices.
- Next week’s DemoCamp. David and I talked about the return of Toronto’s show-and-tell event for the tech community and the presentations that will take place.
- Visual Studio 2008. I fired it up and gave a quick demo.
- Le Gourmand’s chocolate chip cookies. The best in town!
- Game development in XNA and The Unfinished Swan. The Unifinished Swan is a game being prototyped in XNA and is an interesting combination of first-person shooter and painting game.
- Ruby, IronRuby, Python and IronPython.
- The upcoming Ignite Your Career webcast and EnergizeIT cross-country tour.
- The people we know who’ve been sent to the “body cavity search room” at U.S. Customs. The moral of the story: if you want to maintain anal sovereignty, be on your best behaviour at the border.
- Exploding office chairs. I think I’m going to work on the couch from now on.
- Hackers, which was recently on Space (Canada’s sci-fi channel).
- Johnny Mnemonic, another movie from around the same time as Hackers, and another movie that depicts the internet using a fly-by through a vector graphics cityscape.
- …and so many other conversation topics that were out of earshot.
All in all, the second Toronto Coffee and Code was a success. Stay tuned for an announcement of next week’s event!
This article originally appeared in Coffee and Code.
Coffee and Code is happening today, Tuesday, February 24th, from about 1:30 p.m to 5:30 p.m. at Le Gourmand, (152 Spadina, on the west side, south of Queen and north of Richmond).
It’s not the only geeky get-together in Toronto today:
- The Developer Lunch (the 10th so far!) takes place today at Noon at Sky Dragon restaurant, on the top floor of Dragon City mall, at the southwest corner of Spadina and Dundas.
- Later this evening, I’ll be at HacklabTO’s open lab, which takes place every Tuesday night. I’m bringing the Xbox 360 with me, although the Rock Band kit will have to wait for some other night.
- Also tonight is FacebookCamp 5, a.k.a. Facebook Developer Garage. It’s at MaRS and starts at starts at 6:30. Admission is free.
- UX Book Club Toronto is meeting tonight at C’est What at 6:30 p.m.. Tonight’s book: user experience guru Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
Even though we now have over a decade of e-commerce history under our belts, credit card processing is still one of the most stone-knives-and-bearskins primitive aspects of web app development. It seems like a lot of trouble and arcana just to move money from buyer to seller, an action that at its essence is as old as civilization itself.
Making matters worse for the developer is the sad state of documentation on credit card processing. It’s often unintelligible, written as if it was given as an unwanted task to an intern who couldn’t care less. Sometimes it’s outright wrong.
Enter the folks from the Freckle time-tracking web application: Amy Hoy, Thomas Fuchs and Dieter Komendera. They decided to do a good deed an create a guide titled Jump Start Credit Card Processing, a 15-page PDF guide that explains credit card processing in a manner that’s not just comprehensible, but fun to read. Here’s a sample page:
Among the things explained in this guide are:
- The credit card processing life cycle
- Key industry terms and actions
- JavaScript code for validating & detecting card types
- Code samples for the ActiveMerchant Ruby module
- A “getting started” checklist & account information
Best of all, this guide is available for download absolutely free of charge. If you’re new to the world of e-commerce apps and want to make sense of credit card processing, I strongly recommend Jump Start Credit Card Processing. Grab it from the Jump Start site.
Categories
EnergizeIT 2009: Coming Soon!
It’s been announced on Canadian Developer Connection, but I thought I’d mention it here: we folks at Microsoft Canada are gearing up for the 2009 edition of EnergizeIT, a cross-country tour where we’ll show off our upcoming tools, technology and platforms.
For starters, we’ll be showing off Windows 7. I’ve been running it on both my “developer” and “TPS report-writing” laptops for weeks now, and it’s been nothing but rock-solid: all my XP and Vista-based software, from development apps to games and even my synth software (I run Ableton Live and FL Studio, a.k.a. “FruityLoops”) work like a charm on it. We’ll show off the improved UI, additional capabilities that you can take advantage of as a developer, and even give you a chance to install the beta on your own machine.
EnergizeIT is also an opportunity to check out what we’ve got in the way of server tech, such as the revamped Windows Server 2008 R2 with its Hyper-V virtualization and Windows Azure, our cloud computing platform that scales to meet your needs and saves you maintenance headaches.
We’ll have five different kinds of events at our EnergizeIT stops:
- The Future of the Windows Platform: We’ll talk about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, all with this question in mind: “How is this going to make my life easier?”
- Energize IT: From the Client to the Cloud: Find out about our “Software + Services” vision, where you can access computing power anywhere, any time and on any device.
- Student Connection: Get Energized About the Future! Get a head start on your journey from academia to “the real world” as we show you some upcoming tech and talk about the opportunities that exist, even in current economic mess.
- Faculty Connection: Supporting Faculty to Support the Future: Find out about our programs to support people who teach technology and let us know what you need.
- Enthusiast Connection: Windows 7 Installfest: Take Windows 7 for a spin and ask us about our experiences with our up-and-coming desktop operating system.
In the past, we’ve only held EnergizeIT in Toronto, but this time, we’re borrowing a page from Aerosmith’s book and coming to your hometown. Starting in mid-March and running through until the end of April, we’ll be hitting these cities:
- Victoria
- Vancouver
- Edmonton
- Calgary
- Regina
- Saskatoon
- Winnipeg
- London
- Kitchener-Waterloo
- Mississauga
- Toronto
- Ottawa
- Montreal
- Halifax
- Moncton
- Fredericton
- St. John’s
As for how much it’ll cost for you to attend our EnergizeIT events: nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Honkis de Konkis, as we say in some circles. Simply put, it’s free of charge.
Want to find out more about EnergizeIT or register? Go hit the EnergizeIT site.
Categories
Future Man Tried to Warn Us
Click the photo to see its source.
This article was originally posted on the Coffee and Code blog.
Here’s a picture of where this week’s Coffee and Code will take place:
On Tuesday, February 24th, from about 1:30 p.m to 5:30 p.m., I’ll be at Le Gourmand, which is located at 152 Spadina (on the west side, south of Queen and north of Richmond). If you’ve ever gone walking around Paris looking for a quick bite to eat, it’ll give you a sense of deja vu. It’s a cafe that doubles as a somewhat pricey mini-grocery that carries gourmet food. They make excellent coffee and hot chocolate (you even get a choice of two of French chocolate mixes), delicious sandwiches, a nice bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with fruit, but most importantly, cookies to die for. Hell, they’re cookies to kill for.
As with all Coffee and Code events, I’ll be working there instead of at my home office or the Microsoft offices so that it’s dead simple for you to walk up to me to talk about anything – Microsoft, our tools, tech and platforms, the industry, whatever!
(Prior to Coffee and Code, I’m going to be at the Developer Lunch at the nearby Sky Dragon restaurant. If you’ve got the time, you might want to check that out too.)