White collar conservative flashin’ down the street
Pointin’ their plastic finger at me, ha!
They’re hopin’ soon my kind will drop and die but uh
I’m gonna wave my freak flag high, high!— lyrics from If 6 Was 9 by Jimi Hendrix
Yeah, C# is pretty decent, but if you really want to hold the freak flag up high, the Dynamic Language Runtime and IronPython and IronRuby are where it’s at, baby!
I’m 5’11” (180cm) tall, and here’s what the legroom in United Airlines’ economy class is like once the guy in front of you has reclined his seat. He’d originally reclined his seat all the way, but I was able to talk him into doing it only halfway:
As you can see, my knees are touching the seat in front of me. If you’re 6 feet or taller, you’ll probably want to get upgraded to what United calls “Economy Plus”, where you get a little more legroom – about as much as other airlines’ economy class seats.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Starting tonight (Pacific Coast Time), John Bristowe, I, and a few other folks from Microsoft Canada’s De veloper & Platform Evangelism team, will be in Seattle all next week to attend Microsoft’s 8th TechReady conference. TechReady is a Microsoft internal conference where ‘Softies from all over the world gather to get briefed on upcoming releases. The coming months promise a bumper crop of Microsoft goodies – Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, Visual Studio 2010 and Azure to name a few – so the sessions should be very interesting. (I think I’ll actually be taking a lot of notes during the presentations rather than checking my mail or looking at that video of kittens riding a Roomba.)
We’re going to try to take advantage of this gathering to get some interviews with some of the big brains at Microsoft from Redmond and all over the world, as well as show you some of the sights and sounds of Seattle. Watch this blog for updates!
Are you in Seattle? Want to catch up? Talk about Microsoft, software development, accordions. Zardoz or anything else? Drop me a line or give me a ring (416-948-6447)!
[Seattle photo by Andrew “papalars” Larsen and licenced under Creative Commons. Click here to see the original.]
If you watch the Star Trek original series, you’ve probably already internalized what’s in this flowchart created by Stephanie Fox for the sci-fi blog io9.com:
Click the chart to see it at full size.
This article originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.
If you’re a developer who’s either into building games or has been meaning to try out game development, you’re in luck this weekend. From Friday, January 30th through Sunday, February 1st, the Global Game Jam will be held in various cities all over the world, giving people a chance to collaborate on the design, building and presentation of a videogame in a single weekend.
The participating Canadian cities and their Global Game Jam venues are:
At CUSEC 2009, some of the attendees attempted to psychoanalyze the speakers out of concern for what seemed to be obsessions. The IRC backchannel during my presentation expressed concern for what they believed to be my fixation on butts, what with mentioning the movie Deliverance and showing the “Bottle Rocket in the Butt” video from my blog entry Assrockets and Opportunities.
Other speakers had their own obsessions. Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman’s twin obsessions were with the level of lighting in the room and his “Four Freedoms” ethics. Pownce lead developer/co-founder and now Six Apart developer Leah Culver (who was on the conference’s other end of the scruffy/slinky spectrum) was obsessed about getting a tattoo based on designs created by the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff (or _why for short). Leah somehow managed to contact _why – who is notoriously J.D. Salinger-esque in his reclusiveness – to commission him to create some tattoo designs, which she showed me at the CUSEC speaker dinner last Thursday night.
A message on Twitter from _why has confirmed that she did indeed get the tattoo. Here’s a close-up:
The blank word bubble above the cartoon character is there to let her fill it in with whatever she feels like having it say for the day.
“Late binding for tattoos!” I said, regretting that uber-nerdy statement mere moments later.
TechCrunch points to a news report from San Francisco-based TV station KRON that dates all the way back to 1981, when home computers were 8-bit wonders like the era of the Apple ///, TRS-80 and Atari 400 and 800. The piece on how some people are reading their newspapers by logging into Compuserve, and how someday, we’ll all be reading our newspapers and magazines on our computers:
Back then, a computer in the home was very unusual, hence their underscoring of this interviewee’s name with “owns home computer”. It seems quaint now, but back then, that was pretty 1337:
The TechCrunch article points out a couple of lines in the piece that stand out given our 2009 perspective. The first is from the San Francisco Examiner’s David Cole:
This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.
The other memorable line is from the reporter:
This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.
This is Joey deVilla, signing off from one of those Dynabook-style computers.