For nostalgia’s sake, here’s an old Dell ad featuring the Dell Dude:
Can’t see the movie? Click here.
I think he and Ellen Feiss (stoner chick from Apple commercials from a few years back) should work on some kind of — ahem — joint project:
Can’t see the movie? Click here.
Hey, it’s Friday, so it’s “funny pictures day” as far as I’m concerned. Here’s an animation featuring the graphics from Nintendo’s Duck Hunt, with a Vietnam setting…
Animation courtesy of Miss Christie St. Martin.
If you’re doing some development work and need interim (or even final) icons for your user interfaces and are short on cash to hire a designer or even buy icon sets, these free — but decent — icon resources may be just what you need!
User Interface Icons is a new site created by Abdylas Tynyshov as a personal project. “The objective of this project,” he writes, “is to provide high quality, free icons to software and web application developers at zero cost!” The first set he’s posted is a collection of common application icons with a yellow-and-blue color scheme in 80-by-80, 48-by-48, 32-by-32 and 24-by-24 pixel sizes.
FamFamFam has Silk, a set of 1000 16-by-16 icons that covers all sorts of application needs. I’ve found these to be quite useful on a number of projects.
Pinvoke’s Diagona icon set is similar to Famfamfam’s “Silk”, but has icons in both 10-by-10 as well as 16-by-16 sizes.
Drunkey Love has a set of over 100 icons 16-by-16 icons in the “Silk” and “Diagona” vein.
If you’re developing a grayscale app — maybe something for older mobile phones, or perhaps you’re going for a “retro” look for your app — BrandSpankingNew’s set of 113 10-by-10 icons might fit the bill.
This may be of more use for website design than application development, but when you need a graphic bullets, Stylegala’s got a good collection made by various artists called Bullet Madness.
Sweetie is a set of “cute and clear” general application icons created by Joe North.
If you’re looking for icons with a Windows XP look, ASP.NET Icons has over 300 that should do the trick.
What if your Facebook news feeds were read to you as if Facebook were CNN? Perhaps like this:
[found via Mathew Ingram, who found it via Fimoculous.]
The latest videogame to get featured on South Park — and lampooned a little to boot — is Guitar Hero, in an episode (in)appropriately titled Guitar Queer-o. The episode guide has this brief summary:
Stan and Kyle are hooked on Guitar Hero. But Stan’s superior skills on the video game damage his friendship with Kyle.
Here’s a quick snippet from the opening act, in which Stan and Kyle play Kansas’ Carry On Wayward Son, one of the songs featured on Guitar Hero II:
Can’t see the video? Click here.
When Randy saw the kids playing Guitar Hero and tried to impress them by actually playing Carry On Wayward Son on a real guitar and singing as well, only to be told “that’s gay, Mr. Marsh”. Not only does the real guitar fail to win the kids over, but later that night, Randy finds out that real guitar-playing skill does not translate into Guitar Hero skill. The bit where Thad, the professional backup player, played Guitar Hero without a console — “acoustically” — was a laugh-out-loud moment. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I’ll just simply say that the “real vs. virtual” and “rock star” themes get pushed farther, to hilarious results.
The episode aired last night and won’t air here in Canada for a few more weeks, but it doesn’t matter — the entire episode is online at South Park Zone.
If you’re interested in security and in the Toronto area on November 20 and 21st, the SecTor conference might be for you. Eldon Sprickerhoff tells me that it’s organized by TASK (Toronto Area Security Klatch). Although it’s a local grassroots effort, I’m told that they’ve corralled “a great group of speakers – basically, some of the best speakers from security conferences around the world” to speak at this event.
SecTor takes place on Tuesday, November 20th and Wednesday, November 21st and takes place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Registration is CDN$950, and if you use the promo code “ESENTIRE”, you’ll get a 10% discount.
If you’ve already got some programming experience under your belt and are searching for a book that’ll get you up to speed with Ruby very quickly, I strongly recommend Ruby by Example (written by Kevin Baird and published by No Starch Press, whose books on coding have impressed me).
As the book’s name implies, it covers the the Ruby programming language (with a little bit of Rails thrown in) through dozens of annotated examples, which covers not only the language but Ruby idioms as well. Experienced programmers will appreciate not being dragged through yet another set of introductory chapters (“this is branching…this is a loop…these are classes and objects…”). Any introductory material is saved for topics that might be new even to experienced programmers, such as chapter 6’s — Functionalism with Blocks and Procs — which may represent some of the best coverage of the topic in any Ruby book. (Even better, it’s available as a free sample chapter!)
Pair Ruby by Example with Agile Web Development with Rails (you could throw in Everyday Scripting with Ruby as a bonus) and you’ve got a killer combo for getting started with web development using Ruby.