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.]
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“Guitar Hero” Meets “South Park”
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.
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SecTor Conference
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.
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Quick Book Review: Ruby by Example
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.
- The PDF version sells for US$17.95 at the No Starch Press site
- The paper version sells for US$29.95 at the No Starch Press site
- The paper version sells for US$19.77 at Amazon.com
- The paper version sells for CDN$23.79 at Chapters/Indigo Online
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Cylon-O-Lantern
Happy Hallowe’en! If you’re feeling that your jack o’ lantern just doesn’t enough nerd oomph, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ Cylon-O-Lantern might be what you need. Here’s a video of the Cylon-O-Lantern in action…
Can’t see the video? Click here.
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Automan!
I’ve been tied up with all sorts of work- and life-related things, hence the lack of posts over the last few days.
By way of apology, allow me to offer the so-bad-it’s-good nerd TV show from the 1980s, Automan! Loosely based on the movie Tron and driven by the then-new interest in personal computers (this was the age of the original IBM PC and the Apple ][). It had all the earmarks of a cheesy Glen A. Larson production, plus all the technobabble of that era and made the old Buck Rogers series look like hard sci-fi by comparison.
Click here to see the video at full size.
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If You’re Happy and You Know It…
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.