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iPod Amnesty Bin at Zune Headquarters

Microsoft may not always crank out the best products, but I will have to hand it to them: they certainly can tell jokes. The best part of any Microsoft keynote is the spoof video — consider their parody of VW’s “Da Da Da” tv spot, their Matrix spoof and the “Bill Meets Napoleon Dynamite” clip. If their stuff worked as well as their spoofs, my Vista laptop wouldn’t be relegated to second-banana duty.

Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz recently experienced some Microsoft self-promo humour when paying a visit to Zune headquarters. Here’s what he saw near the entrance: an iPod amnesty bin:

“iPod Amnesty Bin” at Zune headquarters
Click to see the photo on its original page.

The Mac fanboy/fangirl reaction seems to have largely been one of amusement, and as one commenter on The Unofficial Apple Weblog puts it, the Zune Amesty Bin is the store shelves.

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Makin’ the Gas Smell Like Ass

Harold and Kumar Go Huffin’

I once had the honour of having lunch with a Nobel Prize Winner: Frank Wilczek, who won the 2004 Physics prize with two of his colleagues (I knew him through Betsy Devine, whom I knew via blogging). All sorts of topics came up during lunch, from “What book do you think was the most influential, ever?” (I answered Principia Mathematica, to which Frank replied “Now do you mean Newton’s or Whitehead and Russell’s?”) to favourite television shows. Frank and Betsy were big fans of CSI, and they were telling us about the episode with the furries, which they’d just seen.

“And here I thought I’d seen everything!” said Frank, who confessed that he’d never heard of furries before. “I must be getting old.”

I’m getting that same feeling now. While I knew that kids huffed no-stick cooking spray and aerosol furniture polish, I had no idea that they did the same with that compressed-air-in-a-can that you use to blow dust out of computers and circuitry. It makes sense, though: it’s got the propellant to get you high, minus the butter scent that comes with Pam or Pledge’s sickeningly strong lemon smell.

(Another sign I’m getting old: my first reaction to hearing this was “Damn, kids today are morons.”)

Apparently aware of this fact, Memorex — a company that lives in my mind’s “Where are they now?” file — has added some kind of Bitrex-like agent to their compressed air duster products to keep the kids from huffing them. Their press release includes some slang terms for inhaling aerosol vapours for the benefit of parents who want to get hip to their kids’ lingo: “huffing”, “bagging” and “dusting”. I can imagine these terms being read out by my local out-of-touch news anchor, emphasizing the words so that you can almost hear the quotes around them.

While I am glad that it’ll probably save a number of kids’ brain cells, I am concerned that it’s going to make my computer smell like ass. Have any of you gotten a whiff of the new formulation?

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Spam’s “80-200” Rule

Laptop computer with Spam clogging up the floppy drive.

You might refer to it as The Law of the Few, the 80-20 rule, the Pareto Principle or — if you’re angling for serious math geek cred — the principle of factor sparsity. All these names are used to describe a major factor in epidemics or epidemic-like phenomena: widespread effects are often caused by a few key players. Malcolm Gladwell cited all kinds of examples of this phenomenon in The Tipping Point: the transformation of Hush Puppies into a trendy shoe brought about by a few “influencers”, the success of the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood thanks to devoted fans with personal networks and how an gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs was traced to a small number of people in a half-dozen bars.

It seems that the same principle applies to spam and spammers. According to The Spamhaus Project’s ROKSO (Register Of Known Spam Operations), 80% of all the spam out there is being created by a mere 200 operators. To make it onto the ROKSO, you have to have had your services terminated by at least 3 ISPs for spamming.

A snippet from the sidebar of the ROKSO page:

80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations (“spam gangs”), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database. These spam operations consist of an estimated 500-600 professional spammers with ever-changing aliases and domains.

For those of you who really want to stay on top of the spam underground (or maybe you’ve got a fascination for things like the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list), Spamhaus also publishes a “10 Worst Spammers” list, updated weekly.

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Playing Accordion at the RailsConf Keynote (or: “They’d Never Let Me Do This at JavaOne!”)

Joey deVilla on accordion, onstage at RailsConf 2007.
Photo by James Duncan Davidson. Click to see it on its original page.

Yes, it’s total bias on my part, but one of my favourite moments from the RailsConf conference was playing the intro musical number for the evening keynotes — me on accordion, along with conference organizer Chad Fowler on his ukelele.

Joey deVilla on accordion and Chad Fowler on ukelele, onstage at RailsConf 2007.
Photo by James Duncan Davidson. Click to see it on its original page.

We took the Radiohead single Creep and changed it from a song about unrequited love and self-loathing to a little ditty about Rails and its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. Here are the reworked lyrics:

Writing applications
Used to make me cry
But you wrote a framework
So friendly and dry

You’re a supermodel
And I hear you code too
You’re so effing Hansson
David Heinemeier Hansson

But I’m a noob
I barely wrote depot
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

(Falsetto part)
Da da da da…
David Heinemeier Hansson
has_many
has_one

The song’s chords are pretty simple: G – B – C – Cm, over and over, so rehearsing it didn’t take very long. Here’s a video that Aaron Huslage shot during our rehearsal just outside the administrative area:

Here’s the video of the actual performance, shot by one “KeeperPat”:

This makes this the second RailsConf at which someone performed a musical number with the words “David Heinemeier Hansson” in the lyrics (why the lucky stiff did it last year with lyrics about how Hansson was killed by Robert Scoble after a flamewar). It’s a tradition now!

I’d like to thank Chad Fowler for going along with the musical suggestion and for being an excellent musical partner. Maybe we could do it again next year — perhaps a ditty where we mention everyone in the Rails Core Team by name?

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1600

Tonight we dine in Portland!

“There are 1600 people attending this conference today,” said RailsConf creator Chad Fowler in the opening keynote, “Do try to meet them all.”

Things have changed since last year’s RailsConf. Where we had 400 people packed into an overly air-conditioned ballroom at an airport hotel in the Chicago ‘burbs, this time, we’ve got four times as many nerds packed into the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

When Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson asked the audience “How many of you are paid to work on Ruby on Rails?”, about half the keynote audience raised their hands.

Keynote audience at RailsConf 2007.

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And Now There are Two

Looks like I’m not the only one who brought an instrument to RailsConf

Chad Fowler plays ukelele at RailsConf

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Ground Kontrol

Ground Kontrol logo.

Someone suggested on the #railsconf IRC channel that we have some evening festivities at a place called Ground Kontrol, a “barcade” featuring a reasonable-looking selection of beers and an amazing (and nostalgia-inducing, for those of us who grew up in the ’80s) selection of video games and pinball machines. The DJ offerings for this weekend also sound pretty promising to this late 30-something nerd’s ears.

Video and pinball games at Ground Kontrol

Ground Kontrol is located at 511 NW Couch St. (here are directions from the convention center), and will be open until 2:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday night. Anyone interested in checking this place out?

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