What happens when you take computing’s proto-heroes Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, turn them into characters in a steampunk adventure television series with a title sequence lifted directly from Space: 1999? You get Albion: 1849, a series with a themes similar to The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne.
[Found via 2D Goggles, via Rob Miles’ blog.]
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Microsoft was a sponsor of CUSEC last year – that’s Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, the premier conference on building software aimed specifically at students. One of the perks of sponsorship was a “corporate speaker” slot, and it was decided that the presentation should be given it to the then-new guy…namely, me.
At the time I got slotted in as the speaker, I’d barely been a Microsoft employee for two months and was still feeling my way around both the company and its technology. By the time I would stand on the podium, I would have just passed my three-month probationary period. If I was going give a talk for forty-five minutes, it would have to be something other than “what it’s like to work at The Empire”.
Luckily, I did have something to talk about: a not-quite-normal career in tech, and the lessons I picked up along the way. The end result was a presentation titled Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist’s Story (yes, it’s a bombastic title, but it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a guy whose personal blog’s name is The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.)
The presentation was scheduled for the end of Day 2 (it’s a three-day conference), which is a challenge. The audience would be tired and being students, they were likely to be more focused on the big drinkfest that would take place that evening. I decided to go for “offbeat” and built my presentation around the abstract I gave to them, which was:
You’ll spend anywhere from a third to half (or more) of your waking life at work, so why not enjoy it? That’s the philosophy of Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joey deVilla, who’s had fun while paying the rent. He’ll talk about his career path, which includes coding in cafes, getting hired through your blog, learning Python at Burning Man, messy office romances, go-go dancing, leading an office coup against his manager, interviewing at a porn company and using his accordion to make a Microsoft Vice President run away in fear. There will be stories, career advice and yes, a rock and roll accordion number or two.
They recorded my session and unleashed it on the world yesterday. I share it with you below:
If you watched the video, you’ll note that I skipped a couple of stories, namely “learning Python at Burning Man”, “messy office romances”, “go-go dancing” and making a Microsoft Vice President run away in fear. I’ll save those for another presentation. (By the bye, the guy I made run away is a President now.)
I had a blast doing this presentation, and the general consensus of the attendees was that it was one of the highlights of the conference. I’m honoured that I was invited back to host DemoCamp, and look forward to chatting with everyone. See you in Montreal!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Here’s a great video from 1963 featuring the great-granddad of today’s web servers and cloud computing systems. It was just posted by Boston’s Computer History Museum titled Solution to Computer Bottlenecks. Filmed in May of that year, it features MIT Science Reporter John Fitch – who has a classic 1960’s announcer’s voice – interviewing MIT computer scientist Fernando J. Corbato, the guy behind Corbato’s Law (“The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used”).
The subject of the film is the then-new approach of timesharing, which Corbato describes as “connecting a large number of consoles to a central computer”, which made the great (and very necessary – it even gets mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers) leap from batch to interactive processing possible. Here’s the video; enjoy all the retro-tech goodness:
This may have been really deep nerd stuff back in 1963, but today, it the sort of thing that you might see covered in a grade school class. Even if you’re not a programmer or IT pro, I think you’ll find it entertaining.
A computer terminal in one’s office isn’t unusual in this day and age, but back in 1963, such a thing must’ve been incredibly super-1337. Here’s the console in Corbato’s office, which he introduces by saying “Here’s one of the consoles we might be using in the future.” Even to the reporter of that era, it looked like an ordinary IBM Selectric typewriter:
The general principles of digital computers haven’t changed much since those days. Corbato describes memory as “a bunch of pigeonholes” that store numbers, some of which function as data, some of which function as instructions.
The concept of a CPU, the program counter stepping through memory and looping already existed in 1963:
He describes the new setup “a set parallel consoles which are not all near the computer in fact, most of them are remote…and let the users use these with a reaction time of a few seconds instead of a few hours.”
He says that eventually they’d like to switch from “typewriter” consoles to "graphic displays”, but at the time there were still some kinks to be worked out.
One of the “elaborate advanced ideas” that he hints at but says is beyond the topic of the film is going beyond hooking up dumb terminals to the mainframe and attaching smaller computers to it as well, such as the DEC PDP-1 and 1620:
When discussing the hard disk and its capacity (9 million words), Corbato has to explain to Fitch that it isn’t a big whirling disk on which you store tape, but a platter coated with a magnetic material like tape. This is old hat to us in the 21st century, but at the time, disks weren’t household items:
At the time, disks had been around for about a year. Corbato confesses that there are still some problems with them: they “haven’t figured out how to keep things from getting mixed up”.
And on it goes with ideas that are still in use today: programming languages (“a particular synthetic language which is largely technical, and which is to some extent algebra too”), the organization of different programs in memory at the same time, multitasking with a scheduler that determines which program gets the processor’s attention at the moment, file loading and management by the operating system, the concepts of “brute-force solutions”, context switching (which they can “keep down to 10%”), input validation and even the phrase “it’s a feature”.
The line of Corbato’s that I love most is his prescient statement about usability and demand: “We’ve really made the computer extremely easy to use here. And so it’s very clear that in the long run, we’re going to increase in the need for computer time by a large amount.”
This video is all sorts of old-school awesome. If you’ve got nothing to do on your lunch break, check it out!
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
How’d I miss this video? At TechDays Winnipeg, Dylan Smith of ANVIL Digital (and speaker in the “Fundamentals” track), showed me this it’s-funny-because-it’s-true video that’s been around since May that looks at the vexing expectations that clients have of vendors in IT and the creative industries:
All work and no play makes Joey a dull developer, which is why even though we make sure that TechDays is chock-full of content that developers and IT pros can use in their day-to-day work and stay on top of their tech, we also like to have a little fun. For example, in the video above, I interview local developer and well-coiffed gentleman D’Arcy Lussier about the possibility that he might don the Mexican wrestling outfit (he’s our answer to Strong Bad) and whether you can still be stylin’ whilst wearing Microsoft logowear, contrary to what Vancouver’s most notorious cage-fighting-and-coding arbiter of style says.
By the way, I’d like to thank D’Arcy for taking over my track TechDays, Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, track at the last minute while I took over the Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track. D’Arcy, you are truly worthy commanding the Orange Shirts – I salute you with the finest hair-care products on a flaming sword!
In case you didn’t see yesterday’s blog entries, we spent most of yesterday on a little road trip from Toronto to Montreal. We took nine hours making a journey that normally takes about five, but that’s because we made a number of stops along the way, demonstrating Bing to random passers-by and trying out the Sync technology in a Flex that was lent to us by Ford Canada.
Here are links to yesterday’s blog entries in case you missed them:
I did a lot of tweeting from the road as well – go check out what I wrote on my @AccordionGuy twitter page.
Upstream bandwidth wasn’t quite so hot on the road, so it wasn’t possible to post videos yesterday. So I’ll be posting yesterday’s video today.
Here’s our boss, John Oxley, Director of Audience Marketing, at Microsoft Canada Headquarters in Mississauga (just outside Toronto), handing the keys to the Ford Flex to Damir with much apprehension:
In the video, John says:
It’s Monday morning and our good friends at Ford Canada and Bing have sponsored my team to go out and highlight technology innovation changes and the impact they’ve had – with Ford Flex, location-based software and Bing – across the country.
I’m about to give this brand new Ford Flex to Joey deVilla and Damir Bersinic to go from here to TechDays in Montreal, to do Coffee and Codes, show it along the way to developers, IT pros and anyone who wants to come by and see how technology has changed.
I’m really excited about the possibilities [but] I’m a little hesitant about giving away the keys to a car…especially to Joey and Damir. But you’ve got to trust your team, and I trust the impact they can have.
You’ll tell me three or four days from now whether this was a good decision or whether it was a lesson that I learned.
Was letting us take a brand new car on a road trip a good idea or a bad one? Let us know in the comments, or email the boss-man directly at john.oxley@microsoft.com.
(Please tell him it was a good idea.)
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and it’ll be going live very soon – expect to hear a number of announcements about it from next week’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC).
I’ll be posting articles showing you how to get into developing on Azure, but if you want to get a head start in the meantime, a good place to go is MSDev, Microsoft’s site that’s packed to the rafters with video training on all sorts of Microsoft platform development topics. There’s a series of training videos covering Azure development, including:
…and more videos are on the way.