May, 2010

As a technical professional, it's a safe bet that you will attend a conference (or two) during your professional career. Given this reality, it's a good idea to have a plan that outlines what you should do before, during and after each conference. With Microsoft TechEd 2010 less than a week away, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of my tips & tricks when attending this conference...

I’ll post a more detailed write-up of the Make Web Not War conference later, but I thought that those of you who were there (or wished they were there) would like to see some photos as soon as possible. I’ve posted my photos at full resolution to my Make Web Not War Flickr photoset , which you can view either on Flickr or the slideshow above. The photos all have titles, and I promise I’ll finished...

The business of helping out with the NerdTrain , the Make Web Not War conference, associated activities and participating in a team offsite meeting has kept me a busier than I expected to be – in fact, this has been my first chance to post a blog entry! Stories and pictures are forthcoming, but in the meantime, enjoy this video that explains what I’ve been working on for the past couple of days. As...

Recently, I've been playing around with Microsoft Live Labs Pivot . Pivot is a tool from Microsoft Live Labs that allows you to visualize massive amounts of data. Through its interface, you can ask questions of the data to gain new insights. Here's a quick overflow of what Pivot is and how it works: Introducing the Stack Exchange API I'm a fan of Stack Overflow because...

Here’s a great movie which takes the audio from a presentation by Dan Pink based on the research for his latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and augments it with video of a whiteboard cartoonist illustrating what Pink is talking about. I have no idea how long it took to film the illustration sequences, but I love the end result – I think it makes for better internet viewing...

Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is headed to Montreal this week, where we’ll be getting together for our annual team meeting as well as to help run the Make Web Not War conference on Thursday. We’re not travelling in the usual way either. We’ve hired out a VIA Rail car to take us and a lot of Make Web Not War attendees to Montreal in style. The car’s rigged with power, wifi...

It’s not too late to register for Prairie Dev Con , the prairie developer conference, which takes place in Regina next week on Wednesday, June 2nd and Thursday, June 3rd – in fact, you can still get a discount on the registration fee! Register before next Monday, May 31st, and save 20% off the ticket price. Winnipeg-based developer D’Arcy Lussier put together Prairie Dev Con with the goal of providing...

The Hand Eye Society describes itself as a “not-for-profit coalition of people and projects in support of Toronto’s videogame communities”. Their goals are: To help people make games To connect game makers with each other and with an audience, offline To foster diversity in game creation and public perception of games I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the people behind the Hand Eye Society is Jim...

Make Web Not War, the conference on how Microsoft and open source tools and technologies can work together takes place in a week! Because we’re feeling pumped about this event and got an advance shipment of swag, we thought we’d share the wealth. If you’ve already registered for Make Web Not War ( which you can do here, for free ), here’s how you can win some cool stuff before the event next Thursday...

You’ve probably read the news already , so I’ll cut right to the chase: earlier today, Internet Explorer’s big kahuna Dean Hachamovitch made an announcement about Internet Explorer 9 support for HTML5 video in Blogging Windows : In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows. (And in case you were wondering, the...

  Creative Commons Photo by the Poissant Family. Open Government / Government 2.0 The intersection of the internet and politics has given rise to many things, including the concept often referred to as “Open Government” or “Government 2.0” . To borrow a couple of lines from Mark Kuznicki’s keynote at ChangeCamp Toronto , its goals are twofold: For governments to become more open, transparent,...

It’s Mesh week here in Toronto! Today, the developer-and-creative-focused MeshU conference takes place, followed tomorrow and Wednesday by the social-media-and-marketing focused Mesh conference. I’ll be in the audience at MeshU, and tending the Microsoft lounge (and the cocktail parties) at Mesh. If you’re attending, please say “hi!” In the spirit of Mesh, I present Social Media Revolution 2 , the...

The blog Geeks are Sexy put together a wonderful alphabet rhyme using Creative Commons “share-alike”-licensed photos on Flickr, which I thought I’d share with you: Here’s the text of the rhyme, along with a credit for each corresponding photo: A is for Away Team, where you should never wear red ( mild mannered photographer ) B is for Binary, 1s and 0s in your head ( jpstanley ) C is for Cosplay, making...

Once again, Kristan “Krispy” Uccello has declared another Toronto developer dim sum lunch! It’s at the usual place – Sky Dragon, located on the top floor of Dragon City mall (corner of Spadina and Dundas ) tomorrow (Friday, May 14th, that is) at noon. I’m trying to boost the .NET geek quotient at these lunches – it can’t just be me, Mark Cidade , Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite (he’s developed with just...

A quick reminder: if you’re looking for cheap transport to Montreal for MonDev , Montreal’s Open Source Week (which concludes with the Make Web Not War conference), we’ve booked an entire VIA Rail car from Montreal to Toronto! The train car (pictured above) has wifi, power outlets and will be equipped with video monitors, an Xbox or two, a big-ass HP TouchSmart computer and other technological goodies...

The 2010 Mesh Conference – the fifth one – takes place at Toronto’s MaRS Collaboration Centre on Tuesday, May 18th and Wednesday, May 19th. Its organizers call it “Canada’s Web Conference”, and it is: it’s this country’s premier get-together for creatives, techies and “suits” to share ideas about the internet and how it affects how we work, live and play. This Year’s Keynote Speakers This year’s keynote...

Photo found via kloctalk . Sound advice from Kathy Sierra (pictured giving one of those mind-blowing presentations that are her stock in trade). Her blog, Creating Passionate Users , while dormant, is still worth reading. [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

MeshU – short for “Mesh University” – takes place on Monday, May 17th at the MaRS Collaboration Centre ( 101 College Street , just east of University). It’s a series of workshops for web designers, developers and “suits” that takes place the day before the Mesh Conference (“Canada’s Web Conference”) and will feature 12 workshops divided into “Design”, “Development” and “Management” streams delivered...

  Creative Commons Photo by the Poissant Family. Open Government / Government 2.0 The intersection of the internet and politics has given rise to many things, including the concept often referred to as “Open Government” or “Government 2.0” . To borrow a couple of lines from Mark Kuznicki’s keynote at ChangeCamp Toronto , its goals are twofold: For governments to become more open, transparent,...

Hello, IronRuby 1.0! Although it's been out for the past couple of weeks and might be considered old news, I couldn’t let it pass unmentioned, especially given my history with the Ruby programming language: IronRuby 1.0 has been released! IronRuby is an implementation of Ruby targeting the .NET Framework and built on Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime , which in turn runs on top of the Common Language...

Every field comes up with its own jargon, and oftentimes subgroups within a field come up with their own specific words or phrases (those of you familiar with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team know that we have our own term for “broken”, named after one of our teammates who is notorious for killing all sorts of tech gear). A question recently posted on Stack Overflow asked for...

Last night, “Junior” and I went on Amber MacArthur’s show, Webnation , to talk about our show, Developer Junior . You can watch the clip by visiting Webnation’s site and clicking on the “Webnation May 06 – PT 3” link. [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

It wasn’t that long ago that an early version of Internet Explorer 9 – we called it Platform Preview 1 – was announced at MIX10 Conference back in mid-March. If you missed it, here’s MIX10’s Day 2 keynote session , in which the Internet Explorer team’s supreme Kahuna, Dean Hachamovitch , made the announcement (it’s the first part of the keynote, so you don’t have to watch or scan through the entire...

Make Web Not War is a cross-platform conference focusing on web development in mixed open source and commercial environments. Make Web Not War is jointly sponsored by Microsoft, our friends at PHP Quebec and open source communities across Canada. We’re proud to be a part of MonDev , Montréal’s Open Source Week, which takes place from May 24th through 28th, 2010. About Make Web Not War Make Web Not...

Yesterday, I wrote about an opportunity to help a University of Toronto grad student build a tool to help programmers build and debug database queries . Today, I present a similar opportunity. Once again, it’s one of the grad students of Greg Wilson , whose name you might recognize – he’s the co-editor of the must-read O’Reilly book Beautiful Code , and this student, Mike Conley , is looking for Python...