On August 25th and 26th, Montreal will, for the 5th time, host the Top Challenge competition, featuring skateboarding, speedboarding, street luge, inline skating and inline boarding.
I know I’m shooting myself in the foot as a dad, but I’m definitely bringing my boys to see this. They surely would lynch me if I went by myself…
I just have to let it all out: I love mootools!
I’m not going to get in a pi**ing match with prototype, jquery, dojo and company, since they’re all truly neat little bundles of joy, but as a write-all-javascript-from-scratch kinda guy, I wasn’t inclined on having to rely on such involved libraries in the past. Especially when coupling them with huge server-side code base that I must keep in mind might actually outlive me. Call it an ever-lasting “vendor” lock-in allergy.
Choosing the best contender to be included in the McGill web platform among the countless available options in the compact JS framework sphere was one of the most difficult tech decisions I’ve had to make in years. But so far, I sure am glad we opted for mootools. Bonus: I didn’t even have to force it on anyone either, and adoption by different levels of developer has proven smoother than in tests involving other potential choices.
Great docs, tight syntax, (close to) worry free platform compatibility and a lively dev community are all among the many benefits we are so far enjoying.
But beware! I’d advise anyone going the framework way to:
On this, I’m going back to milking it for all its worth.
The first open mobile solution is out and available for purchase (developer preview).
Neo Base US$300
The Neo Base kit contains everything the mobile application developer needs to enjoy the benefits of the first freed phone, the Neo 1973.Neo Advanced US$450
The Neo Advanced Kit everything the mobile device hacker wants to get down and dirty with the first freed phone, the Neo 1973.
/happy-dance
I was recently talking to someone about the first computer I owned: an Amstrad CPC 464 (@wikipedia). Attached is a nice flickr photo of the beast in all of its 64kb-RAM-and-tape-recorder glory.
Good times; good times indeed. I was 12 (1987) and saved my money for around two years to get one. It was my first major purchase on my own. The first computer I used was a Thomson TO 7, and its lovable turtles, at school.
Oh, how I wish I was back in Vancouver, where people actually celebrate our country, instead of disguising the day as the province’s official moving day…
Something rather peculiar puzzled me today… I went on to purchase the latest Nine Inch Nails album, eager for a fresh batch of their trademark sound. If you haven’t heard about Year Zero yet, they had a killer marketing campaign associated with it that anyone interested in the viral trend should check out.
When the download was complete, I promptly went the the Recently Added smart playlist in iTunes, and there were the two last album I purchased from the iTMS: Year Zero, by NiN and The Best Damn Thing, by Avril Lavigne. Before you scold me for the latter, I bought it last month on my wife and kids’ request… Everybody should know the artwork is all I wanted. 😉
What I found peculiar about this view was the rating on the tunes. Every single Avril Lavigne track was labeled as explicit, while none of the NiN ones were flanked by the telling red icon.
Had I purchased the radio-edit version?!? Argh… But no. After listening to the whole album, it just does not contain anything deemed offensive by the music rating authorities.
Really, what has the world come to when the music marketed to my kids gets such a rating and an album many puritan bodies would surely like rated 18+ is squeaky clean?!?
Personally, I think it’s a giant yet brilliantly subtle [explicit] to the rating bodies. Kudos Trent and co. You did it again.
On July 24th 1967, French president Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech in Montreal in which he declared 4 simple yet revolutionary words, echoing the Quebec separatist slogan: Vive le Québec Libre.
After reading about the said speech for years, I finally found the video on the Web in its entirety today. Regardless of one’s (or even my) opinion on the subject, this is a historical moment by all measures.
The CBC Archives also has a newsreel for this day, highlighting the controversy this created in the rest of Canada.
It still amazes me how Unix man pages shaped my approach to digesting information.
I first started using Unix-based systems around 1997. My Unix mentor had, in retrospect, a fantastic approach to helping me out on my autodidactic path. Whenever I needed help with a command, he would always prepend his answer with “man”.
I: How do you check your disk space?
Len: man df
I: ???
Len: man man
I am now more than grateful for his wisdom, but I cursed it many times in context.
What amused me the most about the man repository was how it was simply impossible to read one page without reading ten others, by curiosity if nothing else. The same holds true for many subjects, but man pages have this special twist that unlike so many other publications, they never dumb down their content to widen their audience reach, but instead historically assume that the reader is a highly trained operator and knows (or should know) everything about the rest of the system. This shapes an interesting vicious cycle, since it makes for a documentation system with essentially no true beginning or even accessible entry point.
While this might be perceived as a flaw in the man’s matrix, it truly catalyzed my habit of always pushing myself to learn and know more than just what I need for the very task that brings me to a piece of information. To this day, I find myself quasi-incapable of reading anything without going into the research equivalent to a shark’s feeding frenzy, unless I’m on a on a tight schedule, in which case I only limit and control myself.
In the end, two things are for sure: Thank [insert fav’ deity here] for hypertext, and Digg, Facebook , Slashdot, et alii sure do not help one bit. 😉
Motivation for me and others.
Found on Health Bolt, via Digg.
It’s days like this I both love and loathe my vocation all at once.
Love it: never bored, always have new things to learn, mentally challenging, great interaction with the many development communities, constant stream of new opportunities, etc…
Loathe it: there are only 24 hours in a day and my body and brain stubbornly force me to sleep for a few of these… Almost every day too…
Thirteen years of web app dev, and still see it it as the World’s biggest playroom. 🙂