At the same time, we’ve got an old dual-G4 mac kicking around that’s only being used for video work, so I went out and got a Belkin Flip for KVM and wired it up.

The downside is that I don’t have a dual display solution anymore. In theory I could keep the PC with two monitors and toggle one of them between the Mac’s VGA and the PC’s DVI when I want to switch, but at the moment I like the simplicity of a single button click so I’ve got one monitor showing OS X and the other on XP, so I can see what’s going on in both at the same time but only have one monitor available for each. For now that seems like a better idea than to drop down to just one monitor (can’t see as much, and I still have the option to use both for the PC when I need to).

Of course, the other fun part is remembering setting from a computer that hasn’t been used as a primary in at least a year or two - copying apps from the other Mac I used to use, remembering settings, and waiting 300 years for Mail.app to get going with my somewhat larger-than-then IMAP folders.

TableCell cell = new TableCell();
cell.Controls.Add(cell);

Huh.

It’s funny, I can remember buying Neuromancer, down to a mental picture of the shelf of the store I picked it up at (W.H. Smith in the Quinte Mall in Belleville), and I remember that I knew to look for the book and it had some important ideas that I should read, but this was the late ’80s, so how did I know to buy it?  The internet didn’t exist as we know it back then, so what was my recommendation engine?

Given the speaker and the topic, I thought it would be fun to try to take notes on the talk on my Nokia e61.  I’m not an contender for the Blackberry Olympics, but fortunately Gibson has a bit of a drawl in his speech that slows him to a point where I could capture about one in every five sentences, so here are some quotes I picked out - in a lot of cases the quotes are verbatim, but due to the relatively low bandwidth provided by my thumbs, they shouldn’t be attributed directly to the speaker as they’re written here.

On the MacGuffin in Spook Country

For a while I didn’t know what was in the box…  I had a list of possibilities, but they were no more than the standard items that a reasonably educated person would think of after reading the setup.  When I finally knew what was in the box, it was a lovely day in the basement, a lovely day indeed.

On his writing process

“He writes with Google on…” That’s the meme that’s replaced “William Gibson writes with a mechanical typewriter.”  Bruce Sterling used to write with a 12 inch television on top of his computer and headphones on to listen to something else, so compared to that what’s a little Google?

If it disappeared tomorrow, you’d miss your Google.

On eBay

eBay is a vast and constant rationalization of the world’s attics…  The ultimate democratization of connoisseurship…  You become Sotheby’s worst nightmare.  This goes on all the time.

You can see every toy you ever had as a child.  I’ve collected jpegs of every frog toy…  I don’t want them… that would be sad… eBay’s an interesting tool with which to explore one’s life.

On books and novels

Books are the oldest mass [media? meme?]…  We’re still making wheels.  They’re titanium, they’re really fancy, but they’re still wheels, so we’ll still be making books.

Learning to read novels is a very culturally complex activity… We don’t recognize the creative contribution of the reader versus the writer… (tree falls in the forest thing)…  The person who reads the marks [Gibson refers to writing as “putting marks on paper”] performs an equally creative act.  The movie of your favourite novel never equals the one you’ve seen in your forehead.  Nobody else has seen that movie.

On the settings of his works

Science fiction is always about the day in which it’s written.  Having written about the 21st century since 1979, the ability to write about it as the present is really a hoot.

When I wrote Neuromancer I thought I was committing an act of almost ludicrous optimism…  Nuclear armament was getting us all down…  [Neuromancer’s setting was] a very simple extension of Reagonomics…  Mexico city as North America…  It’s not commented on in the text but I think it’s there…  People think it’s dystopian but there are so many people in the world who would instantly and happily move to that world.

The final question yielded a fitting closing:

As wonderful as life is a fair bit of it is fairly creepy…  Happy endings are about when you close the curtain, more a part of art than a part of life because life goes on and usually ends kind of creepy.

Tags: WilliamGibson, Spook Country

As is the tradition, the format changed again - this time the demos were shorter and then there was an Ignite-style series of sessions, which I liked a lot.

I didn’t get as into the technology as I have in the past, but I came home more pumped than I have been for the past few sessions.

A few notes:

Chris Thiessen’s Zoomii (private beta, nothing to see here) had a few lessons about affiliate linking - he’s working with the top 20,000 books on Amazon, and that seems to be enough for now, long tail be damned.  Why the selection?  Because he does a lot of stuff with the data in advance, including assembling a 63 gigapixel image (for some reason he thought to tile it).  “Picking the top zillion sellers” doesn’t really count as editing, but it’s a start, and I think the successful stuff that’s out there does and will rely on something at least a bit smarter than straight feed reading.

There was a real divide visible between those who’d done a presentation before and those who hadn’t, or at least those who hadn’t rehearsed.  Oh, and big fonts are important when your demo’s on a projector (which led to some irony in the demo for the product that aims to deal with information overload), and doubly so when you’re trying to demo a framework as opposed to an app.

I also ended up speaking to more vegans than ever before, so I was happy to see some overlap - most of this was in the form of referrals from other ‘campers I’ve spoken with in the past, but I think I might as well start positioning myself as the online vegan guy instead of trying to explain what it is I do in my day job - I had some interesting conversations about that too, but in the months to come I hope that there’ll be enough overlap and then I can talk without having to worry about NDAs.  A lot of the people I talked to were either running their own business already or were there to get ideas and contacts for their own venture, so I’m not going to be hiring anyone from this pool directly anyway.  Oh, and once again a huge percentage of the crowd claimed to be at their first
DemoCamp.  With an audience of 300, maybe retention problems are a good
thing…

All in all, a great night, even if I had to leave before the bar session.  Kudos once again to the organizers and presenters.

Tags: Democamp

Yeah, only a little annoying when you’re, say, typing. Or testing a web app. Or, you know, using the Internet.

I tried everything - reinstalled, disabled all of my beloved plugins, nothing would work.

Until I disabled Norton Antivirus.

The app hasn’t stalled in hours.

What good is a security product when it prevents you from enjoying the stuff it’s protecting? I could make an antivirus product like that - I’ll call it “big tank of water” and it’ll be just what it sounds like. You won’t be able to do much, but you’ll be safe from viruses.

I’ve been running pretty much unprotected for years, and this is the only computer that has antivirus software installed (sorry, “had”). I did it in a moment of weakness when this was my primary company computer, but you know what, I think I’ll take my chances with regular backups from now on.

Update: well, my success was short-lived, and the problems have returned. Thankfully, it looks like Flock doesn’t have any of these problems, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with it since I saw Will present at a DemoCamp eons ago, so I win!

Technorati Tags: Norton, Firefox, bugs

If you’re programatically adding items to an ASP.NET dropdown list, you do it with something like this:

_cboDropDown.Items.Add(new ListItem(”Item Text”, “Item Value”));

Which is fine for most cases, but unlike with, say, the Text property of the Label control, ASP.NET will HTML encode the text before rendering it, so if you have something like:

_cboDropDown.Items.Add(new ListItem(”Brand X®”, “1131″));

It’ll show up in the dropdown as “Brand X®” instead of the intended “Brand X®”

What’s a poor developer to do?

I ended up using the Server.HtmlDecode() method, as follows:

_cboDropDown.Items.Add(new ListItem(Server.HtmlDecode(”Brand X®”), “1131″));

…and it’s all good, if a little ugly for my tastes. Has anyone got a better idea?

I especially enjoyed Mark Piotrowski’s introduction to Dali - I was about to do another search for a simple O/R mapper and this looks like it might fit the bill, assuming I can get it working with MySQL. I’ve been split between code generators and ORM lately, with both the commercial stuff I’ve seen and our homegrown semi-solutions not quite fitting, but this looks like it might be something I can evaluate without having to book a day or two of work just to research. Cool.

Also, Jean-Luc David did an XNA demo, and attempted to make Pong funner by applying a guitar theme, including power chord sound effects and use of a Guitar Hero controller. He did a good job of using zoom during his demo, but made one crucial mistake - when doing a demo involving power-chords, if you’ve got the opportunity to boost the speed of an object from 3 to something else, do you pick 7, as Jean-Luc did? No. You pick 11.

The other two demos (Rob Windsor on encryption, Randar Puust on Silverlight) were good as well, but as I won’t be doing anything with them in the next few weeks, I can’t do much about them other than to make some mental bookmarks (and no, I won’t be making a pong game either, but any excuse to get Guitar Hero…)

On a related note, I highly recommend The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I’ve had two concrete takeaways so far - checking email twice a day and separating location from function.

Tim recommends checking your email at noon and 4. I haven’t been totally successful on this one, but it’s been amazing how many situations I’ve been in where I’ve replied to something at noon, expecting resources to come back to me that need to be acted on right away, only to receive them at 5 (or later). In the past, this would rob me some serious time, checking the inbox everytime it dinged, etc. So far, no ill effects from the new email schedule, and I haven’t even set the autoresponder up yet (but again, I manage to do this maybe twice a week at this point).

I’ve also started working at the local library, which has no internet access and a strict no cell phone policy. It’s not suitable for every task (let’s just say that dual monitors can be a blessing and a curse), but coding full screen with no online diversions available is a huge thing. I don’t have access to source control or online docs, and there’s an integration phase when I get into the office, but I’ve been able to churn out some serious chunks of new code through this process. Bonus: the library’s near some restaurants I don’t normally get to frequent, and their lunch specials rock…

Technorati Tags: gtd, The Four Hour Work Week, productivity

Of course, the 30 second pre-roll ad played just fine, but the content itself, well, that must have been pretty hi-tech stuff.

This seems to be the theme this week. I tried to download a ringtone, from a company I work for even, and when the WAP push came along, it told me that my phone wasn’t compatible. I actually paid a significant premium for a phone that was extra-super compatible, to the point that the major carriers weren’t selling it in favour of its less-featured successor, but it’s just not compatible.

This reminds me of the earlier days of the internet and computing, when I would run Linux and whatnot not for the freedom, but because it was all I could afford, and I was willing to sacrifice some compatibility to get stuff done. Today I’m paying extra for the same level of service. You know, if I’m going to get screwed at the low and high ends, I think I’ll be a lot more comfortable in the cheap seats.