Tag: Events

Twin Cities Code Camp Spring 2008

I will be giving another talk at the next Twin Cities Code Camp about Visual Studio integration. The event is on April 5th and is free so you should definitely come down and make me sweat with questions that I cannot answer!

http://www.twincitiescodecamp.com/

I plan on talking about visual studio integration in general but I will hopefully show off the current state of the NBusiness 3 plugin as well.

XNA AI Talk

Tomorrow night (Thursday, 2/21/08) is the next XNA Twin Cities User Group meeting and I will be giving a presentation on the MinMax algorithm in Drop In. It should be pretty fun, there will be some pizza and swag (including some xbox games) and a few other speakers talking about some other interesting AI topics. If you’re in the area you should definitely stop in and learn about XNA!

Here is the main link http://www.twincitiesxnausergroup.com/

And be sure to RSVP so we can guage how many people will be there and get the appropriate amount of pizza.

Lang.NET 2008 Wrap Up

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Redmond. I was at the Lang.NET conference sponsored by Microsoft. Overall it was great. Microsoft took care of us like royalty and the people and conversations were incredible. With all the big brains around I felt even more retarded than normal, I was definitely an amateur compared to a lot of the people who were attending. The only thing that was unfortunate was that I managed to get a cold just before going out there, which was mild at first, but caused me to miss out on a lot of the free beer supplied (and lots of breweries I haven’t had a chance to try out yet too!) as well as miss the 3rd day entirely! I was really looking forward to seeing the VSX presentation and get a chance to talk to someone about NBusiness and get some integration questions I have been kicking around answered. Also, based on the description of Don Box’s speech I’m really sad to have missed that.

I met a guy there named Ted Neward. He was going to hook me up with a chance to meet with Ken Levy to talk about VS integration. I had to miss it because I was too sick and had completely lost my voice but I have his email address and will probably be sending him an email with a few questions and ideas.
 
Besides Jason Bock and I there were at least two other people from Minneapolis, Wez Furlong from the PHP group as well as Charles Nutter who works on JRuby for Sun. There was another guy there from Sun named John Rose who had a lot of interesting things to say about the similarities between Java and .NET and also knew a lot about creating programming languages. He talked about a lot of interesting things with me at the Rock Bottom brewery. It’s really encouraging to see that it’s possible to collaborate and discuss topics such as programming languages even between competitors. It seems that programming languages might just unite nerds more than divide them after all.
Overall I’d say that this symposium really revealed an intense focus towards dynamic languages right now. Perhaps it’s just the language enthusiasts who are the most interested in dynamic languages. This was an overwhelming focal point for this event. It’s all very cool stuff and I’m completely sold on the idea of using a dynamic language for developing unit tests first then writing your application. I’m not completely sold on the idea of a dynamic language everywhere however. It seems like it’s perfect for the top tier of an application, where things change the most and need to be the most flexible, but the lower you go a nice strongly typed library with strict encapsulation is probably preferable.
I was able to see Anders Hejlsberg (C#), Jim Hugunin (Iron Ruby and the DLR), Erik Meijer and many others speak. The videos should be on Channel 9 any day now. Here is a channel9 interview that took place with some of the speakers called Erik Meijer, Gilad Bracha, Mads Torgersen: Perspectives on Programming Language Design and Evolution but this was not one of the actual presentations. I also recognized John Lam (Iron Ruby) and Miguel De Icaza (Mono) in the audience but I missed their talks because I was sick.
One other interesting thing was getting to talk to a guy from Intentional Software. Now this is real brain bending stuff and if you haven’t heard of intentional programming before I suggest you go look it up because it’s a fascinating idea… probably best left for another post.

 

Rockband and Homebrew Aftermath

So it turned out that my homebrew was undrinkable. It seems it had sat too long and suffered from a mild infection so I had to dump it out. Fortunately we had Surly Bender to the rescue! After thinking about it a little bit I headed out to Midwest Supplies and picked up some equipment to upgrade my keggerator to be compatible with both American Standard and Kornelius kegs. This is a pretty nice upgrade!

  

Actually there was on piece that didn’t quite work right so I have a little bit more work to go. The piece was a splitter that turned out to be a one-way splitter. It turns out that you can’t combine the flow with this splitter, you can only split it. So I had to do a temporary splice directly from the tap to the keg, but I will probably go back and get something like this 3/8” Stainless Steel Barbed “T” instead and save my self $30 in the process.
The beer was delicious and the food was good and we had some good friends come over and had some fun. There were a few people who I was hoping would show up but couldn’t for various reasons (you know who you are) so that was a little unfortunate. Otherwise we ended up playing Rockband until 3am (much to the dismay of my upstairs neighbors I’m sure) and then I had to kick people out so I could crash.
One last thing, I couldn’t resist going out and buying Scene It since I knew so many people were coming over. We played it in impromptu teams and it turns out that it is hard as hell. Don’t plan on buying this game for your kids because I’d be shocked if they knew half of the answers, it is really intended for the truly discriminating movie buff.  That aside it was pretty fun, we were a little perplexed by the big button controllers since the ‘X’ on them didn’t light up when you pressed it like regular xbox 360 controllers but it turns out that they are not truly blue tooth enabled controllers, they communicate via IR with a reciever that goes ontop of your TV. I don’t know why they went that rout… probably just being cheap. However I am looking forward to the next version of XNA which I heard will have drivers to allow you to use these controllers for your games.