James Kovacs' Weblog

Prairie Dev Con was a blast. Great job by D’Arcy on organizing the conference. Thank you to everyone who attended my sessions and especially those who asked questions. I also enjoyed catching up with many of my friends who showed up, even if I was only able to speak to some of the briefly. (It was a busy two days.)

For those of you looking for session slides and code, you can find it here:

jQuery Dojo

NHibernate Dojo

Advanced NHibernate

BTW – I applaud D’Arcy’s bravery in going to a Saskatchewan Roughriders autograph signing in an Alouette jersey and asking them to sign his calculator. Classic! For those of you unfamiliar with the story, the Alouettes beat the Roughriders in the Grey Cup (Canadian football equivalent of the SuperBowl) this year due to a “too many men on the field” penalty in the closing seconds of the game. Fortunately the Roughriders were good sports about the prank. Check out D’Arcy’s blog post for full details and video footage of the stunt.

Do you want the next gen of next-gen applications? Get the Visual Studio 2010 CTP! Which is – according to Microsoft itself – really just Visual Studio 2008 with ReSharper installed.

Take a close look. (Click on the image above for the full-size image.) The window in front clearly shows Visual Studio 2008 with the ReSharper menu (between “Test” and “Window”) and right-hand ReSharper code analysis bar (yellow square and lines indicating warnings in the file). Even funnier is the window in behind, which is the ReSharper Options dialog (ALT-R-O). This is not a photoshopped image, but an actual screenshot from Microsoft.com.

https://www.microsoft.com/Visualstudio/products/2010/default.mspx

This gave me a chuckle. I hope it brightens your morning too.

This is the must-see Web 2.0 parody video by The Richter Scales. The lyrics are superb and hit the proverbial nail on the head. The lead singer, Matt Hempey, is a high school friend of Scott Hanselman. More info can be found on Scott’s blog.

Having attended Harvard, I am very familiar with the friendly rivalry between Harvard and MIT. The MIT engineers are notorious for their pranks aka hacks, sometimes at the expense of Harvard. To celebrate the release of Halo 3, the famous bronze statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard underwent an extreme makeover.

John Harvard Before:

John Harvard After:

(via Raymond Chen)

What happens when you pit a Trojan Horse filled with a half-dozen Greek soldiers versus modern security guards? Watch and find out…

Of all the attempts, I found it most amusing that the history department had not learned its lesson from history, but the Turkish embassy didn’t fall for the ploy a second time.

Bil Simser is looking to upgrade from his current status as SharePoint MVP to the world’s first ever Notepad MVP. Support his cause and wish him luck! You go, boy!

Rico Mariani, performance guru extraordinaire, turns out to be an amateur lyracist too. For all those geeks out there, here is Rico’s version of Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For A [Coding] Hero. (You can listen to a clip of the original version here, compliments of Amazon.) Enjoy!

Very humourous cartoon. I suspect that the intersection between fans of blogging and Star Trek is a very large group. Enjoy!

• A good topic


• Co-authors


• Time to write it


• Any knowledge of computer science