The big announcement came earlier this week - IronPython 2.0 is now released to the world. Check out the IronPython 2.0 Release Notes to see the changes.

In less than a month, I will be showing off IronPython in my "Pumping Iron into Python: Intro to FePy" talk at CodeMash. Coming from a mixed background, I'm hoping that I can show off the features of IronPython and what FePy can add to those who may not have a Windows background.

If you're interested in IronPython and are on Twitter, join the IronPython Twitter Group, and let's get a better way of seeing who all is using this language! I know that DevHawk is a prolific IronPython Twitterer, but there have got to be others. I'm sure there are other IronPython people out there wondering the same thing, so let's see who else is out there!

Labels: CodeMash, FePy, IronPython, Twitter

I'd like to introduce Cleveland Tech Events. Cleveland has a very widespread technical community, but I've found that a lot of people haven't heard of the other groups in the area. In an effort to bring the groups together so that we can have a wider audience to get event information out, I've set up this site.

I've got an RSS feed setup for its front page, and you can subscribe here. All posts will also show up on Twitter as the user clevtechevents.

If you know of a group that isn't listed in the resources links on the site, please get me the group's name and their website address so that I can add them. If you want to be able to add your group's information on your own, sign up for an account and let me know so that I can set you up with the ability to post your group's events and other news. And if you want to get your information out there but don't want to sign up for an account, please email me the information and I'll get it up there.

Please spread the word and let's show the other communities what happens when all the technical user groups get together and work as a united community! Check out Cleveland Tech Events for the latest news and events from the various groups throughout the community.

Labels: Cleveland tech events, clevtechevents, Twitter

Before I got my Q, I could only imagine what a mobile user's experience was like through my emulators. Emulators alone though are not enough to get a feel for the true mobile experience.

As many of you know, I'm on Twitter quite a bit. As much as I use the site for communication, I pay attention to interfaces as well. For example, on the mobile version of the Twitter page, pressing 0 takes you to your home, where all of your friends' tweets show up. However, let's say you want to find someone you're following who hasn't tweeted in awhile, then you would press 2 for the people you follow and navigate to the person that way. If the person you're looking for isn't on your first page of followers, you can press 6 to go to the next page. But if you think you passed them up on the last page, you could press 4 to go back a page.

The menu at the bottom of the mobile site has caught my attention quite a bit. In code that I'm launching tomorrow, I'm hoping to include my last minute idea - implementing a mobile menu inspired by the one on Twitter.

A few of the pages that I maintain are quite unruly in length, at least for a mobile user. So my goal is to include links to make it a little more manageable. Adding a mobile menu would definitely make it a little easier for users to navigate.

I can't link to my project here, but I can give you an example of what I'm doing.

I have a piece of software that interacts with various brands of hardware. One of the pages is a list of all the pieces of hardware that are compatible with the software. Right now, we have it set something like this:



As a mobile user, if I currently want to read the notes at the bottom of the page, I'd have to scroll through the list of compatible hardware, which would take a minute or two. That list is only going to grow, making the experience even longer for mobile users if I left the page as it is.

So for my mobile users, I'm implementing a menu that would look like this:



So how do you make a menu for mobile users?

It's simple HTML, using the accesskey attribute of the <a> tag. For my example, it could look like this:



Thanks to my phone, I now understand the joys and frustrations of being a mobile user. Since I am more aware of the mobile user experience, experiencing it firsthand, I can now consider making our designs more mobile-friendly. We'll see over the next few months how my work website evolves in catering to our mobile users.

Labels: mobile, mobile menu, mobile-friendly, Twitter

I'm currently listening to the latest episode of Deep Fried Bytes while thinking about the deep fried Twinkies I had last week. Episode 3 is about Twitter war stories. After hearing others' stories, I figured I'd share one of my own.

One of Sarah's Favorite Twitter War Stories

I can't tell you how I found him for sure, but I somehow came across Michael Eaton on Twitter. At one point, I saw Joel Ross pull a picture out that involved Mike and the band Ratt. (I'll spare him the link in this post.) It was quite entertaining to watch his reaction every time Joel pulled out that picture.

One night, Mike Eaton was sending me a bunch of tinyurls to the World of Warcraft (WoW) account pages. Every now and then, the WoW guys on Twitter try to get me to resubscribe to WoW. He kept telling me it was fun while using the tinyurls to attempt to lure me back in. But I know better than to trust his tinyurls depending on the context, so I tinyurled the picture and asked if WoW was as fun as that pic.

I pulled the picture on him in person at Central Ohio Day of .NET this year, and I knew that payback would be hell. But at the same time, I just couldn't resist. And that's how the VBA rumors about me got started. We hung out quite a bit that day, and I'm definitely glad to have found him.

So thanks to Twitter, I now have someone else that I enjoy hanging out with and teasing. But I wouldn't have met him if it weren't for Twitter.

Comments on Deep Fried Bytes in General

I'm not much of a podcast listener. To me, podcasts are like talk radio, and that typically bores me to tears. But Deep Fried Bytes has me hooked, and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what else they have planned. So if they keep posting blog-worthy podcasts, count on seeing more posts from me on it.

Deep Fried Bytes is almost as heavenly as deep fried Twinkies! So if you haven't gone there yet, get your helping of Deep Fried Bytes now!

Labels: Chris Woodruff, Deep Fried Bytes, Joel Ross, Keith Elder, Mike Eaton, Twitter

Within the past week, I've been introduced to more social networking sites. Thanks to Stevi Deter for the Bright Kite invite. I'm still tinkering with this location-based social network (as they claim on their site). Today was my first day using it, but I'll play with it more throughout the week and talk about it in another post.

Today, I want to tell you about Plurk. I had seen many messages go by on Twitter with people talking about it, and I had read about it on Brenda's blog. So I followed her link and checked it out.

What does Plurk have to offer that Twitter doesn't have?

While looking at plurk, there were a few things I noticed that it has that Twitter doesn't.

• Timelines: Plurk has a visual representation of when people plurk. Unfortunately, the timeline goes right to left (as opposed to the left to right that most of us would expect). But despite that little quirk, it's nice to see the conversations in a timeline.


• Threading: Plurk does threading in-line. So if you have a post and people reply to it, it's all kept to one plurk. For example, tonight I made a post on what I was making for dinner and Stevi responded. You can see the threaded message here. If you look at my Plurk page, you can see what it looks like. Some of my plurk friends get more responses, like this plurk. But you can see the responses to a plurk either on the timeline or look at the plurk pages, as I have linked.


• Verbs: Twitter is free-form, and Plurk can be free-form. But it also offers verbs to choose from: loves, likes, gives, is, was, wants, wishes, hates, shares, feels, thinks, asks, shares, will, and has. So if you like to use verbs in place, they have verbs that apparently don't count towards the 140 character limit.


• Multiple languges: Now normally I wouldn't care about language support, as I typically stick with English. But I'm impressed to see that there's support for a variety of languages - including Spanish, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Hungarian, and Italian. There are other languages as well. When you change your plurk language, the verbs change to that language as well. I tested out looking at Spanish and Chinese, and it's pretty neat to see that they do that.


• Sharing pictures inline: There are things like TwitPic for sharing pictures on Twitter. But with plurk, it's as simple as putting the URL in the plurk and the picture will show inline on the timeline. For example, I shared deep fried Twinkies on plurk. If you click the picture, it opens the picture in its own window, including a link to the image.


• Cliques: You can group your fans/friends into cliques and send plurks to a particular group of people, rather than to the whole world. You can also do private plurks, much like direct messages on Twitter. So if you have a lot of friends but want to group them and send a message to a particular group, plurk will let you do that.

See for yourself!

Now you don't have to take my word for it. But if you click on the link to my Plurk page or the Plurk link on my links on the right side, you can try it out for yourself.

Posting to multiple social networking sites

And for those of you who are getting tired of having to post statuses in multiple places, you may want to check out ping.fm. This site lets you post to many sites at once - including Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, MySpace, Facebook, Plurk, BrightKite, and many others. If you want a beta code for it, either email me at sarah at codinggeekette dot com or IM me or call me or get a hold of me however you typically would get a hold of me. (And if you're trying to find me on social networking sites, I'm typically sadukie. So if you can't find me on one, drop me an invite or tell me about it and I'll check it out.)

Labels: Brenda Wallace, Bright Kite, ping.fm, plurk, social networking, Stevi Deter, Twitter

If any of you follow Amanda Laucher (pandamonial on Twitter), you may have seen her comment about meeting someone who didn't know about their MS evangelists. I have to admit - I had no idea of these people called evangelists until just this last December.

Living Under a Rock

When you work for a small company that really doesn't use new technologies nor hears about it, you never realize that you're outside the realm of influence. The only reason why I knew about C# was because my buddy G and I were talking about how we'd never need to know it as long as we were at that company. I remember the discussion clearly, and to this day, G's still there and not using much in the way of .NET (other than probably maintaining my small VB.NET app). Meanwhile, I moved on to a smaller company, bigger technical staff, and am using C# and having fun learning new technologies. There we were, the developers (yep, just the 2 of us) for a manufacturing company of 600+ people, not knowing of all the resources available to us.

Developer Evangelist?

I imagine that if my buddy Russ hadn't mentioned the .NET SIG, I wouldn't have thought to look to see what else is out there. Even so, going to the SIG meetings apparently wasn't enough, as I had been going to the meetings since May 2007, shortly after I started my current job, but still had no idea that there were these people called evangelists. I wouldn't hear about them until December 2007, when this guy Jeff Blankenburg came to the Bennett Adelson SIG and showed us some cool stuff from Microsoft (like Popfly). He mentioned that he is a developer evangelist for the region. At that point, I had to wonder what it was they did. After prodding Russ for more details, I learned that there was some other guy who would come along rarely but apparently not much else happened here in Cleveland. Still, there wasn't much that I could find out from Russ on what a developer evangelist did.

So, some of us lived under rocks or were just out of the realm of influence with the evangelists. (SIGs too far, no evangelists geared for the industry, etc.) If you know people who are left out, mention this post to them, as the Microsoft evangelists (at least those here in the Heartland District) are just an awesome team to meet!

So what do evangelists do?

Before I get into the "who", you need to know what they do.

Just as the title suggests, they evangelize! Seriously, though, they're developers, architects, and other tech-minded individuals who get to hear about the cool stuff ahead of time and make sure that we know about it. Tools and technologies, they're seeing just what the industry has in store, where things are going, and they tell us about it. Through presentations at user groups and events, blog entries, podcasts, videos, forums, and just being themselves and talking about the things they're passionate about, the evangelists get the word out.

Who are our evangelists?

Ohio is in the Heartland District, which happens to have quite active evangelists in the area. Since I'm a dev, I'm going to mention the developer evangelists first - Jeff Blankenburg and Jennifer Marsman. If you're a dev and reading my blog, you ought to read their blogs as well! Jeff's blog may be slow at the moment, as he's out until the end of May, but definitely stay tuned to his blog when he returns, as you never know what he'll blog about - from something about Silverlight to the after-party of a .NET event or a contest for swag at Codemash, his blog covers all sorts of things, some .NET related and some just regular blog entries. Jennifer just started her blog at the beginning of April and has returned to our region after a few months on leave. Something that Jennifer's doing in her blog is featuring women in technology on her Friday entries. Definitely check out her blog as well!

Then there are the architect evangelists. We used to have Josh Holmes as an architect evangelist for the Heartland District, but he recently was promoted to Central RIA evangelist. Josh is one of the guys from Code to Live, and although he has a bigger region now, he still comes around to the Heartland area events. Our new architect evangelist is Brian H. Prince. I can't comment on the architect coverage, as I'm not an architect, but I definitely recommend checking out Brian's blog even if you aren't an architect. He talks of cool technologies like LiveMesh, robots, and even these things known as "soft skills".

There are other evangelists in the area, but I've met the 4 that I mentioned, and I can definitely tell you that these guys (and Jennifer!) are passionate about technology and getting the word out to the community. Sometimes, I think part of their job is to promote the "unity" in "community".

Don't know who your evangelists are? Want to know who the others are in the Heartland area? Meet your local Microsoft Evangelists!

I've sent this info on to my buddy G, so that he's no longer just another dev out of the realm of influence. But there are other devs out there who don't know about these great contacts. So pass this word on and get the word out there, so that they know that there are awesome resources out there for us in the field.

And a shout out to the PA evangelists, especially John McClelland, for getting the word out to their PA followers on Cleveland Day of .NET! Thanks for spreading the word! :)

Labels: Brian H. Prince, evangelism, Jeff Blankenburg, Jennifer Marsman, Microsoft, pandamonial, Twitter

Recently, the GoF came up in a discussion on Twitter. They were talking of design patterns, and Joel Ross actually had to refer to the book for some reason.

Now to a seasoned programmer, the GoF is well-known. But some programmers out there are not aware of the GoF or their book. They didn't mention it in my data structures classes in college, and we never did look at it in programming paradigms either. For me, I learned about it firsthand at OOPSLA '99.

The GoF was the Gang of Four, referring to the four authors of the book - Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. The GoF is also used in reference to the book, so take the abbreviation in context. The book came out in late 1994, and it was first made available at OOPSLA '94. (Side note: I use the term "was" - sadly, John Vlissides died on Thanksgiving of 2004.)

At OOPSLA '99, the GoF was on trial for crimes against computer science. The trial description can be found at The Show Trial of the Gang of Four For Crimes Against Computer Science panel description. After having spent some of the day coding in Java, a language I was cramming to learn on our off moments, I was glad to get a break and to witness this.

On Wednesday, November 3, 1999, the GoF was found guilty of their crimes. This was probably the best part of OOPSLA '99, in terms of bringing in experts with a great sense of humor. Although I don't remember all of the details of the trial, I do remember John Vlissides kept it interesting. That's what made me curious about the GoF.

After seeing them at OOPSLA, I had to see what their story was. What is a design pattern and why was there such a big deal about it?

A design pattern is a reusable solution to a common software design problem.
Some pattern references can be found here:

• data & object factory (C#/VB.NET)


• Java's J2EE patterns


• AJAX patterns


• Yahoo!'s Pattern Library


• IBM Patterns for e-business

The more I had read about it, the more I wished that they would teach as a followup to a data structures course. The data structures teach the basics - loops, clauses, classes, and other building blocks. A class on design patterns would show just how to use those building blocks in real world applications. Sometimes, you need that extra step to show just how everything comes together.

Then again, it could just be the engineer in me that likes to see building blocks being used to build something in the grand scheme of things.

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Links for this entry were gathered via a collaborative search on Tafiti, which was recommended by Jeff Blankenburg.

Labels: design patterns, Gang of Four, GoF, Jeff Blankenburg, OOPSLA, tafiti, Twitter