Holy Banana: TR2N

Tron has always been my favorite "computer" movie. I don't remember if I saw it in the theater, but I do remember that my friend Will had a copy on Betamax that we watched probably twenty times, even on his "portable" tiny 5" black and white TV. I loved the movie--it actually had a plot, a geek for a hero, some great sets (e.g., the Big Door), and—at the time—some incredible computer graphics. I always thought that the light cycles were the coolest thing I had ever seen, and was constantly disappointed by the video game with its crappy graphics and lack of cool, screaming sound effects.

I remember when the Laserdisc release came out 12 years ago and I realized just how crappy the VHS transfer of Tron was—the Laserdisc had gorgeous colors and incredible details. I even pull out my DVD copy every year or so and give it another watching just for fun. I would occasionally peek at the Internet Movie Database to see if a sequel was in the works (partially in excitement for new Tron action, partially in fear of yet another rape of my childhood, but I never found anything.

Well, it looks like the long-rumored "Tron 2" or "TR2N" is actually being made, and a grainy crappy copy of a teaser leaked from Comic-Con this weekend all but made me explode because, well, it looks awesome:

TR2N cleaned up 001
Uploaded by genchang2112

Let's see what we've got here:

• Light Cycles: Check.
  
• Kick-Ass CGI animation: Check.
  
• Jeff Bridges: Hells yeah check.
  
• Plot: Maybe?
  

And now I have to wait until 2011 to see it. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!

Dear Disney: Please hurry. Also, please don't screw it up. KTHXBAI.

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The Ben and Fitz Show Goes to OSCON

At OSCON this year, Ben and I are giving three talks and sitting on a panel, including:

• Do You Believe in the Users?: This is our latest talk—we'll give examples and anecdotes to show why it takes more than just great code to make great software.


• People for Geeks: This is a reprise of our infamous Poisonous People talk, given as part of a larger tutorial


• Subversion Worst Practices: The top 10 ways to destroy your project with Subversion—always a crowd pleaser


• An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid: I'm going to talk about "Feeding the Trolls" while Ben is going to show you how to "Rule the Code With an Iron Fist." Come by and see why writing code on the internet is like trying to build card houses on a trampoline

So there you have it—all the Ben and Fitz you can stand, plus a whole lot more. If you see me at the conference, ask me for a My Other Computer is a Data Center sticker if you want to pimp your laptop (or, um, your car, I guess). Hope to see you in Portland.

Protocol Buffers: Now in Open Source Flavor!

Google has open sourced protocol buffers, our data interchange format that we use for, well, just about everything we store. Protocol buffers are fast. And cool. And fast. Did I mention fast? I thought so.