Street View hits Italy!

Google Street View for Italy just launched and It's giving me a serious case of Rome-sickness. The official blog post has some great views of the city, so I'll share a few of my favorite non-historic places. For starters, I can see a view down the street to the John Felice Rome Center where I lived, studied, and worked for three years:


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(You can click to zoom or drag to look around on all of these shots)

The "Green Bar" where we used to go for coffee and chocolate croissants:


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OK, I can't resist--here's my favorite church (architecture-wise),
The Basilica of St. Giovanni in Laterano:


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And Marie's favorite,
The Basilica of St. Maria Maggiore


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I could go on for hours, so I'll close out with the greatest gelateria in the world, Cremeria Monteforte (run by my good friend Roberto):


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Drag the image around 180 degrees to see that it's facing the side of the Pantheon. Oh man, now I'm seriously craving a big cup of Roberto's Cioccolato Semifreddo.

A Message and a Messenger

If you've had enough hearing about politics and this presidential election, you can stop reading now

Most of you who know me well know that while I sit firmly on the left side of the political bus, I don't go around beating a drum about it, and that I think that most politicians are crooks and liars. So it's exceptionally uncommon for me to find a politician that I respect, believe, and am willing to listen to.

First, as a speaker who has given over 100 talks in the last 8 years, I really appreciate a good orator (and can barely sit through a bad one). Barack Obama is a dynamic speaker who can connect with people on an emotional level, but more importantly, he conveys a message of inspiration and unity. Both of these messages have been sorely lacking in our country's leadership for the past eight years.

With that introduction, take a look at the last six minutes of a campaign speech he gave in Canton Ohio:

At no time in my life has this country needed someone like Barack Obama as much as we do today.

Take a good look, kids: this is our next president.

Everybody Should Have One

The Second Edition of Version Control with Subversion has finally hit the bookshelves. Ben and Mike and I enjoy working together, but we're all happy to see this finally put to bed.



If you're a fan of the dead trees, you can buy a hardcopy or if you're a fan of whizzing electrons, download a free copy.

I hope you like it--enjoy!

PS Please don't tell my Grandmother that the book's not actually about turtles--she'll be really disappointed if she finds out that it's about "that crazy computer stuff."

Life Imitates Art

My favorite web comic wrote this cartoon.

A short time later, my favorite online video site did this.

I tried it out and practically fell over laughing. Go ahead and try it yourself.

Further proof that the folks over at YouTube rock. I love it!

Is That Really Necessary?

I went to Zurich this week and thanks to a massive brainfart, I forgot to bring socks. Fortunately, a Puma store was less than 20 feet from the entrance to my hotel. I ran into the store, bought a pack of 3 pair of socks, and found this tag fastened to the socks:




What I want to know is: have they really had a problem with people not washing their socks when dirty? Is that something that shows up in a high volume of support calls ("My socks seem to be kind of gross... what should I do?"), or is this a general public service announcement?

I'm not sure, but I'm going to go wash my socks right now, just to be safe.

Packed

I was in an Apple Store the other day to pick up an iPhone belt clip, and I was totally flabbergasted by the sheer number of people in there. It was insane--there were people trying things out, two older women on folding chairs sitting at the feet of a store employee taking a class on something or other, and scads of people buying everything in sight. Most people weren't in line at a cash register waiting to buy their purchases, they were buying and paying for their merchandise at any spot in the store via handheld point-of-sale PDAs that most of the employees were toting.

It really was an unbelievable experience to see so much buzz around Apple products--and to think that some folks swore that the stores wouldn't work back when they were first announced.

I'd say they're working pretty damned well.

Wordle

Wordle is a great way to waste an hour or two creating pretty word clouds from a given corpus. Since somehow or other Red Bean has become a home for a number of version control books (namely the CVS book, the Subversion book, and the Mercurial book), I thought I'd run them through Worldle and see what came out (click on the image for a larger version):

Tivo Olympics

A few years ago I lamented the state of the Olympics on television, and while NBC hasn't done a whole lot to improve their televising of the Olympics, Tivo made it all somehow bearable. Tivo let me skip the commercials, the background pieces on athletes, the medal ceremonies, and the grating color commentary by Bob Costas and others. All in all it took me about two hours to watch each five hour stretch of the Olympics, and that somehow made it pretty OK.

I love my Tivo.

Stirling Engines at Sci Foo 2008

I spent last weekend in Mountain View at Sci Foo 2008, and it was incredible. I attended some excellent sessions, talked with a lot of interesting people, and, along with Robert, assembled some Stirling Engines that Cat bought for the conference. Since Stirling engines run off of any temperature difference, the obvious choice to power them is a cup of hot water or coffee, but I figured you could get a nice difference if you only had something cold to run the engine on. So I... well, I'll let you see for yourself:

My Other Computer is a Data Center

I was pretty happy last week when Dewitt sent me the article that Marc Benioff wrote entitled Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center. It's a good article, but the really cool part of the article was the last paragraph:

One of our developers has a bumper sticker on his laptop that captures the spirit of Web 3.0 perfectly. It reads: "My other computer is a data center." That's a claim that any developer in the world can now make. And that's the stuff of revolution.

Why is that cool? Well, because I designed that sticker.

That sticker traces its roots back to May 2006 when Jason Robbins and I were brainstorming some new sayings to put on the Google Code Hosting page and one of the saying Jason came up with was

My Other Computer is a Google Data Center

I thought that was an awesome quote for the hosting page, but it was crying out to be made into a laptop sticker. After all, it's the perfect companion to the sticker I used to see around in the '70's, "My Other Car is a Rolls Royce". It's fun, campy, and, unlike the Rolls sticker, it's actually true!

I ran over to Andrew, who was running Google Developer Day (the predecessor to Google IO), and wildly tried to convince him that this was the sticker to give out at the conference. He wasn't convinced, but he was busy, and I forgot about the sticker.

However, two months later I went to Foo Camp 2006, and Chris DiBona was manning the Epilog 35 watt carbon dioxide laser engraver and I just knew I had to engrave something. My laptop seemed to be the obvious thing...

But what to engrave? I wasn't feeling particularly artistic, and I didn't want to do anything too weird since I use my laptop to give dozens of presentations every year. I then remembered the "Data Center" idea and decided to etch a giant "sticker" on the back of my laptop. The saying didn't quite flow right, so I pulled "Google" out of the middle of the saying and added a big Google Code logo and a link to the hosting page. It wasn't particularly artsy, but definitely geeky, and hey, it's contextual advertising if bring it when I'm speaking at conferences!

After cleaning the NeXT sticker off the back of my laptop and giving it a good scrubbing, I headed into the lab where Dave Recordon was etching his laptop and he kindly offered to help me etch my laptop in the interests of me not completely destroying it--after all, you only get one shot with a 35 watt laser. After three test runs on paper (at 20% power, of course), it came out perfect:



Over the next year dozens of folks wanted to know where I got the cool laptop "sticker" from because they wanted one. I explained that it wasn't a sticker, but a laser engraving ("Really? Cool!"). In early 2008, since PyCon was going to be in Chicago and I was giving a keynote, I decided it was time to get some stickers made to give out there.

I designed the sticker with the quote in white on black and placed the Google logo off to the side on a white background so that if people wanted to put the saying on their laptop but not the Google logo, the only thing standing in their way was a sharp scissors.



(photo used under CC license from ryanobjc)

I ordered 1,000 and distributed about half at the conference and sent a few dozen off to Googlers in other offices who had asked for them.

Well, once those few stickers showed up in our offices, I started getting email after email from other Googlers wanting stickers. I cooked up another 10,000 stickers and sent packs and packs out to the teams requesting them, and gave a ton away at Google IO, OSCON, and various other venues. I've seen them on the laptops of VPs at work, hundreds of other Googlers, strangers at conferences, and even several Yahoo engineers! (with the Google part cut off, natch)

And now it's being talked about in essays by CEOs. Quite a journey for a humble little sticker.

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.