11 November 2010, early morning
I went to the Gladstone with a coworker and Tyler to hear Ali and Matt from Well.ca talk about how they keep Well.ca chugging along. They discussed the software development process at Well, the tools they use to get things done, and the corporate culture that facilitates the work they do. Ali’s one of the smartest people I know, so if you’re interested in starting a start up I recommend you copy what he does, more or less verbatim.
Since i’m new to web development I thought the talk was particularly interesting and informative. I learned about a few cool projects that I will share with you now:
- Matt’s told the audience about an automation tool he wrote called doo that looks quite nice. It’s made out of surprisingly little code. Ruby is a strange beast.
- Ali showed off a jabber bot called well-partychat. It’s an implementation of Partychat you can run behind your own firewalls. Partychat is a way to do group chats with Jabber, regardless of how shitty or not your IM client is. Since most everyone already has a Jabber account, this is a good way to set up a persistent chat room. Since it’s in something people already have open and running, I can see how it would actually get used over something like status.net or Campfire.
- Well.ca have somehow managed to trick out Speedtracer to do all sorts of magic. Sadly, i’m not entirely sure how. Speedtracer looks like a seriously awesome project in and of itself. It’s a profiler for Chrome that can tell you all about your web application.
After the talk everyone headed over to the Rhino for drinks. How did that place become the defacto hangout for Toronto software geeks?
Life | Technology
9 November 2010, early morning
Yesterday was a long and exhausting day. What better way to cap such a day off than by watching Primer, one of the craziest movies I have ever seen. It’s a time-travel film, but calling it simply a time-travel film does it a great injustice. I think it’s one of the best science fiction films i’ve seen in quite some time. It’s very creative. It’s also fairly confusing. At 77 minutes in length, I was tempted to watch the film again right after Shima and I finished watching it. At the start of the film it’s not quite clear what’s going on. Then there comes a moment of clarity when you realize, “hey, they finally figured out they built a time machine.” They explain how the machine works, and then the film quickly becomes confusing again. The film was made by a real life engineer, who wrote and stars in the film. (Nice.) They apparently made the movie for $7000, which is amazing: the film doesn’t look low budget at all. I really enjoyed the movie. I’ll definitely watch it again. (Yet another Netflix FTW!)
The official Primer website.
[2] Movies
6 November 2010, late morning
I decided to watch Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman without reading its description. I saw the photo on the web site, read the title, and assumed it’d be a kick ass movie. Now, the film was good, but it was also not at all what I was expecting. The Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman is a slapstick comedy, somewhat akin to Kung Fu Hustle. I was expecting an action movie. The film is split into three stories: one about a butcher, one about a chef, one about a swordsman. (Hence the name.) I liked the Chef’s story the best. The love interest in the Butcher story is incredibly hot. (It’s nuts.) As a film it is very crazy. There are some really bizarre sequences. I think it’s one of the more creative films I’ve seen come out of Asia in recent years.
The Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman on the TIFF website.
Movies
