I loved the Napoleon Dynamite movie - a definite cult classic. I only saw the movie in 2006, so I did not take any interest in the “Bill Gates Goes to College” opening vid from the PDC 2005 Conference. The 5.5 minute video features Napoleon and is hilarious.

Favourite quote: When Napoleon turns to Gates and says “You look like my brother!”.

If you have yet to experience Napoleon Dynamite - Go rent it out now!

Would have loved to attend, but could not…. The presentations are up and I their are a few that I’m interested in:

• Advanced Spring Framework by Rod Johnson
• Databases Don’t Matter by Emma McGrattan
• Generating Gorgeous Word Documents, PDFs, and Excel Spreadsheets by Michael Koziarski
• Machine Learning Made Easy with Perl by Lino Ramirez
  I’ll have to check out the Perl and Support Vector Machine (SVM) bindings. Looks promising - SVM classification in a couple of lines of code.
• Mahara: Putting Thought into ePortfolios by Penny Leach
  Mahara is an Open Source Elearning Portfolio application.
  This is developed in New Zealand. I absolutely love the slide that shows just how many NZ universities have moved from Blackboard/WebCT to Moodle. Makes me want to move to NZ.
• Next Generation Data Warehousing: Using Open APIs for Embedding Massively Parallel BI Analytics into the Data Warehouse by Luke Lonergan
• Programming for Everybody: CP4E by Kirby Urner

A new series - a series of blog posts from me. I can only really force myself to learn a new technology if I can clearly see its potential. Rather than read documentation, I like to see examples. Usually after a few clicks (maybe 10) of discovering something new, I know whether its useful or not. Hopefully even if it is not useful immediately I’ll be able to remember the ‘cool’ examples and be able to make an informed decision about whether this new technology has something to contribute to a new project or perhaps even to my productivity. So in the next few weeks look out for a series of blog entries to help inspire you to explore Rails, Flex, Silverlight, ‘insert cool new tech here’, etc. All posts will be prefixed by “10 Clicks to feel inspired by”.

This can only be good. If Madonna performing at the Live Earth concert was not cool enough, now there is news of a new cd (produced by Timberland with collaborations from Justin Timberlake), Madonna directing a short film and even Madonna lending her voice to an Annie Lennox track.  I can’t wait… I love new music from Madonna. Actually I love everything Madonna does.

I’ve waited patiently for a year and a bit and now finally it looks like I can deploy my rails apps on Tomcat. Digital Sanctum has posted a nifty tutorial. An additional deployment platform is always welcome but this means that Rails can finally ‘enter the enterprise’. Not that Rails was ever not ‘ready for the enterprise’, it was really the enterprise not being ready for Rails and placing barriers in its way without considering the flexiblility, productivity and joy it brought to programmers. Sadly programmer happiness does not count for much but now at least I can rapidly prototype apps in Rails and deploy on Tomcat. …and if those Rails apps never get ported to Superior Enterprise Language (I wont mention names), yet are fully functional then so be it….