www.nickhodge.com

The above is the sunset-view from my room. To the left is the hin­ter­land, and to the right is the beach itself.

On Loc­a­tion, at the Gold Coast pre­par­ing for a busy, edu­ca­tional week at Microsoft TechEd. Being my first TechEd, any­thing could and prob­ably will hap­pen. I do know I will leave more edu­cated than I arrive.

Whilst I watched the SBS TV series on the mak­ing of the Crowded House album, Wood­face, there were much rev­els going on around me. It seemed to be a beer bash-come-stag party. So I turned up the TV with Neil Finn hope­fully calm­ing the din. Neil gets the impact of his music. The mer­cur­ial Finn brothers.

Up at 9am this morn­ing thanks to a fire alarm. I could smell the smoke, but thought it was someone smoking on a non-smoking floor.  By the time I got my import­ant items (pair of pants on, room key, wal­let, cam­era, phone — in that order) ready to stroll out — the fire­men were look­ing around for the smoking cul­prit. No one seemed ultra alarmed, so stayed put.

Today, it’s about plan­ning. To quote Uncle Mike: “Piss Poor Plan­ning Pre­cedes Poor Per­form­ance”. Check­ing the cam­era equip­ment comes first.

Hav­ing installed the new Adobe Pro­duc­tion Premium Suite, I tried out OnLoca­tion. And this piece of tech­no­logy Adobe pur­chased rocks. It essen­tially turns your Firewire/Laptop into a hard disk recorder and mon­it­or­ing sta­tion. No more cap­tur­ing slowly in post-production. Straight into Premiere, encode and you’re outta there.

Tomor­row it starts: danah boyd in Brisbane.

Time to LOLCODE. Watch­ing the for­ums, it’s fun watch­ing the defin­i­tion of a pro­gram­ming lan­guage where the gram­mar is obvious.

And I’ve also thought of a great, quot­able reason to use LOLCode:

“Nick Hodge, Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist for Microsoft, recom­mends the invest­ig­a­tion of LOLCODE as Enterprise-worthy Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage if your devel­op­ment pro­ject has a strong require­ment to enter­tain future sys­tem main­ten­ance engin­eers, and your present devel­op­ment team gets LOLCATS humor.” You can quote me on that.

What was not imme­di­ately obvi­ous, another effort is to make your lines of LOL­Code funny. Care­ful choice of vari­able names should res­ult in LULZ.

There were a few occa­sions where I had a peek at the C# source code of the LOL­Code com­piler. It will be inter­est­ing to see how much of the engine that makes the com­piler is taken over by the new DLR, and how hard/easy it is to cre­ate a domain spe­cific lan­guage. The DLR con­tains mainy of the infra­struc­ture pieces, such as cre­ation of abstract syn­tax trees, etc.

Note that these examples com­piled with LOLCODE.Net Build 35, and are based on the 1.2 spe­cific­a­tion.

First pro­gram: Hello World

HAI
VISIBLE “hello world“
KTHXBYE

What’s going on here? HAI is the indic­a­tion of the begin­ning of the lol­code app; KTHXBYE is the end.

VISIBLE “hello world” prints out, well, hello world.

Second pro­gram: Get­ting Input

HAI
    I HAS A FLUFFYZ
    VISIBLE “ur namez is?”
    GIMMEH LINE FLUFFYZ
    VISIBLE “hello “!
    VISIBLE FLUFFYZ
KTHXBYE

So, what’s going on this time?

I HAS A FLUFFYZ– declares a vari­able called FLUFFYZ

GIMMEH LINE FLUFFYZ– gets some input, in this case from the keyboard

The exclam­a­tion mark at the end of the VISIBLE “hello “! keeps the prin­tout on the same line

VISIBLE FLUFFYZ prints out the con­tent of the vari­able FLUFFYZ. Simple

Third pro­gram: Loop­ing, Conditionals

HAI
I HAS A LIFE ITZ 1
I HAS A OSCARZ ITZ 10
IM IN YR HEADSPIN UPPIN YR LIFE TIL BOTH SAEM LIFE AN OSCARZ
    VISIBLE LIFE
IM OUTTA YR HEADSPIN
KTHXBYE

This code example should work; it com­piles in lolc but neatly stops when run­ning in the CLR. The new parts are the assign­ment of a value to a vari­able (I HAS A LIFE ITZ 1)

Secondly, the line  “I am in your loop increas­ing your LIFE until both-the same life and OSCARZ” is a simple loop with incre­ment and a test.

The “IM IN YR HEADSPIN” is an example/attempt at humor. HEADSPIN is the name of the loop. Craft­ing these names to some­thing funny will provide a future code main­ten­ance geek some LULZ in the future.

Next week (actu­ally, from Caturday for me) is TechEd.

This year, Zaakera is over from Microsoft US to cap­ture the spirit of TechEd in a video-bottle for release on Vir­tual TechEd.

Also, we have a “Blogger’s Lounge”. WTF? Oh, and there’s a Blogger’s lunch

This is an area on the Exhib­i­tion Floor where I will be with my laptop, talk­ing to people. All are wel­come, blog­gers or not. Chat, pho­tos, link­ing up. We’re keep­ing it a little less struc­tured so any­thing could happen.

Oh, and I’ll be stor­ing your “The Geek Stor­ies” for pub­lish­ing http://on10.net/

Vir­tual TechEd will be at TechEd Aus­tralia. This is a major coup as Microsoft con­tin­ues to evolve the TechEd format.

As you can see from the exist­ing con­tent on Vir­tual TechEd, if you have some­thing to say to the world: now is the time to stand up and be interviewed!

Com­ment here/send me an email and we’ll sched­ule you in.

Also, I’ll be at the Blogger’s lounge with video cam­era, laptop and a wire­less con­nec­tion. Come and have a chat!

TechEd, from a newcomer’s per­spect­ive, needs more cow­bell. http://twitter.com/atl intro­duced us all to the world’s new­est pro­gram­ming lan­guage in May.

Based on a demo­cratic yet tech­no­lo­gic­ally flawed vote on http://nickhodge.com/ pop­u­lar opin­ion is that LOLCODE should be presented.

There­fore, Chuck has let me sub­vert the hier­archy and made a slot for me to present the following:

Thursday 9^th August

12:45pm-1:15pm   NIck Hodge: LOLCODE. CAN HAS NEW .NET LANGUAGE. LOLCODE IZ IN UR TECHED. C U THERE. KTHXBAI

Just the thing to start the day, and shake off any resid­ual hangover.

Not sure what I’ll get to cover in a mere 30 minutes. Maybe LOLCODE will get into the key­note for 2008?

Buy the t-shirt at http://store.lolcode.com/

As the LOLCATS meme goes TechEd; here one of my submissions:

Now, in the interest of learn­ing new pro­gram­ming lan­guages: I pur­chased a LOLCODE.com T-shirt. What was inter­est­ing was the non-geeks look­ing at me strangely. People already think I am “out there”, and the LOLCODE t-shirt just proves it.

Before you start dis’in my new lan­guage of choice, there is a Visual Stu­dio 2005 with syn­tax high­light­ing and Intel­li­s­ense and a .Net ver­sion on the way.

So, my ques­tion to the developer com­munity: do we need a spe­cial BOF LOLCODE ses­sion at TechEd 2007?