Author: Joey deVilla

Categories
Geek

TSOT’s Ruby/Rails Project Night — Next Tuesday!

Bruce Lee, wearing a TSOT t-shirt and holding Ruby on Rails nunchuks.

Don’t forget: TSOT’s first Ruby/Rails project night takes place next Tuesday! Admission is free, but space is limited, so sign up now!

The Quick Version

TSOT Ruby/Rails Night
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 (and the second Tuesday of every month)
@ TSOT’s office — 151 Bloor Street West (on the south side, just east of Avenue Road)
11th floor
Door open and food at 5:30 p.m.
Presentations start at 6-ish
FREE ADMISSION (but limited space)
To register, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

About TSOT

TSOT is a Toronto-based start-up that develops — look out, here come the buzzwords — social networking applications using Ruby on Rails. Our first applications are FraternityLive and SororityLive, social software built specifically for people in fraternities and sororities. Both apps are currently being tested with a userbase of thousands of university students and alumni, and we expect to release them in early 2008.

About Ruby/Rails Project Nights

We believe that it’s good for Toronto to have a healthy developer ecosystem — it’s good not only for us as a Toronto-based development shop, but also as a group of developers who are passionate about the work we do. We’d like to see Toronto as “Silicon Valley++” — with the vibrant high-tech scene, but with all the amenities that make Toronto a better place to live than the Valley (such as not being a dreary 50-mile stretch of suburbia and having decent places to go at night).

Hence our contribution to the local developer scene: TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Nights, which will take place on the second Tuesday of every month. They’ll feature in-depth presentations by developers working on interesting projects — primarily Ruby and Ruby on Rails — along with drinks and munchies and a chance to socialize with your fellow developers. They’ll be hosted by Yours Truly, TSOT developer and DemoCamp regular Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla.

The First Night: Next Tuesday, January 8th

This first Ruby/Rails Night will feature presentations by a couple of Ruby/Rails local heroes on their current Ruby/Rails projects:

The doors will open at 5:30, the first presentation will start at about 6, and we hope to wrap up the evening by 8:30 or 9. We’ll provide food and drinks, and if there’s enough of a demand, we can always go out to a nearby pub afterwards. There’s no cost to attend (but be advised that seating is limited).

If you’ve been thinking about making a Ruby or Rails presentation (perhaps you want to rehearse for RailsConf 2008!), we’d like to have you present it at one of our project nights!

Add TSOT Ruby/Rails Nights to your list of New Year’s resolutions!

How Do I Register?

Registration is free, but space is limited. To register for the upcoming Jan 8th gathering, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

For More Information

For more information about TSOT Project Nights, please contact:

The event is also listed on Upcoming.org.

[This article was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.]

Categories
funny

2008 Batman, Meet 1966 Batman

The Adam West Batman, hurling his batarang

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the latest trailer for The Dark Knight, the upcoming Batman movie with Christian Bale in the title role and Heath Ledger as the Joker:

Better still, here’s a trailer that mashes up the audio from the trailer above with scenes from the 1966 Batman movie, in which Adam West plays the title role. It’s camp-licious!

Links

[This article was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.]

Categories
funny

“Maaaaa! Not in Front of the Mouse!”

Large cat grooming a wincing smaller cat in front of a toy mouse
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Categories
Uncategorized

Happy New Year, Emily Flake-Style!

Here’s a New Year’s greeting created by Emily Flake:

“Happy New Year 2008″ comic by Emily Flake
Comic by Emily Flake.
Thanks to Miss Fipi Lele for sending me this pic!

Categories
Uncategorized

Happy New Year!

“Sinfest” comic for January 1, 2008
Comic taken from Sinfest.
Click it to see the strip on its original page.

Categories
Uncategorized

A Little Reminder for the New Year

Photo of stencil graffiti on a wall: “The best things in life aren’t things”
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Toronto’s Language Quilt

Map: “The Language Quilt”, a map of Toronto and area, colour-coded by mother tongue
“Language Quilt” map taken from the Toronto Star.
Click here to download the full article (20 MB PDF — you’ve been warned!)

Yesterday, the Toronto Star published a map titled The Language Quilt, a map of Accordion City and surrounding areas colour-coded by prevalent mother tongue based on 2006 census data. If you’re willing to download a 20-megabyte PDF file, you can get the map plus the accompanying article here.

Here’s a list of observations taken from the article:

  • English is the second language in 47 of the GTA’s (Greater Toronto Area’s) 1,076 census tracts
  • English is in third place in 7 tracts in Agincourt, on Toronto’s northern edge [often referred to in jest as “Asiancourt” — Joey]
  • In 57 tracts, 70% or more of the population has a non-English mother tongue
  • The preponderance of English as a mother tongue is 90% or more in 42 census tracts
  • In 200 tracts, more than 30 distinct mother tongues are spoken by 15 or more people, the minimum number of speakers required for a language to count in the census
  • In 13 tracts, there are more than 40 mother tongues

When the article refers to “mother tongue”, it’s referring to the first language learned in childhood and still understood. In the case of Yours Truly, that’s English — I started speaking when my family lived in the States. My parents’ mother tongue is Tagalog, the 7th most popular mother tongue in Toronto.

(Note that there wasn’t a language barrier when we came here in 1975, as English is one of the Philippines’ official languages and if you ranked countries by English-speaking population, the Philippines would rank 5th, right after the United Kingdom.)

Here’s a chart based on the data showing the popularity of English as a mother tongue alongside the top 10 non-English mother tongues:

Bar graph showing top 11 mother tongues in Toronto

Here’s how the most popular mother tongues break down among the 5.4 million residents in the Greater Toronto Area:

  1. English: 56%
  2. Italian: 3.5%
  3. “Chinese” (no language specified): 3.2%
  4. Cantonese: 3.1%
  5. Punjabi: 2.5%
  6. Portuguese: 2%
  7. Spanish: 2%
  8. Tagalog: 1.9%
  9. Urdu: 1.8%
  10. Tamil: 1.7%
  11. Polish: 1.6%

Note that the third-place mother tongue, “Chinese”, is a bit vague. It could refer to any one of several spoken forms — Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese or Taiwanese, to name the most popular. Part of the problem is that there’s still some disagreement over whether “Chinese” is a language with several dialects or a group of different languages (and some of this disagreement is based in politics, to boot). Further confusing the issue for census takers is that although the spoken versions are different, the written version is the same: a person who spoke only Mandarin wouldn’t be able to have an oral conversation with someone who spoke only Cantonese, but they could be fluent pen pals.