The Morning Brew

Last Thursday (15th May) I presented at the Liverpool Users of .NET monthly meeting on F#, the Microsoft Research Language demonstrating that the CLR is a good basis for Functional Programming. My talk was mainly a language overview, with the intention to give the audience a grounding upon which they could get started with the language and functional programming in general.

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The code samples from the presentation, including one or two I skipped out can be found here:
F# Presentation - Demo Code

My thanks to the audience - you made giving the talk very easy, and enjoyable and especially to Hakim Cassimally for the nice write up of the talk over on his blog.

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Last night I gave a presentation to the Liverpool Geekup group about NHibernate, thanks to everyone who came along - you were all a very nice audience. The slides from the presentation entitled Getting a Good Nights Sleep - ORM with NHibernate are available as a PDF, here. There are a number of links in the slides, but here is a more comprehensive list of links that people may find useful or interesting

• NHibernateDataSource: A DataSourceControl for ASP.NET 2.0
  The Article and code for the 2 way databinding library of NHibernate objects
• NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET, 1.2nd Ed.
  A good source of information about using NHibernate within web applications
• NHibernate Reference Documentation
  The official documentation for NHibernate
• TheServerSide: NHibernate
  Excellent Introductory article from TheServerSide.NET covering most of the basics of NHibernate
• NHibernate Query Analyser
  NHibernate query analyser allows you to work interactively with your NHibernate Mapped objects
• Ayende@Rahien - Presentations
  A collection of great NHibernate presentations, covering lots of the more advanced functionality

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OK, the time has come to unveil my Hack for Yahoo Hack Day.  Face Ball is the ‘Crazy new game at Flickr HQ‘, and images have been popping up all over flickr as other join in.  Well now, you too can join in the fun, and just like Thom Shannon, make your own Face Ball images without risk of injury or special equipment.

Flickr Face Ball is a .NET 2 Windows Forms application that allows you to select images from you Flickr photo stream by tagging them as ‘ToFaceBall’, and add one of three different face ball images to the original photo, uploading the results to your Flickr account.

So, how do you get involved in this craze:

1. Ensure you are running Windows with the .NET 2 framework - sorry Mac guys - this one probably isn’t for you.
2. Download the Zip File
3. Tag a few suitable images on your Flickr photo stream with the tag ‘ToFaceBall’
4. Extract the .zip and run FlickrFaceBall.exe
5. Enter your Flickr user account name into the box provided and click ‘Fetch From Flickr’
6. Wait patiently while it loads the images.
7. Choose an Image from the thumbnail strip at the bottom of the screen, choose a ball from the pallet on the left, and click on the image to position it.
   
8. When you have achieved the look you want, click save, enter a title and description, followed by Authenticate.
9. When prompted in your browser, please allow the application to upload the images.
10. Finally, click upload, and (hopefully) your creation will be be uploaded to your flickr stream.
     

Credits:

FlickrFaceBall uses the Flickr.NET API Implementation - I have only good things to say about this library - it just works

Thom Shannon for providing the inspiration for the Hack, and also providing the PSD of face ball images.

Finally, to the original source of the Face Ball images - photo1 and photo2

Please Note: This program is hack quality code - It’s not been tested much, and if it breaks your computer, flickr account, or anything else, its your own responsibility.

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Day 1 was certainly eventful, and now with <2 hours sleep (and one completed Hack) under my belt, I’m ready and raring to go for Day 2.  The Music in the West Hall went off at about 6:30, about the same time I woke up, and now all that remains is the subdued noise of people waking up (and a few who must be attempting not to fall asleep in their laptops.

The count down clock on the big screen reads a little more that 6 hours hacking time remain, and I’m beginning to wonder if its time I went to try to wake the other members of the team.

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My Hack Day invite arrived today (thanks Derek), so I need to put my thinking cap on and attempt to come up with a few interesting ideas we could produce. If you are going to be there and fancy collaborating, drop me a line.

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