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This geek gift guide is not so much for geeks and techies but for those that have geeks and techies in their life and need a little help in finding the right techie gift. So if you don’t know what is the hottest gift item or you want to redeem yourself from the Cosby sweater you gave last year, this is the gift guide for you.

The hottest tech gift must be the Apple iPhone. The iPhone is one of those gifts that will be used every single day, and not just to make calls. In fact, the feature I use most often is email, browsing online, and Google Maps. I also use the iPhone to play freely available casual games available on the App Store. And of course you can play your iTunes music on the iPhone just as you would on your iPod.

Netbooks are a trendy new segment in the ultra portable laptop market. Netbooks usually refer to sub $500 laptops perfect for email and internet browsing. The ASUS Eee PC is perhaps the most popular brand in this market but there are available models like the HP Mini 1140NR and Acer Aspire One.

The Flip Mino is quickly gaining a big market share of the camcorder business from established brands such as Sony, Panasonic, Canon, etc. The Flip is the iPod of video cameras. It is small, portable, and simple to use. When recording, you can zoom in out and stop. When playing back you can increase/decrease the volume and pause.

The Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) has the best graphic intense games available in the hand held gaming market. The PSP is also a great platform for watching movies on the go. Whenever I travel on long trips I make sure to pack a couple of UMD movies. There are a ton of movies and shows available on the PSP. In terms of games you can’t go wrong with titles such as God of War: Chains of Olympus, Medal of Honor: Heroes, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and Sega Genesis Collection. Notice that most of these titles are sequels to popular games systems like the PlayStation, XBox, and Wii.

The Nintendo DS portable gaming system will also be a popular with geeks this season. Unlike the PSP, the DS has more innovative games that take full advantage of its touch dual screens. On the DS, the geeks in the family will enjoy games like Mario Party DS, KORG DS-10 Synthesizer, Brain Age, and TouchMaster.

The Nintendo Wii is perhaps the most fun and social gaming platform currently available. The game play with the Wii Remote can be very animated. The Wii is definitely a gaming console for the whole family, and there are plenty of games that the family can play together. Some personal favorite games that I am enjoyed this year have been Carnival Games, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

One item that a geek never has enough of is disk space. Technologist can easily fill a 100 GB hard drive with bittorrents, software, games, movies, pictures, data, etc. in no time. The geek in your life will appreciate a portable hard drive like the Western Digital My Passport which are available with 360 or 500 GB. The My Passport is the slimmest, slickest, and sexiest of the portable drives I have seen. They are small enough to carry with you in your laptop bag. As a stocking stuffer, you might be interested in getting a 16 GB USB drive.

Earlier this year Oprah said that the Amazon Kindle was her favorite new gadget. The kindle an electronic book reader like the Sony eReader except that the Kindle’s wireless connectivity allow you to shop and download books on the fly as you go. Hundreds of blogs are also available through the Kindle such as Slashdot and The Onion.

As everyone already knows, the standard geek uniform is jeans and a t-shirt. Any self respecting geek needs to have some ThinkGeek shirts in his wardrobe. ThinkGeek gear is like Armani Exchange for geeks, binary fashionable and geek chic.

Be sure to take a look a the Juixe Store. We have selected the best software development books that need to be in every software developer’s bookshelf such as the classics like Code Complete, The Mythical Man-month, and The Pragmatic Programmer.

If you still need a little bit more help in finding the right tech gift for the geek in your life, take a look at the following geek gift guides from other sources such as CNET, Engadget, and Ars Technica.

• The Ruby and Rails Library
• Beginning iPhone Development
• Beginning Android Development
• Holiday Video Game Buying Guide
• Ars Staff Gift Guide 2008
• Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: For Him
• Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: For Her
• GameSpot Holiday Gift Guide 2008
• TechSpot Holiday Gift Guide 2008
• TreeHugger Gift Guide 2008
• CNET Holiday Gift Guide 2008

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, netbook, flip, mino, eee, pc, nintendo, psp, wii, ds, kindle

The iPhone App Store has been a huge success for both Apple and indie developers that have developed applications for the iPhone. Even with all the success, some iPhone developer have been very vocal about the stringent process and restrictions involved to release applications for the iPhone. On the other hand, the Android platform promises to be a more open environment and developer friendly. Sure Android does not yet have the market share that the iPhone currently enjoys but if history is any indicator, an open platform will gain a wider market share in the long term over a closed platform. Just look at the near monopoly success of PCs over Macs. Whatever the case, developing mobile application on the Android platform can be a fun and positive endeavor. To help you move onto the Android platform there is a myriad of development books. Here is a short list of the currently available books aimed at those interested in created mobile applications for the G1 phone.

• Professional Android Application Development
• Android Essentials
• Pro Android: Developing Mobile Applications for G1 and Other Google Phones
• Unlocking Android
• Hello, Android
• Android: A Progrmmer’s Guide
• The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development

If you are interested in developing for the iPhone, you may be interested on the following Beginning iPhone Development.

Technorati Tags: google, android, apple, iphone, java, mobile

There was a large contingent of Microsoft evangelist at this years Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 pushing Microsoft Azure, XNA, and Silverlight technologies. I was able to see Microsoft Surface in action. Surface is an interactive table top, it reminds me of a large iPhone made into a coffee table. Just like the iPhone, you gesture at the Surface screen to manipulate objects. Java, Groovy, and Flex also had a good showing. Below are conference notes from each of the sessions I was able to attend.

• Java 2D and Groovy
• Silverlight 2.0: It Just Keeps Getting Better
• Windows Azure
• Component Based Java Web Development with Apache Wicket
• Silverlight 2.0 Made Easy
• Destroying the Universe with XNA
• Flex and 3D UI: For Games and More

Continue reading

Here is a recap of the top Ruby-related links for the month of October 2008. Links for The Rubyist are provided by A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

Ruby

• Ruby Processing
• 50+ Rubyists to Follow on Twitter
• Ruby's Roots: Smalltalk Comeback and Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk
• Elements of Ruby Style
• Why Ruby is Not My Favorite Language
• Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby
• Ruby and dead simple code coverage
• Outside.in Scales Up with Engine Yard – A Case Study
• Ruby conferences that matter
• Powerful, easy, DRY, multi-format REST APIs
• Ruby 1.9 and Lambda Calculus
• Ruby Tools Roundup

Rails

• 10 Awesome Ruby on Rails Techniques to Get You Started
• Creating a BlackBerry Version of Your Rails Application
• Introducing Vasco: A Route Explorer for Rails
• Screencast : Unobtrusive jQuery with Ruby on Rails
• World's Best Rails Hiring Process
• TOG – Extensible Open Source Social Network Platform
• Ruby on Rails: Opportunity in a Financial Downturn
• RailsXLS Revived
• Elasticizing Your Ruby on Rails App
• ‘Has_many through’ Association Across Databases
• Rails Rumble 2008 Apps
• 2008 Rails Rumble

Merb

• MerbCamp: Streaming Video Now Available On-Demand
• Do Ruby on Rails Developers Need Merb?
• Merb's run_later Coming to a Thread-safe Rails Near You
• MerbCamp Keynote and Introducing Nanite

JRuby

• Counting Ruby Objects on the JRuby Heap
• JRuby, sharing objects across multiple runtimes. JMagLev?
• Cross-platform development with JRuby and Swing

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, jruby, ror, merb, rubyist, twitter

For the last session of Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008, I attended the talk by Vic Cekvenich. Vic shared his experience of developing rich interactive UI applications with Flex. Vic started out by saying that the Flash development culture is completely opposite than your typical software development project. Any half decent software development project uses version control software, build systems, programming best practices, unit tests, etc. Flash developers are more comfortable with the Flash CS design tool whereas classically trained software developers are more comfortable using Integrated Development Environments such as Visual Studio or Eclipse. Vic stated that Flash CS has an anti social development feel.

Vic also had time to walk through flash 3D 101. He demoed Flex, Papervision 3D, and FlashDevelop.

At the end of the talk, Vic made the following suggestion when working with flash: Use shadows/reflections, encapsulate 3D models in a standard format, avoid Flash CS, allow for repeatable testable and agile development environment, avoid local assets…

Technorati Tags: flash, flex, flashdevelop, papervision, 3d, cs

Jason Mauer set out to destroy the universe with Microsoft XNA at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008. No, XNA is not a doomsday device from Microsoft. XNA can be a confusing term thanks to MSFT marketing, but in a nutshell it is a next generation game development platform for PC, XBox 360, and Zune. XNA, as an initiative, is set to develop and improve the game development ecosystem. XNA is a pseudo acronym, it doesn’t mean anything.

Prior to XNA, the game industry was seen as very sick, games where mainly sequels much like the movie industry. XNA is set out to revitalize and revolutionize the game industry for casual gamers, hobbyist, academia, etc. Games are supposed to be fun, it is not just about graphics, blockbuster, licensed content, first person shoot and bomb them ups. Goals of XNA is to become the ‘youtube’ of games without the lawsuits for copyright infringements.

This session covered some of the history and basics of XNA. At the end of the session, we did have some time to see some demos created by the XNA Creators Club.

Technorati Tags: xna, ms, xbox, zune, game, development, directx, opengl, graphics, codecamp