The Montreal Tech League

2007 Theme: For sustainable development
Thème 2007: Pour un développement durable
Date: From September 15th to September 23rd

FACiL is taking over the organization of the SQIL (QFSW) from Robin Milette, the original instigator. The QFSW is in its fourth year already and it’s a fantastic initiative to make people more aware of Free and Open-Source software.

As Robin previously emphasized, FACiL is about helping people self-appropriate the tools of free computing. And for that, they need to be made aware of Free computing and software resources and their benefits.

To start it off, Canonical’s Fabian Rodriguez will be volunteering and coordinating a kiosk at the SQIL for Software Freedom Day, together with other members of FACiL. Fabian and other friends of FACiL like Nicholas Marchildon and Yannick Cyr will be at the Berri-UQAM metro (site 3) in Montreal on Saturday the 15th from 9am to 6pm.

They’ll have some goodies like Ubuntu Linux CDs and the OpenCD, with information about licenses, stickers and more.

Additional information sent by Nicholas Marchildon:

—

Montréal, le 12 septembre 2007 - Depuis un certain nombre d’années, les
logiciels libres et les standards ouverts font progressivement leur
chemin et sont adoptés par de plus en plus d’institutions publiques,
d’entreprises à travers le monde.

Nous pouvons citer entre autres le navigateur Firefox qui compte chaque
jour un nombre de plus en plus important d’usagers. OpenOffice.org est
un autre bon exemple, avec son format OpenDocument (ODF), un format
ouvert et normalisé pour les applications de bureautique. Ces logiciels
libres, comme Firefox et OpenOffice.org sont actuellement disponibles
sur presque toutes les plateformes informatiques.

La Semaine québécoise de l’informatique libre (SQIL), d’abord initiée
par Robin Milette, est organisée depuis maintenant quatre ans par
plusieurs acteurs de la communauté du libre au Québec. Cette année, la
SQIL se fera sur le thème du développement durable.

Le but est de démontrer qu’on peut faire du développement durable autant
de l’économie que des activités humaines. La communauté du libre,
comprenant développeurs et utilisateurs, s’oppose aux brevets logiciels
tout comme la communauté des agriculteurs sensibles à l’environnement
s’inquiète des brevets sur le vivant.

La liste des activités ayant lieu pendant la semaine est disponible sur
le site web de l’événement. On y trouve aussi des informations pour ceux
qui désireraient organiser une activité.

http://www.sqil.info

Qu’est-ce qu’un logiciel libre ?

Un logiciel libre est un logiciel livré avec son code source de manière
qu’il puisse être accessible, consulté, copié, modifié et redistribué,
évoluant ainsi de façon continue vers une version plus perfectionnée,
dans un contexte de développement coopératif et communautaire. Le
système d’exploitation libre GNU/Linux, du nom du projet GNU de la Free
Software Foundation et du noyau Linux, lui-même un amalgame du nom de
son premier concepteur, le finlandais Linus Torvalds, et du système Unix
qui est à son origine, est un exemple de logiciel libre.

FACIL est une association à but non lucratif qui fait la promotion de
l’informatique libre au Québec. FACIL organise la Semaine québécoise de
l’informatique libre, des présentations mensuelles au sujet de
l’informatique libre, des ateliers du libre, et organise ou participe à
plusieurs autres activités au sujet des logiciels libres et des
standards ouverts.

Renseignements :

Daniel Cedilotte, coordonateur
Téléphone: 514-664-1260
Courriel: daniel@facil.qc.ca
Site Web: http://facil.qc.ca/

It’s a great day today for the ICT industry in Montreal, and by extension for Quebec and Canada as the TechnoMontreal team, spearheaded by Lyne Bouchard, has launched its very own blog.

The blog will be a collective blog with contributions from knowledgeable authors of the ICT industry from the Greater Montreal area. It will be a showcase for Montreal’s Business of Technology community and also a hub for conversations about the ICT industry.

The seven sectors identified for the local ICT landscape are:

Lyne has posted the first blog post this morning.

TechnoMontreal, and now its blog, are exactly what Montreal needed for strategic economic development through ICT and its community.

Congratulations to Lyne and Eric Kucharsky for launching the blog!

The second edition of Montreal on Rails organized by Mat Balez and Carl Mercier of Karabunga at McGill had three presentations this time around.

1. Chris Scott - Ext on Rails

Chris is a Ruby on Rails developer and he presented Ext, a JavaScript framework for building client-side windows and widgets. More precisely, Chris showed how to integrate Ext within a Ruby on Rails project.

Ext is a project started by Jack Slocum. Initially developed as an extension to Yahoo’s YUI library, Ext has grown into a full-fledged framework which can target different Javascript libraries through ‘adapters’:

The widgets demonstrated were impressive for client-side display and data-manipulation. Grids have automatically sortable headers and also editable cells. Chris also showed drag-and-drop functionality for columns and trees.

Chris mentioned how it is interesting to transfer data back and forth between Ruby on Rails and Ext through Arrays and JSON respectively. Since JSON can be processed by the JavaScript engine natively with the eval() procedure, this makes sense.

The documentation for Ext is extensive and very well formatted.

It seems that some people misunderstood the benefits of using Ext although Chris did explain in the opening minute that it targeted several JavaScript libraries.

First, Gary asked about the preference of Ext over Prototype. Well, you can target Prototype with Ext, and, in fact, refactor your project or parts of it to target other libraries too.

Secondly, Heri, on a comment on Ext on Rails about Ext as an alternative to other client-side technologies for Rich Internet Applications, like Adobe’s AIR. This observation is incorrect since a recent example of Adobe AIR by Adobe themselves targets Ext. It’s perhaps here a misunderstanding of both Ext and Adobe AIR technologies.

Chris obviously knows his way around Ext and Ruby on Rails. It was a very interesting presentation and Ext is very promising and will soon be released as version 2.0.

2. Chris Lamothe - Rails authentication

The second Chris for the evening presented the acts_as_authenticated plugin for Rails. Chris demonstrated the plugin on a Youtube look-alike Rails projects, Footube.

He showed how to remove administrative links from some pages of the application through the plugin and a simple command:

script/generate authenticated user account

With this, the fields id, login, email, crypted_password, salt, created_at, updated_at are automatically generated in the database.

From there, it’s a matter of adding the :login_required symbol in your controller.

There is also a way to generate roles for users and give them different access permissions.

3. Tierje Tjervaag - Web development Testing and Debugging Tools.

Tierje had a short but nice wrap-up of several web-testing tools. He advised not to start with client-side debugging.

However, browser debugging is interesting in the following cases:

Tierje mentioned the following tools for Firefox:

It’s a favorite tool of mine and Tierje showed the Profiling options among other tips like changing CSS info on the fly and seeing the results update dynamically in the browser pane. I also like the Inspect tool.

A tool by Yahoo to diagnose and advise about why your website could be slow.

François Beausoleil had one or two feedbacks during the night to correct some glitches in the presentations. François was also filming the event, so we can expect to have the presentations online someday.

Mat and Carl asked for feedback for the event. It seems everybody’s happy with how things are going currently.

I was glad to meet up with Hugo Frappier, Francis Wu, Chris Scott, François Beausoleil, Caroline, Mat, Carl, Fred and Marc-André and the others.

Fred generously pointed out that the next meeting would be in Standout Jobs’ headquarters, as they’ll be able to host more people.

Maybe the donuts will make a come-back?

Other Reports:
1. Djief
2. Heri
3. Marc-André

Here are links to some reports of the event gathering the Montreal Tech community:

1. Report by Josh at YashLabs
2. Report by Heri at MTW
3. A wrap-up by Marc-André Cournoyer

DemoCampMontreal4 is today at the S.A.T. There are 5 demonstrations scheduled by the members of the Montreal Tech Community who developed them. It’s free too.

Presentations at DemoCampMontreal4:

1. Daniel Haran - url_pipe
2. Francois Magnan - BrainCuts by Categorical Design Solutions
3. David Xu | Podbean - a Podcast Social Subscribing Site
4. Mitch Cohen - ClixConnect
5. Josh Nursing - IronRuby, Ruby & Ruby on Rails IDEs. How to extend the e Text Editor with Cygwin, Ruby and wxCocoaDialog

MAP:: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

For a taste of what to expect at DemoCamps, see the reports for previous ones here:

DemoCampMontreal2 Reports
DemoCampMontreal1

Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of registrants on the wiki below, and prepare to participate in this gathering of Montreal’s Tech Scene. If you are not presenting (and the five slots are taken already), prepare to help out there or at least later report on it on your blog or some other way.

For more information:
DemoCampMontreal4
DemoCampMontreal4-en

DemoCampMontreal3 was an event packed with technological prowess and even some magic.

Here are some reports about the event:

1. DemoCampMontreal3 Report at YashLabs by Josh

2. A DemoCampMontreal3 follow-up by Marc-André Cournoyer

3. DemoCampMontreal Report at Montréal Tech Watch by Heri

4. Some posts including videos by Chris Moore at SearchAnyway:

- Video highlights from DemoCampMontreal3

- Vinismo

- Defensio

5. A post by Daniel Haran

6. A post by Mitch Cohen

Till next time at DemoCampMontreal4.

DemoCampMontreal3 is today at the S.A.T. There are 5 working product demonstrations scheduled by the members of the Montreal Tech Community who developed them. It’s free too.

Presentations at DemoCampMontreal3:

1. Nicolas Ritoux, Evan Prodromou - Announcing a new project
2. Heri - WorkCruncher
3. Carl Mercier - Defensio
4. SimonLaw - Building a counter-clock
5. Jerome Paradis, Francois Aubin - A new project

MAP:: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

For a taste of what to expect at DemoCamps, see the reports for previous ones here:

DemoCampMontreal2 Reports
DemoCampMontreal1

Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of registrants on the wiki below, and prepare to participate in this gathering of Montreal’s Tech Scene. If you are not presenting (and the five slots are taken already), prepare to help out there or at least later report on it on your blog or some other way.

For more information:
DemoCampMontreal3
DemoCampMontreal3-en

Guy Laliberté, the Canadian founder and CEO of Cirque du Soleil has been elected Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 among the best Entrepreneurs from 39 countries by Ernst & Young.

Guy has changed the face of entertainment and had a huge global impact. The shows that Cirque du Soleil creates and performs have brought joy to millions. All of this year’s entrepreneurs were exceptional, but Guy’s commitment to his artistic vision and the passion he has for his work were what swayed the judges in his favor.

- Chairman of the judging panel, Joseph Schoendorf, Executive Partner of venture capital firm Accel Partners

Entrepreneurs sometimes talk about the luck they’ve had in their careers, but what we’ve seen over 21 years of the Entrepreneur Of The Year program is that luck contributes little to these leaders’ successes. Passion, vision, innovation — and a lot of hard work — are what make these entrepreneurs and their companies exceptional. Guy demonstrates these traits in abundance.

- James S. Turley, Ernst & Young Chairman and CEO

The Quebec Federation of Information Technology (FIQ - Fédération de l’informatique du Québec), presented awards to the winners of the Octas 2007 Awards this 2nd of June 2007.

Sologlobe won the excellence award for their automated tracking system for Alimentation Viau, and CGI with Garant for their superb ERP implementation, and National Bank of Canada won for their Client Opportunity Management project. These three awards were all in the business solution category.

The full list of finalists for all categories is on the FiQ website and the complete list of award winners is available at Les Affaires.

Congratulations to all the finalists and winners.

From Hugh McGuire who is on the advisory board for the Atwater Library Digital Literacy project:

Start Date: Monday, July 9th, 2007
Position Type: Full-Time (1 yr-contract)

Have some tech skills and don’t want to work in a call centre? Apply to work in a challenging mixed-technology library/community centre.

Organization

The Atwater Library and Computer Centre (ALCC) is not-for-profit, independent community organization that has been promoting life-long learning and innovation since 1828.

ALCC operates a 12-station public access computer centre, a computer lab for private and group computer instruction, a free wireless network on the premise and in the adjacent park, and a budding web-hosting project for other community organizations. The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, launched in 2006, engages youth and community groups in using creative web technologies such as blogging, audio, video, digital photos.

Job Description

The Computer Centre Manager’s primary job is

* to maintain a small network of 30 workstations, two servers (one Windows 2k, one Linux), and wireless access
* to ensure the smooth day-to-day operation of the Computer Centre staffed by a team of 12+ volunteers of varying computer skill levels and
* to oversee a small computer classroom with 6 computers.

Remuneration: $15 per hour, 8-hour day, one hour for lunch

Deadline for applications: June 15, 2007

Skill Testing Question:

If the ip address of your linux server at work is 192.168.0.2, how would you use ssh from your home computer to connect to the server? (Please submit answer with your application)

Apply to:

Tanya Mayhew
Atwater Library and Computer Centre
1200 Atwater Avenue
Westmount QC H3Z 1X4
Fax: 514-935-1960
Email: tmayhew@atwaterlibrary.ca

For more information, please see the full job posting.