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