Initially, I couldn’t have any output from my laptop to the projector. It might have been a cable problem. Before the event start, I had chatted with Gary, Daniel, Tamu and Ben. Simon had a large digital clock readout on his laptop to countdown the 15 minutes per presentation, and Tamu was assigned the clock-keeping duties. Simon really is into these time-reversal devices, isn’t he?

Daniel wasn’t completely ready with his presentation, and so we just rotated the schedule. I informed Philippe, who was MC’ing, of the change. So, out-of-the-blue, I was now 4th presenter at DemoCampMontreal4.

1. Braincuts by Categorical Design Solutions

François Magnan, along with two colleagues, demonstrated their online software, Braincuts, which relies on semantic searches and freely available information from Creative Commons licensed sources. The multimedia information culled from these different sources can then be very easily combined through the Braincuts web interface. More precisely, the GUI enables the positioning of the various multimedia elements on a visual timeline by drag and drop.

Effectively, this means that you could position an audio track in parallel to a video or slideshow, and this way you could edit a whole presentation, documentary or educational multimedia package by arranging various multimedia elements. Finally, the whole presentation can be published and shared with other people.

I found this really interesting, because, this is the kind of information aggregation that we are doing when researching and writing an extensive article for our blogs these days. Except, the blog ‘timeline’ is just how people scroll from top to bottom, reading text, and maybe watching a picture or a video along the way.

Now, if Braincuts could be reused to produce new multimedia blog posts, that would be extremely helpful. And to me, automatic discovery of semantically-related multimedia information based on keywords I specify would really earn it a Web 3.0 moniker.

The team has built an accessible and useful interface using only open standards and protocols, and for the GUI, they rely on JQuery, with additional components developed in-house. An impressive demo with lots of potential, especially in the educational realm.

2. David Xu – PodBeans.com

PodBeans (Podcast hosting, Social subscribing) is actually a well thought-out platform with two aspects, one for podcast publishers and one for podcast subscribers.

For publishers, there is a variety of services integrated into PodBeans to make it simple to start your own podcast and benefit from it. The publishing tool is built on WordPress, and makes it easy to upload your files. PodBeans provides the hosting and the bandwidth and both are unlimited. Moreover, PodBeans also contains tool for promoting your podcast, and there are at least two possible income streams – either through ads or paid subscriptions to your podcast if you want to set up premium content.

If you host your podcast and whole site on PodBeans, you can of course customize the look of it through WordPress themes. However, should you decide to include the content on your own site or blog, despite PodBeans hosting your podcast, then you can also do so by simply embedding automatically generated code into your site.

For podcast listeners or viewers (as PodBeans also does videos), it is possible to collect all your podcasts in one place, tag and organize them, and create a new personal feed from them. In addition, you can also discover what your peers on PodBeans have subscribed to. This part of PodBeans resembles Collectik quite a lot.

Overall, there is a good deal of integration of various services and technologies into PodBeans: open-source technologies, open standards and freely available tools have all been put to great use for this website.

3. Mitch Cohen – ClixConnect

Mitch demonstrated ClixConnect, which has a tagline of 24/7 Live-Chat Sales and Support Service. When a visitor connects to your ClixConnect-enabled website, a small popup window opens with either a representative from your own company or else a person from ClixConnect.

This allows the visitor or prospective customer to asks questions in real-time about the website or the products and services you offer through an unobtrusive and movable chat window. In addition, the system, can provide the visitor with automated recommendations on products based on the products being viewed.

The technology used as back-end is proprietary, but at the client site, all you need to do is sing up to ClixConnect and include a small HTML code in your website. In fact, ClixConnect can even do the integration for you for free if you send them your HTML page.

This is clearly interesting for sales and support, as it accompanies the prospective customer from the point of landing through browsing the product catalog until the close of the sale. I think it could also be used to diagnose website usability. If statistics were kept about frequently asked questions on website navigation for instance, then the benefits for tweaking the web design through direct consumer feedback would be obvious.

4. Josh Nursing – Hacking IronRuby, extending the e Text editor with Ruby, Cygwin and wxCocoaDialog

I had no presentation per se, as I hadn’t prepared any, thinking that the 5 slots for presenting were already taken until just 3 hours before the start of DemoCamoMontreal4. But I wanted to show what I had been hacking with around Ruby/Ruby on Rails on Windows so I stepped up to the mike when Mitch had finished.

First, I talked about Microsoft’s just-released IronRuby (pre-Alpha) which will run on top of the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) for .Net and about my tutorial on how to Hack IronRuby, in which I showed how I fixed a bug and also extended IronRuby. It’s easy to do as the source code (C#) and whole project structure is really clean.

IronRuby will run together with other dynamic languages targeting the DLR, namely IronPython, C# and VBx, a dynamic version of Visual Basic. This will enable you to reuse all the libraries from all the DLR languages from your language of choice. I will be able, for instance, to reuse all the IronPython, VBx and C# libraries from IronRuby.

IronRuby is significant to me for many reasons, the first of which is I am really fond of Ruby as a programming language.

Secondly, I mentioned that, to me, Microsoft have some of the best IDEs to develop in. The possibilities for Rapid Application Development of software including database access within Visual Basic are astounding when you know how to use the tool properly. Now imagine how great it would be to have IronRuby integrated with a Visual IDE and target Windows and other platforms.

Thirdly, Microsoft has decided to make IronRuby open-source (using the Microsoft Permissive License), and that means they’ll be accepting outside contributions to enhance and extend IronRuby. Besides, Microsoft will be hosting the source code on Rubyforge rather than Microsoft’s own Codeplex.

And finally, an avowed goal of John Lam is to be able to run the whole Rails framework on IronRuby to test its completeness. Therefore, there is a strong possibility that there will be amazing Ruby on Rails development tools for Windows.

I wanted to show more IDEs for Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but time was limited, and so I showed how to extend the e text editor. e is designed to be compatible with the Mac-only TextMate’s Bundle system. So, with some porting, the TextMate bundles can be reused within e. The latter contains several in-built ones which enabled easy insertion of code snippets, just like TextMate.
What I wanted to do was to access all Ruby methods for the most used data structures, like Strings, Arrays, Hashes and FixNums from e while typing Ruby code – a type of IntelliSense in Microsoft/Windows terminology. Ruby already has great reflection capabilities, and hence, a simple object_name.methods gives you a list of all the internal methods.

The way I did it was to use Cygwin, Ruby and wxCocoaDialog, the latter being a port to wxWidgets of Mac OS X CocoaDialog. That was the technical part of my ‘presentation’ as there was a short but quite complex piece of code there, which I’ll leave for another tutorial post here on YashLabs soon, but suffices to say that this is how it works:

1. A keyboard shortcut triggers a Bundle command.

2. The bundle command is a ruby script in which I referenced the wxCocoaDialog path, as well as the x and y position of the cursor at trigger time.

3. This Ruby script executes and gets all the methods for Strings, and builds a specially formatted array of entries (otherwise some symbols can’t be included in the menu)

4. The Ruby script taps into the system execution (through Cygwin) of wxCocoaDialog which populates a GUI menu with all the methods

5. The menu pops up in the editor, and you can browse through all the entries via the arrow keys or jump straight to an entry by clicking on the starting letter.

I demonstrated this with a string and from the menu, I pressed “u” to reach the .upcase method.

6. On selection of a menu entry, Ruby executes and prints a dot followed by the selected method name within the editor.

Because of time constraints, I didn’t show the other shortcuts for Array, Hash and Fixnum, but they work just the same and as well, and are easy to implement.

What’s also great about this is that the commands are accessible within your Rails code in e too. Because of the compatibility between e and TextMate, something similar can easily be done with TextMate and CocoaDialog on Mac OS X.

I also mentioned Microsoft’s Open-Source moniker adoption.

Daniel Haran – url_pipe

Daniel showed a partial version of his idea of piping urls and feeds through a RESTful implementation.

In his demonstration, he filtered feeds through Google Maps by proceeding the following way:

1. Feeds were geotagged through the piping mechanism

2. In Google Maps, he defined a polygon to restrain his domain of search to a region on the map (imagine for instance an area around Montreal)

3. By pasting the geotagged feed within Google Maps, and with a calculation of inclusion, he was able to further filter the feed he had based on the region defined.

Daniel used Ruby and Rails to prototype url_pipe and is looking for contributions to the source code. The overall functioning is similar to Yahoo Pipes but without the GUI and to YubNub which I have covered before. A more complete url_pipe could come in real handy for local searches, targeted advertising as well as automated discovery and filtering.

Finally, Simon wrapped up by thanking our sponsors and by reminding us of the upcoming ‘camp’ events, including FaceBookCamp for the end of this month.

I was joined by Philippe Chrun, founder and CEO of MyCarpoolStation and we discussed strategy a bit over a beer. I also caught up with Jérôme Paradis of ParadiVision and we spoke about .Net and where it’s all going. Alok Mohindra and I chatted about what lies ahead in the Rails world especially concerning Windows and .Net. Austin Hill was there and gave me some positive feedback about my impromptu hacking ‘presentation’, as did Simon and Roberto Rocha. Thanks guys, much appreciated. Well done Pierre, for co-presenting with Simon.

After some last minute conversations with Tamu, Gary (‘Use OS X’), Daniel and Simon (expect a Perl 6 demo soon), we parted ways.

It was great to present for a change, and to catch up with other people of the Montreal Tech community.

Thanks to Jérôme Paradis for the pics.

Will be presenting 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 – I will speak about IronRuby and Ruby/Ruby on Rails IDEs. I also plan to show how to extend the e Text Editor with Cygwin, Ruby and wxCocoaDialog so as to make programming Ruby with e more comfortable.

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

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

I will see you there.

It was a fun DemoCampMontreal3. Without further ado, here is what happened at the event.

1. Evan Prodromou, Nicolas Ritoux – Vinismo

Evan and Nicolas presented a new website, a guide for Wine connoisseurs, based on MediaWiki. Evan described how his experience with WikiTravel allowed him to build upon the core engine used there for Vinismo. The latter’s MediaWiki site is customized heavily. There is an integrated open-id extension among others, and the site also outputs semantic data through RDF. You could see that a lot of thought had gone into the underlying architecture of the system.

Nicolas also took a turn at presenting, this time in French, and spoke about how the site had been structured. The logo and the site design were made here in Montreal. The Vinismo team came to DemoCampMontreal3 with a powerful argument about the subject as no less than nine bottles of the finest wines were available freely (‘free’ as in ‘free wine’) at the SAT bar.

Update: Evan wrote in to mention they paid the SAQ retail for the wines.

Dedicated to accurate reporting, I duly sacrificed myself to sample some of the wines in between demonstrations.

Simon and some other people were convinced I was next to present. They confused me with Heri somehow. It could have been the wine.

2. Heri Rakotomalala – WorkCruncher

Heri demonstrated his online application for daily tasks. It’s a simple application with tasks that gets reinitialized each day. This means there’s some pressure involved for you to actually finish those tasks the same day. Heri emphasized that it wasn’t a feature-packed application, but a simple tool for personal productivity. Workcruncher would be available later as private beta.

Workcruncher allows teams to work together as you can assign tasks to a team member. There are also ‘followers’ who are people who can have a look at the tasks and the advancement, but to whom tasks cannot be assigned.

It’s a simple, even simplistic application which is easily built with Ruby on Rails and I’m sure Heri used RoR.

3. Mat Balez, Carl Mercier – Defensio

Mat started the presentation while Carl demonstrated an incarnation of Defensio, their learning spam-fighting software, as a WordPress plugin. Mat compared Defensio to Wordpress’s standard spam-filter, Akismet. Defensio has a ’spaminess’ level, which enables one to specify a threshold above which the spam entries are hidden on your administrative page. This helps identify false-positives and thus letting your genuine comments through. There’s also the option of hiding the spam content, which helps.

At this point, to me these were only additional features that could be implemented anytime within the Akismet source code. however, when Carl described Defensio in more detail, I realized there are additional advantages to the system. For instance, they have gone further with their API than Akismet’s. In addition, Defensio can run as a web service and protect anytime there’s an input of data on a web-form somewhere.

Technology used: Ruby on Rails.

To the absolute and audible horror of the audience, the Defensio team presented a few slides! Gasp! This means that they’ll have to pay some beers around to atone for their sins (the ‘no-slide’ rule of DemoCamp is a definite no-no). Simon was aghast, but had to regain composure quickly as he was presenting next, spurred on and introduced by Tamu, in a ravishing red summer dress.

4. Simon Law – Building a Revolutionary Magnet-Based Anti-Aging Device using a Cheap Wall Clock (Made in China)

The internet was abuzz with the possibility of Simon Law’s extremely controversial demo because of the totally ludicrous claims that it violated some well-established laws of science and provided a clean, free, means of reversing aging by drawing energy from the ether.

We scientists are known to cry “hogwash” to such claims as we dutifully follow our own laws. Anything else would be too high a cognitive dissonance for us to continue to function properly in this world. Understandably, the scientific community was skeptical of the claims about the magnet-based device.

Undaunted, Simon had built up a select panel of PhD-level scientists to explore the device’s capabilities under NDA and try to contradict his outrageous claims.

Besides, to demonstrate his seriousness, Simon had stopped taking investments from interested investors, and lately had stopped eating altogether until he could demonstrate in a foolproof manner the mythical device at work. Maybe that’s why he confused me with Heri earlier – everything’s a blur on an empty stomach.

To put a final nail in the coffin of skepticism, Simon had scheduled a highly-conspicuous televised and webcasted demonstration of how to build the device at the SAT, replete with real-time video cameras and onlookers in the flesh, knowing perfectly well that there would be reports of DemoCampMontreal3 all around the net in a jiffy.

Well, who knows? Tesla did something similar I gather, so he might be onto something.

Skeptic: “But it violates the Second Law of Ther…:”
Simon: “My NAME is Law!”

And besides, people do the strangest of things with magnets.

Simon dived right into the presentation, and my friend Philippe Chrun could hear me laughing all the time because it was reminiscent of Simon’s previous Omelette-Engineering presentation at DemoCampCUSEC1, and I was asking myself “Now what??!!”.

At one point in time though, Simon had his notepad filmed with the device’s structure drawn in pen on paper. This caused further outraged in the already weary (and wine-induced ethanol torpor) audience.

“Isn’t that a similar thing as a Powerpoint slide?!!!!”

Some boos ensued. They were friendly boos though, we’re a small community here. Simon will have to pay some beer next time. I mean he has to show the good example and be the first to be punished for infringing the rules he probably set himself. How else are we going to convince Mat to pay his beer otherwise?

Simon proceeded, but the final test before completely reassembling the device failed.

Phew! We would have been in for a big surprise with a demonstrated violation of the arrow of time, but…

But… were we really safe? Strange things were happening in the SAT, as a wall clock behind the bar was turning backwards while Simon reassured the audience that he would get the demo unit working at the end of DemoCampMontreal3!

Still, at the end of his presentation, there was applause (with airs of “I told you so” and “let’s taste some other wine”), despite the failure.

Quizzed as to what could be the cause of failure of the demo of the polemical technology, Simon had this to say:

“Er, I think it could be the searing heat of the S.A.T. spotlights reflecting on my glasses which damaged the clock’s delicate mechanism. It’s delicate you know…like… CLOCKWORK! HAHAHAHAHA!!”

Fellow member of the Montreal Tech community, Hugh McGuire, a stalwart believer of the prevailing laws, shared this observation through a Twitter post:

“I believe Simon really saw what he says he saw, but I’m afraid this might be a case of prolonged self-delusion.”

Subsequently, Simon suffered some backlash from Engadget which had previously blogged enthusiastically about his demonstration. Fear not, insider sources have just revealed that a full-blown interview with Simon is also under way.

5. J̩r̫me Paradis РCharterWeb

Jérôme, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at YULbiz (the meeting of business bloggers in Montreal), was at his first attendance of DemoCampMontreal, and he was presenting. That’s quite a feat! He presented a project codenamed CharterWeb, which he built in collaboration with François Aubin, of Cognitive Group, who couldn’t attend.

CharterWeb is a Web 2.0 application built for V1 Jets to enable the discovery and reservation of Jets. The application relies on Google Maps to display the maps as well as the draggable routes for each Jet. In addition, the app. can show the relevant details about each Jet and flight. There is a possibility of browsing through different available flights on different days so that should you be unsatisfied with the actual routes and schedules, you can find a similar one easily.

CharterWeb also incorporates the capacity to detect important information within emails through a recognition algorithm, and then interface that with the online application.

Having talked extensively with Jérôme last time, I guess he used Microsoft .Net to build part of the application.

Thanks to Sponsors

Simon took some time to thanks the sponsors of the event: Akoha, Standout Jobs, Garage Technology Ventures Canada, and the S.A.T., our hosts.

Thanks for the wine as well, Vinismo team.

As a grand finale, Simon demonstrated the cheap wall-clock running backwards! The arrow of time was successfully reversed and therefore, all of the DemoCampMontreal3 attendants were youthful again. Or maybe it was the resveratrol.

It was great to meet with Mat Balez, Adrien, Chris Scott and Pierre Phaneuf (the power of Facebook!), Carl Mercier, Kim Vallée, Amélie Racine, Mark, Philippe Chrun, Angelo, Fred, Julie, Simon, Tamu, Roberto Rocha, Alok Mohindra, Martin Dufort, Sébastien Paquet, and others.

Since the patent was pending at the time of the initial report, Thomas said that the website could not divulge more details of the underlying technology, nor did he want to simply leave a comment on the blog post for rectification.

This technology is innovative and nothing short of a revolution in persistent data storage and what it enables above the data layer. Evolution makes your data dynamic and adaptive. I wrote before in a follow-up post that Evolution and Evonium’s DARWIN technology based on it enabled Rapid Business Process Re-engineering. It is also clear that the whole field of Business Process Optimization is changed considerably with Evolution.

That is, the organization’s mechanical heart of IT + Business + Finance just comes closer to the adaptive organism metaphor thanks to Evolution.

I foresee a very bright future for Evolution based on the incredible discussion we had Raj, Thomas and myself and forthcoming plans of Sygenics that I will not divulge.

We also had a fantastic over-arching discussion about AI, a field which is of tremendous interest to all three of us.

I mentioned Ruby on Rails once more, and that merging RoR with Evolution would bring a lot of business value for the whole Business + e-Business stack. That would entail interfacing RoR and Evolution or RoR and Evonium’s DARWIN. Additionally, a Ruby bridge for the Evolution API would be fantastic. I mentioned how building a parser for Ruby can be difficult right now, and that Ruby 2.0 would be much faster than the current implementation thanks to an updated virtual machine, YARV. Antonio Cangiano from IBM Toronto Software Labs has an interesting shootout between different Ruby implementations.

I urge you to read the updated post, or to contact Raj and Thomas. I also have two detailed brochures about Evolution which I can give away thanks to Raj and Thomas.

A common theme in my blog since I came to Montreal is “where are the smart people doing great things in Montreal?”, and here they were with me sharing a great meal, ideas and advice, and also telling me more about this astonishing technology. And it’s all from Montreal.

Anne Goldenberg – RoCoCoCamp Montreal

We were soon joined by Anne Goldenberg who was also looking for something to drink. Unfortunately, there were no clean glasses left for the time being, but we chatted. Anne is doing a double certification at the PhD level in UQAM and also in France. She is very interested in Wikis and their links to the cognitive process and also to politics. Anne comes from France, and has been in Lille prior to coming to Montreal. Somehow her name sounded familiar but I couldn’t pinpoint why at the time. Anne spoke of the forthcoming Recent Changes Camp that she is helping to organize – nicknamed RoCoCoCamp for the Montreal edition. The previous edition about the unconference on wikis was in Portland, Oregon.

Ben Yoskovitz – Standout Jobs

Later on, Ben Yoskovitz generously described the new startup he co-founded with Fred Ngo and Austin Hill – Standout Jobs – to Gary Haran and I. Ben said how the job-hunting marketplace was really quite broken and with Standout Jobs the team expected to enable job hunters and employers to engage in a meaningful conversation so as to get to know each other at a personal level, together with the mutual knowledge of competencies and business environment.

Currently, Standout jobs is hiring a Ruby guru, so do contact the team if you fit the bill. It’s a great thing that they chose to use Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

The job marketplace is upside-down

I thought I heard Ben say that the first thing that employers would do is post their opening on sites like Jobboom, Workopolis and Monster. Here I don’t agree at all as Richard Bolles in “What color is your parachute?” – the job hunting manual par excellence – says it is precisely the last recourse for companies. And it’s even verifiable here in Quebec, where it is said that 85%+ of the job opening markets is hidden. The first thing companies do is try to find the resource internally. And if they don’t, they rely first on internal people to refer them the information about potential candidates.

This is precisely why new immigrants (such as I) have a tremendously hard time finding appropriate work, since when we come here, we don’t have any network per se. We don’t know anybody and nobody knows us. Add to that the fact that some people are not even interested in knowing what we can bring as skills or are super reluctant or doubtful or deliberately stifling our progress, and you can see that things can become very complicated indeed.

I have learned this the hard way and I’m still learning the cultural and work environments here. Where I agree with Ben and the Standout Jobs team and mission is that the job marketplace is really upside-down and something needs to be done. The economic development of Quebec and Canada and their competitiveness depend on new strategies and techniques.

Job hunting here forces me to understand the local culture, and this in turn through comparison, fixes my identity. Job hunting is therefore a process of self-discovery and so it’s welcome.

However, the more I think about the Northern American way, the more I see signs of the wheels of extreme Capitalism and Industry crushing your attention span. And with limited time and shortness of attention span, you start cutting corners and systematizing the making of wrong decisions.

There’s a lot to be done as there are a lot of things that Quebec must improve about bringing in skilled workers from abroad if it really wants to be competitive worldwide.

Post BarCampMontreal2 dinner

A group of us went to a ChinaTown restaurant for dinner – a buffet and there were dumplings among a wealth of other tasty food. i had managed to convince the very busy Anne to come with us, and along the way we talked a little more about what she was doing. Anne spoke of her written study of Koumbit, and that’s when I realized that her name was familiar because Marco of Koumbit had actually sent me Anne’s analysis by email after we met at the Montreal Linus User Group. I vowed to read it.

Annoyingly, somebody infiltrated himself between Anne and myself and so I couldn’t sit near her to continue our conversation as I wanted. I guess I should have proposed that we move somewhere else or ask the other person to move. I joined another table nearby with Angelo Anduaga of PodTattoo and somebody else (he doesn’t wish to be mentioned. I think that’s a tad paranoid). The three of us ended up having a whirlwind conversation about Ray Kurzweil and technological progress, Aubrey de Grey and non-senescence and human ‘immortality’, consciousness and cognitive science. We came to the conclusion that these new technologies when they become available would probably be accessible by people with money first as they would be costly initially.

My own point of view is that advanced technologies and augmented human intelligence may need to be given to people who have a social and humanitarian agenda. Angelo mentioned that one of the first applications of non-senescence would be for CEOs to continue to steer companies. God forbid that they be the CEOs within soul-less organizations that desiccate the earth for pure profit-making.

After our vast, encyclopedic conversation, I managed to get Anne to sit with us for a small period of tea-drinking. we spoke of BarCampMontreal and Homeless Nation. Anne would have fit right in within the earlier conversation about CogSci and Technology. I am looking forward to seeing you again at RoCoCoCamp, Anne.

We also spoke a little with Avery and Erin. Erin is a musician and singer. I told her her name sounded Celtic and she said “yes, it means The Queen of Ireland”.

More encyclopedic conversations

After we had a drink with Fred, Daniel and a few other BarCampers in a bar, Angelo and I walked back home along avenue Mont-Royal willing to share more about our respective viewpoints. We talked for hours literally, fatigue notwithstanding. This was a very interesting exchange, and we have our own respective views about some of the things we discussed but the sharing was done on a basis of differing experience and mutual respect. Angelo is articulate and cultivated, but one has to take some time to listen and understand his perspective. I guess it’s the same for me.

We vowed to meet again another time and discuss our common interests.

There was some controversial backlash about Madame Woo’s initial topic on the BarCampMontreal2 wiki, triggered by anonymous people and hopped onto by others. I believe that the perception about the topic and the presenter’s pseudonym may have been negative and that caused the backlash. I guess the lesson to be learned here (by me as well) is that if it is a serious subject then present it that way. People have such a short attention span these days.

So it’s a great thing that Madame Woo still took it upon herself to change her topic and still go on stage and present. Actually she said she wasn’t prepared, but she did brilliantly and naturally, without any slides. She told of tips on how not to be too lonely when traveling, like for instance, to keep a book or a diary when traveling. Additionally, she advised to be well-dressed. Here again, people have this tendency to make their opinion of you on image.

Madame Woo also spoke of thinking strategically and told us of her hilarious anecdote of being by herself in a place known to be a romantic spot. There’s nothing like being surrounded by couples to make your aloneness apparent.

She did very well, considering she had changed her subject at the last minute because of the pressure heaped on her on the wiki and the controversy and hadn’t had time to prepare. It was an interesting subject which she presented fluidly.

Chris Car – Wireless mesh networking idealism

Chris Car presented a project he started with a friend of his. They wanted to build these small personal cubic wi-fi transmitters which would extend their capabilities through a grid so that others can benefit from the wi-fi access. It was an interesting project both on a hardware and at a software level.

This ties in nicely with the current ÃŽle-sans-fil project which aims to provide free wi-fi hotspots throughout Montreal and other cities.

Moomlyn – Lucid Dreaming

I was looking forward to this presentation as I am fascinated by dreams, their symbolism and interpretation. I am a lucid dreamer myself sometimes.

Robin (Moomlyn) comes from Australia and she flew in for a Mathematics conference if I’m not mistaken. She just took a chance to present this subject at BarCampMontreal2 and it’s a welcome thing. Montreal is technologically and culturally rich and it’s good that we can have diverse subjects instead of just technological demos all the time.

Reality-Testing

Robin was much fun. She described “reality checking” which is a habit you should have in your wake-time so that it becomes automatic in your dreams too. In a most fascinating book I bought on the subject, Patricia L. Garfield’s “Creative Dreaming”, this is called “Reality-Testing”.

What I usually do when I have a doubt about my environment is to try and influence it by thought. For instance, in my dreams, when I find something fishy going on, I just tell myself “oh wait, this may be a dream” and I try to carve the environment by thought or a wave of the hand. As soon as I notice that I can influence the environment, I go into the Lucid Dreaming state, where I can consciously do anything I wish.

The difficulty in the Lucid Dreaming state is the fear of waking up. This fear can be so intense that it does indeed wake you up.

Robin talked about the importance of keeping a dream diary and noting dreams being the first thing you need to do when you wake up. She also emphasized that to be able to recall lucid dreams, you should auto-suggest yourself to do just this right before falling asleep.

Controlling dreams for a positive effect in wake-time

At question time, I asked a question about what could be the useful things to do in a Lucid Dream that would have a helpful effect in real-life. Unfortunately, I did the mistake of describing one of the wild things I do in my Lucid Dreams, and I thought Robin made fun of me. Of course, what I said had been misinterpreted but I didn’t quite catch Robin’s answer (I believe it was about athletes’ performances or something like that).

I should have known there wasn’t going to be any serious answer to my serious question (but then again, as I said above, if it’s serious, then make it so). Actually, in Garfield’s book, she describes how when faced with a confrontational being in dreams, one should always fight to the end, and in case of victory, ask the entity for a gift. Also, in such a situation, it can also help to call for a Dream friend to fight with you. The actual gift and its symbolism must have some repercussion in real-life.

An audience member asked Robin: “Are you dreaming now?”
Robin: “Well, I flew over the oceans, into a country which speaks mostly French, and I’m giving a talk about Dreams in a usually Tech conference. When you think of it, it’s not that plausible…”

After the presentations I caught up with Robin and Madame Woo again (thanks for the mangoes, Madame Woo, that was very generous of you – I like them green).

“Thanks for helping me make a fool of myself”, I said to Robin/Moomlyn.

Different uses of Lucid Dreaming

We talked about what we did respectively in our lucid dreams. Robin takes the opportunity of exploring the personalities of her friends in her dreams. I asked her whether the entities were well-formed, that is if they would reply plausibly to her questions. She replied affirmatively. I told her that it was probably because her subconscious had stored very complete and precise models of her friends. She replied that she didn’t know. Robin/Moomlyn reminded me (in terms of behavior) of an avatar I met in Second Life (it’s a pink midget and was my first friend in SL). She had mentioned in her presentation that her lucid dreams enabled her to not be disturbed by First Life’s incongruities.

Another audience member mentioned that Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” would be of interest.

My own decisions in lucid dreams are basically two-fold:

1. Levitation and flying.

For many years I have had recurring non-lucid dreams of levitation. It’s a most liberating sensation within the dreamworld. When I levitate, I only rise about 30cm above the ground and I start it by thinking hard about pushing the earth with my feet. I glide along my body perpendicular to the earth’s surface.

Flying is different. For several years, rising above those 30cm of levitating space was quite a difficult thing to do. I had to produce a mental effort to rise, and as soon as my concentration wavered, I started falling. It was also difficult to fly in the city because of the dangers of hitting the power cables (remember: these were non-lucid dreams).

Now, in 2003, when I was reading Garfield’s book, I started writing my dream diary. And a few strange things happened, one of which was that I started having more frequent lucid dreams.

And of course, as soon as that happened, I wanted to test my flight again. While formerly flight was mentally exhaustive and dangerous, in the lucid dreams, my flight was extremely fast and controlled effortlessly – I could fly fast but still avoid any obstacles in my path. I could fly horizontally and dash vertically too.

2. Control over my environment, acting in the dream-world in ways not possible in wake-time.

This is mostly about exploring the liberating effect of having a malleable environment. I deal with people differently than I would in real life and it is also sometimes quite liberating. It is a great way to express creativity which is stifled in real-life.

Martine Pagé – “Présence féminine/Where are the girls”

A question based, panel like session about the lack of women’s representation at tech conferences. Is a “women in tech” list, like the one created in the U.S., a solution? Do we even need a solution? Is that a real problem? Une session bilingue (qui se veut davantage un panel) sur la faible présence des femmes dans les conférences reliées à la technologie.

By her own words, Martine said this is an age-old question. She showed some of the statistics of under-representation of women in technology based on the attendance of major tech events, together with a short clip of a tech conference where there were mostly men and probably two women.

Since this was a panel, the audience got to participate and throw in some questions or suggestions. And interestingly, since Hugh had tagged some ladies on his blog to be present at this venue, they had their say as well on the subject. Madame Woo spoke about how her initial presentation had been forced into oblivion by men. Tamu replied to Evan’s observations. Tamu also discussed some with me. Vero.b made a point which made total sense (I can only remember I agreed).

It’s an age-old question, right? This means it still hasn’t been answered properly isn’t it?

The statistics reflect reality

My own thinking was that the statistics reflect reality and that reality is that women are not that interested in diving deep into tech. Let’s face it, it’s not fun. It can be fun to explore the subject initially, but then you do not get a lot of recognition for it be you a man or a woman. Not unless you make tons of money (that sure gets people interested in you really fast – you get plenty of new “friends” this way). Martine herself said that initially when she saw some of the early presentations listed on the BarCampMontreal2 wiki, she told herself “too technical”.

Gary Haran exchanged ideas with me as well but I had the distinct impression that his ideas were rooted in an ideal. The thing is, us geeks like these ideals a lot. But the ideal situation is a “To-Be” situation. It’s not the proper model on which to base today’s decisions. You have to know the “To-Be”, and also face reality, the “As-Is”. It’s only then that you can trace a route from today to tomorrow.

It’s the same thing that happens when some people say “no way, we can’t say that the statistics reflect reality. This would be akin to saying that women can’t do Tech”. Well no, that’s not the same thing. The statistics reflect the interest, not the capabilities. The women in Tech are very capable. But rejecting the concrete statistics based on some idealist notion will prevent you from making a proper diagnosis today and thus also prevent you from making informed decisions about what should be done today.

Some suggestions

Later on, Daniel Haran (Gary’s brother) told me that there is also the possibility that women are discouraged early by peer pressure from going into tech. Maybe there’s a little of that happening too but I think the extent of it is limited.

So my own suggestion was based on the “unconference” that is BarCamp and also on the state of reality. i.e. we should be able to gather more women and men under the same unconference roof by looking for the subject they are interested in and proposing them to present and have their space of expression in BarCamp for instance.

Therefore, something like the CreaCamp which happens this Saturday could have been organized within BarCampMontreal2 itself. This would have enabled more cross-functional connections, and maybe future creative collaborations too.

The discussion was getting long and so Fred asked if I wouldn’t mind postponing my presentation to some other event. I agreed since the subject at hand was important.

This panel was welcome, not because we would find some solution at BarCampMontreal2, but rather as an example that women could come to BarCampMontreal and participate (Tamu, Vero.b, Shawna, Anne, Claire, Erin, etc…) or present freely (Martine, Michelle-Anne, Madame Woo, Moomlyn), and also have a platform to discuss freely.

It’s a great way to exchange ideas, learn about different things happening in Montreal and the people that make them happen.

What we should do

I think that our work (Fred, Simon and all of us participants) for the next BarCamps will be to communicate the idea that it is a cross-functional event, not just a tech one, especially to women. It is really open. We would do well talking about the event to our lady friends well in advance. As Hugh had done (and he said he took it from Patrick), it could be interesting to tag the lady bloggers (they are natural communicators), but of course, you’d reach either your regular audience or those who know how to look for their links in other sites through Technorati for instance.

And remember that when people are passionate about Tech, it is usually as means to solve some problem, a real-world one, making a platform useful to many. In this case, it is a matter of deciding to let go of prejudices and still go to these events to meet with new people and new perspectives.

It shouldn’t be a problem that you aren’t interested with a subject a priori, because – who knows? – the answer to the question nagging you in your bubble of interest is exactly outside of it or else you would have found it already. That would have been the subject of my scrapped presentation (Systems Thinking as a way to enhance problem-solving).

More in part 4 (BarCamp is a whole-day event, you know. Or else I just write a lot. Or I have a very interesting life that I want to share with you)

The last time I reported about DemoCampMontreal2, I poked some gentle fun to Angel Anduaga as he was struggling with the concept of being able to present his startup without having to speak to anyone in particular – by just editing the wiki for BarCampMontreal2. That’s the way of unconference. I did tell him though that if he absolutely wanted to talk to somebody then he could speak to Fred.

And so it was good to see that he had seized the opportunity. PodTattoo enables the high-quality engraving of your iPod, small device or laptop with a design of your choice. This is done through a high-quality fast laser and the etching can sport black, white and a few shades of gray. Angel mentioned that the dye technology for color engravings would be available as from 2008.

Tattooing your device this way prevents theft because the device is permanently marked. The service does not void your warranty and does not damage your device internals at all.

Angel is looking for investors/partners for his startup and he is looking to expand in other cities than Montreal too.

Simon Law – Say “Cheese” – taking photographs with cheap drugstore cameras

Now, the last time Simon set foot amidst the spotlights to present, we had some riotous fun about engineering omelettes. So with a title like this, I could barely suppress the thought that some kind of cooking would also be in order – cheese omelettes?

Not this time though. Simon went on to describe some very expensive cameras and some other fine and cheap ones. His point: if you want to learn about photography, then start with a cheap one.

Simon said that one should understand how the camera isn’t like an eye and therefore it doesn’t receive light as our eyes do. He mentioned that there were some privileged times of the day when the light is particular beautiful, namely near dusk.

“You see, although this yellow light is shining on me, you wouldn’t say I was yellow… Or else it would be a racial slur.” – Simon Law

In addition, Simon advised to use the Flash only during the day-time. However, not using the flash during night shots mean that you’d have to try and stabilize your camera as much as possible.

He made the point about diffused light or light coming from the side being better than our digital cameras’ straight on flash. The latter makes for very harsh lighting conditions.

Simon finished with a link to a tutorial resource but I haven’t noted it. If anybody did please let me know.

Avery Pennarun – Designing a company culture

Next up was Avery who talked about designing a company culture. His take on technology and business was interesting. Avery said that somehow Web 2.0 had made technology people who could produce related code and applications cool. And thus, on the other side were the people with lots of money but severely lacking in the coolness department.

That is how Avery came to work with investors and banks. He brings them his knowledge of Web 2.0 technology, which many of these financial institutions lack and in turn benefits from integrating such an industry.

Avery also emphasized how important it is to find a trustworthy partner in your commercial endeavors. He seems to have found just this.

Michelle-Anne Jenkins (MAJ) – WikiTravel Extra

You may have heard of WikiTravel – it’s probably the best crowd-sourced travel site on the internet. It has actually won the 2007 Webby award for best travel site. Well done to the co-founders, MAJ and Evan Prodromou, who are also husband and wife.

MAJ presented WikiTravel Extra, a type of addendum to WikiTravel where members can share their photos and also get to know each other better as each member has a personal profile page. Users can browse the location pictures by member too. Another interesting feature of WikiTravel Extra is that as a member you can tag some of your personal blog posts so that the WikiTravel Extra site recognizes it and gathers an abstract through the RSS feed. This allows a global page where updates from members can all be seen together.

After this presentation I’ve spent some time looking at the entry for my homeland (Mauritius) in WikiTravel and corrected the National Anthem. I think it’s one of the shortest and most beautiful anthems ever – and I’m not saying this because it’s my anthem, but rather from the perspective of a composer and songwriter. Lyrics, chords and melody meld in a coherent way.

more in part 3

He was leaving as I arrived, so that means you can expect some coverage of the first half-day of BarCampMontreal2 on his blog and some coverage of the second-half here at YashLabs. There are others who are only now waking up to the necessity of covering these events so that you can expect additional coverage from them too.

Fred was being interviewed by a lady in a corner, while I was meeting with the ever-smiling David Fugère from Code Genome. David looks like a rock-star – you would have thought he’s a singer in a band or something (who knows, maybe he is). He’s using Ruby and Ruby on Rails for Code Genome, and my theory is that this is why he is happy and smiling all the time.

I ate some of the food and it was welcome and talked a bit with Heri.

Co-Working and co-operative spaces

All this time, Patrick had convened a discussion about the Co-Working space which has as project to gather people working in Tech or with Tech in Montreal under one roof. It’s a good idea to foster cross-functional collaboration, but it’s so good that it should really be funded by the organizations whose mission is to promote and develop all things Tech in Montreal or Montreal as a Tech hub. Globally I’m for the idea but there’s already a co-working space at La Bande Passante, which can probably be used for less than the advertised fees for the Co-working space.

This said, it’s a great thing that BarCampMontreal2 itself has willing sponsors – it’s a kind of co-working or co-operative space, isn’t it? Gratitude is necessary here, and is extended to the sponsors: Garage Technology Ventures Canada, Standout Jobs (Austin Hill, Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz), Akoha (Austin Hill – he’s everywhere – except at BarCampMontreal2. He’s resting in Mexico, he needs it. See you soon in full form back in Montreal, Austin), and of course, our very generous host, the SAT (kudos to René Barsalo, the SAT Director and some of the staff who were present on a Saturday to make this event a reality, including a really nice, smiling lady who came and also filmed the event for the SAT and for her vlog. What’s her name, Fred, and where’s her vlog?).

Asia and Kung-Fu

Then, I took a seat in the big room and tried to connect via wi-fi but it wouldn’t work. In the meantime, I was exploring a few of my text files on AI. A lady, MAJ, who was going to present later, sat in front of me and she seemed to have no trouble getting connected.

Marc Chriqui and I talked about technology and development, mainly about Microsoft’s development tools and also Ruby on Rails. I mentioned to him how Ruby on Rails output AJAX natively.

After a while, Fred came over to say hi, and we chatted a bit about his new startup, Standout Jobs. Fred has been really taken up with the project, together with the other team members, Ben and Austin. Austin couldn’t be present this time at BarCamp as he’s on a much-needed vacation in Mexico.

Fred and I talked a bit about Hong Kong and Toronto. I myself went on a month-long trip to Asia in 1988 and visited Singapore (ah, the Omni Planetarium with its 20,000 Watts of sonic power and hemispheric screen…and Sentosa Island), Thailand (Bangkok, the Indra Regent Hotel, and the temples with reclining Golden Buddhas), Taiwan (er… expensive apples?) and Hong Kong. I remember the phenomenal Ocean Park in Hong Kong, and the Skyscrapers, while we were hosted by my father’s long-time best friend, Ah-Liat Lam Lan Yu. Ah-Liat has always been like a father to me. He’s the one who introduced me to “Game and Watch” and gave me an Atari VCS 2600, my first ever game console. Fond memories indeed.

I thought I saw Francis doing some Wushu on the left. Was that you, Francis? Was that some form of Wushu? I’ve done some Bajiquan myself so maybe we should have talked about this – next time.

Afternoon presentations

Angelo Anduaga (hey, on your cards it’s written “Angel” so that’s what I was using up to now) was readying his presentation with the help of some other attendants. So finally, he would have the opportunity of presenting PodTattoo, his startup, probably even without having spoken to anyone.

Mike spoke about his experience in China and the Intellectual Property laws there – and the phenomenon of brand copying or brand piracy if you will. It was a short but interesting presentation.

Simon took the microphone to introduce Alok Mohindra who presented FonoMe, an online system to get calls through standard VOIP protocols. Alok emphasized his appreciation of Google’s technology for Google Talk. He mentioned Asterisk, SIP, Jabber and also Jingle. The technology was demonstrated on the spot with two people, including Simon, calling Alok’s test phone number. It worked! Applause.

In between two 5-minutes presentations, Fred decided to practice his BarCamp T-shirt throwing skills. Yes, since not all the original BarCamp attendants claimed their T-Shirts, they were giving them away. There was no small T-shirt for me which means I need to buff up again soon, ideally before summertime here. [In front of me is MAJ, on my left is the very cool Philippe Chrun of Mycarpoolstation.com and behind me are Vero.b, and Martine Pagé whom I talked to briefly at a YULblog and who's also a scenarist for "A vos marques, Party!"]

David Fugère also got five minutes to present Code Genome’s online project management or project tracking system and it looked sleek. Easy Drag and Drop functionality for tasks re-organization thanks to AJAX and… Ruby on Rails of course. David said that SoftImage were already using his system among other companies testing the beta. Good for you, David. Code Genome’s system will be able to migrate your data from BaseCamp to their own so that you can benefit from additional features.

more in part 2

Where: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent
When: Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 9:30 a.m.

It’s a free and open event where anybody can come and participate. Everybody is actually expected to participate in some way, either by presenting or by helping others present or by giving a hand with the organization.

Now, although the idea of BarCamp was borne out of the Tech world in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, the presentations need not be about Technology, and this time around at the SAT in Montreal, we are expecting a whole group of non-tech people and presentations. The cross-fertilization of ideas from all sides will be beneficial to all parties involved. People will gather and meet with others outside their usual bubble and this can only bring in new ways of thinking, new avenues for collaboration and new opportunities.

To illustrate the variety, we’ll be having these presentations among others including the Tech ones:
1. Simon Law – Taking photographs with cheap drugstore cameras
2. Moomlyn – Lucid Dreaming (I love this)
3. Marcella Lorenzi – E=mc2; superstring installation; music from cellular automata
4. Martine Pag̩ РPr̩sence f̩minine/where are the girls (in Tech). An age-old question.

New this time is the Slide Karaoke – 5 volunteers present slides they don’t know anything about. We cheer them up. It’s riotous.

Ever the gentleman, Hugh McGuire who’s also presenting, tagged some ladies so that they be present and thus equalize the attendance. I for one would love to see Ella present. I saw her at Laïka the other night and went to speak to her as I had seen her play the contrabass at a BlueGrass joint on a Sunday night – the Barfly. It turns out she’s a pretty techie geek too and has many diverse interests including open source (?) and linguistics. Marie-Jo should be there as she’s in the registrant list, and of course, I would like to see Deborah there too. Come on Egyptian Geek Goddess. It’s your community, you should be there.

The first BarCamp in Montreal was launched by Fred Ngo with the help of some friends back then in October while I was looking for an apartment (which means not only I couldn’t attend, but I hadn’t even had the time to search online for the Tech community here – I didn’t even know there was a BarCamp in Montreal).

This time, I will be there with the community and will present:

“Hacking Thought – Systems Thinking and the Myth of Exclusive OR”

with the intention of showing you how to hack your own thoughts and make you better at problem solving and generally at understanding the world. Yes, it’s about the expansion of your consciousness.

Come on over. You know you want this.

I was supposed to lend a hand but reached the SAT a little late as this week has been a supremely busy one for me. I arrived at the same time as Brett so we greeted each other in the queue for name-tags. Julie was on name-tag and welcoming duty. Simon was already there photographing and he caught me again.

Fred and Simon were wearing Google t-shirts. I had told Patrick to come and he was there already. Saw Austin who was priming himself for MCing as John couldn’t be there this time around I believe. Said hi to Hugh McGuire with whom I participated in Brett’s impromptu Mashpit earlier.

Chatted to Patrick and told him that I should really get a seat up front for my fun report filming. Right behind Patrick, was Sean Power from Coradiant with three colleagues, so we talked about the good times we had at the last Web Analytics Wednesday organized by St̩phane Hamel. St̩phane is a super cool guy and his blog, Immeria shows his passion for Web Analytics. I told Sean and Patrick how I really thought his last two posts were very insightful and in-depth. Immeria is a really really great blog by St̩phane Рgo read it, bookmark it, add it to your blogroll. Sean said a few good words about my event report too and he was even presenting me to his colleagues by the name of my blog, YashLabs which they knew about! That was nice. Sean added that he was thinking of speaking at the next Web Analytics Wednesday in Montreal. That would be cool.

As the SAT bar was open this time around, so it was beer in hand that Patrick and I chatted to Julie about her upcoming presentation at the next BarCampMontreal. Eventually, I somehow stole Julie’s seat next to Simon, but she was cool about it.

The night was under way as Austin spoke about the sponsors and general sponsoring of the BarCamp movement here in Montreal. The sponsors are: Garage Technology Ventures Canada, represented by Tom Sweeney, and RadialPoint. Our host, was this time around again, the S.A.T.

1. Alec Saunders – iotum Talk Now

Alec, who hails from Ottawa, demoed iotum Talk Now, which currently targets BlackBerry owners and makes your calendar availability known to your friends. It is possible to make groups of people so that your availability information is customized per group. You can even make your availability known to a user who is not on Talk Now’s online web service as a web page is generated for you.

Alec was fun. He showed as an example how he was supposedly sending Bill Gates availability information to have a meeting about money – to finance iotum, of course.

“We’re looking for money” he said.

Come question time, Simon said “I do not have as much money as that guy in the USA, but…” to which Alec responded: “yes, but do you have money?”.

See? That’s what I meant about knowing your objectives for DemoCamp. The message was clear that night – iotum is looking for funding. As a sideline, they are also looking for people to try the service.

The iotum team will keep the availability sharing free and is planning to charge for other value-added services, like the ability to schedule conference calls for instance.

2. Hugh McGuire – Collectik

Austin presented Hugh and LibriVox just as I was saying the same thing to Patrick, which brought thunderous applause and screams from the audience. It’s understandable, LibriVox is such a great idea which leverages open-source software and principles and brings value today.

With Collectik, Hugh is helping solve another problem relative to the time spent for discovery and organization of podcasts. Collectik makes looking for podcasts of interest to you easy and helps to mix them up for easy listening. You don’t necessarily have to download the podcasts as there is a possibility of listening to them via a streaming Flash plugin.

All podcasts of interest are displayed clearly in one page and allow you to subscribe to them by a simple click. From there you can also get a feed of these into iTunes as a playlist, and listen at leisure or skip whenever you want to.

Hugh said several times that one important thing he learned with this project was that it is necessary to fix UI and architectural design issues first before adding more features.

With Collectik, you can also see what other people’s playlists are.

At question time, somebody asked about videos, and Hugh replied that Collectik also allowed you to monitor videos, so it’s a great solution. I believe Alex Eberts asked about whether it was possible to know which podcasts were popular and Hugh showed that this was already possible with Collectik.

Collectik is a fantastic project.

3. Martin Dufort & Alain Lavoie – Kakiloc

Martin Dufort took the microphone first to describe the services of Kakiloc. Kakiloc enables you to make your location and availability known to your friends. The website demo itself showed a mashup between a user’s locations and Google Maps, so that when one of your friends announces he’s around, you can locate him on the map.

Kakiloc also supports J2ME so that part of the overall service can be used on mobile phones too, which makes it a mobile location-based social network. The web-services allow for fast sending of text messages to your acquaintances’ phones as was demonstrated on the spot.

Another interesting thing about Kakiloc was that friends of friends were also shown in your instant messaging-type of application. Therefore, given geographical proximity, you could choose to chat and meet with that person who is only 2 degrees of separation away in your trust network.

At one point Austin said “We have people from Yahoo and Google here”. He was kidding! But seriously, this will happen for DemoCamps in Montreal. Both Yahoo and Google are now in Montreal, so it’s just a matter of asking them to attend or participate, explaining the potential benefits. There are many other great companies here in Montreal too.

4. Brett Gaylor – OpenSourceCinema.org

Brett started off his presentation by showing a most interesting clip about old media people speaking to young kids about downloading music. Lots of fun, and in there lies also the rise of the Commons for artistic and technological sharing. This concept, which already existed before but which has been crippled by pure money-making is coming back slowly but surely thanks to Lawrence Lessig and his project The Creative Commons. Lessig is a fantastically intelligent man. Go to his site, download two of his free books and start reading now.

Brett actually showed some footage made for this forthcoming movie about Free Culture, called “Basement Tapes”, including GirlTalk and Lawrence Lessig.

Brett explained the concept behind his shiny new website for Open-Source Cinema where users could download video footage, re-edit them and upload them back. These contributions may in turn make it into the final movie.

Much applause for Brett too. His project is great so all the applause was well-deserved.

Brett mentioned the open participation experiment called Mashpit which he nicknamed BeerCamp. This united Brett, Sylvain, Hugh and myself and we all lent a hand to enhance the website CMS. I hadn’t met any of them at that time, but the reason we met was because all four of us were already seeped in open participatory culture and knew it was important to go out there and participate. It was fantastic and it’s great to see where his project is heading now.

Somebody in the audience generously offered to host Brett’s project. Isn’t that amazing?

5. Anand Agarawala – BumpTop

BumpTop was presented at another DemoCamp and then later also at the TED conference in Monterey. Anand, who lives in Toronto, showed the 3D interface which is a layer above your usual 2D desktop metaphor. The interface is best seen and manipulated to grasp what it’s about so the videos will speak for themselves. Suffices to say that BumpTop allows some realistic physics-based manipulation of icons and photographs.

The audience was engaged throughout as the demo was both fun and impressive.

How impressive? Well, having already seen Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel interface demo, I think that using a mouse with BumpTop is also a limitation. BumpTop would work much better with a TouchScreen.

In fact, I had noticed some similarities with Jeff Han’s demo at the gesture-recognition level for grabbing and manipulating groups of icons and the popup menu too. So at the end of the night I did ask Anand about this and he said that he had spoken to Jeff about it and the latter had said that it was a kind of homage to BumpTop. Well, this better be true Anand as it’s written here now.

As parting words, Austin emphasized how it was important for the community to get out and make itself known and participate in the BarCamp events.

Post-Demo Conversations

Patrick

Patrick and I had quite a long and interesting talk as usual. I urged him to consider presenting some of his ideas at a forthcoming DemoCamp or BarCamp. One of his many pet projects is about net accessibility and the other one he told me about was about a distributed fault-tolerant system. It’s funny because I was recently thinking about the need to keep secure digital collections of humanity’s history everywhere. Patrick’s solution however is meant for personal use, but I’m sure it could also be adapted. I also told Patrick about how one could use distributed computing technology like the one for Folding@Home so as to render Computer Graphics frames throughout the internet to make an open-source 3D movie.

Patrick and I also spoke about Twitter. I basically said that I wasn’t using Twitter as I need the meditative/reflective mood conducive to elaborating blog posts. Incidentally, Heri asked me to try Twitter a few days ago but I passed on the invitation.

Heri

Speaking of Heri, we met and he said that he thought that advertising would one day disappear. I told Heri that if Google is the behemoth it is today it is more importantly because of advertising – the majority of the revenue itself is made with advertising. Besides, a recent Google acquisition was a company making adverts within games. Whenever there is a product or a service and you have competitors, then there is a need to advertise and market. And there is value in advertising for the end user too for new product and service discovery. This is crucial, so I know it’s not going to disappear. Its form can morph but it will always be there as long as there is business.

And personally I welcome the new disruptive pricing models online advertising brings with it. There are services which are free thanks to online advertising. Moreover, advertising can help as a revenue stream for an online project, so much so that it can also become a strategy for funding a web project, the actual extent of which varies with scale, of course.

Alden Woodward

Alden Woodward of Evonium was there so I asked him about whether the last DemoCamp had helped bring their amazing technology to the light. We had a long chat and I asked him whether Evonium could do dynamic form production. Alden said they didn’t do that, but it’s very easy and fast to produce new forms. I asked about that because I recently caught up with a former colleague and friend who now works at a company in the US and their technology does do dynamic form production. Alden said that their prospective customers sometimes do not believe their ears when he explains how fast Evonium can develop and enhance their Business Information systems. I told him he should make a strong statement out of it for his upcoming marketing campaign, like “we develop 10 times faster than with SAP” or something.

Daniel Haran

I also spoke with Daniel Haran from Growwwing about why a full-stack dynamic Business Information Systems is something highly interesting for business agility. Daniel asked me about what I’m passionate about and I replied that it was to bring value to business through information systems. I like optimization. I also spoke about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, of course. This reminded Patrick to check it out someday. I think we’ll have an exchange of demos with Patrick as he’s an expert on PCSoft’s WinDev and WebDev. For WinDev, the tag-line is “Develop 10 times faster” – see? – another high-impact statement. Incidentally, Rails made headway when people said that it enabled developing web applications 10 times faster than Java. Daniel mentioned he couldn’t stand going back to Java now that he programs in Ruby and Ruby on Rails and he’s happy with them.

Never underestimate the importance of happiness of coders for the productivity of your business. If you haven’t had a look at Ruby as a programming language or Ruby on Rails as a framework for rapid prototyping and development of web applications, then I urge you to do so. Rails outputs AJAX natively.

Patrick 2

After Daniel left and Hugh too (I told Hugh how much I had liked the Collectik demo), this brought us logically to Ruby and Rails. I told Patrick that the reason Rails was such a great framework was because Ruby allowed easy development of Domain-Specific Languages. Patrick however, had a good question: “How is a Domain-Specific Language different or better than procedure calls”.

I was preparing an answer thinking of the :scaffold symbol in Ruby On Rails which automatically produced all Create, Read, Update, Delete methods for DB access extrapolated from your DB model when we were interrupted by Angel Anduaga of Podtattoo, describing his project of laser-engraving iPods and also asking about who he should talk to to be able to present at DemoCamp.

I told him about BarCamp and DemoCamp and described how there was no need to talk to anybody per se, one could just go to the wiki at BarCamp.org/DemoCampMontreal add one’s name and presentation and be able to present.

“How much does it cost to present?”

Me: “It’s free”

“Who do I have to talk to?”

Well, it’s DemoCamp or BarCamp, and as I had already explained you don’t necessarily need to speak to anybody, but it’s difficult to understand this if you’re still thinking along traditional conference or business lines. This is unlike conferences, it’s unconference. Not everything in the old model applies.

All in all, a great night at the SAT again with Montreal’s Tech community. It was a fun night, with some great technology demos. I got to catch up with some friends and meet some new people. Austin made for a great MC too. Well done, everyone. Thanks to our sponsors and the SAT and all those who made this event so great.

Memorable quotes

“Yes, but do you have money?” – Alec Saunders (to Simon)
“Imagine all the people… Living for today” George “Dubya” Bush (Imagine mashup)
“Who do I have to talk to?” – Angel Anduaga
“If you build it, Yahoo will buy it” – Hugh McGuire (see Alec’s event report below for the context)

Other DemoCampMontreal2 reports and pics

1. Alec Saunders of iotum
2. Martin Dufort & Alain Lavoie of Kakiloc
3. Heri Rakotomalala of Montreal Tech Watch
4. John Stokes of A Montreal Startup
5. Fred Ngo of Silicon Island sent some link love. Thanks Fred.
6. Simon Law has the best pictures
7. Bosko Milekic was happy
8. Hugh McGuire of Collectik
9. Hugh has put up a more extensive write-up on his new site.
10. Alistair Croll has a write-up
11. Roberto Rocha from the Gazette has a Report on the Reports on his fun and informative TechnoCité blog.

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Update:
- Stirling Westrup wrote in about WordPress malfunctioning. I was aware of this for a few days. I updated WP but the actual problem was the HashCash plugin which doesn’t currently work well with PHP 5. Plugin deactivated – Akismet is doing wonders anyway.
- Hugh wrote in about my misspelling Collectik and the need to correct the link too. Corrections made.

Thanks Stirling and Hugh.
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Looks like Youtube introduces some audio-video synchronization issues, so I’m thinking of exploring alternatives. Brett suggested using Blip.tv for movies. Laurent swears by DailyMotion. What do you think?