Ruby

Deloitte’s TMT Prediction 2010 and winning the MyTMT Prediction 2010 competition.

On 20/1/2010, In Business, Finance, Firefox, Investments, Linux, Mozilla, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Trading, Ubuntu, By Josh

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: Image by Eva Blue via Flickr

I was at Deloitte’s TMT Prediction 2010 launch event yesterday morning at the Fairmont – The Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Here is a recap of the event and some thought on the predictions and the discussions we had during the event, including Google and Twitter. I’ll also write about Twitter and try to convince Duncan Stewart, the Director of Deloitte Canada Research: Technology, Media & Telecommunications, Life Sciences and GreenTech of why Twitter is a force to be reckoned with and is here to stay. In fact, by the time I finish this post, I have the intention of convincing any Business, Finance, Technology, Media or Telecommunication person reading it of the high value there is in following me, reading my blog and working with me for Business and Web Strategy, Industry and Business Analysis.

Winning the MyTMT Prediction 2010

This time around, Deloitte actually launched a competition called MyTMT prediction, opening it to the public. I was glad to be in the five finalists and also learn during the event that I won the competition with my prediction that Google is poised to massively disrupt the traditional Telecom Industry, to the applause of approximately 200 Business and Media people during the launch event yesterday, January 19th in Montreal.

Business Strategy

Many people have asked me what the prize was. It was recognition, from the Jury, from a big consulting firm like Deloitte and also many people in the Technology, Media and Telecommunication industries. I also won exposure, mingling with like-minded people, and participating in the conversation about foreseeing and predicting where Technology is bringing us and how it impacts our Businesses and lives. As Deloitte themselves argue, the value of the Predictions event is to

explore emerging trends that will have an impact on Canadian businesses in 2010.

and to

helping their clients evaluate complex issues, develop fresh approaches to problems, and implement practical solutions.

There are dedicated TMT practices in 45 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. DTT’s member firms serve 92 percent of the TMT companies in the Fortune Global 500. Clients of Deloitte’s member firms’ TMT practices include some of the world’s top software companies, computer manufacturers, semiconductor foundries, wireless operators, cable companies, advertising agencies, and publishers.

About the research
The 2010 series of Predictions has drawn on internal and external inputs including: conversations with TMT companies, contributions from DTT member firms’ 7,000 partners and senior practitioners specializing in TMT, discussions with financial and industry analysts, and conversations with trade bodies.

Being able to foresee where things are going allows strategizing, planning for the long run. Being able to monitor things allow for swift changing of Business tactics so that the changing environment can have less deleterious effects.

This is why Deloitte’s TMT Predictions 2010 is essential reading:

Technology Predictions 2010

Media Predictions 2010

Telecommunications 2010

Similarly, somebody reading my blog back then in 2005 would have already known the pitfalls of using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer based on quasi-prophetic words at the time, totally vindicated by the recent huge security debacle involving Microsoft, Google, China, and some other 30-odd U.S. firms this January:

During and after these brushes with Justice, Microsoft officials have repeatedly been heard chanting the mantra “Innovation, Innovation. If Microsoft is broken into smaller pieces, we won’t be able to do our Innovation.”

But see, before all this, by bundling their inferior Internet Explorer with Windows, they still managed to make IE the most used browser on the planet since they also force Windows down the throat of the PC-buying customer.

But once they achieved this, what do you think they did with IE? Do you think they kept on innovating, adding features to it, sorting out the kinks, supporting Internet Standards?

No, they sat on it for 3 years. And since IE is a security hazard, the flaws were rapidly exploited. Last year, there were countless storied of PCs being hijacked by spyware, popups everywhere, people tearing their hair off, going mad.

All of this because Microsoft in intent on dominating a segment but does not really care about the customer, nor about innovation. And once they do, and every time a finger points at them, they will strive to cover everything up in marketing or P.R.
—
Not only that, but the Mozilla team, true to Open Source spirit, regularly updated the browser. More specifically, they patched any flaw very rapidly.

Typically, Microsoft will take weeks before even acknowledging a flaw, and if they patch it, the user is left with a vulnerable system for months.
—
Internet Explorer 7 will still be flawed. The problem is Microsoft.

MS’s IE7 will still be flawed. Microsoft still hasn’t learned to support open standards and they still haven’t learned to released a secure software. Instead they are still rushing bug-ridden software and covering it up with P.R. and marketing millions, the latest case being Visual Studio 2005.

Then they also want you to get their Windows Defender anti-spyware software. How come they cannot patch their faulty software first and foremost?

Microsoft hasn’t learned and won’t learn from its mistakes. It’s a monopoly and feels safe enough there. So it will rely on weird tactics for a long time. Like removing all trace of some Linux-bashing articles from the Internet. Like funding pseudo-neutral analysts to tout their software and bash alternatives. Like spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about alternate products. Like enabling only passport-registered people to post comments on their inane MS-marketing blogs. And who posts there? Well those who have MS passports, that is, MS employees primarily and who will do some mutual back-slapping hoping the community takes it up (astro-turfing – a fake grass root marketing approach). Like stubbornly not supporting Open Standards. Like pissing off customers, partners, and employees all at once. Like creating an artificial shortage of XBox 360.

The choice is yours. Make the best one.

You have the choice to try an alternative: the best browser in the world.

Microsoft has been at it again: trying to minimize the seriousness of the security issues, while bashing other browsers. The Web, however, is quick to point out the flawed reasoning:

Mashable – Microsoft downplays Internet Explorer security holes

It takes years to change an ingrained company culture with blessings of wrongdoing from above, and knowing the software engineering advantages of open-source (“With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – Eric S. Raymond), I knew there were fundamental problems with the company itself.

My point of view is validated today with entire governments like France and Germany saying no to Internet Explorer and urging to do the same, but only with 4 years of delay…

So, if you would like to know what I think of where the future in Business and Technology lies, here are the essential posts you should read:

Revisiting past predictions – 2009

The essence of Google’s Success

Google Telecom, Hello!

Top 9 reasons why the Google Nexus One beats the iPhone

The Apple tablet and other industry disruptions signed Apple

Clash of the Titans – Google vs Apple in 2010 and beyond. That one was a whole two weeks before the nice BusinessWeek article.

And more predictions from me are here:

Technologies to watch for us 2010 and this decade

10 Science, Business and Technology Predictions for the next decade 2010-2019

Predictions discussion

a. Google

After the presentation of my prediction, Duncan Stewart said “You nailed it. I think for everything, you nailed it. But I don’t agree with one thing”.

And that was about how in the US, people are very used to a certain level of customer service. He does have a point, especially judging by the flood of questions and complaints regarding an issue with continuous switching between Edge and 3G networks. This got the Google-T-Mobile-HTC trinity passing a hot potato around for a while.

Personally, I think it’s just growing pains for Google, but the bases of the innovative disruption are already there and the consumer will like that.

Check out this very insightful text by Jon Stokes on Ars Technica where he describes how selling the handset unlocked and separately from the carrier changes the competitive landscape:

Because AT&T has ensnared—and locked in—legions of consumers with the iPhone, the company’s incentive is to minimize their infrastructure spending so that they can maximize per-user profits. AT&T also has a motive to nickel-and-dime you to death, because it has you locked in with that amazing phone and its accompanying ETF.

b. Twitter

Asked by Michelle Blanc about what his thoughts on Twitter and its positive role in the aftermath of the Haiti disaster were, Duncan turned out not to be such a big fan of Twitter after all.

Here is what I think Duncan should do to do to get more out of Twitter:

1. Use TweetDeck (my favourite) or Seesmic (using it on Android since TweetDeck is not available and it’s very good indeed) to separate different streams into columns: “All Friends”, “Direct Messages”, “Mentions”. In TweetDeck, you can also add your Facebook column.

2. If you like Finance, Trading and Investments,
– register for StockTwits
– download the Nasdaq QFolio app for the iPhone in the App store and follow what people are saying on StockTwits for each ticker.

3. Follow people of interest, those with expertise and breaking news, through search or pre-existing lists on other people’s profiles or on TweetDeck’s homepage. e.g. Follow @howardlinzon, and @fredwilson

Here is why I think Twitter is important:

1. Nasdaq has built an iPhone app which leverages StockTwits, which itself leverages Twitter. I bet this is going to be important for algorithmic trading.

2. Twitter has made deals with Google and Microsoft to the tune of $25M so that their realtime search results appear in the two giants’ traditional search engines

3. Twitter has an ecosystem of 50,000 apps, and growing. It has become a platform where people use it for marketing and finance. This is crucial and there area many other details in my criteria for IPO selection in Two IPOs to look forward to in 2010.

4. Remember IRC channels during the Iraq war? Twitter plays that role today, and much more. Breakout news happens there first, and much later on other channels.

5. I was spending some night in New York and at one point in time there were insistent traffic of fire-trucks and I thought “This is not the city that never sleeps – it’s rather the city where you can never sleep”. My first reflex? Checking #NYC on Twitter to see if there was any danger in the vicinity. Similarly, Twitter will become essential for alerting you to any opportunities in your surroundings. That’s part of the power of real-time and location-based services.

6. Twitter allows you to do social computing. Your trusted friends and contacts will help when you have a genuine question and if you are helpful too.

7. Last but not least… Dell made $6.5M through Twitter channels sales in two years.

Solar

I was a bit disappointed to hear that solar would have some difficulties along the 2010 because of a supply glut. However, stumbling blocks can turn into stepping stones – this may be an opportunity to regularly stock up on the equities, value-averaging along the way until the big break provided the choice is made carefully.

How Deloitte leveraged Social Media for TMT Predictions 2010

Deloitte did very well in leveraging Social Media prior and up to the event. First, they decided to open up submissions from the public, leveraging user-generated content.

They further leveraged several social media applications, services and strategies and Katheline Jean-Pierre has been a driving force behind that, and I actually learned about the MyTMT prediction through her Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Deloitte was present on the Web, on Twitter, and on Facebook, together with UStream, YouTube etc…

Deloitte called upon Laurent Maisonnave of ZeAgence to build upon his social media and video streaming skills – the event was filmed and streamed to Deloitte’s UStream channel in realtime over the web.

They leveraged the Wildfire application for Facebook, which allows campaign management. Any participant could upload their videos and then invite their Facebook friends to vote through the Wildfire app embedded in Deloitte’s MyTMT web page.

Before and during the event, Deloitte had communicated and prominently displayed its hashtag for the event (#TMTPrediction2010 or #TMTPred2010) for others to include in their Tweets.

This morning, I was also flabbergasted to learn that my prediction was shown to 400 Business people at the event in Toronto.

Actually, it will also be shown throughout Canada during Deloitte’s stops in major cities during their TMT Prediction events. I believe they are:
Winnipeg, Quebec, Ottawa, Calgary, Halifax and Vancouver.

Thanks Deloitte for this opportunity and kudos to the team, Duncan, Robert, Peter, Katheline, Laurent and the Jury members.

Tagged with: $GOOG • Deloitte TMT Prediction 2010 • myTmt • Twitter

Revisiting past Technology & Business predictions – 2009

On 30/12/2009, In AJAX, Business, Firefox, General, Google, Linux, Masters at work, Mozilla, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Ubuntu, Web 2.0, Web O.S., By Josh

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At the close of 2009, it is time to revisit my past predictions and see how I fared. I find that with time, my blog has become more self-referential as things I have envisioned years ago – sometimes up to 4 years ago – become validated or progress in the general direction I foretold.

1. Google Telecom, Hello! – July 2nd, 2007

Google

I envisioned then as TechCrunch had featured a rumour that Google was going to buy GrandCentral, that Google was bent on becoming a Telco or ISP themselves.

The acquisition of GrandCentral and mobile ambitions – The Google phone?

GrandCentral provides you with one phone number linked to all your existing phone numbers, and many other features (thanks to Techcrunch for this great overview) through its website and also through your mobile.

There have been rumors of the Google phone before, and such a device with the mobile Google applications, linked to all the Google integrated goodies mentioned above would be pure bliss for managing and sharing data and event information with contacts when either online or offline thanks to Google Gears.

Google’s killer move

Here is what I predict will happen with Google Telecom. Based on the current state of Telecom, i.e. VOIP disrupting the industry with the old Telcos still charging too much while there are cheaper VOIP offers like the Gizmo Project, Skype, VBuzzer and Jajah, Google will adopt a similar strategy to Google Apps. With Google Apps, Google has a tiered access: free access for users and paid access for businesses.

I believe Google Telecom will offer free calls locally and worldwide to fixed telephone lines and mobiles to individual users and basic paid access for businesses and bring a more severe disruption of the Telecom industry as it will rely on getting more advertising through these channels. Alternately, Google could use the Google Web infrastructure to position itself as an ISP and offer free Internet access to all too.

That’s a killer strategy, and they can pull it off. Beautifully at that.

2. How Apple will revolutionize music-making – March 11th, 2007

Apple

Months before the launch of the iPhone, I foresaw how the multi-touch device will change the way we make music, essentially because multi-touch is organic and enables the use of the device as Midi controllers.

However, the iPhone and the iPod Touch are a little too small for a big revolution. The forthcoming tablet will be different. Being bigger, we can expect many more practical uses like playing virtual instruments live, using the tablet as a virtual mixer and sequencer and so on.

Conclusion

The whole experience of how you make music within a sequencer with virtual instruments is about to be revolutionized by Apple with a forthcoming combination of multi-touch hardware and software based on Logic and running on at least Leopard.

The very act of recording, manipulating and producing music on a computer will become an organic performance in itself.

I don’t know when it’s coming, but I do know it’s soon, probably this year, and it’s going to be Apple and Leopard+.

The Next three ones come from a long post called The Web O.S., Web 2.0, yubnub and YashNub dated October 10th, 2005.

A revolution is under way. It is one of those times when technologies developed separately converge and congeal. From this emerges a new system that is better than the sum of its parts.

3. The Web O.S. / The Cloud – October 10th, 2005

This begs the question of how to propagate technical requirements to an underlying platform to enhance the end-user’s experience with Web 2.0.

The first point of contact is the user’s browser.
…

My view of the Web OS is that it must be a combination of the computer’s OS and the browser. …

Given Firefox and AJAX and great web services, there will be an increasing migration of desktop applications to remotely hosted locations on the web. Of course, not all applications can be hosted this way yet – desktop installed apps will still be around for a long time.

But assuming increased hosted services, it is a simple and logical step to envision that the computer OS can itself be tweaked for Web 2.0 usage. In other words, you could enhance existing Web support, but in addition, you could also strip an existing computer OS from any superfluous capabilities and code. You would then obtain a low-cost alternative to the bloated (and sometimes expensive) OSes currently available.

These WebOS 2.0 PC’s, being cheaper, could be used to power schools, especially in developing and third world countries and businesses alike.

Businesses would also benefit of broadband connections to leverage hosted services.

Although schools in poor areas may have broadband, they would still benefit of the network architecture: imagine just one server providing the necessary web services to a class of pupils. They could all be writing their assignment with a software like Writely.

The whole of the software service maintenance is outsourced – this is less costly in time and money for anyone using a PC with Web OS.

Of note recently is the announcement of the partnership between Google and Sun for cross-marketing of their services. This fuelled a lot of speculation about whether a Web version of StarOffice would be in the works. In addition, people have been talking about a possible Google browser and GoogleOS.

I envision the future Web O.S. to be a stripped down Linux distribution with subsequent enhancements. And the single distribution which is poised as the best contender has to be Mark Shuttleworth’s forever free Ubuntu Linux.

Based on the above, I don’t think Google is preparing a browser or O.S. Because both the browser (Firefox) and the Computer OS (Ubuntu Linux) already exist, it doesn’t seem to be a good strategy to me.

4. Firefox – October 20th, 2005

In December 2009, Firefox overtakes IE 7 to become the Word’s most popular browser.

Firefox

…
My weapon of choice in this area is Firefox and it should be yours too. Mozilla’s awesome open-source browser is highly customizable through a variety of extensions. A personal favourite is GreaseMonkey which allows you to install scripts that personalize the browsing experience of some sites, removing annoyances in some cases or enhancing functionality in others.

My view of the Web OS is that it must be a combination of the computer’s OS and the browser. The advantage with a browser like Firefox is that it is already cross-platform and standards-based. It is therefore a candidate of choice for basing any development of the Web 2.0 services.

I also praised Firefox in this other post in November 2005 – Firefox, the world best browser.

Not only that, but the Mozilla team, true to Open Source spirit, regularly updated the browser. More specifically, they patched any flaw very rapidly.

5. Ruby on Rails – October 10th, 2005

Twitter

Thanks to launching with Ruby on Rails, Twitter has managed to raise $25M at the end of this year.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a Rapid Web Development framework built using Ruby, an open-source and truly object-oriented programming language.

Ruby

I am quite fond of Matsumoto-san’s Ruby language and hence I founded a local Ruby user Group.

Ruby on Rails has made the development of new web services a disarmingly simple thing to do. The very implementation of the Rails framework enables you not to have to repeat yourself in your code. Actually, a lot of the code is automatically generated.

Thanks to David Heinemeier Hansson and thousand of other contributors, RoR is and will continue to be a driving force for evolving Web 2.0 because it’s now easy and fast to build new applications. It’s also worth mentioning that RoR now incorporates AJAX functionality by default.

6. Open-source

I have been involved in Linux User Groups and the open-source community for more than a decade and I use and recommend open-source software for that much to enterprises and individuals alike.

Open-source continues to grow as an influential way of building technology and businesses. Sometimes, the open-source product is better engineered than the commercial product, since:

Companies usually operate in an economy of resources mode and management often have no clue what development is about.

In the open-source world, “with sufficient eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, meaning that someone, somewhere in the world is an expert in solving exactly the problem or bug that the software has and can do so in a small period of time.

Therefore, building proprietary solutions from scratch is an increasingly losing battle. It is much better to build around open-source software and open standards, ensuring interoperability and robustness.

Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Ubuntu, Google, Apple Mac OS X are all built with or around open-source software.

By the way, Eric Raymond, the term ‘open source’ won – we rarely hear of Free Software anymore. However, let’s not forget the seminal work of Richard Stallman.

At the close of 2009, one of the most impressive companies of the decade relies heavily on Open-source software, contributes heavily to the Open-Source community and has evolved into a major player in several industries by building a hybrid business model:

Proprietary or closed-sourced core algorithms and technology + Heavily leverage open-source technology and contribute back to the community

That company is Google and is a great model for merging technology and business and succeeding in the digital age and the knowledge economy. Note that to replicate Google’s success, you also have to rely heavily on Engineers and Engineering in Computer Science.

Tagged with: $GOOG • AAPL • Apple • Business • Firefox • Google • Open Source • Ruby • Ruby on Rails • Technology

Twitter profitable after Google and Microsoft deals – it’s a win for Ruby on Rails

On 22/12/2009, In AI, Algorithmic Trading, Finance, Hedge Funds, Investments, Masters at work, Open Source, Quantitative Analysis, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Josh

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Bloomberg reported that Twitter inked two deals for a total of 25M USD with Google and Microsoft so that tweets can be inserted in their search results page.

This shows how essential real-time has become on the Web.

For me it’s a big win for the underlying open source technology framework for Rapid Web Development, Ruby on Rails, which I have been recommending to enterprises since about 4 years ago.

Where are you on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle below regarding Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Have you innovated? Are you an early adopter because you understand the business implications, or will you be at the other end of the spectrum, a laggard?

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

The news is, however, huge for Twitter, which is said by Bloomberg to be profitable now.

Twitter has become a platform essential to the Web in Marketing/Advertising, Customer Care (though less as people understand this less) but also in Finance. Witness Howard Linzon’s StockTwits, itself leveraged by NASDAQ’s Portfolio Manager application for the iPhone.

It’s huge news because the real-time web can be input signals into high-frequency trading strategies.

If Twitter does an IPO, I won’t miss it.

Tagged with: High-Frequency Trading • Howard Linzon • IPO • NASDAQ • StockTwits • Trading Strategy • Twitter

Extending the e Text Editor for Ruby Programming

On 3/9/2007, In Open Source, Productivity, Ruby, Software, Technology, Tutorials, By Yash

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e Logo At DemoCampMontreal4, I showed the results of time spent programming Ruby and RubyOnRails within the excellent e Text Editor for Windows. You can read about the presentation in my DemoCampMontreal4 report here at YashLabs, MTW and Marc-AndrÃ© Cournoyer’s blog.

e Text Editor and the extensible Bundle system

e is compatible with (the Mac OS X-only) TextMate bundles and can load in its snippets for faster Ruby and Rails programming. However, I also wanted to have quick access to all the methods associated to the common Ruby data structures:

String

Array

Hash

Fixnum

The Design

A keyboard shortcut for launching the menu

A menu displaying all methods is displayed

From the menu, the user can scroll and select the method or jump to it with a keypress for the first letter of the method

On selection, the menu disappears and the appropriate method name is inserted at the current cursor position

Ruby’s reflection capabilities

Ruby is a great object-oriented language. In Ruby, everything is an object and hence all the object-oriented principles I learnt are implemented in Ruby quite well and simply, which is more than can be said for C++ and Java. For instance, in Ruby, you can do this:

10.times

"Hello".length

Ruby is great for introspection as it has good reflection capacities – an object can provide information about its internals. The inbuilt .methods method gives all the methods associated with a data structure. e.g.

puts Array.methods.sort.inspect

gives

["< ", "<=", "<=>", "==", "===", "=~", ">", ">=", "[]", "__id__", "__send__", "allocate", "ancestors", "autoload", "autoload?", "class", "class_eval", "class_variable_defined?", "class_variables", "clone", "const_defined?", "const_get", "const_missing", "const_set", "constants", "display", "dup", "eql?", "equal?", "extend", "freeze", "frozen?", "hash", "id", "include?", "included_modules", "inspect", "instance_eval", "instance_method", "instance_methods", "instance_of?", "instance_variable_defined?", "instance_variable_get", "instance_variable_set", "instance_variables", "is_a?", "kind_of?", "method", "method_defined?", "methods", "module_eval", "name", "new", "nil?", "object_id", "private_class_method", "private_instance_methods", "private_method_defined?", "private_methods", "protected_instance_methods", "protected_method_defined?", "protected_methods", "public_class_method", "public_instance_methods", "public_method_defined?", "public_methods", "respond_to?", "send", "singleton_methods", "superclass", "taint", "tainted?", "to_a", "to_s", "type", "untaint"]

However, [].methods.sort contains additional methods not contained within Array as shown by:

res= [].methods - Array.methods puts res.inspect

This gives the additional methods of []:

["select", "[]=", "transpose", "< <", "&", "indexes", "partition", "map!", "uniq", "empty?", "fetch", "values_at", "*", "grep", "+", "shift", "clear", "-", "reject", "insert", "reverse!", "indices", "delete", "first", "concat", "member?", "flatten!", "|", "find", "join", "delete_at", "each_with_index", "nitems", "unshift", "index", "collect", "fill", "all?", "uniq!", "slice", "length", "entries", "compact", "last", "detect", "delete_if", "zip", "each_index", "map", "sort!", "assoc", "rindex", "any?", "to_ary", "size", "sort", "min", "push", "find_all", "each", "slice!", "pack", "reverse_each", "replace", "inject", "collect!", "rassoc", "at", "reverse", "compact!", "sort_by", "max", "reject!", "flatten", "pop"]

Therefore, instead of Array.methods, I’d rather get [].methods.

Cygwin

Cygwin’s great UNIX-like programming environment is used by e for the bundle system. This is interesting because from there you can run Ruby code within the e Bundle system and communicate with Cygwin through to the Operating System.

There’s a great post by Ben Kittrell describing how he made a great Mac-like environment for Rails development on Windows using Cygwin.

wxCocoaDialog

CocoaDialog is a lightweight Objective-C application for Mac OS X to provide easy access to common GUI widgets and is particularly suitable for object-oriented scripting languages.

Fortunately, some kind soul ported CocoaDialog to use the cross-platform and open-source wxWidgets toolkit. Actually, it is e Text Editor and its TextMate-compatible bundle system that gave rise to wxCocoaDialog.

And in this wxCocoaDialog port, we have three additional runmode items not present in CocoaDialog on Mac OS X, including…menu!

Putting it all together

Provided you have e installed (wxCocoaDialog comes with it) as well as Cygwin and Ruby for Cygwin, here is how to proceed.

In e, press CTRL-SHIFT-B to open the Bundle Editor
On the left tree-view pane, select Ruby
Click on the big + button lower down and choose New Command
Name the command RubyMethodsString (or anything suitable for you)
Paste in the following code I wrote which connects Ruby, Cygwin, wxCocoaDialog and e. Be careful when pasting as currently the code formatting plugin does weird things with quotes – all the quotes are straight except after index= – the outermost ones really are backticks to access the system

#!/usr/bin/env ruby


#Access Ruby Methods for strings

#August 2007 - Josh Nursing - josh.nursing AT gmail.com
SUPPORT = ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH']

DIALOG = SUPPORT + '/bin/CocoaDialog.exe'

sel = ENV['TM_CURRENT_WORD']

x = "--xpos #{ENV['TM_CARET_XPOS']} "

y = "--ypos #{ENV['TM_CARET_YPOS']} "
am="".methods.sort 
menu=[]
#Populate menu with formatted entries

am.each do |w|

    menu.push "'" + w.to_s + "' "

end
#CocoaDialog menu

index =`"#{DIALOG}" menu --items #{menu} #{x} #{y}`.to_i - 1

#Insert the selected method text at caret position print '.' + am[index]

In the upper right corner, as Environment, select Cygwin
Lower down, select as Input: Selected Text or Word
As Output, select Insert as Text
As Activation, select Key Trigger and press a key combination. I used CTRL-SHIFT-Y
Close the bundle editor and in your Ruby file within e, after a string variable name or string, press the key shortcut

e menu extension for Ruby Programming

Navigate the menu either with the Up or Down Arrows or jump straight to a method by pressing its first letter

e menu extension for Ruby Programming 2

The selected method including the dot is inserted within your code in e.

From here you can derive the very similar codes for the other data structures and add them with new shortcuts. My shortcuts are in a row on the keyboard (CTRL-SHIFT-Y, -U, -I, -O).

This menu extension can be accessed when you’re developing a Ruby on Rails application as well.

This shows how e can be usefully extended to work better with your favorite programming language.

IronRuby source code by Microsoft on RubyForge

On 1/9/2007, In Open Source, Ruby, Software, Technology, By Yash

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Last night, as I had announced in my presentation at DemoCampMontreal4,John Lam of Microsoft released IronRuby on RubyForge. This implementation of Ruby for Microsoft’s DLR is written in C#.

The IronRuby team managed to add enhancements since the first sharing of the source code about a month ago, including:

* Comparable
* Enumerable
* Array
* Hash
* String (not quite complete yet)
* Dir

To get the source code, I had to go down to the SCM icon and then get the Subversion url:

svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ironruby
svn checkout http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/

I am using TortoiseSVN on WindowsXP and it works very well.

My previous post on Hacking IronRuby can come in handy. For more thoughts on IronRuby, check out my presentation report about DemoCampMontreal4.

Congratulations to John and the team for reaching the deadline of the end of August for this release.

Update

John has just released new instructions and a short and sweet screencast to show how to checkout and build IronRuby.

DemoCampMontreal4 Report

On 18/8/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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Maybe it was because yesterday was Friday, but on announcing DemoCampMontreal4 yesterday on my blogs, I saw that there were only 4 demos instead of the usual 5. And so I added myself to the wiki in the 5th remaining slot thereby contributing as a presenter to the event this time around.

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

FranÃ§ois 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 JÃ©rÃ´me 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 JÃ©rÃ´me Paradis for the pics.

DemoCampMontreal4

On 17/8/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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BarCampMontrealLogo DemoCampMontreal4 is today at the S.A.T. There are 5 demonstrations scheduled by the members of the Montreal Tech Community. It’s free to attend.

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

August 17th 6:30pm, 8:30pm 2007 — DemoCampMontreal4— at 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.

Montreal on Rails – 1st event

On 9/8/2007, In Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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Ruby on Rails enthusiasts in Montreal met at the MAAS Chemistry building at McGill university this Tuesday for the first edition of Montreal on Rails. The event, organized by Carl Mercier and Mat Balez of Karabunga, was packed and featured one advanced presentation and an easier one. And fresh donuts.

Marc-AndrÃ© Cournoyer – Making API testing more efficient. InActiveRecord

First, Marc-AndrÃ© Cournoyer, from StandoutJobs delivered a high-pace presentation about how to make API-testing with Ruby and Ruby on Rails more efficient. The introduction was hilarious, with choice illustrations accompanying Marc-AndrÃ©’s quick and witty delivery in sync.

MA showed explained how testing can last too long when you are accessing APIs through the net, especially with many different tests. So as to ease development and testing, MA proposed that fixtures and tests\mocks within the Rails project could be used to get a local cache of the results of API queries and from then on, the tests could be edited so that the local file could be accessed instead based on the setting of an environment variable (REAL_REQUEST in his example).

MA showed re-building using Rake and CruiseControl to specify the special build with the REAL_REQUEST variable.

His demonstrations concerned the Twitter API, and the results before and after the implementation of the mock tests using the cache file were:

Before: 3.73 seconds for all tests
After: 0.06 seconds

This is extremely useful, and combined with, say an RSS feed on the API blog to be aware of any API change (in which case you’d need to refresh your cache file once), makes for efficient testing.

In the second part of his presentation, MA showed InActiveRecord, a DSL for ActiveRecord, which is built on top of mockups so as to enable caching of data instead of database access and thus make testing faster in these cases too.

In true open-source spirit, MA has put his code online. His presentation is available too.

During the presentation, MA performed some on-the-spot refactoring through the code. He evidently has great chops programming Ruby and RubyonRails, and the Standout Jobs team did well to get him on board.

Carl Mercier – HAML

Carl did a short and informative presentation about HAML, a markup language by Hampton Catlin which produces other markup languages. HAML exists as a plugin to Rails (you can also use it from Ruby) and enables you to replace the .rhtml files.

Why would you do that? Because HAML is much more compact and easy to read and write and therefore using it speeds up your Rails development when specifying your views. HAML does not need closing tags, and relies on 2-space indentation for block definition – very reminiscent of Python. In addition, HAML intelligently relies on ‘convention over configuration’ by defaulting to a div tag.

Example: these two are identical in HAML:
%small{:class=>’code’, :id=>’message’}
%small.code#message

Ruby code can run directly in HAML too.

Another example Carl showed was:

%head = {:name=> 'dochead'}

%ul - @users.each do |user| %li[user]=user.name - end

As an aid to speed up development, HAML is very useful. However, Carl mentioned that current performance is 30% slower than ERB (dynamic ruby inline of HTML).

After this there were talks of SASS, which is the equivalent of HAML but for CSS.

Derek: “Can you define your own tags?”
Carl (hacking up some HAML):

Audience member: “But…what does it do?”
Carl:”I don’t know… It eats donuts.”

Montreal on Rails, 1st edition, was great. Introductory presentation of Rails for businesses would be interesting too in next editions. The event is planned to be a monthly one. TextMate on Mac really rocks as a development tool.

- MA has his own account of the event online.
- The event debrief is at the Montreal on Rails site.

And thanks for the donuts.

Hacking IronRuby

On 27/7/2007, In Ruby, Software, Technology, Tutorials, By Yash

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IronRuby image John Lam of Microsoft released IronRuby this July 23rd. IronRuby is destined to enable the use of Ruby with .Net to build Windows applications. It targets the Dynamic Language Runtime, which Microsoft plans for IronRuby, IronPython and VBx, a dynamic version of Visual Basic. This post is a tutorial for hacking IronRuby.

In this tutorial I’ll show:

How to build IronRuby and test it, including a simple .Net interop test

How to set up a Visual environment to hack IronRuby

How I hacked the IronRuby C# source code to fix a bug about string concatenation in Ruby

How I extended IronRuby with a new method implementation with the Visual environment

A few months ago, I emailed John about the possibility of using his RubyCLR, the precursor to IronRuby, to integrate with open-source IDEs. John was quite open to the idea. This new project renews my interest as already, IronPython has been integrated within the Visual Studio environment, and it would be great to tackle the VS integration of IronRuby in the future.

I checked out the source code to IronRuby in its really early pre-Alpha stage (so you should expect incompleteness and bugs). Antonio Cangiano wrote a long post about this, but this first release is under Microsoft’s Permissive License, so that anyone can look at the code and modify it.

1. Building IronRuby

1. Make sure you have the IronRuby source code and that you have extracted it, and also the .Net framework installed.

2. Because of a bug in Microsoft’s .Net framework installation, paths to the framework or the corresponding system environment variables are not set correctly. Check the path to your latest version of .Net framework by looking in the Windows\Microsoft.Net directory.

Mine is: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

3. In IronRuby’s installed directory, edit Build.cmd and replace
%frameworkdir%\%frameworkversion% by your full path to your .Net framework dir.

4. Save Build.cmd.

Mine contains
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\msbuild.exe /p:Configuration=Release /t:Rebuild IronRuby.sln

5. Launch Build.cmd from the command line.

IronRuby should now build successfully.

2. Testing IronRuby

1. Launch rbx.exe in the Bin\Release subdirectory and try a simple Ruby command like 3+5 or puts ‘Hello!’

2. A simple .Net interop test:
require 'System.Windows.Forms' f=System::Windows::Forms f::MessageBox.show "Hello from .Net!"

IronRuby test

3. A string test which fails:

Here, we can see that string concatenation unfortunately modifies the first argument. We’ll see how to fix this in IronRuby’s source code in a short while, but first we’ll set up a nice Visual environment to code in.

3. Setting up Visual C# Express 2005 to hack IronRuby

1. Download Visual C# Express 2005 and install it. Do register the software.

2. Load the IronRuby solution file, IronRuby.sln, in the Visual C# Express 2005 IDE.

3. You can then build IronRuby straight from the IDE and also modify it which we will now see by going through fixing the bug encountered above.

4. Hacking IronRuby to fix the string addition operation bug

After grasping the overall source-code structure, I narrowed down the bug to the Ruby\Builtins\MutableStrings.cs file and the Concatenate(MutableString self, MutableString other) implementation of RubyMethodAttribute “+”:
[RubyMethodAttribute("+", RubyMethodAttributes.PublicInstance)] public static MutableString Concatenate(MutableString self, MutableString other) { return self.Append(other); }

self.Append(other) was obviously effecting the concatenation but modifying self (as that’s what Append should do) and returning the result.

To fix this in C#, I needed to instantiate a new temporary MutableString object to which I could in turn append self and other and return this instead:

MutableString result = new MutableString(); return result.Append(self).Append(other);

Once you’ve modified an existing IronRuby implementation, you can Build the solution within the Visual C# IDE (F6).

After a successful build, you can browse to the IronRuby Bin\Debug directory (or Bin\Release if you set it up this way within Visual C#) and check whether rbx.exe is recently timestamped.

Just double-click on rbx.exe to launch it and to check the bug fix:

Don’t forget to exit the debug version of rbx if you’re doing other modifications or you won’t be able to build it.

5. Extending IronRuby with new Ruby methods implementations using Visual C#

Here, we’ll be adding a new Ruby method implementation to the Ruby Builtins classes, so a simple Build of the code would not work, as there is intermediate C# code which has to be generated automatically thanks to a small program named ClassInitGenerator.

There’s a bad path setting in one of the files we’ll need, so we have to fix this first:

1. Browse to the Src\Ruby\Builtins directory

2. Right-click the GenerateInitializers.cmd file and select Properties.

3. Uncheck the Read-Only attribute and click Apply, then OK.

4. Right-click the same file again and select Edit.

5. Remove the initial ‘..\’

Your new file should contain:

..\..\..\Bin\Debug\ClassInitGenerator > Initializer.Generated.cs

6. Save the file.

As Antonio Cangiano of IBM Toronto’s Software Labs and others rightly pointed out, a simple float division will throw IronRuby astray:

That’s because the Ruby “/” method for floats within the Builtins\FloatOps.cs file is not implemented yet.

Here’s my simple code for the IronRuby implementation of the Ruby “/” operation:

[RubyMethodAttribute("/", RubyMethodAttributes.PublicInstance)] public static double Divide(double self, double other) { return (self / other); }

Here are the steps to recreate an extended IronRuby with the IDE:

1. Save the FloatOps.cs file (or the project)

2. Right-click ClassInitGenerator in the solution tree-view and select Build

3. Browse to Src\Ruby\Builtins and launch GenerateInitializers.cmd. A new Initializer.Generated.cs file will be generated. If the Visual C# IDE asks for it to be reloaded, click “Yes”.

4. Select the Solution and Build it (F6)

5. Browse to the \Bin\Debug directory and launch rbx.exe to test it:

You can now hack away at IronRuby with the Visual C# IDE. Microsoft will be accepting outside contributions to the source code which is expected to be on RubyForge by the end of August.

DemoCampMontreal3 Report

On 25/7/2007, In BarCamp, DemoCampMontreal, Open Source, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web 2.0, By Yash

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Rule-violation edition

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. JÃ©rÃ´me Paradis – CharterWeb

JÃ©rÃ´me, 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 FranÃ§ois 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 JÃ©rÃ´me 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 VallÃ©e, AmÃ©lie Racine, Mark, Philippe Chrun, Angelo, Fred, Julie, Simon, Tamu, Roberto Rocha, Alok Mohindra, Martin Dufort, SÃ©bastien Paquet, and others.

Amazing Montreal Technology – Sygenics Evolution

On 17/5/2007, In AI, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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Sygenics Evolution logo I mentioned Sygenics‘ Evolution before in my DemoCampMontreal report in glowing terms. I have since met with Raj Vadavia, the CEO and Thomas Fedoryak, the Chief Strategic Officer of Sygenics. They have taken the time to describe Evolution more precisely so that I could improve on the technical accuracy of the article. Thomas sent the edits and I incorporated them into the blog post today.

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.

BarCampMontreal2 Report – Part 4

On 11/5/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, By Yash

Digg me

Right before the slide karaoke, I went backstage near the bar to get some refreshment. On the way Daniel Haran filled me in about ActiveResource in Ruby on Rails just as David FugÃ¨re did in a previous DemoCamp.

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.

DemoCampMontreal2

On 31/3/2007, In BarCamp, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

Digg me

There was not a cloud in the sky this Thursday, and so I was heading to the SAT for DemoCampMontreal2 with a few recurring thoughts in my head like “Isn’t this the best city ever?”. There was a bohemian air throughout Montreal. And what’s St-Laurent if not the very heart of artistry and exotic wizardry?

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 StÃ©phane Hamel. StÃ©phane 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 StÃ©phane – go 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 TechnoCitÃ© blog.

—————————————————————————–
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.
—————————————————————————–
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?

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 2

On 4/3/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Linux, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ubuntu, By Yash

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Part 1 of the DemoCampMontreal1 Report is here.

Based on more information provided to me during a recent meeting with Raj Vadavia (CEO) and Thomas Fedoryak (Chief Strategic Officer) of Sygenics, I have updated the description of the fantastic Sygenics Evolution technology today so that it portrays the technology more accurately. Thanks to Thomas Fedoryak for the more accurate wording. Josh – 17th of May.

3. DARWIN by Evonium Inc. – Kingsley and Alden Woodward

John set the tone for the presentation as usual and practised his ~~Bruce Buffer~~ John McCarthy impersonation. He also posed for a photograph in a cheeky Wasnot@BarCampbutgotaT-ShirtNaNaNa stance.

Note to self: the UFC will be in Montreal later this year. Attend. Mixed Martial Arts events have done a lot to change how I think about Martial Arts in general.

The Evonium team demonstrated DARWIN, a modular and customizable framework for Information Management. The demonstration itself at DemoCampMontreal1 showed just a small subset of DARWIN’s possibilities, focusing on the ease of adding new data within the framework and updating a form to access the contents.

The real Wow factor here is Alden Woodward mentioning that DARWIN could evolve with your business process. Now, this statement seems innocuous like this, but what if you factor in that you can re-engineer your business process, easily and rapidly customize your whole Information Systems within and with DARWIN to reflect this while the system is still running LIVE?

A nearly real-time evolutive Business Information System – that’s nothing less than the grail of Business agility! Absolutely fantastically impressive, considering that it is time-consuming and sometimes difficult to re-design your Data models, especially if you using a relational DBMS and rewrite your access code. Now, how do you think Evonium achieves so much flexibility within their framework to do that?

Just imagine tracking the efficiency of multiple business processes per business domain to find what works best in each type of business.

The presentation itself could have been geared more towards showing these benefits. It was difficult to grasp the benefits of DARWIN with the demo as I am not familiar with the interface and based on the feedback I heard here and there, many people did not get the message, which is unfortunate as I strongly believe that Evonium have a winner with DARWIN.

DARWIN is applied to Manufacturing and to Science Laboratories and Science Research in addition to Businesses. Kingsley Woodward is the President and CEO of Evonium Inc.

During Question Time, Raj Vadavia popped a question about the underlying technology.

“Don’t you guys work together? PLANTED QUESTION!!!” said John playfully.

But actually, that was the whole point and the subject of the fourth demo, Evolution or Part 2 of my “Wow!” moment.

4. Evolution by Sygenics Corp – Raj Vadavia

Raj Vadavia started by saying how most modern programming languages are object-oriented (like our beloved Ruby) but RDBMS and these languages do not mesh well together.

He then described Evolution, a new technology that frees business logic from being locked into a given data schema, by installing a true real-time dynamic data model directly within Relational DBMS. Raj said that with Evolution, DB administrators need not go down to the level of the relational tables to modify them. Instead, modifications are initiated from a higher level through an API, and instantly reflected in real-time by the adaptive (or ‘plastic’) Evolution data model. Raj added that Evolution was the result of more than four years of research and development and that the technology is patent-pending. Sygenics Corp, the makers of Evolution, found out during their research that RDBMS and their fixed schema models are actually a bottleneck in data-centric business systems.

Raj said that Evolution uses mathematics, more precisely Set Theory, to manipulate the data. Woah! I was transfixed by the idea. Raj continued to speak about Evolution while looking at me but his words had become a blur as I was lost in metaphysics territory. Could it be that there are other things we take for granted within either our Information Systems and the Businesses they integrate into and that applying a new mathematical model could open up amazing optimization opportunities?

From Sygenics’ website:

The fixed table schema that are used by relational databases are the core bottleneck in the development, lifecycle and flexibility of any data-centric software solution. These fixed schema are the weakest link because they were never intended to change or adapt once activated.

Suddenly, a loud booming voice resonated throughout the SAT room.

“Raaaaj?… Raaaaaaaaj?……”.

OhmigodTheSATisHauntedThere’sAGhostInTheMachine!!?!!

“Raj, it’s your subconscious…. You have five minutes left for your demo.”

It was John, of course.

Evolution dynamically modifies its own data structure (within your relational DB, like Oracle and MS-SQL) without having to manually re-tool access routines or migrate existing data to a new schema. This enables fast reconfigurable data models without having to stop your production system, and is the reason why Evonium’s DARWIN can enable you to dynamically rewire your business logic as your business process changes.

If I were an investor looking for innovative Business Information Systems opportunities that night at DemoCampMontreal1, this is where I’d put my money: Sygenics’ Evolution and Evonium’s DARWIN framework. Their concepts and technologies made my mind reel for a few days.

Interface Ruby and Ruby on Rails with these two technologies and you have the core of the ultimate flexible full-stack Business Information Architecture. Couple this with a Cognos and Google Analytics type of analysis and reporting and you have a fantastic arsenal to track different business processes’ efficiencies so as to select the best one based on practical results.

Sygenics The presentation also suffered from the ‘unfamiliarity with the interface’ phenomenon, but it did show that there was no need to go down to the level of the relational database schema for modifications. But here again, I cannot help but wonder whether the message did get across.

Nevertheless, I’m totally amazed by Evolution. Revolutionary as the website says and I’m inclined to believe it.

Raj Vadavia is the CEO and majority shareholder of Sygenics.

Notes:
- Always distinguish form from content. The two presentations above might have been better formulated with respect to conveying the benefits to the audience, but the technologies and concepts beneath were the most impressive that night and probably the most impressive I’ve seen in the past two years as I’ve mentioned in Part 1.

5. ilovetoplay.com – Marc Chriqui

Marc Chriqui’s stated goal for ilovetoplay.com is to help make people fit, which is a laudable initiative. His demonstration showed the website which helps people find partners for sports activities. He showed the fields within the user profiles and also how photos are added within the site.

Marc also found a creative way of using his 15 minutes of DemoCampMontreal1. After the main presentation, he asked the audience feedback about the marketing aspect for the website and showed us an image with a teasing tag-line.

Tamu, who was sitting in the row behind me, voiced some valid observations about how it can get tiring for people who do not look like the model to see yet another photo not representative of themselves, but Marc replied “You don’t want to be fit?” which created a ripple of laughter in the audience, effectively drowning Tamu’s message.

Well, it’s a good idea to ask for feedback at DemoCamp. Some audience members are even willing to give you that feedback for free, so you might as well listen carefully to their contributions. Another audience member also gave Marc feedback, and John added his perspective too – all relevant.

Note:
- You can use DemoCampMontreal to get feedback on your product and marketing. But make sure you lend an attentive ear if you do get it.

Wrap-up

John announced that the DemoCampMontreal1 team would go to the Ste. Elizabeth afterwards. Then Fred and Simon took turns with the microphone to thank all parties involved and inform people about upcoming events.

Post-demo conversations

Heri and I had talked a little in between demos and I had also caught up with John who said he was away for a while since CUSEC but came back to Montreal. After the wrap-up, I greeted Robin and asked him whether he was going to attend the first Mashpit in Montreal, and he said he’d most probably be there.

I also met Carl Mercier who is a successful serial entrepreneur based in Montreal. Carl, Heri and I swapped business cards spent quite a fair amount of time happily discussing the Montreal Tech Scene. Carl’s business card is a sight to behold – classy and beautiful.

After this, I checked with John whether he was going to the Ste-Elizabeth and then I moved near the bar where there were still a handful of persons around chatting.

Silicon Valley North

I wanted to meet Austin Hill and he was there generously giving the Evonium team and Raj Vadavia feedback on the presentations from his perspective as a VC and Angel investor. Alden, Kingsley and Raj were attentive and open to the feedback. Raj proposed that Austin try to apply Evolution to the problem of sifting and sorting email messages as Austin had mentioned this as an example of a real-world problem that a VC or investor could easily relate to and which would have been advantageous to demonstrate to make the presentations more effective.

I didn’t have the opportunity of speaking to either Raj Vadavia or Alden and Kingsley Woodward about their technology but I did talk to Austin. I asked him about Silicon Valley and the state of the Tech Scene in Toronto and Montreal. Austin mentioned that SV has a lot to do with the mindset but that it was also a question of economics. He said that Toronto is currently ahead of Montreal in terms of activity in the Tech scene, but that he is convinced that Montreal has the potential of becoming the next best SV-North.

That was precisely what I wanted to hear. And with the kind involvement that Austin has in the community, I have no doubt that his words are becoming a reality.

We talked about my background and the Python-wrangler video. Austin said that they were tracking views both on Youtube and from his blog. His blog is an absolute must-read and is a gateway I found when I looked for people in the Montreal Tech community online.

Austin was very approachable and generous with his time, information and even will to help me connect with other people. Generous and friendly, just as I had imagined him from reading his blog and it was a pleasure to talk to him. If SV has Reid Hoffman, Montreal has Austin Hill.

Happiness has a reddish hue

After speaking with Austin, I talked to David FugÃ¨re and he was enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails’ support for REST and web services APIs. Aha! Code Genome is using Ruby and Ruby On Rails. That may well be why David is smiling all the time. Ruby and RoR make happy coders and happy businesses.

SÃ©bastien Pierre said goodbye, but I caught up again with him at the metro, and we talked about Software Engineering in France. I told him about INSA de Rennes, where I did my degree. We spoke of Sugar, which I saw him demonstrate at DemoCampCUSEC1, and of the Recent Changes Camp, or RoCoCo, which is forthcoming in Montreal. This will definitely be an event to attend.

The many faces of the DemoCamp format

DemoCampMontreal1 was astonishing for me. Evolution was especially superb as a singularly original enabling technology and concept which in turns makes Evonium’s DARWIN a reality. I saw that a DemoCamp was not just a meeting among geeks but also an avenue to pitch your startup to willing investors since Austin Hill was present and Tom Sweeney of Garage Technology Ventures Canada was there too, a way to get feedback and advice on your product, marketing, an opportunity to hone your presentation skills and meet smart people and even probable partners. A DemoCamp is all these things simultaneously.

Thanks to Fred for getting me involved, Simon and John and all those who helped with the event and thanks to all those who took some of their precious time to chat, especially Heri, Carl, John, Austin, David and SÃ©bastien. I couldn’t talk to everybody but I would have loved to talk to Simon about his recent trip to Norway, his work for Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution and his omelette-engineering demo, and I would have asked Ben about the passion podcast and whether he had had submissions. I will gladly see you all next time.

Memorable quotes

“Let get it on!” – John (imitating ~~Bruce Buffer~~ UFC referee, John McCarthy)
“Julie, I hadn’t seen you for a while – I liked it that way.”- John (to Julie)
“Mon franÃ§ais n’est pas trÃ¨s bien aujourd’hui.” – John
“Planted question!” – John
“Raaaaj? Raaaaaj, it’s your subconscious. You have 5 minutes left” – John (to Raj Vadavia)

“80% de notre objectif est atteint…on avait besoin d’un deadline” – Thierry Poitras

“I want people to get fit.” – Marc Chriqui (on his objective for the presentation)

“It was a metaphor!” – Simon (about his omelette engineering demo)

“We use mathematics to manipulate the data.” – Raj Vadavia

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 1

On 2/3/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

Digg me

Tuesday February 27th

There were beautiful lights this afternoon in the Montreal skyline. It was DemoCampMontreal1 day, and there were more than 40 registrants on the wiki. I knew it would be fun to be there and reconnect with Montreal’s Tech scene, but little did I know that I would see some of the most amazing technologies in about 2 years… This photo is by Simon Law

The previous “Wow!” moment a couple of years ago was right after I typed scaffold :category while following Curt Hibbs’s Ruby On Rails tutorial on O’Reilly’s OnLamp. At that time I wrote an enthusiastic email to the Linux User Group I was in, saying “I’ve seen the future of web apps”. Two years later, RoR use is rocketing and Ruby just entered in TIOBE’s top ten programming languages index – you know the score.

I reached the S.A.T., the “SociÃ©tÃ© des Arts Technologiques”, on St-Laurent early as Fred had asked to help with the T-shirts for BarCampMontreal1 attendants. I tried the door. It was closed. Recognizing Simon inside, I waved to him, smiling. Simon waved back from inside with a warm smile and walked off. Simon is a riot. Have you seen his mysterious and supposedly loosely Software-Engineering-related videos about cooking eggs?

I would have remained stuck outside if it weren’t for a nice smiling lady working at the S.A.T. who said hello as she passed me by. She let me in the room where preparations were underway for the night including testing the triple big-screen arrangement.

T-Shirt Duty

I greeted Simon again and he invited me to build myself a name tag. Our MC, John Kopanas, to whom I had talked briefly at DemoCampCUSEC1, was already on the spot. Fred arrived not long afterwards with a box of T-shirts, telling me: “This is yours!”.

Fred: It’s not in alphabetical order or anything. You’ll be okay?
Josh: Sure, I’ll get to meet people

While Fred was briefing me about the T-shirt distribution…
“Stand very still!”. It was Simon trying to photograph us. We obliged. Time flew.
“Can I move now???” asked Fred after an eternity and threats of cramps setting in, still holding a T-shirt in mid-air in front of me as Simon’s camera wouldn’t focus.

I couldn’t keep the pose anyway as I was laughing.

For about 20 minutes, I was asking people their names and whether they had attended BarCampMontreal1 in which case I handed them a T-shirt according to the size indicated on the list and crossed out their name. I also sometimes prompted them to write their name-tags and guiding them to the DIY coat-check behind me. DemoCampMontreal1 is a type of D.E.Y. event – Do Everything Yourself.

They were a very interesting 20 minutes, since I recognized some of the names from the Montreal Tech blogosphere. I recognized Austin Hill and Alex Eberts from the extremely fun Python-wrangler recruitment video for their Montreal startup code-named Project Ojibwe. Alex told me they had had thousands of views the last time he checked. Seth Godin links to the entry with a few thoughts on the process.

When Ben Yoskovitz introduced himself, I said “Instigator!” and handed him his T-shirt. I even recognized his voice since his recent foray into podcasting, the Passion Podcast. Ben launched a recurring event for Tech Entrepreneurs in Montreal. The first episode was a resounding success.

I chatted with Heri of MadMedia, whom I’ve been in contact with by email recently, and a nice lady named Tamu. Heri has launched a blog where he focuses on news about startups and entrepreneurship in the Montreal Tech scene with a quick analysis on each item – it’s called The Montreal Tech Watch.

Roberto Rocha, from The Gazette, also fetched his T-shirt and we swapped a few words. Roberto is covering news about the Montreal Tech scene with his freshly-launched blog, TechnoCitÃ©. Roberto informed me by email today that the blog had been renamed from ‘Montreal Tech Scene’ to ‘TechnoCitÃ©’.

I exchanged a few words with a seemingly very happy and perpetually smiling attendant, who was in fact the only one with whom I swapped business cards right there and then at the table while I was on T-shirt duty. I made a mental note to later check back with David FugÃ¨re from Code Genome to see what it was exactly that made him so happy and smile all the time.

Some of the presenters also dropped by the T-shirt table, and that’s how I met Evan Prodromou and Raj Vadavia who were presenting first and last respectively. Tom Sweeney of Garage Technology Ventures Canada asked me if Austin was there already. I replied affirmatively and it was easy to spot Austin in the audience through his hip beret. Tom Sweeney is photographed by Simon Law.

Opening

Things sped up from there. John took the microphone to introduce the concept for DemoCampMontreal1 and captured somebody’s iPod for his girlfriend’s 23rd birthday despite Simon’s warning to the gullible audience member not to trust him while Evan was getting ready, followed by Austin who duly thanked all the sponsors of the event: RadialPoint, Tom Sweeney and Garage Technology Ventures Canada, Project Ojibwe, and of course, our hosts, the S.A.T.

Introduction by John Kopanas

Austin Hill thanks the event’s sponsors

Demonstrations

1. Evan Prodromou – MediaWiki extension for OpenID

OpenID is a protocol which enables single sign-on across a growing number of sites supporting the protocol. Evan creatively tried to circumvent DemoCamp’s ‘no-Powerpoint’ rule by displaying the Wiki documentation for OpenID.

Unfortunately, Evan had some technical issues during his demo which were pinpointed to probable DNS problems. This could have projected the wrong impression about the benefits of OpenID, and it did to some extent, but fortunately a member of the audience asked about this, which enabled Evan to explain that the demo wasn’t functioning as expected.

It could have been stressful to open DemoCampMontreal1 in front of a 60-people strong audience and realize that the machines are never going to cooperate fully, but Evan took all the technical difficulties in stride with good self-derisive humor.

Notes:
- Have a backup or offline solution for your demo in case of network issues
- Humor helps alleviate a demo which deviates from your expectations
- The ‘no-Powerpoint’ rule should really be a ‘no-slide’ or ‘no-documentation’ rule

2. Growwwing – Daniel Haran and Thierry Poitras

John was in his usual what-do-you-want-to-get-out-of-your-presentation form which helped focus the Growwwing team’s minds on their goal. Their objective for demoing at DemoCampMontreal1 was to have a deadline to progress on their project. Use DemoCampMontreal as a milestone for Project Management and self-motivation… Fair enough – That’s quite a creative use to a DemoCamp!

Growwwing is a web service which helps small business owners easily set-up a website for marketing their products or services through the use of several already available web APIs. Daniel demonstrated how they could access the Flickr API easily and choose pics with a Creative Commons License and also do basic in-place image editing for a user’s website.

When they encountered a small glitch in the demo, Daniel explained in perfect English that he had been refactoring the code very recently since their main Ruby on Rails developer was on paternity leave. Later on, when replying to a question in French, his reply was in impeccable French. Well done, Daniel.

Growwwing uses RubyOnRails.

Although their objective was really self-motivation at reaching a deadline, the team has blogged that they were told about partnering and financing opportunities among the benefits they derived from presenting at DemoCampMontreal1.

Notes:
- You can use DemoCampMontreal as a way to mark a milestone in your project
- At DemoCampMontreal, there are opportunities to meet potential partners and investors.

Fred has a post about DemoCampMontreal1 wrap-ups on his blog.

Read Part 2.

« Previous Entries

YashLabs

Finance, Technology and the pursuit of Alpha Beauty

Deloitte’s TMT Prediction 2010 and winning the MyTMT Prediction 2010 competition.

Revisiting past Technology & Business predictions – 2009

Twitter profitable after Google and Microsoft deals – it’s a win for Ruby on Rails

Extending the e Text Editor for Ruby Programming

IronRuby source code by Microsoft on RubyForge

DemoCampMontreal4 Report

DemoCampMontreal4

Montreal on Rails – 1st event

Hacking IronRuby

DemoCampMontreal3 Report

Amazing Montreal Technology – Sygenics Evolution

BarCampMontreal2 Report – Part 4

DemoCampMontreal2

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 2

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 1

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