It's DemoCampMontreal2 night at the SAT. The presenters look pretty interesting this time around, so I'd suggest signing up and swinging by the SAT at 6:30pm.

• HughMcGuire - Collectik (or possibly the project behind door #2)
• Martin Dufort - Kakiloc : Mobile Social Networking (We are back on after some arm twisting by Austin ;-))
• iotum Talk Now Technology Preview on BlackBerry - Try it Today
• Brett Gaylor - Open Source Cinema
• BumpTop

I found this on join-the-dots, but the photos are from jackrabbit.etsy.com on Flickr.

I wonder how hard it is to get crochet cartridges? For the more violent at heart, you should consider checking out the woven guns...

So I wrote my DemoCampMontreal1 post for Midnight Poutine, I uploaded some photos to Flickr, and I added a couple of videos to my YouTube account. The event was interesting, nicely setup, and pretty well organized. Criticisms: the presentations by Evonium and Evolution felt more like a sales pitch than a "sharing" (but that's not really a big deal), and the bar was closed (I really wanted a beer).

I'll definitely be going to the DemoCampMontreal2.

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Just a reminder that DemoCampMontreal1 is tomorrow night (Tues Feb 27 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm) at the SAT. If you wish to register as an attendee you can do so here.

FYI I just been approved as a contributor to Midnight Poutine and this Democamp will be the subject of my first MP post.

Democampmontreal1
Society for Arts and Technology (SAT)
Tues Feb 27, 6:30pm to 8:30pm
1195 Boul. St. Laurent

Went to Ottawa for the weekend, and while I got a 12km of skating in on Sat I'm not going to count it. On Sun I did little other than hang out with my Dad, and on Mon I was in full geek out mode with a Drupal 5.1 setup for mile-end.qc.ca and a well overdue Gentoo upgrade on my Mythtv box.

Julien at in over your head posted this blog entry Montreal… needs… brains…….. which sparked a flurry of comments about the state of geekery and the geek community in Montreal. His blog continues the discussion with the entry Montreal has brains?. Robin at IM2 | OQP adds to the discussion with Montreal, action !, and I myself...

I haven't been paying enough attention to the tech community lately to truly be entitled to an opinion, but I do have geek friends, I do work geek jobs, I do know that there is a fairly large community here, and I'm feeling an interest in probing the edges of possibility...



Enter BarCamp, and more specifically BarCamp Montreal; If you're unfamiliar with the concept of BarCamp you can checkout this entry in Wikipedia. I have never attended one of these things, and I don't have anything to demo, but I think that I will attend the Feb 27th event at the SAT to get a sense of what it's all about.

The dates of the Montreal BarCamp activities are as follows:

DemoCampMontreal1 - Tues/Mar Feb 27, 2007
DemoCampMontreal2 - Thurs/Jeu Mar 29, 2007
BarCampMontreal2 - Sat/Sam Apr 28, 2007
RoCoCoCamp - May/Mai 18-20, 2007

iPhone not running OSX? Hmmmm is Apple fibbing... not that I would expect them to be honest. I mean their entire add campaign of Mac vs PC is at it's core a lie. Their campaign is really Mac vs Windows... a PC is a hardware platform and not an OS. In fact the PC platform is the primary platform used for Linux, FreeBSD (who's code base is partly at the core of OSX), and many other OSs. This is why it urks me that people worship Apple, they're a company, and their business practises have historically been little better than those of Microsoft (though OSX is significantly better designed than XP).

Even the battery life on the iPhone is tolerable... I so want to dislike it, but I don't... In any case I have a contract that will last another year and a bit so there's lots of time for the competition to come up with something (preferably a Linux device).

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the biggest fan of Apple. I like half their design decisions and hate the other half (those clam shells were hideous). I respect OSX and find it quite usable, but in the end Linux is way more fun and interesting. However, what I hate most about them is their fashion oriented trendiness; I especially hate the iPod trend (although they are technically sound, I would never consider buying one). I regularly use a 17" powerbook that I got from work, and while I really like it (the screen is great), I'm somewhat embarrassed when I have it out in public. In fact if it weren't a work computer I'd definitely plaster over the apple symbol with a bunch of stickers and install Linux on it.

But I think I may have to hand it to apple when it comes to the iPhone. From the look of things they appear to be the first to have gotten the convergence device right. This might be the device that I've been waiting for. I'll have to reserve my final judgment 'til I see it in action but...

However, Blork points out that their deal with Cingular in the US brings some user rights issues into play (at least for Americans).

Here's a list of Ile Sans Fil's Hotspots...

• Visit http://auth.ilesansfil.org/node_list.php?sort_by=name

Free Wifi -- you just have to register at their site. The number of Ile Sans Fil covered cafes, bars, and what not keeps growing every day.

• Visit http://www.ilesansfil.org/tiki-index.php

The oldest and best of the Linux Magazines. My interest has varied largely by issue, but there was always something worth reading in it.

• Visit http://www.linuxjournal.com/

So I just spent all my Airmiles on a new digital camera, the Canon SD630 Digital ELPH. The reviews seem to give it a good rating so... I guess I'll have to review it myself once it arrives.

I'm hoping it'll be comfortable enough to tuck into the back of my bike jersey. I see a lot of cool stuff when I'm logging in the hours cycling, and it might be nice to document it.

Almost looks like I have a double chin (really I don't).

I make a little mess wherever I go.

Oh the pain... I missed breakfast, and I only managed to make it to one of the morning sessions. Drinking until 2:30 is not wise when you're supposed to get up early in the morning. I did however take a couple of Tylenol, grabbed a sandwich thing at a weird mall, and went to the seminar on legal "Fair Use". It was pretty good, although I still have to check whether canadian law has something similar.

I ate lunch with some of the people I had gone out with the night before, bid my farewells, and decided to skip the afternoon session and take off. I figured I'd get more tired as the day wore on and that the drive might become dangerous.

Anyway I got home safe and sound, the conference was worth it, and all is well.

Had a great night's sleep and I'm feeling a great deal better today than I did yesterday. I woke up naturally at 7:00, but I still had trouble motivating myself to get to the first seminar.

The first seminar was good, but it was about SEO (search engine optimization), which I'm only partially interested in. I did however learn a couple of things that might help me out in the long run.

The second seminar was about designing universally accessible templates for faculty. This was a bit of a waste of time for me, they didn't say anything I didn't know, and it was pretty simplistic.

The third seminar about form fillable PDFs was pretty useful, and I'm sure I will be able to apply it to the Office of Research at Concordia where I work.

Lunch was good, I sat with the a bunch of the Canadians, and I seem to get along with them pretty well.

The first seminar of the afternoon was about security, and since I've been both a server and network admin, and since I'm a Linux freak (my favorite distro being Gentoo), I found the take on security to be very lightweight and simple. Still I could see it being useful to the other attendees.

I went to a seminar about implementing a University Student Portal. It was mostly just the story of how they went about implementing it. I found it reasonably interesting, but not directly relevant to me.

The last seminar was about implementing Podcasting, and it was also interesting. I don't really know much about Podcasting, but it seems fairly easy to implement an RSS feed using PHP.

I'll blog about tonight later tonight, right now I'm resting before heading out to the museum.

Well up at 7:15 for breakfast at 7:45 to make the keynote at 8:00, but I got a good night's sleep, after my drive yesterday I went to bed at 9:30 - yes I skipped movie night.

So the first seminar this morning was too management oriented and not technical enough for me. Although it's in the TPR track (the technical track), and billed itself to be about web application security.

The second seminar was about Ruby on Rails, and it was great. I really have to use it to do something sometime, but the question is what? They impressively demonstrated how quick a simple web app could prototyped.

Lunch was good, but I took off pretty fast after. I decided to go to my hotel room, skip the first afternoon seminar, and have a little nap.

The fieldset seminar was good in the sense that I didn't know much about them (didn't realize that they even existed as a semantic organization element for forms), but bad in the sense that he could have said everything in 10min instead of an hour.

This Apache seminar was good, but it mostly covered stuff that I'm aware of. It might have been better if he had more time to go into detail.

The Voice XML seminar was also interesting but was way too big to fit into the half hour time slot.

Hanging out with geeks and pseudo geeks is kind of fun. I've met a cool crew from the mid-west and I've met a bunch of Canadians here as well. We went to the Dinosaur BBQ, and the only thing for me to eat on the menu was a portabella burger (granted it was very good). But I haven't gotten too social yet because I've been resting rather than cavorting.

It's conference day -- 5:00 am alarm -- up bustle and out.

I hit the road by 5:30, and made it from Montreal to Rochester NY in 5:30. The only hassle I ran into was finding an ATM before I hit a toll road (no American money).

They let me check into the hotel 4 hours early, and I think I got a great room because of it; I'm on the 19th floor and have a pretty good view.

I paid for lunch because I didn't know that the Sunday lunch was catered.

The first session, on CSS and XHTML, was a little too rudimentary to be useful. HOWEVER, I recognized the guy giving it. He was somebody who lived in Steven Doll's house in DC when I stayed there during my contract with the World Bank 6 years ago. Small world syndrome strikes yet again.

The other Concordia people show up around 5:00, and apparently they crossed with the same US border guard as me.

I ditched the festivities a little early to get a good night's sleep, but I'm still feeling a little under the weather and I have to watch it.