The Third Bit

The demo and presentation roster for DemoCamp15 has been updated; according to David Crow (chief instigator), 300 people have registered to attend.  W00t!  (And: please God, let the wireless and A/V work… )

We’ll be heading off to the Duke of York afterward — hope to see you all then and there.

DemoCamp

Ex-49er Ben Vinegar’s panel proposal for “Web Service APIs Your Mom Will Love” was one of the first 30 accepted for SXSW Interactive 2008.  I won’t be able to attend (yet another mid-March’08 event), but I look forward to hearing from those of you who do.

Announcements

The University of Toronto‘s BlueSky solar car racing team is competing in this year’s World Solar Challenge, which is now under way in Australia. They’re car #77 — go team!

Uncategorized

I used to play a little jazz, and was fond of a Gershwin tune called “But Not For Me”:

They’re writing songs of love, but not for me,
A lucky star’s above, but not for me

The lyrics came to mind when I saw this announcement from IBM about a new Jazz Faculty Grants program, which is giving faculty at UC Irvine, UBC, and the University of Victoria funding to study ways of “…exploring the promise of global collaborative software development that taps into the skills and expertise of developers regardless of location.”  That’s a pretty good description of what I’d like to do with DrProject; unfortunately, IBM’s money is tied to its Rational-based products (which I believe are too heavyweight for undergrad education).  Oh well…

DrProject, Research

I’ve just realized that while PyCon’08 is in Chicago (good), it’s scheduled directly opposite SIGCSE’08 in Portland (bad).  Either would be a lot more fun that the last two workshops I’ve been to… *sigh*

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Jorge Aranda‘s paper “Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it” has won an award for most innovative paper at the 2007 Requirements Engineering conference.  Congrats to Jorge, and thanks to all the local companies that agreed to share their secrets with him.

Research

Via Andrew Louis, a pointer to A List Apart’s 2007 web design survey. Raw data is available as well for people who’d like to crunch it in different ways.

Uncategorized

My apologies to those of you who stumbled over ads for Viagra and web sites depicting…um, stuff.  I haven’t been keeping up with WordPress security patches as religiously as I should.  I’ve cleaned out as much as I could find; if you see any suspicious links at the bottom of articles, please let me know.

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Family

We’re starting to finalize a schedule for DemoCamp 15, and it’s lookin’ pretty fine. If you haven’t already registered to attend, please do so: there are only a few places left.

Here’s what we have so far; stay tuned for breaking news.

Demos

• Pete Forde, Unspace Interactive: Jester is a JavaScript implementation of REST, modeled after Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. You can use it to read, create, and save your application’s data in your browser-side code. Considering recent advances with cross-domain JSON requests, Jester in positioned to be the glue to developing a new class of client-side database driven websites (without buying into the current “off-line” fad that no consumer is actually asking for). Jester has the capacity to be disruptive because Jester is to Javascript what ActiveRecord is to Rails.
• Radu Negulescu, Aceora Software: Java ME productization issues using a currency exchange calculator that downloads exchange rates. Appreciation of the 20-some issues that need to be solved to bring even the simplest mobile phone software to the market: installation using jad, configuration without config files, user authorization requirements, conversion of keys to digits, Java ME vs .NET tradeoff, etc. It works on practically any new cell phone and they can install/use it right there! Then they’ll use it during every trip abroad.
• Liang Song, OMESH Networks: The demo shows a prototype of opportunistic wireless mesh networks, which shows the drop-and-play of mesh stations that can vastly save network planning/deployment costs, and performance that can support voice and video services. The enabling technology is the large-scale cognitive network technology (patents pending), where network resources, including both spectrum bandwidth and radio availability, are opportunistically utilized to achieve reliable communications. The demo promises the commercialization opportunities in a number of applications, especially in current municipal WiFi mesh networks for broadband wireless Internet access.

Ignite Presentations

• Rick Segal, JLA Ventures: Raising Money from the Suits and other talking Checkbooks
• Greg Judelman, Bruce Mau Design: Meet Bruce Mau Design
• Michael Bolton, DevelopSense: Emotions as Test Oracles
• Andy Walker, Little Geeks: Give a computer. Reboot a child’s life.
• John MacRitchie, OCE: Shortcut to finding OCE funding

DemoCamp