Switching jobs from Tucows to TSOT means that for the first time in four and half years, it’s quicker to commute by subway than by bicycle. Hence for the past couple of weeks, I have been doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’ve been riding the subway during rush hour on a regular basis. I’m concerned by what I’ve been seeing.
It’s been a while since I was a regular subway rider, so my memories may be wrong. Could someone tell me if there’s been a downhill slide in the Toronto Transit Commission’s service? I’ll admit that my commute is incredibly quick — it’s a quick walk to High Park station, 10 stops to Bay station, then a quick walk to the office — but even in that short trip, I’ve faced trains too full to board, trains running at half-speed and trains sitting idle at the station, sometimes for five minutes at a time.
TSOT Ruby/Rails Night
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 (and the second Tuesday of every month)
@ TSOT’s office — 151 Bloor Street West (on the south side, just east of Avenue Road)
11th floor
Door open and food at 5:30 p.m.
Presentations start at 6-ish FREE ADMISSION (but limited space) To register, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com
About TSOT
TSOT is a Toronto-based start-up that develops — look out, here come the buzzwords — social networking applications using Ruby on Rails. Our first applications are FraternityLive and SororityLive, social software built specifically for people in fraternities and sororities. Both apps are currently being tested with a userbase of thousands of university students and alumni, and we expect to release them in early 2008.
About Ruby/Rails Project Nights
We believe that it’s good for Toronto to have a healthy developer ecosystem — it’s good not only for us as a Toronto-based development shop, but also as a group of developers who are passionate about the work we do. We’d like to see Toronto as “Silicon Valley++” — with the vibrant high-tech scene, but with all the amenities that make Toronto a better place to live than the Valley (such as not being a dreary 50-mile stretch of suburbia and having decent places to go at night).
Hence our contribution to the local developer scene: TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Nights, which will take place on the second Tuesday of every month. They’ll feature in-depth presentations by developers working on interesting projects — primarily Ruby and Ruby on Rails — along with drinks and munchies and a chance to socialize with your fellow developers. They’ll be hosted by Yours Truly, TSOT developer and DemoCamp regular Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla.
The First Night: Tuesday, January 8th
This first Ruby/Rails Night will feature presentations by a couple of Ruby/Rails local heroes on their current Ruby/Rails projects:
…and a quick presentation by Joey deVilla called “Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work”.
The doors will open at 5:30, the first presentation will start at about 6, and we hope to wrap up the evening by 8:30 or 9. We’ll provide food and drinks, and if there’s enough of a demand, we can always go out to a nearby pub afterwards. There’s no cost to attend (but be advised that seating is limited).
If you’ve been thinking about making a Ruby or Rails presentation (perhaps you want to rehearse for RailsConf 2008!), we’d like to have you present it at one of our project nights!
Add TSOT Ruby/Rails Nights to your list of New Year’s resolutions!
How Do I Register?
Registration is free, but space is limited. To register for the upcoming Jan 8th gathering, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com
For More Information
For more information about TSOT Project Nights, please contact:
Today, the Toronto Star spent hours interviewing staff and customers at Karl’s Butchers and Grocery (105 Roncesvalles), which has sold fresh sausages on our street for 46 years. Karl’s has been forced out of business by the province.
In October, the provincial government decided to enforce a harsh, literal interpretation of the 2001 Food and Safety Quality Act. The Province took Karl’s out of the Yellow/Green inspection system operated by the City (where they passed every inspection), and placed it under provincial regulations. According to these regulations, Karl’s is now considered a “manufacturing plant,” because it makes its own sausages. These sausages, which have helped make Roncesvalles famous, are prepared fresh in the store, unlike most sausages which are packaged and shipped from centralized plants.
Under the regulations, Karl’s is forced to pretend it is like some mass-production facility, forced to conform to a massive list of regulations that make little sense for a small, local business – even one dealing with raw meat. The province must even test the water every week, as if they were some rural factory taking water in from a local well. The province is simply incapable of distinguishing between a local butcher and a factory slaughterhouse, and a part of Roncesvalles is being destroyed as a result.
According to Walter Jarzabek of Karl’s, they decided they could not fight the province, and so they decided to close just before Christmas. A lot of local residents are upset. We should be too.
Unless the province can show how a local butcher like Karl’s poses a threat to public health, they should find a way to distinguish a business like Karl’s from the large factory slaughterhouses that are the Act’s intended target. Just because a sausage comes from a box out of a truck does not make it healthier, and it certainly doesn’t make it tastier. The public should have the choice to buy fresh sausages from a trusted and responsible butcher like Karl’s.
Here’s a quick description of MizPee, taken straight from their own site:
Do you ever find yourself desperately looking for a clean toilet in the city?
MizPee finds the closest, cleanest toilets in your area. You can add and review toilets, get some cool deals in your area and challenge your knowledge of toilet trivia.
(It has been a while since my knowledge of toilet trivia has been challenged…)
Here’s a sample of MizPee’s results when I asked for toilets near TSOT, where I work — 151 Bloor Street West:
Someone out there needs to rate the women’s washrooms at the nearby Four Seasons Hotel. It seems closer than the Second Cup, and I’m sure its washrooms are pretty good.
Don’t forget — DemoCamp 16, the show-and-tell and networking event for Toronto’s tech community takes place tonight at the Toronto Board of Trade in First Canadian Place.
As of this writing, there are 51 free tickets remaining, after which you’ll need to purchase one of the 74 outstanding $10 tickets. You can order a ticket on DemoCamp’s EventBrite page.
For more details about what’s happening tonight, see this entry.
Last night, I took part in Band Camp, “an evening of ridiculous noisemaking” put together by Kelly Seagram. She sent out a call to a couple of dozen musicians here in Accordion City to join her for a free-form musical jam at Guitar Girl studio. Since I love jamming with other musicians, I couldn’t refuse the invitation.
I’d never been to Guitar Girl studio before, so I expected the typical inexpensive music studio: a dank, dark industrial space with only the most basic of amenities. I was pleasantly surprised when I walked in to find this:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Yes, it was converted warehouse space as I expected, but it was nicely converted warehouse space. Bright, well-heated and with nice furniture and paintings on the walls, it was even nicer than a number of warehouse lofts that people call home.
The studio is divided into three large areas, two of which seem to be specifically for performing and recording. We spent most of our time in one of these areas, which is shown in the photo above.
The third area, shown below, seems to be for hanging out.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
An important part of a music studio is the couch — I’ve never been in a studio that didn’t have one. I was expecting the standard issue ratty fifth-hand Goodwill sofa, but that’s not the case at Guitar Girl:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
The place had a nice little kitchenette:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
And there were even a couple of “floater” instruments: a decent electric guitar and bass, each hooked up to a pretty decent amp:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
People started arriving at about 8 p.m.. As one would expect, there was no shortage of guitars:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Gavin brought the synthesizer rig. This being the 21st century, “synthesizer” these days means “keyboard hooked up to a laptop computer”:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
I brought the you-know-what:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
And people brought other, less typical instruments — there was even a Theremin, which has hooked to an amplifier via an assortment of guitar effects pedals.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
What jam session is complete without a big inflatable mattress?
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
And then, the jamming began:
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Click to see the photo on its Flickr page.
Someone brought a projector and projected Baraka and other films on the wall, which made for some great pictures:
We got a lot of great jamming done, I got to meet new people and everyone appeared to have a very good time. My thanks to Kelly for putting Band Camp together — I’m looking forward to the next one!
Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but it’s true: this Monday, December 3rd, we’ll be hosting the 16thDemoCamp at the Toronto Board of Trade (located in First Canadian Place). What started as a boardroom gathering of a couple of dozen Toronto-area developers showing their current projects to their peers has grown into the city’s premier techie networking event, and the inspiration for other local “Camp”-type gatherings.
Here’s the schedule of events:
5:00
Doors open
6:00 – 7:00
Demos (see below for details)
7:00 – 7:30
Break
7:30 – 8:00
Ignite presentations (see below for details)
9:00
To the pub!
Although the Toronto Board of Trade’s meeting room is very large (and has a cash bar to boot!), it has a limited capacity. If you want to attend DemoCamp, you need to sign up on the EventBrite board. As of this writing, there are 59 free attendance slots remaining; if those get used up, there are 78 $10 donation slots, the money from which will be used to help pay for the venue rental.
Some Quick Explanations
Demos are five-minute presentations where the presenter demonstrates one of his or her current projects in action. This isn’t your ordinary presentation: we only want to see your software in action — no slides are allowed! Think of demos as a geeky show-and-tell showing actual software in action rather than a marketing slideshow with a lot of handwaving.
Ignite Presentations are rapid-fire presentations in which the presenter talks over a set of 20 slides that are timed so that each is shown for 15 seconds (the slideshow runs automatically; the presenter just does the talking). The format helps to ensure that the presentations are interesting and get to the point!
And now, the demos and presentations…
Demos
Teaching Test Driven Development with UTest (Igor Foox)
UTest is a tool developed at the University of Toronto to allow students to submit test cases to be run against a professor’s solution to a programming assignment. We will be demoing UTest, as well as an Eclipse plug-in for UTest and explaining how we think it will help undergrad computer science students learn TDD. The community will get to see a new tool to improve the testing skills of their future employees! They will be able to tell us their feedback and so indirectly influence the skills that students graduating in a few years will have.
Sketch Based 3D Modeling with ShapeShop (Ryan Schmidt)
Shapeshop’s demo video. Can’t see the video? Click here.
I will demo a 3D “sketch-based” modeling system called ShapeShop that anyone can learn to use, and scales from simple toy models to significant complexity. Think Google SketchUp, but for everything from CAD to complex organic characters, instead of just blocky shapes.
I have been building it as part of my MSc/PhD research, since 2004. It is under active development, there have been 2 public releases and I just started releasing betas of version 3. My demo should be selected because everyone I have ever shown it to has enjoyed it, from 6-year olds to jaded computer graphics researchers. Also, it’s a good example of what is possible in university research environments.
The community will get a sense of where 3D modeling and user interfaces might be going in the future, and learn about some of the other stuff happening in the UofT lab that BumpTop came out of. They will also get some new software, because ShapeShop is free. 3D modeling software is really hard to use. I have spoken to lots of tech people who maybe want to make a 3D logo, so they try Blender, and it’s incomprehensible, so they give up. ShapeShop isn’t like that – a real, non-trivial model can be sketched in seconds. And it’s fun. And learning the basic interface is extremely easy. When I get kids using ShapeShop on a SmartBoard, we always have to tear them away. So, I’m pretty sure I can “wow” the democamp crowd. As for inspire, the only thing I can say is that I have recently been demo’ing ShapeShop at UofT recruitment events, and there is always a jump in downloads the next day. So, hopefully some people might be inspired to give 3D modeling another try. I guess it might also inspire other students to try to turn some of their projects/research into usable software.
Last but not least, I might have some huge new top-secret features that I will release during the demo, but I can’t promise anything until Monday when the conference reviews come back…
We will be demonstrating an early version of the HealthSpoke practice management and integrated wellness application. We will focus on some of the automated test tools (NUnit, WatiN) we are using and frameworks (Microsoft Application Blocks) that make our development life easier. This will give the community another example of the application of these tools to real-world projects, and hopefully give people some ideas on tools they can try as well.
Coming from Waterloo, I am looking to get involved in the Toronto tech / startup scene, and DemoCamp sounds like a great opportunity. We are working on an interesting Web 2.0 / Social Networking application applied to a niche market. Our presentation will provoke some thought on automated test frameworks, and how these can be implemented with limited resources from Day 1!
My name is Scott Annan and I have been involved in the camp scene for the last 2 years and an active member of the Ottawa startup scene, (where I live). I have also introduced and organized the democamp concept in Cincinnati and Lexington, KY.
I will be doing a demo of our Web Groups collaboration software which is used by over a dozen fortune-500 companies and several more small businesses ranging from floral consultants to international advertising agencies. I would like to provide a perspective on how we financed our business through consulting, and are purposely growing it without ANY investment in a traditional sales team or marketing (including Adwords). We may be able to use DemoCamp to make a new release / killer feature announcement.
We will demonstrate a fully AJAX-based Identity Management system which allows you to manage your passwords and personal data without disclosing them to our own server. Our approach to authentication and identity management differs from traditional ones in that nobody has to ever rely on us or trust us in any way to complete user authentication and personal data disclosure to different web services. We believe that SlashID is the right way to do identity management in the internet setting (as opposed to enterprise setting), since people are becoming increasingly aware of privacy and trust issues.
We want to raise awareness of our approach with the community, and demonstrate the benefits that our system provides to the websites – ease of registration, one click login, single sign on and keeping user’s data always up to date. All these result in better user experience and more users willing to register – which may translate to direct profit for commercial websites. While the procedure of logging in to a website has always been a hassle rather than something inspiring, we believe we can clearly show that hassle going away. We will show how you can login to any SlashID-enabled website with a single click.
We will also show how updating your personal data on our website automatically propagates to all websites you registered with. All this is possible to do from any computer with just a browser. No data stored on your computer, no data disclosed to our server, no plugin installation required. Our system was launched October 16th, and is available at our website.
Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Flight of the Creative Class now calls Toronto home. How can creative people – from artists to software developers – be engaged in the act of city-building? This presentation is intended to quickly get the community up to speed on the creative city idea and to inspire them to participate in making Toronto a better place to create.
By showing the connections between DemoCamp/BarCamp and Burning Man, I hope to shift the perceptions of the community to see how an artist and a developer might have values and interests in common, and to inspire the audience to find the spark of their creative souls while making the city a better place to live and work.
In a start-up, where resources are always tight, it’s important to understand what’s critical and what’s not needed. This Ignite Presentation will explore lessons learned (so far) while building our start-up. It’s a study in what we know now, what we didn’t know then, and what we (luckily) got right all along. The goal is to help the democamp community understand what is and isn’t necessary for building a web start-up. From product development to building community, biz dev to IT infrastructure, human resources to pitching VCs… all done in 20 slides. In 5 min.
This presentation should be selected because what we’ve learned over the past year will benefit many start-ups. The learning has occurred through a mix of hard work, serendipitous events, painful mistakes, and reflective moments and we’d like to share these lessons with the community in a fun, 5 min, presentation. Contrasting what we have and what we don’t gives some insight into what is necessary and what a start-up can do without. We have over one million downloads of our first product. We don’t have a single server. We have people in three countries. We don’t have an office. We have a CEO who handles front-line support. We don’t have company email… and so on.
The presentation will entertainingly explore how we got to where we are today by loving constraint and learning to bravely question everything. Inspiring tales, told over 15 seconds, drills home what is and isn’t critical to growing an idea into a company.
Switching jobs from Tucows to TSOT means that for the first time in four and half years, it’s quicker to commute by subway than by bicycle. Hence for the past couple of weeks, I have been doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’ve been riding the subway during rush hour on a regular basis. I’m concerned by what I’ve been seeing.
