Apparently the most common reaction was “OMG Facebook, I use that website!” — just more proof that the key to a successful Halloween costumes is to keep it simple enough so that even the drunkest idiot can understand it.

No details were overlooked. We all know how horrifically bad Youtube comments are:

Who is this chick? Halloween rox omggg

Or the Related Videos:

Or the meta Facebook wall comments. It gets even more meta:

All photos courtesy of Lori Lee.

What could be geekier than going to Halloween as video game characters from TF2?

Close enough?

This certainly wasn’t the first time it’s been done. Heck, it’s even been done in Lego.

But none of these other guys had a backdrop quite as video-game-like as the Bahen Centre (computer science HQ) at UofT.

And here are some individual shots of the characters:

Pyro

Sniper

Engineer

Scout

Spies

Demoman

Medics

A cameo

The spy character in TF2 has the special ability to disguise himself as another player:

When disguised in TF2, you will resemble a Spy wearing a “cardboard-cutout mask” of your chosen class, to your teammates. This will help to distinguish you from an actual enemy player.

Here’s my friend Ian disguised as a certain blogger/photographer:

A full day of inspiration and learning for developers, brought to you by the team behind StackOverflow.com and FogBugz. Lunch is provided so you’ll have plenty of time to hang out and meet other developers. Hope you can join us!

Here’s the guy who organized it. Contrary to appearances, I don’t think Joel Spolsky is tweeting: Update: he says:

I was checking the time, I think… we had so much on the agenda we timed everything down to the minute.

Unfortunately, I only arrived midway through the conference so I only have photos from the last two talks. It also means the only front-row seat left was behind a TV monitor on the stage - lots of awkward shots.

If you want to read all the proper reviews, they’re compiled — where else? — on stackoverflow. In particular, Geoffrey Wiseman has more photos.

Greg Wilson

I’ll leave it to Joey deVilla to do the summary of Greg’s amazing talk:

By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of “let’s change the world” vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions.

“How many people are still programming Java?”

Some hands went up. “It’s our generation’s COBOL.”

Joey deVilla always takes excellent best conference notes. Here’s
an look at what goes into producing them:

Greg posted his slides:

They got quite a bit of circulation around the internetz. The Hacker News discussion was particularly interesting. Most of the criticism surrounded the difficulty in measuring properties of software engineering. A comment from arohner:

Software bug rates are not comparable to scurvy incidence rates, and developer productivity is not similar to the number of bricks a laborer can move in an hour.

In any case, the message wasn’t that we should throw up our hands and crying “it’s too hard!”

Reg Braithwaite

Reg Braithwaite has some of the most challenging writing on software development out there. I recommend going through the posts in his sidebar if you’re at all interested in software development. In particular, A Brief History of Dangerous Ideas gives me goosebumps.

Last summer he announced that he was going to stop blogging. But all’s not doom and gloom. In fact, quite the opposite: he now publishes his thoughts using distributed version control software.

He gave a talk that was similar to the one he did at FutureRuby. His slides are all on Flickr.

Wrap-up

From Joey’s post:

At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

Full slideshow

(Excuse the awful photos. You’re not allowed to bring bags inside and I didn’t feel like carrying around my big camera.)

Aren’t fundraising book sales supposed to be folksy affairs with too many tattered copies of The Late, Great Planet Earth? Not Trinity College’s:

It is this country’s - and possibly this continent’s - greatest celebration of the allegedly dead medium known as the printed word. There are some 50,000 books being hawked, ranging from a rare 1884 world atlas selling for $100 to vintage literary paperbacks - Eliot, Hemingway, Richler - selling for pocket change. Nowhere else will you find a table of secondhand theology books assembled by an actual theologian.

How many other book sales get written up by the Globe and Mail? For those who want first crack at the offerings on the first day, they’ll have to stand in line for hours behind veteran collectors and fork over $5 for admission. It’s that hardcore.

To get an idea of how large this event is, last year’s book sale had 100,000 books and raised over $136,000. (Seeing these two stats together should also give you an idea of how good the deals are.) The listing on BookSaleFinder.com (a lovely gem — worth a poke around) gives it the coveted “BIG SALE” label.

When I first came to UofT, this and the other similar book sales on campus were Nirvana. I’d stumble home with piles of books, busting open more than a few backpacks in the process. But when I moved downtown, I became tired of dealing with “stuff” and implemented a zero-input policy for my apartment. This means absolutely no book buying (thankfully the internet is a big place). It’s surprisingly zen.

So why do I keep tempting myself by going to these book sales?

To witness moments like this: Michael Moore sitting next to an early edition of MaCaulay’s History of England:

Believe it or not, this is from the “Treasures” room. It’s hallowed ground for collectors — first editions, signed books, and rarities:

It’s filled with quirky books that represent different times. Like the glory days of eugenics :

Or history books written in the time when Christianity ruled the land:

Many of the books are breathtakingly beautiful. Like the cover art for George Orwell’s The English People, a strange book that he requested not to be reprinted. This copy is now in the possession of my friend Rob Duffy):

Or the beautiful gold foil printing on the cover of this otherwise crazy book about spiritual warfare written by one of the prophets of the Sevent-day Adventist Church, Ellen White:

How about $45 for a dozen pages worth of utterances from UofT royalty, Harold Innis. Here’s what Marshall McLuhan, also UofT royalty, had to say about Innis:

His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, lamented Innis’s premature death as a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: “I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing.”

I spotted a pair of first editions of these classic novels (hang on to your Stephen King books, folks):

To the main room! The first picture in this post shows the space. This is where the plebs browse for middlebrow non-fiction. UofT dignitaries of yore stare down at you while you browse:

When asked where the US history section was, a volunteer unsarcastically directed us here (note the section’s name):

I read The Dark Side of Camelot almost cover-to-cover in one of those beautiful corner windows on a top floor of Robarts Library. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shatters most of the sacred myths of the Kennedy era. I tried to force it on my friend Rob Duffy — a huge Kennedy fan — but he flat-out refused to give up his illusions. I secretly told his girlfriend Emily to buy it for his birthday:

A frustrated conservative ridding themselves of all their McCain artifacts?

Some volunteer probably thought they were being clever for using an oversized $1000 bill to mark the Business section:

The one thing that shocks me is how much alcohol Trinity alums seem to consume. The books are all transported in these boxes:

All in all, a wonderful afternoon of journeying through times of old. And I even managed to emerge without purchasing a single book.

The full list of violations is pretty egregious.

I ate there at least a few times a month. Not only did the food taste exactly like my Lebanese grandmother’s cooking, they always kept a chess set around. Andrey and I used to play all the time when he still lived in Toronto.

Here’s a picture of a typical plate.

Sigh

Update (Oct 29): And it’s open again? I’m so torn.

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=336407319&s=143455

To re-emphasize, that’s 730 tracks / 2:10:06:35 time / 6GB worth of music for $9.99! It’s almost certainly a pricing error on the Canadian iTunes store. It’s listed at $119.99 in the US store. (Canadians get cheaper healthcare AND classical music!)

Deal or no deal, this is a pretty fantastic collection from probably the best classical recording label in the world. This ain’t no second-tier, discount-bin “Classical Greatest Hits”. Here’s a press release-ey statement:

Deutsche Grammophon’s president Michael Lang said, “Deutsche Grammophon remains the preeminent classical recording company – presenting the finest in recorded music by the best artists – while anticipating and fulfilling the evolving interests of its old and new audiences. Deutsche Grammophon is poised for a vibrant future as remarkable as its storied past.”

http://www.dg-111.com/en_GB/albums/55-cd-box-set

To all my Canadian friends, I’m officially considering you an idiot if you don’t take advantage of this temporary price anomaly.

Update: Someone landed on this post via the Google query “111 years of deutsche grammophon crash itunes” — there’s that much music.

Update (Oct 27, 01:20): Could they be finally changing the price? The front page of iTunes shows the price at $119.99 (if you click and go to the album page, it’s still at $9.99):

Update (Oct 27, 11:26): Christmas is over. The album is now $119.99. For everyone who’s still arriving at this post, that price is still an excellent deal!

Download now or listen on posterous

3-04 24 Préludes, Op. 28_ IV. In E Minor.m4a (4114 KB)

Download now or listen on posterous

21-13 Suite No. 2 in B Minor, BWV 1067_ VI. Menuet.m4a (2611 KB)

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

Well, not necessarily.

“Unconference” isn’t a catch-all term for any event that’s free and unstructured. Instead, it’s a gathering where the rules are agreed upon by all participants. (Consult the Wikipedia entry for details.)

Apparently this distinction trips up even publications like NOW. In a piece titled “‘Un’ too many”, Josh Errett asks: “has Toronto reached a tipping point with unconferences?” The article’s message: there are way too many unconferences in Toronto and perhaps some consolidation is in order.

But people immediately jumped on his lack of evidence. Ryan Coleman comments:

Wow. Stunning research at work here as approximately NONE of the events you list would be considered, nor advertise themselves, as “unconferences”.

Again, from another comment on the post by Mark Kuznicki:

I will add that you do your readers a disservice by failing to clearly explain what an unconference is. “The idea is that there is no format” is completely wrong. There is a format. An unconference is a self-organizing format where the participants create the content.

So the bottom line: there are lots of casual events in Toronto but not all of them are real unconferences.

Last month, I found myself at one of the real ones: HealthCampTO.

We will use the “unconference” format to create a safe place for contrarians, free thinkers, change agents and idea entrepreneurs. It is the first healthcamp in Canada, modeled after the globally renowned healthcamp movement begun in San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia.

The invite came courtesy of my friend Rob Fraser. I first met him while working on an article for The Varsity about online communities. After an earlier interview with Daniel Patricio, he introduced me to Rob and his blog, nursingideas.ca, citing it as an example of someone who was using technology to reach out to a broader community beyond the boundaries of a particular school.

Half a year later, Rob is still extremely active in the healthcare community. One of his latest projects was helping organize HealthCamp.

Here’s Rob introducing himself at the start of HealthCamp:

Fellow organizer Carlos Rizo kicked off the day with a tale about Umberto Eco. The scholar has a collection of 30,000 books and when visitors enter his library, most comment on the sheer size of his collection. However, 1% of the time, someone will tell him: “Amazing! All this knowledge — there’s so much more that we have to learn.”

Likewise with healthcare.

Unconference facilitator, Mark Kuznicki laid down some rules:

• Law of two feet: if you don’t like a session, you can leave
• The 1/n rule: don’t try to talk more than 1/n percentage of the time, where n is the number of people in a session

After the introductions, people wrote down issues and questions which they felt should be discussed. The grid below represents the room and time for each topic (also available online):

A full day later, here’s Jen McCabe sharing some her thoughts at the end of the day.

If you want to go through the digital artifacts from the day, you can replay the CoverItLive Feed or check out the various topic pages.

From an excerpt on Wikipedia:

This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the ‘theory’ of evolution is actually a fact - as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.
—Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, p. vii

Heavy.

As part of the literary-industrial complex’s promotion efforts, he made a whirlwind voyage through Toronto’s media scene last week. Hamutal Dotan and I decided to join in the fun and cover the Indigo-organized book reading for Torontoist.

Full house at Isabel Bader. Apparently lots of people like this guy. So for everyone who had to fork over $10 (or $100 in the case of this desperate soul) to see Dawkins, was it worth it?

Only if you enjoy listening to celebrities read. Don’t get me wrong — Richard Dawkins has a beautiful voice and an even more beautiful writing style.

But about the only thing that I learned that I couldn’t have got from his book is the fact that his wife knows how to paint neckties. He was wearing one that featured various icons of evolution and apparently it’s one of his most cherished possessions.

Other than that, it was the usual Creationist-bashing that anyone who follows the evolution “debate” is familiar with.

The Canadian twist, of course, was the abundance of self-congratulatory clapping to indicate how much saner we are than those crazy Americans. From Hamutal’s piece:

In a textbook case of preaching to the choir, Dawkins gleefully skewered the 44% of Americans who believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” and his listeners laughed right along with him.

If Dawkins really wants to reach this group, is such a sarcastic, aggressive tone the most effective?

Again, from Hamutal’s piece

The very last question of the evening dealt with a recent attempt to repackage atheists under the more positive-sounding name “Brights.” Dawkins, a supporter of this movement, told the audience that the term never took off because it implied that non-believers were smarter than believers. “So?” he asked rhetorically, with an arched eyebrow and a knowing smile.

But at least he wasn’t as offensive as another angry atheist I’ve covered before.

After the highly-regulated Q&A, it was off to the assembly-line style book signing. Streams of people were hustled past the sales table and given a brief moment with Dawkins to get their books signed — “No greetings! Just signatures” — and perhaps squeeze in a few moments of chit chat. Like most celebrities, Dawkins is a master at extricating himself from demanding questions (the swarms of Indigo staffers also helped on this front).

All in all, not the most memorable event. But hey, at least I wasn’t the victim of a theft like I was the last time I covered something with Hamutal.

If you want to see pictures of someone who managed to score closer seats, Michael Willems has also has some shots on his blog.

This event is a special one – we’d like to thank each of you that has supported Refresh Events over the past year. Come on out to The London Tap House on August 24th at 7pm to meet fellow designers, developers, social media experts and others working in Toronto’s vibrant interactive community.

Here’s the view from the roof:

This DJ sure gets around:

This DJ, not so much. Here’s Saul “wiki wiki”-ing.

There was cake:

(Sprouter has a better photo.)

Some more pictures

(Alternately, you can look at Elaine’s set - she has way more.)

But eagle-eyed readers will spot a slight variation in the casing of the letters. This one is pronounced “ho-HOT-o.”

Get it? “Hot.” As in the awful muggy weather we’re having right now.

Yesterday was the summer followup of the charity event that raised $25k for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

Join us at the #hoHOTo summer camp. Do you really think that we geeks could resist the chance to run a summer camp?

Due to the lack of lakes — I said “lakes” not cesspools — in Toronto, it was held at the multi-storied Wetbar & Suite 106 in the heart of Clubland.

Mmm. Summer breezes.

Actually, it was much cooler inside. Here’s the view:

A whirlwind summary of the night

Prizes were drawn:

And cotton-candy was handed out:

Certain Microsoft employees were there. Like this guy:

Or this guy (the accordion-playing variety).

As usual, the tunes were brought to you by these fellows:

And the photos were taken by this birthday boy (taking a drinking break):

Final tally: $10,500 to the Daily Bread Food Bank.

The full set of photos

Yes, it might look more like Colorado, but this photo was indeed snapped in Ontario. It’s from an area known ominously as “The Cheltenham Badlands” and is located right about here.

So what’s the story?

Ages ago, this part of Ontario was the edge of a shallow sea. Iron-rich sediment and the shells of sea creatures compressed together to form this reddish shale and now it’s part of the Niagara Escarpment.

But why don’t we see more of this in Ontario? That’s where us humans come in. A century ago, farmers cut the trees down, and the land was used for cattle grazing. In other parts of Ontario, shale is typically protected with layers of harder rock but here, heavy overgrazing and erosion left nothing but this scifi-ey landscape.

This handy sign had the full scoop (view it at full size):

It’s very interesting to see where vegetation surviving in the middle of the shale.

It’s also a great stage for some parkour… without the buildings.

This was only half of our trip. After this, we headed west to Elora Gorge.

Because of past electronics-related tragedies, I decided to play it safe and stow away my camera. The remainder of the afternoon was spent relaxing in a tube that moved rather slowly down the Grand River.

We took the scenic route home, passing through Ontario’s beautiful countryside.

(Ironically, I almost like my iphone photos more)

 — 
Andrew Louis http://hyfen.net

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

Once upon a time, I had a math teacher who constantly suggested that my friend Sharlene and I should get married. One day, instead of groaning, we decided to just go with the flow and announce that we got engaged.

And so she became my “fiancée.” This nickname guaranteed a solid five minutes of fun confusion whenever we happened to introduce each other at gatherings.

But alas, all great party tricks must come to an end. A few years ago, she went to Calgary and came back to Toronto with a real fiancé. Yesterday, she got married.

As part of her wedding gift, I offered her my camera-operating capabilities. This got me a spot in the limo:

It had what all good weddings should have: tree climbing, cute children, and a group dance of the Macarena.

Congrats Sharlene and Ian!

(no decision yet on whether we will maintain our sham engagement)

Update: Why did it take so long for someone to tell me that fiancée is with two e’s? Come on people.

Greg Wilson (that’s him at the front) has been running a Software Carpentry course for the last few weeks and yesterday’s conference pulled in a bunch of guest lecturers to give some closing thoughts.

Doing it in the open

For most people in the audience, the fact that Michael Nielsen experienced projector troubles and had to be rescheduled to the end of the afternoon was a minor nuisance. For me, it meant that even though I showed up near the end of the conference, I still got to hear him. Fortuitous — it was one of the most interesting talks I’ve heard in a while. In fact, it was so interesting that I even forgot to take photos.

Here’s the title:

Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery

Michael Nielsen is writer who’s been spending a lot of time thinking about open science and mass online collaboration. He began by highlighting a post on mathematician Terence Tao’s blog that outlined the Navier-Stokes problem and sketched a few techniques that might be used to solve it. “This is not your typical BoingBoing post,” said Michael. It’s a heavy, sprawling post but most interestingly, it sparked a conversation that at the latest count has 129 comments including contributions from some of the heaviest heavyweights in the math world. And the debate is still raging two years later, both in the comments and the other blog posts that have linked to it. The kicker: “This guy is pumping these posts out, over and over again.”

But it’s not just Tao. About 10% of living Fields medallists have blogs. Many others are pushing the boundaries of blog and wiki software with great success.

(Ironically, the LaTeX encoding that has allowed mathematicians to use math formulas in blog posts on wordpress.com was added almost as an afterthought. A developer announced that he was installing the plugin but joked that it’s a “niche feature that maybe 17 people would use regularly”. Little did he know…)

So what’s actually going on? Nielsen argues that we’re seeing a restructuring of where experts focus their attention — and attention is the ultimate scare resource in science.
These online tools facilitate small insights that couldn’t be published in a conventional way but contain the seeds to later progress. In this sense, it’s a way of scaling up scientific conversation, both across space (geographically over the Internet), and time (remember the comments on the Terrence Tao post have been going strong for two years).

As someone in the audience asked, with this massively collaborative way of doing science, who gets the credit for achievements? Michael asked a related question: “Who sequenced the human genome?” It definitely wasn’t the result of a few people. In the future, the concept of authorship might be trumped by a culture of recommendations. Besides, if science is done in the open, you could lie about your contribution but all claims would be trivial to verify.

He ended his talk with a great anecdote — probably not quite historically accurate — about how Michael Faraday was asked by Queen Victoria “what the point of electricity is” after he explained the concept. His reply: “of what use is a newborn baby?” None of us know quite how the Internet will change science but Science 2.0 values the process of sense-making rather than simply pumping out theorems. Online tools enable these conversations to happen.

Needless to say, I’m excited to read his upcoming book which will be an expansion of what he’s been talking about now.

So, what else?

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear all the talks but some other people did. Steve Easterbrook was liveblogging it and has good notes from everything. Milan Davidovic also has some notes. And of course, there’s the twitter stream. Here are all the blurbs

And a few more photos:

Jon Udell gave the closing talk on “Collaborative Curation of Public Events,” another great talk that I might write about at some point…

One of my favourite examples from his talk. A high school that said “We posted weekly.pdf to our website. Isn’t that good enough?”

David Rich talking about “Using ‘Desktop’ Languages for Big Problems.”

And the attendees at the end of long day.

Toronto’s favourite tech show-and-tell was back for another iteration but instead of being held in one of the quirkiest bars in Toronto, it took place in the basement of the Rogers Headquarters. We didn’t uncover the hatching of any gouging plans but we did get to see the Rogers corporate Internet experience first-hand. More on that later.

Huh? What’s the deal with Rogers?

But first, why were our Canadian overlords of the airwaves, the cloggers of the tubes of the internet, and the reducers of television choice interested in hosting a scrappy tech gathering? Lately, they’ve taken a particularly non-evil interest in the startup world, incubating several in Toronto. One of them is the real estate site, Zoocasa.

Pictured above is Saul Colt whose job title is “head of magic” — or as Joey DeVilla says, “the Elvis of our local web 2.0 scene.” He shared his dream of purchasing his childhood home and showed how Zoocasa was making this possible. The company gathers data from “all available public information” and presents layers on top of its map interface.

Art Anywhere

Christine Renaud hails from a Montreal — Joey awarded her the “Phileas Fog Award for Travelling” — and was here to talk about a new site launching in September: ArtAnywhere. It’s a new platform that lends out art pieces

A lot of open questions though: who delivers? What happens if the artwork gets damaged?

Homestars: Teaching social media to contractors

HomeStars is a Toronto startup that offers a platform for sharing and reading reviews about home contractors. It doesn’t sound too sexy but apparently its shaking up the renovation world.

Here’s Brian Sharwood sharing some characteristics of the contractor crowd. The traditional marketing vehicle has been YellowPages — one contractor spent almost half a million dollars on advertisements. HomeStars is introducing this group of people to the power of social media tools for the first time.

Ben Vinegar unveils Guestlistapp.com

Fellow UofT computer science graduate, Ben Vinegar, presented his side project and it was one of the best demos I’ve ever seen, even up there
with the legendary DabbleDB demo from ages ago.

Guestlist is a slick new way to host event registration pages. The next DemoCamp will use it for the signup and after seeing the demo we’re considering using it for CUSEC registration as well.

“But doesn’t Eventbrite do the same thing?”, someone in the audience asked. Ben offered the following distinction: if Eventbrite is the swiss army knife of event management, then Guestlist is the chef knife.

Bonus: check out the lovely IE6 icon that Ben had on his desktop (IE6 will come up again. Read on).

Jason Roks presents guiGoog

“Jason Roks” eh? Seems like there are some easy jokes in there. Joey DeVilla took the bait: “You might as well change your last name to sucks because Jason Roks,” he intro’d.

At this point, the projector stopped playing nice with other laptops and organizers were forced to use the Rogers corporate computer that it was attached to. What we witness can only be described as horrifying. Jason looked in vain for a modern browser but only IE6 was installed. Always quick with the money quotes, Joey quipped: “If you got a cat when IE6 came out, it’s dead now.”

But with no other options, Jason double clicked on the icon. What came next was a red-alert style warning about the dangers of the Internet (it was even bilingual!).

Be sure to see this one in full size. Who knew that pop-ups could even contain that much text? As a bonus, we got a sneak peak at their corporate intranet. Congrats on the Q2 results, Rogers!

Jason’s site was clearly not tested in IE6 — can we blame him? — but he managed to demonstrate the gist of it. guiGoog is a wrapper around Google that lets users tweak the type of results that are returned. Hold on a second. Doesn’t Google already offer advanced search options? Yes but “they’re a disgusting awful mess,” said Jason.

Give it a whirl. It even turns out guiGoog is great for finding torrents with but — the Rogers jokes never really got old — “if you’re on a Rogers connection, you can’t actually download the files,” someone yelled out.

More coverage

Geoffrey Wiseman took some photos, Josh Sookman took notes, and the twittersphere made pithy observatons. Update. Greg took notes.

The full set of photos

There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation, which is equal parts pop culture, deep science, software engineering and Monty Python’s Flying Circus

His previous talk in Toronto featured this mouthful of a title:

Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces… Made Easy

So what could possibly dampen my enthusiasm when I found out he was giving another talk in Toronto? Simple: his life’s work is devoted to Perl, a programming language that some have described as “bloody witchcraft” and “write-only”.

But with the first slide, he cheekily addressed this image problem:

“Content advisory: This presentation contains a substantial amount of explicit Perl.”

What’s going on in the photo? Did he forget to also warn us about violence? Not quite — it’s him giving a demonstration of Aikido on a certain local accordion player.

(Damian says these skills come in handy in bars — coincidentally, a strange setting considering he’s “the only Australian who doesn’t drink” and the “designated driver for an entire continent.”)

In any case, Damian’s dragging of Joey across the room was actually a lesson about Perl. Aikido uses the “motion of the attacker and redirects the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on.” Similarly, Perl is all about finding the easiest way to get your job done. Something all geeks are on board with right?

Another thing we all love: duality. Lego vs Mechano, Star Trek vs Star Wars, and more specifically, which was the more annoying golden robot. It harks back to a more ancient duality: chaos and cosmos, deified in the gods of Ares and Apollo. As geeks, our sympathies lie more on the Apollo side of the spectrum. We have a natural tendency to look for patterns in data. For example, nerds have created periodic tables to describe just about everything: vulgarity, visualization methods themselves (bonus: the recursion in the chart), anti-science attitudes, or Perl 6 operators.

With Perl — and open source in general — our obsession with elegance and order has an extra dimension: we chaotically bring order out of chaos.

So what does all this have to do with Perl? Regular Expressions — something that even the most ardent Perl-hater would admit the language does a kickass job on. For the next two (!) hours, Damian explained the ins and outs of a new regex library that he had coded and how he had made it compatible with the current version of Perl.

The grand finale: a programmatic version of Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First” skit:

It might not look glamourous but that’s the new Perl regular expression engine talking back and forth with itself. Mind-blowing.

Addendum

As we all know, no discussion about computer languages is complete without a few gratuitous jabs at the other languages:

(A reference to the notorious porn presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference)

And now a word about Perl 6

Perl 6 seems to be quite an improvement over the current version but it’s been in the works for almost a decade (could it be the official scripting language of — the most famous of vapourware — Duke Nukem Forever?)

So for those yearning for a firm date, Damian might have hinted that there might be an announcement that might be made next week about a specific release date that might happen to be in Spring 2010.

After being warmed up by FailCamp and rooftop partying, the real FutureRuby conference began. Before you start wondering where all the hardcore technical Ruby talks are, keep this in mind:

FutureRuby isn’t a Ruby conference, but a conference for Rubyists.

Here’s organizer Pete Forde starting things off (before someone checks the EXIF data on this photo and catches me in my own lie, I’ll admit that it was actually taken later that day):

I’m not going to describe each talk in detail — the pipes of the Internet are already bursting — clogged? — with coverage already (thanks Enrico, Ron, Jay, Youssef, Barry, Krispy). For reference, here are all the talks.

But a few sessions stood out in particular.

How to program life

On the FutureRuby registration day, Austin Che ran a bio hacking session. The next day, he followed up on this theme with a more theoretical talk about what it takes to “hack biology.”

From Austin’s blurb:

Biology is currently at the tip of a revolution similar to that of electricity and magnetism at the beginning of the 20th century. The electrical engineering revolution has allowed non-physicists to program in high-level languages like Ruby by distilling classical physics into a set of engineering design principles. Similarly, the emerging field of synthetic biology applies engineering principles to biology. Efforts to bring modularity, interchangeable parts, abstraction and standardization to biology is beginning to allow non-biologists to quickly and predictably design and build biological systems. Soon, it may become child’s play to program with DNA.

He started by talking about the unique challenges of biology. For some perspective:

“Imagine Ruby code that not only interpreted itself, but also found silicon, constructed circuits, and made its own computer.”

But that’s not all. Compare and contrast Ruby with DNA:

• Purpose: Ruby was designed to make you feel good. DNA was designed to make you survive.
• DRY: Rubyists know this as “Don’t Repeat Yourself.” However, nature doesn’t have the advantage of starting from scratch each time. Redundancy makes natural systems more robust.
• Object Orietned: Also, one gene can have multiple distinct functions. \
• Coding Style: Let’s just say nature doesn’t really have a style guide. Although Austin has a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices.

Hacking biology requires a new paradigm because:

• Cell growth/death: imagine trying to code when random codes and bits randomly disappear
• Crosstalk: there’s no insulation within a cell
• Mutations: these have significantly more impact than the mostly-mythical memory flips.
• Evolution: Most importantly, evolution works against what we might want to engineer. Almost by definition, modified organisms will be worse off and the cells that are more likely to survive are the ones we don’t want.

And I thought my software development job was challenging. Mind-blowing talk.

Making noise. Ohhhhhmmmmmmm

If you ever find yourself amongst Rubyists and the room erupts into spontaneous “ohhhhmmm“‘s, read on to find out what’s going on.

As Pete explained many, many times, FutureRuby isn’t a conference about Ruby. Instead, it’s:

a congress of the curious characters that drew us to this community in the first place.

For Pete, one of these “curious characters” is Misha Glouberman, a Toronto fixture, the host of the wildly popular Trampoline Hall Lectures, and a professional facilitator.

His contribution to FutureRuby was running a “noise session.” After making sure that cellphones and laptops were put away, two hundred FutureRuby attendees sat in their chairs and simply made sounds (vowels, hand sounds, and hisses, to be precise).

Here’s a game where you were allowed to make sounds only when a floating spatula was in your vicinity:

The result was fascinating. The room — which contained many introverts, many egos, and many characters — seemed to meld into an hour of near-perfect unity.

The crowd-favourite was undoubtedly the moment when Misha got everyone to determine whether to make noises depending on the volume of neighbours. Yes, you’re correct if you suspect that sounds familiar: it’s Conway’s Game of Life played with humans as cells!

Flying robo blimps!

And they weren’t even used to kill anyone! Not only that, the creators, Ron and Damen Evans, coded on it live. Talk about a demo.

The technical name for these gadgets is “BlimpDuino,” a reference to the open source Arduino chip that they’re based around.

The session started off with quietly until a giant silver blimp burst from behind a wall to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries (kudos to Phill for nailing the timing on the music). Ron and Evan remote-controlled the blimp to interact with some people in the crowd.

Pravda

After a few more iPhone sessions in the afternoon, Saturday’s talks came to a close. However, that was only half the day, perhaps the less memorable half.

Where does a Soviet-themed conference host its flagship party? At a vodka bar. Duh.

Thrown in was a FutureRuby ice sculpture. Sadly, it didn’t live to see another day.

Remember Krispy’s crazy goggles from the night before? He went even further for the party at Pravda:

It is certainly quite an experience to walk the Spadina corridor dressed as a World War 2 russian general sporting a KGB medal. The cabbie kept glancing at me in his rearview not quite sure about who I was or what I was doing. The best was when I got out near the bar and walked the last few blocks and a drunk guy comes stumbling out of an ally and says “What are you - fucking KGB?” I simply stopped and turned my head toward him to which he shrunk his shoulders and slunk back into the ally from which he came.

Krispy was one of the many people captured in the photobooth. The results are on Flickr (including a shot of these two revolutionaries.)

Not everyone went with the Soviet theme. Here’s Matt Knox doing his own thing:

Needless to say, much food and vodka was consumed. In fact, so much so that the tab ran short. Thanks Tobi / Shopify for the last-minute infusion of cash which kept everyone going until the end of the night.

Saturday’s slideshow

This beautiful vista was the backdrop for most of my Friday night. It’s the view from the Unspace roof. What was I doing up there?

Simple. It was FutureRuby weekend and organizers Pete Forde and Meghann Millard opened up their office roof up for the kickoff party.

But what’s FutureRuby, you may ask? Well it’s not a Ruby conference.

FutureRuby isn’t a Ruby conference, but a conference for Rubyists. This is a call to order - a congress of the curious characters that drew us to this community in the first place. We have a singular opportunity to express a long-term vision, a future where Ruby drives creativity and prosperity without being dampened by partisan politics.

(And for the non-geeks, Ruby is a programming language.)

Whereas RubyFringe was all about the punk aesthetic, FutureRuby went for a Soviet theme. The posters were stunning. Some attendees also got into it, some a bit more than others.

But first, some biology hacking

As part of Future Ruby’s mandate to be a “congress of the curious,” Pete invited Austin Che to give a talk about hacking biology (but more on the talk in a later post). To warm up the audience, he ran a hacking session during conference registration.

From the official description:

After this 20-minute hands-on workshop you’ll be able to give it a cute name, let it incubate overnight - and viola! You too have a new petri-imprisoned pet for the duration of FutureRuby.

Apparently some of them did indeed end up smelling like bananas. Others glowed.

Setting up

But as people who went to RubyFringe last year know, this experience is almost as much about the parties as the talks. Friday night was the first of three open-bar, catered parties.

A few fellow-volunteers and I arrived early to help set up. Unspace’s office is above the Lululemon store on Queen West and they have two levels of decks.

Christopher Walken isn’t particularly Soviet but he certainly lived at approximately the right time.

But it wasn’t all hard work. Here are Ryan McMinn and Greg Borenstein:

The Unspace office is furnished with all sorts of wonderful distractions. RubyFringe attendees from last year are all memorialized on the wall:

Here’s Phill looking worried because he just thought he broke the pinball machine. (Wups, did I just break our secrecy pact? Well the machine is fine now so I figure it’s cool to mention):

Partying on Unspace’s roof

The guests (and booze) started flowing in.

And here’s Pete with one of his legendary film Leica M8 cameras:

Last year, Giles Bowkett attended Future Ruby and gave what many consider to be the best presentation of the conference. He demo’d Archaeopteryx, a ruby MIDI generator. Sadly, Giles couldn’t make it again this year but his project was able to make the journey to Toronto in the form of a robotic drum set created by Greg Borenstein. Here it is set up in Pete Forde’s office.

(By the way, if you think his office is gorgeous, so do the good folks at Unplggd)

Here’s a video of it in action. Apparently it’s also a relaxing place for Ruby heroes to catch up on emails.

All in all, a fantastic way to start off the weekend.

Stay tuned. Two more posts in the pipes for Saturday and Sunday’s proceedings. For FailCamp coverage (another FutureRuby-affiliated event), see my previous post.

The full slideshow

As usual, there’s a slideshow:

FAILcamp is an open event for folks to share their stories and lessons taken away from failure. It’s also a valid excuse to hit the docks and overrun the swanky QCYC yacht club with hedonic nerdery.

Yacht club eh? How cool would it be to actually arrive on private vessel?

In the yellow is my friend Tim’s sailboat, “No Frills” — the name is a nod to both the colour of the boat and inclination of the skipper. He kindly invited us on board.

Because I seem to particularly prone to to damaging my electronics, I did a full hard drive backup the night before. Fortunately, we arrived without incident.

And I even got to help raise the sails.

Tales of Failure

Safely back on solid ground, we were greeted with badges that asked for our names and what we fail at. I filled in “I fail at saying no.” This proved to be a liability when Trina noticed and asked me to buy her a drink.

Here’s Trina putting Phill through the same routine.

Joey warmed up the crowd with some quick icons of FAIL: keyboard cats, a survey of president of Mexico, and his favourite movie, Deliverance — “a canoe trip that failed.”

He turned over the floor to people to tell their tales of failure.

First up, an awkward — but certainly passionate — case for living an “unencumbered lifestyle” with “zero baggage.” Joey cut in and asked if she had any stories about failure and she yielded the stage.

Next up, a story of three fails and a win. A developer from Toronto described his courtship fails: driving on the wrong side of the road on a first date, taking the dog-loving girl to a movie that involved animal cruelty, and remaining in his boxers at the girl’s parents house. The win: a 10 month son and 8 years of being together.

After a few more first-date stories, Pete Forde came up.

Joey’s intro’d him with the following analogy: “If DHH is the father of Rails, then Pete is it’s Bad Touch Uncle.”

Pete had his own anecdote about romantic attempts.

“I once took a date to Downfall. I challenge anyone to make out after seeing that movie.”

But he sidestepped that theme by shifting gears into the second theme of the night: border crossing tales — FailCamp went into “anal sovereignty territory,” as Joey put it.

I won’t ruin Pete’s story by trying to retell it but the punchline sounded something like this:

“If dude wants to stare in your ass, it’s likely shittier for them.”

(Pete, I think you’d agree that the story was more about the journey than the punchline)

The prize for shortest and sweetest went to Sarah Lindsay. “Pete sent me an invitation for FailCamp last year but I declined it because I thought it was some sort of camping trip.” Communication fail.

Sailing home

But alas, the seas called again. (Y’arrr.) In short, sailing is the most relaxing thing I’ve done in years.

Also, nothing’s more beautiful than seeing Toronto at night from the lake.

And the slideshow

But let me hijack our collective mourning of Jackson by drawing attention to another person who died a bit too young: James Jamerson, the bassist who played on some — if not most — of the early Jackson 5 hits.

Jamerson was one of the first musicians to do something interesting with pop music basslines, inspiring pretty much every bassist since. Sadly, he faded into obscurity and died at the age of 47 — a death probably related to alcoholism.

Here’s my favourite example of the young Michael Jackson singing on top of Jamerson’s playing. If you mentally isolate the bassline when you listen, it’s almost like hearing a second song. Blissful.

RIP, the two of you.