This week is going to be a week unlike any other in the Toronto technology scene: a week of events created not by municipal groups, large techno-conglomerates or industry think tanks, but by small groups of passionate individuals who enjoys working with both people and technology.

These events don’t have the benefit of major sponsorship or media coverage, nor will they be lining their organizers’ wallets. They’re events put together by amateurs in the original sense of the word: people who do it not for profit, but for their love of their craft, in the hope that both the attendees and even the field itself will be advanced from insights, understanding and knowledge gained by gathering together and exchanging ideas.

It’ll be a busy week for me. I’ll not only be attending these events, but I’ll also be MCing two of them as well. I’ll be posting reports from these gatherings here — keep watching this blog!

DemoCamp 18: Tuesday July 15th, 5:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. at Supermarket

DemoCamp 18 is the eighteenth gathering of the bright lights in Toronto’s software development community where we show each other our projects in action. DemoCamp has grown from a gathering of a couple dozen in late 2005 to a meetup of hundreds at locations like the MaRS Centre and the Toronto Board of Trade and was voted “Toronto’s Best Unconference” earlier this year by BlogTO. It’s given many local software people the chance to showcase their work, meet other people in their field, make connections, get jobs and even get venture capitalist funding (that’s what happened to b5media, for whom I work).

I’m one of DemoCamp’s stewards and will be co-MCing DemoCamp.

You can see the schedule of events for DemoCamp 18 at the DemoCamp.info site. This event’s tickets — a good number of which were free, the remainder going for five or ten dollars — got snapped up within hours of becoming available.

Damian Conway: Wednesday, July 16th, 6:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. at the Bahen Centre, U of T

The Perl programming language has been given the nickname “the duct tape of the internet” because of its importance in the development of the early web. Damian Conway is its most eloquent spokesperson and a speaker who can turn the dryest of academic lectures into a brain-tickling comic monologue that delivers both laughs and technical insight.

On Wednesday, Toronto will play host to the world premiere of his new talk, titled Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces… Made Easy. The event will be held at the Bahen Centre at the University of Toronto and it will be free of charge. For more details, see its Upcoming page.

FAILCamp: Friday July 18th, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. at The Rhino

I’ll let the FAILCamp creators, Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs do the talking:

“My reputation grows with every failure,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in a letter to fellow author Frank Harris. A healthy attitude towards the natural state of humanity, if you ask us.

We all know failure: public, private, large, small, free or costly, embarrassing or funny or poignant (or all of the above). We have all experienced what our friend Patrick has called “the beautiful rainbow of Fail.” And we tend to stuff it in the closet, keep it under wraps, don’t-ask-don’t-tell or any other number of hidey clichés that poor, beautiful rainbows should not be subject to. We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by comraderie, beer, and Show and Tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

Also, did we mention beer?

For more details, see FAILCamp’s event page on Facebook.

RubyFringe: Friday July 18th - Sunday July 20th at the Metropolitan Toronto Hotel

Finally, the upcoming weekend belongs to RubyFringe, the “deep nerd tech with punk rock spirit conference”.

“RubyFringe,” says its site, “RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies. We’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.”

I’ll be MCing the opening night’s events at the Amsterdam Brewery. Alas, tickets are sold out!

Grand Theft Childhood is a new book written by Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team who co-founded the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. In the video above, Drs. Kutner and Olson talk with X-Play’s Adam Sessler about some of the findings from the study documented in their book.

Some notes:

• Their study lasted several years and received $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice.
• In their study, they surveyed and interviewed over 1250 kids and 500 parents.
• There is “absolutely no evidence” that playing violent video games turns children violent.
• What’s more important are patterns of play — there are some that parents and teachers should note.
• In their research, Drs. Kutner and Olson tried to find out which videogame playing behaviours are normal, and which aren’t, a cataloguing of behaviours that did not previously exist in the literature on this topic.
• They debunked the experimental methodologies used by researchers who’ve made the vidogames-violence connection.
• One of the flaws in those older experiements was that it didn’t take short-term vs. long-term behavioural effects into account. He cited an example of boys’ horseplay after seeing an action film: it wears off pretty quickly.
• They found that both boys and girls who played M-rated or violent videogames exclusively more than 15 hours a week to be statistically more like to get into trouble, but they also found that boys who didn’t play videogames at all were also at greater risk.
• At least for boys, gaming is a marker of social competence.
• Consider the case of the Virginia tech shooter: although the pundits were quick to place the blame on videogames, he didn’t play them at all, and his dorm-mates said he wouldn’t play videogames with them.
• Kutner: “Kids who don’t play [videogames] at all are actually at greater risk for getting into trouble. It says something about their social relationships.”

E. Gary Gygax, who as co-creator of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, died this morning at the age of 69 at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As a former dungeon master, I feel the urge to get some mead and pour 2d20 ounces on the ground outside the former Yonge Street location of Mr. Gameway’s Ark for my dead homie.

Requiescat in pace, Gary. You were a natural 20.

More on this later.

I fell in love with Montreal in my late teens. It’s quite unlike most cities in North America — you can practically feel the place’s history, and everything from its architecture to the “feel” of its streets just seems different. It’s like having a little bit of Europe, but closer by and cheaper to get to. If you’re from North America and looking for a different vacation destination and on a budget, I recommend Montreal.

Today’s Montreal Gazette features an article titled Silicon Island?, which takes a look at their high-tech community’s grassroots movement:

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the Internet, local geeks with bright ideas started meeting at informal, community-organized events called BarCamps. The global movement that began in the Silicon Valley was the grassroots retort to stuffy, invitation-only tech conferences. In a BarCamp, computer whizzes show the first drafts of their garage projects to anyone who will listen.

This type of networking results in lasting connections that can pay off. Now when [George Favvas of Montreal-based SmartHippo.com] needs someone with a particular skill, he puts the word out on his blog, his Facebook profile or on his LinkedIn page, a social network for business contacts. Other bloggers write about it. Someone who knows just the guy gets wind of it, and Favvas has a candidate in a few hours.

This way of doing things has been so fruitful that it’s being seen as a model for other sectors of the technology industry, like telecommunications and life sciences.

“The young entrepreneurs today are different from the IT entrepreneurs of the ’80s and ’90s,” said René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology, which has become the preferred venue for local tech gatherings.

“They are very good at organizing themselves. … It’s sad to see more established companies not seeing this as a core of business,” he said.

There’s also a gathering called YULbiz, a monthly get-together for local business bloggers (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Pierre Trudeau airport). Montreal StartUp encourages successful entrepreneurs to become angel investors. Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Technology Ventures has a branch office in Montreal.

Map of Montreal’s subway.

As with Toronto, the chicken-and-egg problem also plagued Montreal. As the article puts it: “Do risk-takers attract smart money, or does the availability of money encourage risk-takers? Ideally, both factors are at work, in a mutually reaffirming symbiosis.” The seed money is now coming in, and things are looking up:

With its pool of tech talent, the emergence of seed money, and a budding network of mentors, “Montreal has the right mix of elements and we’ll see it really flourish next year,” [Austin Hill] said.

The next step is to get people from different tech and business sectors talking to each other. René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology (”the preferred venue for local tech gatherings”) says that in his ideal world, a presentation by a 3D animator would have engineers, musicians, medical technicians and furniture designers in the audience.

The article closes with a line that people in the Toronto tech community will find familiar: “The grassroots is moving up quite nicely, but a top-down movement isn’t happening at all.”

Jenny Lam, Hillel Cooperman and Walter Smith of the software company Jackson Fish Market.

Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley is a recent New York Times article that opens with a pretty dramatic statement that I hope we’ll someday say about this weblog’s home city, Toronto: “Many communities dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley. [Seattle] is actually doing it.”

The city has its share of big players: Microsoft has its headquarters the nearby suburb of Redmond as well as satellite offices in Seattle proper, Amazon is based there, Google has a research lab there and Nintendo’s American headquarters is also in the area. However, the real topic of interest — from both the article’s point of view as well as mine — is the city’s startup ecosystem. “More young companies are moving in downtown,” says the article, “near the art galleries and bookstores around Pioneer Square. Still others are spreading into the surrounding suburbs.” A number of these startups fall into interestingly-named categories:

• The “Baby Bills”, startups formed by ex-Microsofties. The name comes (obviously) from Microsoft co-founder Bill gates and (less obviously for those of you who might be too young to remember) the “Baby Bells” that emerged from the breakup of AT&T.
• The “Baby Jeffs”, startups created by former Amazon employees, named after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
• The “Baby Sergeys”, startups run by former Googlers, named after Google’s Sergey Brin.

Silicon Valley got its start as the “Fairchildren” left Fairchild to form their own companies, whose employees moved between them or formed their own spin-off companies, creating the atmosphere of cross-pollination that turned the area into a high-tech Mecca. The same thing seems to be happening in Seattle, according to Walter Smith of Seattle software company Jackson Fish Market: “Seattle is like an adolescent version of Silicon Valley,” he says.

Just as Silicon Valley has Stanford, Seattle has University of Washington, which the article says is fostering the area’s entrepreneurial spirit in the same way. Another similarity is the area’s old industry: aerospace, which provided an earlier boom in the Seattle area, just as it did in the Valley. Now the entrepreneurs and venture capital are moving in, and there are social networks, support businesses and a business culture that views failure as a badge of honour, not shame.

How Green Was My Valley

Scenes from the Valley’s El Camino Real (left) and Seattle’s Pioneer Square (right).

The New York Times article on Seattle inspired this response on Seattle-based Redfin’s corporate blog: How Green Was My Valley. Where the Times chose to focus on the similarities between the Valley and Seattle, How Green Was My Valley takes the opposite tack and focuses on the differences. some of which are:

• Seattle has become unrecognizably wealthier in the past decade, yet is oddly unhappy about it. While Seattle has people who get nostalgic for the city’s good old days, the amnesiac Valley — most of whose denizens only came there for the tech gold rush — have neither the history there, nor any real connection to the place.
• People live in Seattle because they love Seattle — the lifestyle and schools, the mountains and the lakes. Contrast this with the blog article’s author’s story about his first roomate: “My first roommate spent four years building a company in San Francisco without ever buying furniture. When his startup went bust, he packed for the trip home to Toronto the same day.”
• The high cost of living keeps the Valley in a sort of post-adolescent collegiate state. A two-bedroom house in “Shallow Alto” (that was our nickname for it during the OpenCola days) will set you back $1.5 million, which prevents people from buying a suitable place for starting a family. “In Silicon Valley,” goes the author, “Seattle’s 28 year-old family man is still working his tail off for a hit.”
• Stanford is the Valley’s “Hogwarts”. “…without Stanford the Valley would grow old and die,” says the author. “Native Seattleites hardly notice Seattle’s Stanfordlessness; Valley expats never get over it.”
• Here’s something that reminded me of Paulina Borsook’s book Cyberselfish: In Seattle, “High-tech entrepreneurs are expected to be pillars of the business community…not, as Silicon Valley’s establishment likes to think of itself, pirates of the Caribbean.” Techies get involved in non-tech community organizations like the Rotary Club and seem to have a mindset connected to “a set of civic virtues bigger than any one company”.
• Seattle has a sense of “helping out” that’s much harder to find in the Valley: “And it has nurtured a rookie CEO like me. A Seattle journalist e-mailed me while I was still loading the tiny U-Haul that brought me here. A VC who should have eaten my gizzard for breakfast invited me to his lake house for dinner. A startup CEO who offered money-raising advice over lunch diverted us from Quiznos to Carmines.”
• The new-for-new’s sake ethos of the Valley isn’t so pervasive in Seattle. While techies in the Valley chase fashionable ideas, techies in Seattle have the freedom to work on less cool projects that work. Redfin itself is in the “uncool” business of real estate.
• There’s a sense of dedication and loyalty in Seattle. While many of Google’s engineer’s are “plotting their next startup on the company dime,” “ten years on at Microsoft, engineers deep in Redmond’s rain forests are still writing the next version of Office.”
• And finally, one similarity: both the Valley and Seattle have the weather as their selling point, for completely opposite reasons. Says Zillow’s Rich Barton of Seattle: “You work hard here because it’s gray. Then you go hiking or fishing or skiing.”

Toronto’s Challenge

A whole mess of Toronto tech people. Can you identify them all?

Along with Leila Boujnane, David Crow, Jay Goldman and Greg Wilson, I help put together the DemoCamp gatherings here in Toronto. As part of this group, as well as a Toronto-based techie and a long-time resident of this city (since 1975!), I have an interest in making Toronto a great place to work, live and play, in both my geek and non-geek modes.

As I’ve written before, I think that Toronto is an underappreciated gem of a city and that a lot of the elements required to make Toronto a high-tech startup hub are in place. We’ve got:

• A vibrant city,
• with a strong creative class,
• a healthy number of techies with a strong entrepreneurial bent,
• interesting neighbourhoods with lots of character,
• youth and liberalism,
• a local culture with strong social networks,
• a number of good universities in the area,
• and the Accordion Guy!

Okay, maybe the last item in that list isn’t absolutely necessary, but it couldn’t hurt.

There are a number of hurdles that we need to clear, not the least of which are the timidity of local investors and the sense among a lot of people here that “making it” means getting a job in a big company, not starting your own. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the national character; after all, Canada was founded by people loyal to the British Empire, people who said “Hey! We like being a colony! Taxation without representation? Fine by us! So King George talks to trees…who doesn’t?!”

I’m glad that there are a lot of people in Toronto who are thinking about this sort of thing, and I look forward to talking with them, making plans and putting them into action. Over the next little while, I’m going to talk about what it would take to build up Toronto as a high-tech hub and a livable city. Watch this space!

Earlier Articles on Toronto as a Startup Hub

In case you missed them, here are some links to older articles of mine about what it would take to turn Toronto into a startup hub:

• How to be Silicon Valley: My take on Paul Graham’s article, How to be Silicon Valley.
• On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 1: Comments on How to be Silicon Valley
• On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 2: Even more comments on How to be Silicon Valley.
• On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 3: In which Toronto high tech finds common ground with Toronto fashion.
• Silicon Valley Fight Club (or “How to be Silicon Valley, Part 4″): A private fight club made up of developers and engineers in Silicon Valley, and what it says about life there.
• On Becoming Silicon Valley, Part 5: Toronto developer David Janes’ take on How to Become Silicon Valley.
• On Becoming Silicon Valley, Part 6: My comments on Guy Kawasaki’s article, How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt.

Over at FoundRead, Larry Chiang has some advice that you might find useful if you’re following Scoble’s advice for people who’ve just been laid off (particularly the parts about networking and attending business events). His piece is titled How to Work the Room.

Here’s a condensed version:

1. Be more of a host and less of a guest. Make introductions and make people more comfortable.
2. Avoid permanently joining a “rock pile” (a pack of people in a tight circle). Huddling feels safe, but it’s also antisocial.
3. Dress for the party. The basic rule: the more junior you are, the better you should dress.
4. Don’t “hotbox” (square shoulders front and centre to one person). In a one-on-one conversation, it’s okay, but it excludes others from joining.
5. Put your coat and bag down. It signals that you’re about to leave.
6. Mentor someone about your (or your company’s) core competence. “It transitions nicely from the what-do-you-do-for-work question. It also adds some substance to party conversations and clearly brands you as a person.”
7. Don’t forget to get mentored as well. The author suggests this trick: try to learn three new things at each event.
8. Be a good host while you’re someone else’s guest. Say “Hi” to wallflowers.
9. Manage the party host. “When you’re interacting with the host, ask simple questions requiring a ‘Yes/No’ response. I’ve heard disastrous questions in a vain attempt to out alpha-male the host. The best questions to ask of a host are upbeat, light and fluffy. If you want to be Mike Wallace/Chris Matthews with a hardball question, tread lightly. Also, help your host wiggle by wrangling them away from guests who are monopolizing or “hotboxing” them. They will thank you later.”
10. Always, always, always: Thank the host before you leave. If you only do one thing on this list, let this be the one (and work on the others!)

If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer, there are a couple of events you might be interested in…

Tonight: Rails Pub Nite at The Rhino

The fine folks at local development company Unspace have hosted the monthly Rails Pub Nite for nearly two years now, and the event is going strong. It’s a meet-and-greet event where you can hang out with all sorts of people from those who develop in Rails for food to the curious ones wondering what all the fuss is about. It happens tonight at 7 p.m. at The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin).

Ruby/Rails Project Night - Tuesday, February 12th

In a couple of weeks, TSOT — the company for whom I work — will be hosting its second Ruby/Rails Project Night at its offices (151 Bloor Street West, Suite 1130 — that’s just east of Avenue Road), where various Ruby and Rails developers do presentations on their current project or some aspect of Ruby or Rails. The first was a hit, and if you want to see some pictures, they’re here. As usual, I’ll be doing the opening monologue at Project Night, and I promise it’ll be entertaining.

(By the bye, if you missed it and are interested, I’ll show you the slides from the my Project Night monologue, Rant Said Zed, at Rails Pub Nite tonight. Just ask!)

…it was created, and it continues to expand, not through Non-Governmental Organisations or charity or development grants but through the market, with much of it financed by some of the poorest people on the planet.

I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.”

The Assignment

The people participating in the exercise were divided into three teams of four people. The assignment was to build a bridge across which a ball about the size and weight of a plum could be rolled.

The specs for the bridge were:

• It had to be free-standing; we were not allowed to secure it to anything
• It had to have a minimum span of 4 feet (about 1.2 metres)
• While travelling across the bridge, the ball’s minimum height off the ground cannot be less than 2 feet (about .6 metres)

The items with which each team was allowed to construct the bridge were:

• 8 sheets of easel pad paper (each sheet is about 36″ by 24″)
• 4 plastic beer cups
• 4 thick paper plates
• 1 roll of masking tape

We were given ten minutes to come up with a construction plan and twenty minutes to construct the bridge. We were given a stack of 3″ by 5″ index cards for writing out our plan. Each team had to pick a team leader, who would direct the activities and make notes of the plan on the card.

The Outcome

I’ll cut to the chase: the team I was on, Team 2, won. Not only did we build a bridge that met all the criteria, but we finished its construction in 10 minutes and had enough time to hang out in the lounge while the other teams kept working. Here’s the bridge that our team built:

Our team’s bridge.

Another team, Team 1, took all the allotted time. Their bridge met the “freestanding” and “4 foot span” criteria, but didn’t meet the “ball must be 2 feet off the ground throughout its travel across the bridge” criterion. Here’s the bridge they built:

Team 1’s bridge.

The last team, Team 3, weren’t able to complete their bridge in time.

The Design

The bridge we built, viewed from another angle.

The span of the bridge was made with 4 sheets of easel paper: 2 rolls, each one a 2-ply roll of paper, which were then joined together with a one-foot overlap in the middle for extra strength. The design was unconventional, but there wasn’t any rule that the bridge couldn’t be a covered bridge.

The pillars of the bridge were each made with a 2-ply roll of easel paper, with a plastic beer cup at the top and base. For extra stability, we attached one paper plate to the bottom of one pillar and two paper plates to the bottom of the other pillar. This gave the span a slight slope to ensure that the ball would travel from one end of the bridge to the other (there was no requirement that it had to be a two-way bridge).

The span design was my idea, so I was assigned to build it with the assistance of the team leader. The other two members designed and built the pillars. The pillars were mostly identical, so the guys building them consulted with each other throughout the building process.

Although we were given scissors, our design didn’t require any cutting. I’m certain that this cut down on the construction time significantly.

The Lessons

Our bridge, viewed from one end.

The exercise demonstrated the expected points about teamwork (a good leader, clear communication between team members and cooperation) and blitz planning (a simple plan, an iterative approach and adapting to real-world feedback). It also yielded some unexpected lessons about design:

• Build the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s an oft-repeated mantra in Agile Development, but it’s something that programmers sometimes forget — probably because we often erroneously equate “simple” with “stupid”.
• Go with the strengths of the material you’re given. The other teams built structures that took their inspiration from real-world bridges. This might be a good approach if the materials we were given were popsicle sticks, but since we were working with mostly paper and specific height and span requirements, we decided that a tubular design would be the best approach. It offered the advantages of strength and ease of construction.
• The corollary from the previous point is that the solution may look different from what you might expect. With the two previous points and the time constraints in mind, explore the possibilities.

Although the exercise is now over, we’re keeping our bridge around as a little reminder of the design lessons we learned — we plan to use them in building our software.

• Where: The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin)
• When: Monday, January 14th, starting at 7:00 p.m.
• Who’s behind this? Brent Ashley, Pete Forde, Kristan Uccello and Gabriel Mansour
• Is there an official site? Yes, at ajaxcamp.org
• Will this be a recurring event? Yes — starting February, Ajax Pub Night will take place on the second Monday of each month.

Here’s what Brent has to say about Ajax Pub Night:

We’re here to build a community around Ajax and create opportunities to meet face to face at events small and large.

Ajax is a unifying word that brings a number of technologies and techniques together to express one concept - a way to build compelling browser-based applications that comprise the foundation of the future of the web.

Let’s start with a Toronto-based Ajax Pub Nite, informal and unstructured. Once some community is established we can introduce evening Ajax Presentations and Demos and/or Ajax Workshops and build up to an eventual full-day Ajax Camp, perhaps inspiring people from different locales to join in here and set up their own events worldwide.

I’ve been to similar pub nights at the Rhino, and generally the ideas flow as freely as the beer. If you’re interested in Ajax development and are looking to get some new ideas, meet your peers and possibly land a job (it’s happened at these gatherings), come on down to Ajax Pub Night this Monday! I plan to be there.

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

We started by giving people food, drink and some time to hang out, chat and meet their fellow local techies. We agree with the TorCamp folks: having a strong developer community benefits all development companies in the area, and we’re only too happy to do our part. (We may have to kick the beer budget up a notch — not only do Toronto developers work hard, they drink hard too!)

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

I started the presentation portion of the evening by first introducing Kris White, our CEO, who welcomed the crowd, after which I launched into my Saturday Night Live-style opening monologue, a presentation titled Rant Said Zed: Lessons and Challenges from Zed’s Rant. The basic premise was that as with real-life city neighbourhoods that have made the leap from ghetto to renewed community, it’s going to take the effort of people who are willing to take charge and make positive contributions.

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Next up was Andrew Burke (his company is Shindig), whose presentation was on his current project, S.O.S., short for Sign Ordering System, an application for large retailers who need to order all sorts of in-store signage on a regular basis (it’s a need that is large, complex and something that most people don’t think of). He provided a brief background of the sort of problems his customers had, talked about how where custom Rails applications fit in the business software ecosystem, did a quick demo of S.O.S. and provided a handful of development pointers.

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

After Andrew came Unspace’s Hampton Catlin, who presented ZipLocal.com, an app that answers the question “What’s good in your ‘hood?” (it’s local search for restaurants and other businesses). He showed us all sorts of cool things including its clever URL scheme and — because you’re allowed to go as deep as you like in your presentations — actual code. Hampton even managed to throw in some rebuttals to my Rant Said Zed monologue!

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Finally, we had Mike Ferrier, also from Unspace, who presented his project, the iPhone/iPod Touch front-end for TheScore.ca, a sports scores site for the hardcore sports fan. As with Hampton’s presentation, Mike fired up his editor and showed us code, which included his use of Hpricot as an XML parser (because the standard Ruby ways of parsing XML are pretty sad).

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

I’m biased, but the night looked pretty successful to me. Many people approached me, our VP Public Relations Corina Newby and VP Promotions Ruth Rankin and told us that not only did they like the event, but that they also had a good time. As of this writing, two people who attended have contacted us, asking if they could do a presentation at February’s project night!

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

If you’ve got a Ruby or Rails project that you’d like to show off, or if you’d like to do a tutorial session on some aspect of Ruby, Rails or any of the Ruby-based app frameworks, we’d like to hear from you! We’re looking for presentations that run about 20-ish minutes and we encourage you to go as in-depth as you like. Feel like showing code? We’re cool with that! Email me if you’d like to present.

TSOT’s Ruby/Rails project nights take place on the second Tuesday of every month. The next one takes place on Tuesday, February 12th. We open our doors at 5:30 p.m., with the presentations starting at around 6 and wrapping up between 8 and 8:30 (with breaks where appropriate). We provide food and drink as well.

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

I’d like to thank Andrew, Hampton and Mike for their excellent presentations, which provided Project Night with a very auspicious start, as well as all of you who attended. Thanks for coming out, and we’ll see you at the next one!

Click here to see the Flickr set of my photos from Ruby/Rails Project Night.

For the second time in a week, a group of Canadian Facebook users may have broken the law by publishing the names of youths charged under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act. This law puts limitations on the publication of the identity of people charged under it; the basis for this is that revealing their names would be detrimental to rehabilitation and to public safety. The publication ban also applies to the identities of victims and witnesses in cases where people are charged under the act. There are exceptions to this gag order, such as in cases where the crime is transferred to adult court or if the youth court has found the accused guilty and imposed an adult sentence.

It happened with the first homicide of the year here in Toronto, in the case of a 14-year-old girl who was murdered on New Year’s Day. While newspapers, TV and radio stations and their associated websites complied with a 24-hour ban forbidding the publication of the victim’s name, some Toronto Facebook users created a memorial group in which both the victim and her two accused killers — a 17-year-old boy and 15-year-old — were named. The group was created by a 16-year-old who said “felt entitled to ‘pay attention’ to someone who was special to him and who had no idea he might have been violating the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

It happened again, this time in Alberta, where the names of four teenage boys accused of microwaving a cat to death were published in a Facebook group. Reactions were (understandably) harsh, with posted comments like “I think people like that should be shot”, “They will all get their faces smashed in by January 6th” and ” would say these monsters should be tortured, let society at them”.

These appear to be cases where technology has entered a grey area with the law. Referring to the case of the 14-year-old murdered in Toronto, a Toronto area constable said that “It’s a very good question if the people who post things on Facebook are actually breaking the YCJA. I guess it all boils down to whether Facebook is eventually determined by somebody that it is a publication.” In the story on the Alberta boys who accused of killing the cat, a British Columbia lawyer is of the opinion that the YCJA was broken and — as even someone at their first day of law school will tell you — ignorance of the law is no excuse.

My own opinion is that posting things online, whether in a blog, social network site, wiki or any other public online forum, is publication, even if you’re not doing it professionally. If online publishing gives you at least the same potential audience and reach as a city newspaper, then as an online publisher, you also have the same legal and ethical responsibilities that a city newspaper has.

Luckily for me, I worked at Crazy Go Nuts University’s main student newspaper, where we got brief on Canadian law and journalism and benefited from having one of the Globe and Mail’s lawyers do a regular Q&A session with us. I may not be able to quote chapter and verse of Canadian journo law, but I think I’ve can do a decent job at “sniff testing” to see if a posting will get me in legal hot water. I think that a number of bloggers — people who post articles on a regular basis — have made themselves familiar with the legal aspects of blogging, although I’m sure a number haven’t. Things can get hairy on online forums like Facebook, which is made for people who don’t publish regularly but do want some kind of online presence. On these places, users probably don’t think of themselves as publishers and might be unaware that they’re opening themselves up to charges of libel, defamation or violating the YCJA.

Paging Canadian lawyers who specialize in the internet — fellow neighbourhoodie Rob Hyndman, and friend-by-correspondence Michael Geist, I’m lookin’ at you! Do you know of any places where a Canadian blogger or Facebook user can find out more about the law and online publsihing?

This is amusing: BoingBoingBingo.net generates Bingo cards in which the squares contain the Boing Boing editors’ pet topics, which include:

• A post by Xeni Jardin about some crisis in another country
• An XKCD reference
• Disney (that’s Cory’s thing)
• A link to Make (that’s Mark’s thing)
• “OMG Gama-Go!”
• Mr. Jalopy
• Coop
• “Robots are cool”
• Flying spaghetti monster

[via Laughing Squid, which I found via Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood's Twitter stream]

By now, most Rails developers — and even a number of people who couldn’t care less about Rails — have read Zed Shaw’s infamous rant titled Rails is a Ghetto. It’s given me a lot to think about, and as a result, I’m changing my presentation topic at Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night to Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for my Rails (or: Lessons and Challenges from Zed Shaw’s Rant). I promise that it’ll be both informing and entertaining.

• Want to know more about Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night, which takes place this Tuesday, January 8th? See this entry.
• Want to sign up? Email me!

Aside: A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane

How can I reference Right Said Fred without showing you the video for their one hit?

If you’ve been following the usual programmer and tech new sites, you’ve probably read (or at least heard of) Zed Shaw’s rant, titled Rails is a Ghetto. If you haven’t read it yet, go there now, give it a quick read and come back. I can wait.

High-spirited stuff, isn’t it? As you might expect, there have been a number of interesting responses to Zed’s polemic, but only one made me laugh out loud — it’s this entry in Jesse Stay’s blog:

Ruby on Rails is weak right now, it’s breaking apart from the inside. Now is the time for the Perl community to show its strength and unite in an effort to make Perl once again the most used platform on the web!

Perhaps it’s time for Larry Wall to update his maxim about the great virtues of a programmer: it should now be laziness, impatience, hubris and revenge fantasies.

Here’s the report from BlogNation:

PLEASE REPOST

At some time between 7:30 and 8:10 AM on Sunday Morning December 2nd, 2007, Marc Orchant, my fellow author on this blog, as well as one of my closest friends sustained a massive heart attack while working in his home office. At this time Marc is in critical condition at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Critical Cardiac Care Unit, Bed 3. He is not expected to regain consciousness for the next 24 to 48 hours.

I was notified by Marc’s wife, Sue and asked to help notify Marc’s colleagues, friends and other business associates. Marc was scheduled to go to Seattle, WA as well as Ojai, CA this coming week. Obviously he will not be able to attend either event. Those of you that have association with either of Marc’s scheduled appearances at these locations, please notify those that require notice of this turn of events.

According to Sue Orchant, Marc was up early Sunday morning as is his normal custom. Sue told me that he was working in his office from about 7:30 AM until 8:10 when Sue says she heard a strange noise in Marc’s office. When she went to investigate she saw that Marc was not sitting in front of the computer like he normally does and was slumped over between his desk and a small couch that is in the room.

Initially, Sue said, she though he was leaning over doing something to their Golder Retriever but then she realized that he was not conscious. Fortunately, Sue has basic medical knowledge and after verifying that Marc was not choking and had a clear airway she began to perform CPR while their son, Jason, called paramedics.

The ambulance arrived in less than 10 minutes and technicians immediately took over performing CPR and administered treatment with a cardiac defibrillator. Marc was rushed into emergency open heart surgery where an angioplasty was performed to restore circulation in the blocked artery.

Sue went on to tell me that in spite of Marc’s apparent good health, he has severe occlusion in both his other arteries and they too will require treatment soon. That, however is a secondary concern as is the condition of Marc’s heart muscle. The primary concern and the question that cannot be answered until Marc regains consciousness is the nature or extent of any neurological damage as a result of insufficient oxygen reaching Marc’s brain.

While Marc still had what appeared to be normal color when Sue found him she is uncertain as to the exact time that Marc suffered the infarction. It is also unknown if Marc had stopped breathing or been without oxygen for any length of time prior to her discovery of the situation.

Currently Marc’s immediate family as well as his brothers and parents are in or on their way to Albuquerque to be with Marc. Sue has asked me to keep Marc’s colleagues and friends in the technology community updated as information becomes available. Please do not contact Sue for updates. I will publish any information that I have in multiple venues to keep people informed of any changes in Marc’s condition.

For those of you that wish to send flowers, cards, or other gifts, Marc is at:

Presbyterian Hospital
Cardiac Care Unit Bed #3
1100 Central Ave SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106

the hospital switchboard number is 505-841-1234.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Marc and his family in this difficult time. Marc is one of the finest human beings that I have ever had the good fortune to know and I pray that Marc makes a full and speedy recovery.