Posted by Skrud at Saturday, October 20th 2007 at 8:27pm
I’m a Student Volunteer at this year’s OOPSLA (Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications) conference. It’s the biggest nerd conference that I’ve heard of (and it’s probably safe to say that it’s the biggest programming conference there is). When I showed up today to man the information booth, I flipped through the list of speakers and panelists …
The names at this year’s conference are mindblowing. There are a number of former CUSEC speakers: Dave Thomas, Dave Parnas, Kathy Sierra and Ralph Johnson. I can’t even begin to express how happy I am that Kathy’s back on the speaking circuit! She delivered what was probably the best CUSEC keynote of all time.
But that’s not all, there are guys like Richard Gabriel (this year’s conference chair), Guy Steele, Ward Cunningham, James Gosling and Fred Brooks. And these are just the names that caught my eye at a glance!
Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel are giving a talk together called “50 in 50″, where they talk about 50 programming languages in 50 minutes. I was told not to miss it, and I won’t. :D
This next week is going to be insane.
Tags: computers, conference, events, geek, oopsla, soen, tech | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, March 30th 2007 at 10:03am
The organization of the ImagineCup competition is just shy of appalling. I’m sure it can’t be easy to organize a massive software design competition on an international scale, but still – some things are just plain weird.
It started out innocently enough: Microsoft will book the flight for you, and the hotel, and give you a credit card upon check-in with a $125 limit that you can use for food and taxi to/from the airport.
The semi-finals for North America are being held simultaneously in four different cities. All the Canadian semi-finalists are to compete in Toronto, tomorrow. So here I am, checked in at my hotel. My flight came in around 8:35am. It left Montreal around 7:30am. I was at the airport around 6:30am. I woke up at 5:30am. I went to bed at 4:30am. I got home last night around 3:30am….
I don’t know why my flight was booked at 7:30am, and not - say - 5 in the afternoon. At the time I confirmed the booking, I was under the naive assumption that they would group people together by school and/or starting location and we would all be on the same flight.
Nope. All the other Concordians are on separate flights. Mine is the only one that was ungodly early.
Arriving at Pearson Airport around 8:30am, I got my baggage and hopped into a cab to the hotel. $50 later … and here I am.
So I check in at the hotel, and the front desk clerk says “You are sharing your room with another person …”. That’s okay. I was kind of expecting that. Why would Microsoft book 150 single-occupancy rooms? That makes no sense. Surely, I thought, Microsoft wouldn’t be so vacant as to expect geeks to share a room with a random stranger that they have never met, and would instead lump together people from the same school or city…. I give Microsoft too much credit. I don’t know who Lucas is, but he’s not here yet and I’m kind of weirded out by the lack of tact on the organizers part.
Oh yeah, and the front desk didn’t have any welcome packages, track jackets, credit cards, lanyards, or anything else that I was told they would have for me when I checked in. So they called the Microsoft bookers, and they didn’t know anything about the welcome packages, either. “Maybe you’ll get it when you register,” they said. Knowing when and where to register was something that was supposed to be in the welcome package …
And finally, even though this is an older one, Microsoft requires that you bring your own laptop in order to compete. This in itself is pretty strange, since usually the computer that you use is a controlled variable. They apparently will provide computers for people that don’t have one… but anyway… My laptop is a PowerBook. That is, an Apple PowerBook with a PowerPC processor. I couldn’t run Windows on this even if I wanted to. (Virtual PC is unusable.) No Parallels. No Boot Camp. Some kind friends offered to let me borrow their MacBook Pros, but I declined. First of all, I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s laptop, and secondly – I prefer being a shit disturber.
What I do have is TextMate and Mono. Now all I’ve got to do is memorize the .NET API and I’ll be set. (We’re allowed internet access during the competition, but MSDN is notoriously annoying to navigate.) Plus, if I perform reasonably well, then it’ll just be embarrassing for the people using Visual Studio.
I just got an e-mail from the organizing lady saying that the welcome bags haven’t arrived yet, there was some confusion but it’s sorted out now. ;)
Things to do today:
- Take a nap (and hope Lucas doesn’t barge in and wake me).
- Write a SOEN 337 assignment.
- Party.
Tags: events, geek, imaginecup, microsoft, rants, tech | 2 comments
Posted by Skrud at Monday, January 15th 2007 at 9:34am
The last day of CUTC was a blast, despite the TechTeam presentations early in the morning, and the fact that we didn’t end up winning (I’m only slightly bitter).
The Second Life seminar was interesting despite the fact that I was struggling to stay awake. I really was listening and enthusiastic, I was just tired. Second Life itself seems pretty cool – I like the idea of a development platform, that anyone can use, that just so happens to be in the context of a massively multiplayer game world. I downloaded the client at the hotel so I’ll give it a try sooner or later.
The Google keynote was also pretty good. We learned about a lot about Google’s mobile apps, since that’s what they’re developing in the Waterloo office. We also learned that Google does your laundry and dry cleaning for you, has free mechanics for its employees, and lets you bring your dog (but not cat) to work. The best question at this keynote session was going to win an iPod Video.
I walked up and asked “The problem with mobile apps isn’t lack of innovation, it’s the cost of using mobile internet because of the high fees that telecom companies charge per kilobyte. What’s Google doing to ensure that people can afford to use GMail and Google without paying a ton of money in bandwidth costs, especially for people like the students here who likely won’t have data plans?”
I got a really good answer, too. Google has been working on something called the “Google Transcoder” which essentially dumbs down web pages for your cell phone. This includes the ability to shrink images on Google’s server before it gets transmitted to your phone, saving valuable KB as well as the ability to block images completely.
But I didn’t win the iPod. Some other guy won the iPod and I didn’t even understand what his question was about – neither did the Google speaker. Oh well. I got a consolation prize from Fiona, a Microsoft programmer that was mingling with us throughout the conference. She gave me a handy Microsoft Wireless Optical mouse, because she thought my question was better. Thanks a lot, Fiona!
Finally we had the TechTeam awards ceremony and banquet. Our delegation was dapper as hell.
Our fellows from across the hall at University of Ottawa (and our best friends at the conference) forgot to bring fancy clothes:
But that’s okay, because we got Table 42.
CUTC 2007 was a blast! Thanks to everyone we met and hung out with! It’s a shame the SFU guys couldn’t make it this year, but hopefully we’ll be able to go to their NTCU conference in May.
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, geek, tech, toronto | 1 comment
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, January 14th 2007 at 8:42pm
This year at CUTC they replaced the “ThinkTank” with the “TechTeam”. TechTeam was a competition, where delegates who signed up for a particular team were then split up into groups and given a case study or challenge. On the final day, in the morning, you present whatever it was you were supposed to do and the winning team gets a prize.
The prizes were things like $250 gift certificates to Future Shop for each team member, for example. ATI gave out Radeon 9200 graphics cards (which Matt and Alex won, along with a couple of University of Ottawa students and a Waterloo student). I was on the Intel/Lenovo team. The prize: a Lenovo N100 Laptop for each team member.
I joined a team with four McGill students: Kevin, Yang, Yiming and Francois. Our mission was to bring all the laptops to Montreal. What we had to do was develop a desktop PC solution for a logging (as in forestry) company in northern Manitoba to use outdoors in order to log their logging operations. And we spent many hours working on our design and presentation, and actually showed up in suits for the presentation. I thought we had a fighting chance at getting those laptops.
But alas, we lost to a team that had actually managed to contact people in the forestry industry and professors of social studies at their universities to get some real data, and they had a fancy 3D spinning model.
I still had fun doing the competition, though.
You can look at PDF of our presentation if you’re interested.
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, tech | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Saturday, January 13th 2007 at 8:36am
Day 2 was amazing. The opening keynote from Intel was interesting and fun. Following that was a presentation from General Dynamics about the helicopter they’re designing to replace the archaic, museum-worthy Sea King.
I went to a seminar about The “Cool” Internet, by Prof. Parham Arabi from U of T. He’s been working on projects that attempt add “smarts” to web applications. For example, he presented ModiFace which allows you to upload pictures and mix and match facial features. All you have to do is drag a box around the face – and the software is capable of automatically picking out features like eyes, nose and mouth, and realistically blends them into another face. Another project was ViewGenie which is capable recognizing people or objects in a photo, and then finding those same people in other photos. In the example we saw, the software was able to pick out the same person from the back of his head! It was really interesting, awesome stuff.
Then there was the TechExpo, which is CUTC’s career fair. There were booths for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Siemens, Nortel, Linden Labs, Evertz, Motorola, RIM, and others … I spoke to lots of people and planted a number of resumes. Apparently, Apple is hiring lots of people to work on OS X…
The Linden Labs stuff also looks interesting, since they recently open-sourced the client code to Second Life, and they’re looking for people to work on developing the platform further. I downloaded the Second Life client and I figure I’ll give it a shot. It seems like cool stuff to work on. (If you’re so inclined to give Second Life a shot, make sure you say that “Skrud Salubrius” referred you.)
Dinner deserves a post all its own… for now I’ll just say that we ate at the best restaurant ever.
It turns out there are some University of Ottawa people on our floor, and so we had a good alcoholic hallway sit, chatting and hanging out, while my TechTeam worked on finalizing our presentation for this morning. I ended up checking out the club party at this place called Flirt – and it was pretty damn lame (except for Iourri rocking out like crazy).
Now I’m sitting in my suit, at the breakfast table, waiting for my presentation time. I’ll tell you about the TechTeam after we give our presentation. But you can imagine that if I’m sitting here in my suit, that it’s got pretty high stakes.
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, geek, tech | 1 comment
