Presentations on Toronto BARCAMP / DEMOCAMP, March 28, 2006, agenda

• Semacode , (Java ME) - Any cell phone with digital camera and Java ME can be turned into Semacode (special kind of barcode) reader. Simon Woodside presented Semacode and gave a demo. Quite amazing progress given many general Java ME issues, like: slow processor speed, limited memory, truncated Java API and vendor quirks in Java ME implementations.
   
• Disposable Digital Cameras, (?) - Randy Glenn gave a demo showing how to hack into digital disposable cameras sold at the variety stores across North America. Hacking allows the reuse of camera, USB access, and who knows what else. I am not sure why we did not have in-depth discussion and the hands-on hacking session after the meeting! I can't even count how many things I could hack into if I learned how to do it from Java...
   
• Visual Search, (?) - Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore gave a demo of a Visual Search. The audience was shocked and surprised when they showed how their product finds 1/2 inch crop of a larger picture smuggled into the newspaper front page. Given what I know about difficulties of the DNA sequence analysis and the text similarity searches from my days at ACD/Labs this product development team rocks! Beowulf cluster does the job, but I am sure they will be hit by the raising electricity costs as the power consumption of the cluster goes up and up with every new customer...
   
• Social Q/A Website, (?) – A very simple concept behind this: all people have question, other have free time and might answer them.
   
• Outmailer, (Ruby On Rails) – If I am not mistaken, this was Ruby On Rails learning exercise.
   
• tag-Engine, (PHP 5) – Josh Davey gave a demo of a this exciting new library. This is all about letting the Power Users to directly customize the content of their web pages. The Power User hates forms as considers them way too simple, but makes too many errors while using true programming language. The Power User needs simplified programming environment. This is what Excel is on Windows... The implementation of tag-Engine-like thing is quite difficult, especially in PHP. No doubt a lot of work went into the grammar, abstract-syntax tree, evaluator, error reporting to the user, runtime performance, and coordination of presentation view with meta-model. Very difficult job indeed! These kinds of skills are very rare, and there is no surprise that John Lam and Josh Davey are rumored to be working together now.
   

Final word
This was the first DemoCamp / BarCamp I attend and was greatly impressed. Over 100 people in the room, all quietly listening about Java-tag libraries done in PHP... Unbeliavable! I live in the city since 1997 and have never seen one of these! The high gas prices have probably caused this, I guess.