Stack Overflow DevDays was a one day platform-neutral web developer conference, discussing everything from new languages and technologies to general theory on software development and the business of software development.

A public discussion of the Toronto Dev Day is available here, complete with the audio of a few of the speakers:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/27151/devdays-reviews-toronto

Topics of the day:

Joel Spolsky (Fog creek Software, Stackoverflow) discussed Elegance in User Interface Design, and the tension between giving users lots of options (more power) and the decision paralysis that can come from “asking the user too many questions.” He pointed out that many of the questions and options that appear in most applications via settings menus or pop up boxes are mostly things that really don’t need to be asked (such as “would you like to check for new software updates?”)  – they are things that simply get in the way of a user performing a task. In the example of software updates, why not just check and update them silently? The average user does not really care what version of software they are using.

Other examples of bad UI design given were the Windows Vista UAC dialog (where every time you try to do something, the screen goes dark and you are asked “Are you sure?”) and the Dancing Pigs problem, as well as a music website with a search dialog box where you type in a term, but then have to choose from a dialog box wheter the term is a song, artist or album (Why can’t the application just search in all three places?).

Barry Gervin and from Joey Devilla from Microsoft were next, discussing the ASP.NET MVC Framework. This is a framework built on the Microsoft stack, which simplifies the menial tasks that most developers go through whenever building a modern web application. For instance, querying from a database to display results on a webpage are greatly improved, and within a couple of clicks most of the code is generated for you. This is something I’ve always liked about the Microsoft frameworks; setting up the basic things that you normally have to write over and over again in other languages is quick and easy, and gives the developers more time to spend on actually building the logic for the site and other features. It also simplifies tasks like modern SEO techniques such as relevant paths for pages (http://fakesite.com/products/games/nintendo/ or http://fakesite.com/user/edit ).

Jordan Baker (Plone, Scryent) gave a very insightful introduction to the Python scripting language. His demo included a Spell checker written in 21 lines of code. It covers everything from extra letters, missing letters, transpositions (letters in the wrong order), and replacements (an Q typed instead of a W). The spellchecker was accurate up to a distance of two (meaning a word could have two different problems with it). This example was given to illustrate Python’s strength in list manipulation – it is very easy to write loops for reading, writing to and checking values in long sets of data.

Ralph Whitbeck gave a demo of jQuery, a technology already used on tvo.org, the upcoming drupal integrations of the new websites, as well as several Ideashaker projects. While I was already farmilliar with it, I am still new to this Javascript library, so it was nice to confirm based on his walkthroughs that I was not missing anything or doing anything incorrectly.

Joel came back out to give a live demo of FogBugz 7, a suite of tools for software bug tracking. While this was more a sales pitch then anything else, it did strengthen his presentation from the start of the day, illustrating some great UI design choices: The entire web app is cross browser compatible, can be used entirely via the keyboard with the tab key (makes data entry much faster), and uses things like Bayesian filtering to learn which users should be assigned certain emails and tasks based on their previous history.

Greg Wilson (U of T) gave a presentation about the history/future of software development, and how it should be compared to areas of academia such as medicine, specifically the methodologies used to build software and the way we benchmark these practicies. He cited several studies regarding several project management styles and methods as they pertain to software development. Some of them include:

• Most errors occur during analysis and design. The later they are removed, the more expensive they are.
• For every 25% increase in problem complexity, there is a 100% increase in solution complexity
• The two biggest causes in project failure are poor estimation and unstable requirements
• If more than 20-25% of a component has to be rewritten, it is usually better to rewrite it from scratch.
• Inspections can remove 60-90% of errors by reading code before the first run. The first hour of code review is the most important.
• Code Maintenance is 40-80% of the cost of a software project.
  • 30% of the time is spent figuring out how the code works.
  • 60% is code enhancements.

And one of the most important ones to me:

• Physical Distance between project participants has no bearing on post-release faults. However, distance on the company org chart DOES.

This can apply directly to projects the Ideashaker works on, as almost all of our projects work with other departments (web encode, the web teams, producers, etc). It is important to have clear communication early and often with all these teams to make sure that everyone is on the same page at all stages of the project.

At the end of the day, Reginald Braythwayt gave a chat on the differences on programming languages and how they reflect how we think about software development. Specifically, he is implementing features in Ruby to “rewrite” the language in ways that reflect how he thinks about code.

Overall It was a great day of workshops. It not only shed some light on new technologies in the web development world, but also gave me some things to think about when it comes to project management and software design.

These days however, I’ve been a little more stretched for time and there are some personal tasks I would like to accomplish during my commute. For the last few months, I have been listening to and watching podcasts (stackoverflow, The Hollywood Saloon, Layers TV, and The Agenda to name a few), but have since found the desire to get some reading done on the bus. Not books mind you, but blogs and articles that have been bookmarked on my desktop for months, even years, that I originally saved with the intent of reading “one day.”

My original impulse was to look for a tablet. No keyboard, just the screen, the stylus and wifi. Unfortunately, due to my limited knowledge of tablets, I didn’t realize that the only readily accessible form of tablet (read: available at best buy or future shop), was in the form of tablet PCs. Having never really used a tablet before (I have attempted to play with a Wacom Graphire4 4×5″ in Photoshop and illustrator before, to varying degrees of failure), I really wanted to try one out, to see if it was the right thing for me, as most of what I plan on doing during the commute is reading.

After about a week of researching, I decided upon the HP Pavilion tx2500 line. Several sites gave it favourable reviews, stating that it more or less does exactly what I what I need it to do. After some debating I went with the tx2508CA, running Vista 32-bit, which was the deciding factor. Having never really utilized vista before (my girlfriend’s laptop the exception; which doing certain tasks while still accustomed to the “old way” of doing things proved difficult), I was prepared for some struggles, but with the exception of installing Visual Studio 2005 it seemed to go smoothly.

Before I began, I searched Wikipedia and MSDN regarding any problems with the install.

I found no issues.

My bad.

Turns out I should have looked harder. The install crashed about halfway, during the installation of MSXML6. After several hours of research online, I discovered that VS2005 crashing during install on Vista is not only a common occurrence, but it doesn’t always crash the same way. There is also no silver bullet to fix or avoid this.

The way I solved it was via a series of steps (Edit: link attached) involving installing a series of helper apps on the VS CDs (such as MSXML6) before running a repair install on VS. Then, apply the SP1 update, and the Vista update patch. The next time I have a clean install of Vista, I will attempt to install the helper apps first, followed by a clean install.

So how is it? As of day 4, excellent. The tablet functionality was exactly what I was looking for, with regards to reading. For those curious, I have installed Firefox 3 with Scrapbook and FireGestures, which easily allow for temporarily saving and reading offline content such as bog posts. I have yet to try programming on it (That will probably be tomorrow’s test – my mother has been after me to finish an inventory tracker for her that I started last July and put on hold indefinitely once “real work” picked up), but even if that doesn’t work out, I think I’m sold on this product. The stylus, while obviously taking some getting used to, is quite practical on the bus, and the added touch screen functionality (placing your finger on the screen pops up a “virtual mouse” that you can use for both right and left clicking) is great. I’m also a fan of Pen Flicks which (again, after some trial and error) allow you to page up and page down with simple gestures. I read several backlogged bookmarks yesterday without the use of any input device beyond my hand, which on the bus is fantastic.

I’m also working to master OneNote, a tool which I had seen limited use with back in college, but since reading up on it the other day, I now think is the greatest tool ever created – we’ll see how long that lasts. The laptop comes with a 60 day trial of Office 2007, which is really only a “open an office application 25 times or less” trial, which I think is a little hypocritical. I picked up Office 2007 the other day, but have decided to try OneNote out in trial mode first before I commit (I am currently writing this blog post in OneNote).

If you are looking for a lightweight PC for reading on the go, I would highly recommend trying out a tablet PC, specifically the HP Pavilion models. They’re small and lightweight, something that I have never liked about the recent trend of “portable desktops.” While sometimes the glare makes it a little difficult to read on the screen, usually just repositioning the angle fixes it.

Now I just need to master the stylus and track pad, two things I have put off doing for about a decade now.

The first thing he did was define “web 2.0″ for he class as nothing more than a marketing term. Its about time an “industry insider” actually admitted this point. I’ve heard countless “professionals” toss this term around and lost of people I know who are less-computer savvy think of it as a new technology. Wayne defined web 2.0 as follows:

• encourage community & collabaration
• shared content creation
• focus on a single task
• clean, clear interface,
• supports tagging / bookmarking
• moves data and apps from desktop to web

The last point is one I found interesting; for years people were using desktop applications, and around 2002-2004 there began a shift to move desktop apps to web interfaces (currently I am writing this blog post in google docs, and once all my thoughts are organized I will paste the contents into wordpress). In the last year or so however there have been numerous attempts to bring web-based applications back to the desktop. In particular, Wayne seems very hyped about Adobe AIR, a technology that I like, but at the same time have noticed one or two pitfalls with (the lack of threading support that a language such as c++ or Java can utilize proved to be a major problem for my client project last semester). When I asked him his thoughts on this trend, he stated that “different tools can get used for different reasons” and that both technologies can co-exist. While I agree with this sentiment (I am currently not using my personal computer, hence the use of google docs and not Microsoft Word), I find this contradictory with Dan the Man’s “Mutlimedia Pioneering is more than just taking something that already exists and modifying it” stance.

Wayne then gave us a quick rundown of web 2.0 technologies such as tagging (he cited an example of how social norms dictate how things are labeled: Photos from the New Orleans Hurricane are easier to find when tagged as “Katrina”), del.icio.us, rss, and “embed code” (which allow less-savvy computer users easily update their websites with muliimedia. He also broke down some “social rules”:

you dont use a social network, you become a part of it

If you are a company trying to “cash in” on a social network, you will fail if you are not actually a part of the community and instead just try to force your product down people’s throats.

contribution is participation

This goes back to the first point; If you don’t contribute to the community, then you really aren’t a part of the community, regardless of you membership.

social media encourages engagement & evangelism

Wayne cited an example of a group of sheep eating grass; if one farmer is a douchebag then he can let his sheep destroy the entire field, whereas if everyone does their part for the “common good” then the community lives on.

social media:

• is local first
• is viral
• is granular
• is a conversation, not a broadcast
• is mobile
• wants to be free

He also discussed many 2.0 technologies. One that Wayne was very passionate about and kept returning to was Twitter, and kept telling us how wonderful and fascinating the twitter experience is for anyone not involved (for those not aware, the idea is that anyone can know what you are thinking at any time). Well, a quick search through Wayne’s archives found some gems from before and after he spoke to us. I would never want to get involved with something that ARCHIVES your thoughts for all to see. I also would think there would be a problem of professionalism when you rant and rave about this that and the other thing on a public forum. Additionally, didn’t we have a speaker last week in Andrew’s Project Management class who spent a good deal of time slamming the maturity level of most Twitter users?

Finaly, Wayne briefly touched upon some of the following technologies:

• iPhone SDK
• Flash on iPhone
• Android
• Sprout – WYSIWYG editor for flash
• ning, toolkit for “creating facebook”
• jaiku – “social life feed”
• Mogulus – a real time web based tv studio for creating live web tv shows.

He also touched upon the current Facebook Beacon controversy, something I have been following since about December. Its good to see that someone other than myself is concerned about Facebook’s pitfalls.

Wayne was a very engaging speaker, but I felt he left me very confused in the end. Wayne does not appear to even have his own website, and instead jumps on every social media bandwagon out there (a quick google only came up with his name attached to social media sites). While his argument is that in this day and age community is everything, personally and professionally I do not seen any forseeable future where an IT professional would not have a web site, if not even to just store links to all of his social media communities. We also mentioned “not becoming a slut to social media” which, to me, he very clearly is.

Additionally, I am curious when and if there will ever be any form of “social network convergence” where you can keep everything together in one place; right now I find alot of these social media places redundant, and full of redundant information. I assumed the world wide web and in particular “web 2.0″ was supposed to be about ease of use. Right now everyone puts all their photos on flickr, bookmarks on del.ico.us, video on youtube, and status on twitter, and then puts all that information AGAIN on their facebook or myspace anyways.

That’s one of the reasons I have never got much into the whole “social community” trend. I post on applicable message boards, I have a facebook account, and I rate films on IMDB. That’s about it. Perhaps its because I have always had a programming background; if I ever required somewhere to store my photos, I could just write a photo album script and place it on my server and tweak it to my own needs. If i needed a blog, I could install wordpress on to my own server, and not have to worry about Facebook or myspace slowing down to a crawl during peak hours.

Finally, here is a video of Wayne’s more or less talking about the same sorts of things to another group of people I am sure he talked about on Twitter afterwards.

Once we make our way to Adelaide Street (for 10:45, the tour starts at 11), we quickly realize that this is going to require some work to pull off. We circle downtown Toronto for about 10 minutes searching for #317 before deciding to park in a lot and continue our Journey on foot. We find a spot and high five each other in celebration, only to discover that Kilian & her merry band of travelers have decided to pounce on that spot before we can. At least we’re not alone any more.

While finding a spot elsewhere in the lot, “Team (an)Drew” says Hello as they appear, and instantly disappear. We pay the happy man in the booth (I assume he’s happy because he’s making a living charging people $3 per half-hour for parking) and the five of us (Heather, Brook, Karen, Kilian & myself) begin our eastbound trek to GestureTek.

After 5-10 minutes of hiking, we realize that due to the building numbers becoming further and further from 317 we are most likely heading the wrong way. We encounter an unknown passerby who as we pass him says “You appear to be lost!” Not only is he willing to help us out, but he knows exactly where GestureTek is. Indeed, we were traveling in the wrong direction.

It turns out that GestureTek’s offices were literally on the west side of the parking lot. Our bad. As we enter the building (which appears to be under renovation; similar to the hotel in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York) I expected to be hit by swinging paint cans or trip over strategically placed micro machines. My worries were soon gone once the elevator opened and we journeyed to the ninth floor.

We arrive and are quickly ushered into the back room of the GestureTek offices. It appears that we have arrived late, as Vincent John Vincent (President/Founder) is busy showing off his company’s neat toys.

We start with a videogame, which utilizes green screen technology. As we arrived late, I did not manage to catch all the details, but the camera seems to recognize your image from the green screen and put you right into the game. As you move around (either walking, or by using gestures such as waving your arms) the camera picks up your movements and changes the output of the game. Interestingly, this is similar to technology used by Weather Services International, or more specifically, TV Weather Men/Women.

Vincent also cited some examples of television shows using primitive versions of this technology: One game show for Nickelodeon involved players running through a virtual obstacle course which was nothing more than a 30′x30′ wall, with some platforms, staircases, and ladders (all covered in green), and the difficulties would appear on screen. While he could not remember the name, some quick searching revealed it was Nick Arcade, a 1992 videogame-themed children’s game show. What is interesting about this is that while the technology has been around for that long (and obviously longer in the case of TV weather persons), it is still not readily available to the public, nor has anyone found a popular “personal use” application for this stuff yet.

We got a chance to play with their GestureFX technology, which are different renditions of the same hardware: GroundFX, TableFX & WallFX all work similarly, it just depends on where the cameras are positioned (on the ceiling looking down, on a projector looking at a wall, etc) and what the output device is (a screen facing up, a projected image, etc). The Interactive floor uses IR, and is designed to ignore the projected image and only pick up the differences (such as hand movement, or foot movement). What’s neat is that most of the applications written were used in Flash (see video).

I find it interesting that the main example used for the interactive table is Pong. It appears that civilization peaked in 1972.

GestureTek’s Newest venture is GestureTek Mobile, which incorporates movement detection into cellphone cameras. It allows the movement of the phone to be used similarly to a wii controller. I think this has some great potential for innovation in cell phone applications & games. You could use the phone as a controller instead of a straightforward input device.

We then ended our journey with a trip back to Oakville, where a lunch at Kelseys (where a hero did not have to wait an hour for his food for the first time ever) and Flash ActionScript review and learning was in abundance.

Finally, here are a few more links associated with Gesture Technology:

• Handy future for gesture sensor
• Gesture Glove Not Science Fiction

I’d like to at least make one post per day of class (so tuesdays-fridays), but I don’t think anyone out there really wants to read “all about little Jeffy’s day at school.” Those are precisely the type of blogs that I don’t read. That would mean that I would need to give insightful discussion regarding something learned (or not learned) that day. But then we move to the topic of “what constitutes insightful discussion?”

This blog has been created at the request of Dan (hereby known as Dan the Man), with an attempt to (i guess) inspire us to reach out and communicate with others not only in our class, but around the world. Obviously discussing course-related materials is a given, but where to draw the line? I guess time will tell, as I try to get better at collecting my thoughts.

I presume that I will also use this blog for non-educational purposes. Perhaps mini film reviews will make their way online. Over at the naature forums, there is a “20 second movie review” thread where I occasionally post; maybe I’ll begin to move those over here as a more permanent record.

I’m also hoping to figure out how to incorporate this blog onto anti-pattern’s main page. I’m pretty new to Wordpress as demonstrated in my first post, so that should be an interesting goal to try and figure out. anti-pattern is in dire need of a redesign; I quickly threw up a layout just to get something online while I got the back end code working. Most of the code is fully alive now; so now I need to make it pretty.

I think most of the time I’m just going to just stop writing, instead of coming up with clever sign offs.