(Warning : first pass post; English to be introduction later – maybe. (as good as its going to get) As well as further thought and links)
A good size crowd of 100+ of Toronto greekry (want is a word for horde of geeks?) made it out for the 10th monthly show and tell’s return to the auditorium at MaRs.
1. First up was a project to grade code assignments. lots of good ajax usability touches. all of the expected ajax things, but epically being able to high some line in the submitted code and comment on them (and overlying code comments). There is a screenCast.
Built in python frame TubroGrear. Used in 2 course presently. Beyond its current application it was suggested (by Greg?) it could be used it to comment on code patches ( although managing the comment threads might be visual tricky because of how busy it could get) for open source projects. Almost as an forum for Code Lines. I wonder if you could also use a similar application to grade and mark papers from the other Departments (ie marking my eassy on “Economics in the Novels of Charles Dickens”). As always the cultural issues would be more important than the purely Technical issues.
Good Demo’ing by the team of Sana Tapal (now at Jonah Group) and Andrey Petrov.
Update : this is the home page of the : Online Marking Tool.
2. Quotiki.com : Quote collection website updated for Web 2.0, with user contributed content, Sociablity, Ajax and Tags. The most polished application tonight. Built with Microsoft latest and greatest. Add your favorite quotes, Votes for ones you like or dis, build a Collection see what your friends likes. Trying to build a organic collection of contributed quotes rather than becoming a authoritarian index of. I would expect it to quickly become the place of current pop culture (although not necessary mainstream pop quotes) sourced quotes.
I see only a few things (potentially) missing : More feeds (by Quoter, by Tag, most recent); and individual url’s (uri’s; urn’s) for each quote so I could bookmark them, as well as Del.icio.us/Digg/Reddit them; Maybe let people comment on a quote(?); how about JavaScript widgets so I could place subset (new, popular, my favorites) on my blog ,personal home page or desktop (although having more feeds might allow those to be feed to standard tools that consume feed url’s) .
Richard and Shawn posted Some notes to future DemoCamp presenters on their Blog.
3. BrokenTomb.com. I hope Chris is not feeling too bad, but a combination of technical problems and bad nerves made for a less than polished demo.
BrokenTomb lets you use the Squeak SmallTalk environment + the Sea Side framework (the SeaSide framework was introduced to the Code of Demo Camp 5 when Avi Bryant & Andrew Catton showed off their amazing DabbleDB ) to host a named website to host your smalltalk web application. Unfortunately, Chris was just getting to around show off some code before he ran out of time.
Trust the Code, man! (and always be prepared to run local).
4 Jonathan Lung showed PBJ-Web 0.1;Insprise by Chris Nolan‘s demo of RJS templates at DemoCamp 5, Jonathan Lung was one of the Students who was involved with the Bell Kids’ Help Phone project (also at DemoCamp 5) wort a JavaScript generating toolkit (in Java?) plus hooks to call that toolkit in php which was used in a Tick Tack Toe game (all it the process of avoiding year end exams! – we need to give him more tests!). A small amount of surface code leading to a large amount of functionality. All and all a impressive example of boot strapping. (and procrastination).
I wish Jonathan had provided a link to his work, and the DemoCamp 10 page had listed his name.
5 Sacha Chua showed off what can be done in the scriptable environment, in this case emacs, as she went from Text editor, to a.i. doctor, to game engine to task / email organizer and beyond. Sacha was six feet tall on that stage, even though she did not actual levitate at anytime (although she came close, as always). A Tour de force of the Emacs, a text editing tool built in a interpreted lisp language environment, bascially a personalized productivity platform which allows for massive customization.
Sacha had the crowd entertained and enthralled. (Sacha blogged her own impressions and mentions that Emacs was speaking to her!) Seconded!
In the back of the room the lads of JobLoft.com (who presented at Demo Camp 8) where watching and got a round of applause after last weeks showing on CBC’s Dragons Den.
The proceedings where video’d by Puppy Machine Productions and a video podcast of Episode 1 is on YouTube. See technorati and other fine blogs for more like: Greg’s Congrat’s (I want to see his Python powered Text editor do what Emacs did!) ; Found in Translation : Back @ MaRS. Sacha also has a set of notes for the other Demo Camp presentations.
DemoCamp 11 will be on November 20th again at MaRS.
Update: via David Crow, comes word the Toronto Weekly News Magazine NOW has declared BarCamp as Best do-it-yourself conference and mentions it little brother, the monthly, DemoCamp.
Nice review of the night. Good ideas for Quotki.com, some of them are already in the works (widgets, more RSS). We are having a little bit of difficulty with the personal URLs in our current hosting environment, trying to keep costs down at this stage. If traffic keeps picking up, we should be able to get dedicated hosting!