Democamp 15 and ConceptShare

Democamp 15 took place last Monday (Oct 29) at the Great Hall of the University of Toronto’s Hart House, and I went with high expectations after hearing all that good stuff about the previous Democamp. Sadly, I had to leave early –and rather unsatisfied– before the Ignite presentations, which I was looking forward to.

My dissatisfaction came from two issues. First, although the Great Hall is one of my most beloved places in all of Toronto, it didn’t click with the Torcamp community. It felt too solemn for a more “open mic night” crowd, which led to demos that at points almost felt like lectures; and it strained to provide the infrastructure to support A/V requirements that are taken for granted by computer geeks.

Second, some of the demos lacked soul, passion. Others lacked substance. These are the two things that keep drawing me back to the Democamp nights –talented people unassumingly presenting cool new stuff they obviously care deeply about–, and they were largely absent from the demos. (Perhaps if I sticked around for the second half I would’ve seen it, but then I won’t ever learn the guitar if I keep skipping my lessons.)

(OK, my dissatisfaction came from three issues really. Why did nobody from U of T took advantage of the opportunity and presented a cool demo in our own turf?)

However, for the last demo of the day we had the folks from ConceptShare, and they’ve grown ever more impressive. ConceptShare –a web-based service for discussing graphic designs and websites, and for leaving a trace of these discussions documented– is beautiful, slick, and professional. The company is clearly passionate about their work. And as I wrote before, their service can clearly be used for requirements elicitation and prototyping.

ConceptShare wasn’t the only great thing about the night. We had Joey de Villa and his accordion saving the show through one of its A/V glitches with a geek treatment of Radiohead’s “Creep”; and I had the opportunity to meet and talk to very smart, interesting people. Hope to catch the Ignite presentations next time around.

Indian march

While on the road from Agra to Delhi, we saw thousands of people blocking two of the four lanes. They were marching towards Delhi, and many were waving green and white flags.

There were a lot of them, and we wondered whether they’d make it to Delhi before we left (or worse, the same day of our flight). According to the BBC news website, they finally made it to Delhi –a full week after we took off:

“About 25,000 protesters have arrived in the Indian capital, Delhi, after marching 325km (200 miles) to demand the redistribution of land.”

It was a good thing that we missed them, too:

“They plan to hold a huge protest on Monday, which they say will bring the centre of Delhi to a standstill.”

(An aside: The BBC’s pictures look colorful and pictoresque –see the one below. No idea how they managed to take them; the whole thing looked gritty and urgent to me.)

Leon on the map

Until recently, I thought of Google Maps and its competitors as useful only for the lands I came to after leaving Mexico — great for the US and Canada, but zooming in on Mexico produced a low-definition blot with no streets or city names. (Do you remember the old days when zooming out showed only North America and the UK surrounded by one huge ocean, the rest of the world sunken down?)

A couple of months ago, when I last checked, Google Maps had extremely detailed street information of the US south, but everything was abruptly truncated south of the border. But yesterday, while tracking maps of the California fires, I noticed that street and city names had been added to the database. Would my hometown, Leon, appear now on the map? I started to investigate, and what I found surprised me and made me melancholic:

My old neighbourhood! In the full screen map I can see the hospital where I was born, my parents’ house, the cul-de-sac where we played sports, my elementary school, the places where my grandfathers died… I spent hours just contemplating the map — something I imagine many Americans and Canadians did a couple of years ago, but only available to me now.

The street’s are off by about 50 meters, and the grid has several imperfections, which I believe is relatively common. But the definition is much better and a huge improvement over the nowhere-land maps of a couple of months ago. Lovely!

I grew curious and went to other cartographic services:

This is from Microsoft’s Live Search Maps. The satellite view still shows an ugly low-definition image, but the road view is significantly more accurate than Google’s, and it includes neighbourhood names, which is a nice addition.

Finally, Yahoo! Maps:

Yahoo’s image is slightly more crisp than Google’s, but their road view is still an absolute disaster: no streets, and it doesn’t even get the urban blot right:

For street names search, all three services still fail, but at different levels:

• Yahoo! doesn’t have the street database yet, so searching for addresses is pointless.
• Google does, but querying for a street address throws back a “not found” message. Annoyingly, even city searching doesn’t work well: “Leon, Mexico” returns a small town in Mexico’s northeast, not the city most Mexicans would be expecting to get.
• Microsoft comes out slightly better than Google: the street address search fails, but at least it gets the “Leon, Mexico” search right.

What I found most interesting about all this is that it’s a snapshot of the three companies racing to refine their maps of places around the world. They’re being fast, and perhaps by my next visit to Mexico all three (or at least Google and Microsoft) will have correct and crisp maps of my hometown. Perhaps the whole world will be searchable soon after.

Syntax error

At least worth a chuckle:

(via Global Nerdy)

It’s like being in Arcade Fire!

I like The Arcade Fire, but I can see where the latest strip from the webcomic “The Non-Adventures of Wonderella” is coming from:

Presenting at CASCON today

I’m presenting a short paper today at CASCON, on “Discovering the Shared Understanding Dynamics of Large Software Teams“. I co-authored it with Ramzan Khuwaja, from the IBM Toronto Lab, and with Steve Easterbrook. We’ll also have a cute poster with elephants and a summary of the paper –hope you can drop by to either the talk or the poster and say hi.

RE’07 presentation slides

If you’re curious about our RE’07 paper, “Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it“, but can’t bring yourself to read Academese, here are the presentation slides. It’s not the same, of course, but it’ll give you an idea of what the study is about.

Triangular wheels

Heard on the RE’07 conference, regarding the problems of blindingly adopting a set of metrics and trying to optimize them:

“Triangular wheels, then, are a great improvement over rectangular wheels –they significantly reduce the number of bumps you get.”

RE’07 in Delhi — got an award!

The 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference has just wrapped up. There were some wonderful papers, which I’ll write about once I return home, and I have lots to say about the socials and the city, but for now I just wanted to announce that the paper that I co-authored with Steve Easterbrook and Greg Wilson, “Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it” has won the first ever “Most Innovative Paper Award” of the Requirements Engineering Conference series. Thanks to everyone that participated in the study, and yay for us!

Going to Delhi!

I’m heading off to the International Requirements Engineering Conference in Delhi, India. If we haven’t met, perhaps we should! Drop me a note and we’ll set something up.

(photo by babasteve)