Random Notes from DemoCampOttawa9

All right, I want to jot down a few comments about DemoCampOttawa9 before I go off to bed. Now, I'm a software developer. I'm not a startup entrepreneur, nor an investor, nor someone in any way qualified to comment about how insanely great or ridiculously and laughably stupid a business idea is, so I'll just stick to talking a tiny bit about what I saw tonight. Oh yeah, the pics are up on flickr right here if you're interested, the license is Creative-Commons, and sorry about the wacky colours, it was your typical low-light restaurant / bar room.

DemoCampOttawa is a semi-regular series of meetings where members of the Ottawa high-tech community can go up on stage and show off hardware, software, services they're working on.

First, a big congrats to Alec Saunders for being a smooth and lively host. A nice thing about this evening is that no one that presented was a slick, practiced, PR person - every single presenter was a techy, and that made for an accessible, informal feel.

First up was a presenter from SIMtone. From the demo, they basically seem to rent you a WinXP virtual machine running in a datacenter. You don't just connect over RDP however, they provide a light Java client that runs on very modest hardware that can give you access to your VM instance. The presenter didn't have time to explain how they balanced the hosted VMs across physical boxes, or how much CPU and bandwidth you're allowed to use, etc, but he was accessing it over WiMax and it seemed to work OK. [note: we have WiMax service in Ottawa???]

 

We got an engineer who implemented a GPU on a Xilinx FPGA. He had it running live on a demo board, but didn't go into much detail about whether he was generating the video signal himself too or if he had much extra hardware on there to do that, etc.

This is Richard Mayer from Protecode. He demo'ed an interesting Eclipse plugin and associated web service that fingerprints external code added to your development projects and tracks the licenses under which it's distributed. It seems the big value here is in the massive database of publicly-distributed code they've built up. Their software can identify not only third-party libraries and source files added to a project, but small chunks of code pasted in as well.

 

Martin demoing Stockify, a web app for evaluating value stocks. The app looks at historical P/E ratios and earnings growth of public companies.

And finally, Joel and Pascal from picsphere, which makes workflow-management software for event photographers. We've seen plenty of photo-workflow management apps before, but this one seemed to have novel ways of importing the pictures, keeping them tagged by subject, and allowing instant sales at the point of capture (from what I could see in the demo). They were pretty cool because they really didn't project the condescending elitism you usually get from everyone in the photography industry, they felt more like purveyors of software for a more regular-guy, amateurish market (and probably a much larger one, IMHO).

Phew, that's it. I'll surely attend the next meetup, this was overall an interesting night.

Does Google Desktop Search Have Selective Memory?

For frequently used applications, I have shortcuts (that get indexed by Launchy) and/or aliases set up in SlickRun, which are both fantastic little productivity enhancers.

When it comes to infrequently-used programs, however, I don't have shortcuts to them so I prefer to just use Google Desktop to search for the filename and click the first hit [essentially, I want to use Google Desktop as the 'locate' command under unix]. Sometimes though, it doesn't find what I'm looking for, even though IT'S RIGHT FRACKING THERE ON THE DRIVE:

You might start thinking: "Aha, it just doesn't index filenames in .exe" (even though that would be awfully inconvenient), but that wouldn't be true either:

Sigh.

My tech isn't working the way I want it to tonight. When will I start winning?

Conflict!

This coming Monday (May 26th), there are two events in Ottawa, both starting at 19:00 :

• A showing and then discussion panel on "The Story of Stuff", presented by the Sierra Club Ottawa. The panelists include Tracey Clark, who's the managing director of Bridgehead coffee shops. I'd really like to sit in on this.
• DemoCampOttawa9, the tech event of the month for the Ottawa tech community.

Hmmm. I think I'll probably end up going with the nerds instead of the hippies, but this is one of those nights I really wish I could be in two places at once.

Non-Reciprocal Recognition

Confession: I see people. They recognize me. I don't recognize them.
They'll remember me, I won't.
sucks to be me

A snack-sized bite of Java for tonight

With Java autoboxing, always pay attention to what your primitives get boxed into.

Here's an easy little bug to introduce if you don't pay attention: consider these methods of the Map<K, V> interface:

V put(K key, V value)
V remove(Object key)

So you put a value into a map, and remove it. Easy enough.

Pop Quiz

So what does the following return?

public static String test() {
    HashMap<Long, String> map = new HashMap<Long, String>();
    final long some_key = 1;
    map.put(some_key, "foo");
    return map.remove(1);
}

...

...

...

...

Answer: null.

This is why it's important to remember the definition of the put, get and remove methods. While the generified [nda - yes that's a word, according to the Sun docs] flavour of put(K, V) ensures the key is an instance of K, for whatever K you declared for this generic map, the get and remove methods weren't generified and simply take an Object. This can bite you, as in the above function, where autoboxing essentially caused the following calls to happen, though it probably wasn't the programmer's intent:

    map.put(new Long(1), "foo");
    map.remove(new Integer(1));

Even though Integer(1) and Long(1) have the same hashCode() value, they fail the equals() test, so key lookups when using the wrong wrapper class will always fail. The fix, of course, is to declare your keys as the right type when calling get() or remove(), and be careful, as the method signature will allow anything to be passed in, so you'll never know at compile-time you got it wrong.

 

Happy coding!