We three of us in Learnhub, Wesley Moxam, Carsten Nielsen and my self have attended RailsConf 2008 last weekend. It was a great event for sure. After came back, we did a presentation for Toronto Ruby on Rails Project Night yesterday. Here is the presentation file which we’ve used:

| View | Upload your own

More details are on LearnHub Rails Community:

RailsConf 2008 Summary and Review

Toronto, May 10, Sunny, 19°C. A beautiful day after the long long winter.

There is a ZipCar parking spot in front of our building, I’ve been thinking to try them for a while. Finally, I’ve got my zipcard this Monday. So I decided to spend some time with this hot red mini cooper today. It was absolutely an exciting experience and I’ve learned three things:

1. ZipCar is a great solution for occasional driving needs. Reliable and convenient access plus a reasonable price could make our life a little easier and more fun. You just reserve it early, drive it safe and return it on time. After that, you could just forget it until you need it again, so you don’t have to deal with those vampire insurance companies here in Ontario.
2. Mini Cooper is an awesome car. It is beautiful, smart, powerful and big enough. The one I was driving is pretty much the same as the one in the picture. It has some very nice features such as sunroof. Driving mini is a really enjoyable and comfortable experience. I love this car and I am planing to get one when I really need. Well, maybe. If we could have ZENN electric car here?
3. Time is money! (If you return ZipCar late, penalty starts from $50.) Your time is money, every second counts. Even some moments nobody pays you or you don’t pay anybody, they still are. So, if you don’t use it, you lose it, for even.

Wanna give ZipCar a try too?

Savvica Inc announced today the public launch of their e-learning destination, LearnHub.com.

Pretty exciting news for me. Why I am so excited? Well, here is a little secret:

I will start to work for Savvica as a Ruby or Rails developer in less than two weeks.

What is LearnHub.com?

http://learnhub.com/about

LearnHub is for people who love learning and sharing knowledge with others. It is a set of tools that make learning online fun and engaging, and teaching online easy and effective.

Why should you care?

• If you want to learn something:

LearnHub not only helps you learn, but it helps you connect with other students and teachers. A comprehensive reputation system, authority, helps you find reputable teachers, who you can trust.

• If you want to share something:

Communities offer a showcase for your content, and a way to attract attention to your courses and tutoring. Courses allow you to sell your expertise. Tutoring allows you to sell your time. If you’re an expert teacher, LearnHub is the place to go to put up your content and let students find you.

By all means, LearnHub.com will become a new community for all of us, one of a kind community for learning and sharing.

People come to LearnHub.com everyday, but not the same people when they come out.

Want to know more?

• www.learnhub.com
• www.savvica.com
• LearnHub.com launches - Teach and Learn Online
• LearnHub Support

1. Democamp Toronto 17

Democamp Toronto 17 is absolutely another great event again! More than 300 people have attended.

Only want to highlight two here:

• AskItOnline is a online survey system created by Kaitlyn MacLachlan totally on her own. It is a pretty beautiful and useful application. Kaitlyn wins the best demo prize.
• Ignite presentation “The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks” from Tom Purves could be the best ignite presentation in the history of Democamp Toronto so far. Well done, Tom!

Joey Devilla had a very detail post on the schedules, please check it out here. I believe he will post some more tonight soon.

Check out the official site of Democamp Toronto too: http://democamp.info/

2. Adobe Flex 3.0 and Air 1.0

Finally, its On - Flex 3.0 and Adobe AIR 1.0 Are Here!

3. Haxies updated! It works on Leopard!

Haxies - Love it or hate it!

In computing, a Haxie is a term which was coined by developer Unsanity to describe their products. It is a blend of “hack” and “Mac OS X”. Unsanity uses it to refer to “hacks” that are specifically designed for use with its Application Enhancer (APE) software. These are typically small interface and functionality tweaks to the system or existing applications by injecting code into programs as they load.

Until yesterday, all the haxies which come from Unsanity or other companies didn’t work on Leopard, all of them. It is a real pain for somebody who loves these little, cute and useful hack tools, such as me.

After several months hard work, the development team in Unsanity finally bring them back to Leopard today: Enthusiastic Trepidation!

Here are some of them what I use all the time:

WindowShade X. It minimizes your windows on desktop, or shades them.

FontCard. It shows a WYSIWYG font menu for your applications.

FruitMenu. It helps you easily access everything from your menu.

Menu Master. It helps you to create shortcut keys for any menu items of any your applications.

Big day today, by all means!

What’s XPToronto?

The XPToronto/Agile Users Group is a dedicated community of software development specialists located in the Toronto, Canada area. The members of XPToronto are committed to the acceptance of Agile development methodologies, such as Extreme Programming, Scrum and many others.

We usually have discussion meetings on the third Tuesday of every month, except for the months of July and August when we break for the summer. From “Previous Presentations” page you can find a lot of Agile experts and book authors. Such as:

• JB Rainsberge, author of “JUnit Recipes“
• Scott Ambler, author of “Refactoring Databases“
• Mike Bowler
• B.C. Holmes
• Miskin Berteig
• Dmitri Zimine
• Reg Braithwaite
• Barry Gervin
• ……

Yesterday’s meeting is about “Agile Requirements and Planning Using Stories”, presented by Lawrence Ludlow who is current leading the XPToronto community.

Lawrence gave a presentation that he developed in the past to introduce new clients to agile development and how Intelliware approach project scoping and plannin. There was a lot of information and experience sharing.

Anyway, if you missed the workshop, there is one quote from Mr. Ludlow you shouldn’t miss:

How to do Agile planning?

1. Make it work
2. Make it right
3. Make it faster

Want to know more:

• Official website
• XPToronto Facebook group

DemoCamp Toronto 17 will be hosted in Toronto Board of Trade, 1 First Canadian Place again on Monday, February 25th, 2008.

It is open to register now. Please hurry up to get your ticket from http://democamp.eventbrite.com/

If you can’t make it this time, please come back here later. I will cover this event for sure.

What’s Democamp Toronto?

DemoCamp is a variation of the un-conference style of event, started by the TorCamp group as an excuse to have more regular meetings where community members share what they’ve been working on, demo their products, meet others (and share a drink or 3).

What’s TorCamp?

TorCamp is a remarkable community of people in the Toronto area - a community of designers, developers, marketers, PR people, executives, testers, quality assurance specialists, consultants, recruiters, network administrators, business developers, venture capitalists, angel investors, policy analysts, etc. Since the first TorCamp event in November 2005, TorCampers have congregated at least once and often five or ten times a month in conference centers, cafes and parks to share ideas and look for unexpected aha! connections of people and ideas. And it’s not just about BarCamp events: if you look at the hottest things going on in the Toronto Tech community, you’ll usually find a TorCamper among the instigators.

What’s the rule? We have a rule? Yes.

The rules are pretty simple. Demos are 5 minutes. There is generally no Powerpoint for Demos, if there is to be Powerpoint it must be approved by the stewards. Ignite presentations are 5 minutes. They are 20 slides x 15 seconds/slide and the presenter does not have control over the slide advancement. All Ignite decks must be submitted to the stewards before the event.

Should I attend?

• If you want to know what are the hottest things happening in Toronto Tech community
• If you want to show some super cool things you are working on

See you there!

Just came back from Toronto JUG Meeting, we don’t have meeting for almost 4 month already. I really feel I miss it so much.

Toronto JUG meeting is always a fun event to attend, you will have chance to meet a lot of good Java/J2EE Developers from companies around Toronto.

Today’s presentation is given by Eugene Kuleshov , a software developer whom contributes to several open-source Java Projects, such as ASM, Maven and Eclipse. I’ve seen him giving another session about M2 (Maven Eclipse plug-in) a year ago. He is absolute a great Java Developer!

Today’s topis is about Eclipse Mylyn. I’ve used Mylyn for years, back from it was called “Mylar“. I really appreciate this great plug-in from Eclipse Community. Mylyn is a huge time saver and excellent collaborate framework.

What is Mylyn?

Mylyn is a Task-Focused Interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA.

Once your tasks are integrated, Mylyn monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what’s related.

This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylyn also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.

This picture is showing what Eclipse will look like after having Mylyn installed.

What features Mylyn provides?

• Task-Focused User Interface - the interface automatically hides items which are not part of the current task, and keeps track of what items are related to a given task
• Integration with Task Repositories - draws lists of tasks from Bugzilla, JIRA, and Trac as well as several other providers
• Rich editing and transparent offline work - automatic caching of task changes, and automatic synchronization when back online

Want to know more:

• Mylyn official website
• Very detail tutorial from IBM DeveloperWorks: Part1, Part2
• Mylyn FAQ
• Mylyn Extensions - If you are a Ruby, Python or Javascript developer, you can use Mylyn too!

So, go ahead download it, install it and have some fun!

By the way, every JUG meeting will have some job opening announcement. If you are looking from Java job or Java Developers, it is the event to go too.

Here is the list of this month:

• RPM is looking from Sr./Jr. Java Developers
• iLoveReward is looking from Sr./Jr. Java Developers
• Quest is looking from Sr. Java Developes and QA
• TEK Systems as always

Just came back from FacebookCamp Toronto 3. It was absolutely another great event again!

As you can see here, there were more than 400 people from Toronto or around area attended this camp. Actually FacebookCamp Toronto is the biggest Facebook Developer Garage in the whole world so far. Pretty amazing!

I’ve uploaded all the photos I’ve taken onto FacebookCamp Event page, please check out them here: http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=9090547740&view=all

Here is the links to the detail pages:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2411884086 (Group)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9090547740 (Event)

http://barcamp.org/FacebookCampToronto3 (Agenda and detail wiki page)

The actual agenda was pretty much the same as the wiki one, except Dave’s keynote has been moved after “Facebook vs OpenSocial” as he was stuck in the traffic.

• Intro - update from last FBCT (Roy/Colin/Andrew)

Facebook gets bigger and bigger, Facebook users in Canada get more and more…

• Facebook Pages Case Study ( Andrew Cherwenka, Trapeze Media )

Even a Facebook Page can make a success marketing story too!

• Bebo Facebook Application ( Roy Pereira & Colin Smillie, refresh partners )

First website who has licensed Facebook API. Transferring apps from Facebook to Bebo is not that easy now, but it’s getting better.

• Facebook vs OpenSocial ( Jawad Shuaib )

“Write once, run anywhere” is not exactly true. Damn!

• ExtremeVP Introduction (Amar Varma)

I am on Facebook and I am using Mac!

• Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager, Facebook.com

“A lot of big things will happen on Facebook Platform, but I don’t tell you now.”

• Website Marketing in Facebook Case Study ( Tim Shore, BlogTO )

Toronto Faves and Toronto Events, don’t miss them if you are in Toronto too.

• Facebook Beacons ( Jay Goldman, RadiantCore )

Jay Goldman - Author of “Facebook Cookbook”. Check out his blog for more detail information on Facebook Beacons.

Demos: 5 minutes each ( 5 Slots, no more, see you next time)

• Status Competition ( Jerome Paradis, Kim Vallee )

Their status is COOL.

• SceneCaster ( Alain Chesnais, Jonathan James )

3D Scene on Facebook.

• ePresident (Mark Molckovsky, Alex Curelea)

From Facebook President to ePresident.

• Debates (Boxx3G) / (Rethos)

I debate this will be big.

• FREE Conference Call Facebook Application (Alec Saunders)

Serious business conference call for free.

What a wonderful time! See you next camp.

Toronto JUG is the biggest user group in Toronto which was created base on one particular computer language. We have more than 1000 members and have more than 100 members attend monthly meeting. Toronto JUG was formed in 1996 and have a very good domain from 1998 - jug.org. But we lost it at the end of 2007.

Just got a updating email from Mr. Steve Rosenberg, the president of Toronto JUG.

In his email, he said:

The jug.org domain expired, and the notice was sent to a Quest sysadmin who is no longer with the company. So we’ve lost the jug.org domain (somebody snatched it up very quickly!).

So from now on Toronto JUG will start using new domain: http://www.torontojug.org/

Not too bad, maybe even better.

Anyway, the lesson for me is:

Make sure use a reliable email address when register a domain name. Gmail could be a good choice.

Upcoming event:

• Toronto JUG February 2008 Meeting

Task-Focused Programming with Eclipse Mylyn

Current IDEs overload us with tens of thousands of artifacts that make up an enterprise application, and as a result we spend a lot of time searching, scrolling, and navigating through the code. Eclipse Mylyn focuses the IDE to show only the information relevant to the current task. This makes the work with large systems much easier and also helps with switching from one task to another. Mylyn monitors developer’s activity to identify information relevant to the current task, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information and hide the uninteresting. This improves productivity by reducing searching and scrolling, and makes navigation really simple. By making task context explicit, Mylyn facilitates reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise. Task management facilities also provide integration with issue tracking repositories, such as Bugzilla, Trac, JIRA and several others bringing all required information right into the IDE.

Presented by Eugene Kuleshov

Eugene Kuleshov is a software developer with over 15 years of industry experience. Eugene is a committer on Eclipse Mylyn project and an active contributor to several other open source projects, including ASM, Maven and Eclipse. He blogs about various software-related topics at http://jroller.com/page/eu/

Couple of things need to remember about Facebook groups:

1. You have to choose a network which your group belongs to
2. After you click “Finish and View”, you couldn’t change network anymore
3. Only the people are in the same network can join your group

So, here’s one things make sure you do it right at the very beginning:

1. Set Global as the network of your group.

But, if I already created a group and want to change its network, what can I do?

The answer from Facebook is very simple: recreate it.

Today we created a new group for ToRCHI:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7729954398

And the next monthly meeting will be the “Tour of IBM’s Innovation Centre“, make sure add it to your events.