Posted by admin on Jun 23, 2007 in
Whatever Last night was the Flickr party to celebrate the launch of the i18n and of the “24 hours of Flickr” book. There was plenty of cool YULblog and Flickr friends, great music (Ghislain Poirier was the DJ), good food, good booze, lots of schwag and some Mac Mini where you could upload your photos of the party on-the-spot to Flickr =) I was glad to chat a bit with Aaron and Simon, two of the core software engineering team in San Francisco. I also met with Sol Lang and his wife that I only knew from their wonderful photos on Flickr.
Thanks to Katz for invite me.
Lots of photos of the party
A short video taken by Martine
Posted by admin on Jun 17, 2007 in
Whatever (This a response to Olivier’s post inquiring about the state of copyright laws in Canada and how we compare with the US DMCA.)
Thinking about copyright laws in the digital era reminds me of the Copyright 2005 conference where Richard Stallman was invited to talk about the bill C-60 (An Act to amend the Copyright Act in Canada). I wrote a piece on my blog back in July 2005.
So the question is: what has happened since then ? The Liberals presented a first reading of Bill C-60 back in Jun 2005. Then bill C-59 (An Act to amend the Criminal Code (unauthorized recording of a movie)) has passed on June 13th. This is all a big mess and I admit that I don’t understand everything, but you can read more and follow closely what is and what will happen soon on this site. It appears that the conservatives were thinking of presenting a new version of the bill in April, but it probably got delayed because of the fight over the budget…
This is a pretty big deal. We all know what happened after the introduction of the DMCA and the relentless overboard efforts to extend copyright protection (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) in the US. Hopefully, since the turn of the new millennium good things also happened with initiatives like Creative Commons, which I proudly and strongly advocate.
Posted by admin on Jun 13, 2007 in
Internet,
Techno,
Travel / MIT,
Travels So I’m back in Montreal after 5 crazy days attending O’Reilly Where 2.0 and Google Developer Day 2007. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in the Silicon Valley. There was so much information given during the numerous talks at Where 2.0 that I cannot summarize everything, but I am going to try to give you the highlights. By the way, all the links to stuff discussed were posted to my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with “where2007″.
Tuesday kicked off with a talk by Schuyler Erle, which I had met at London WSFII two years ago. Schuyler is author of O’Reilly Mapping hacks, Google Maps hack and one of the developers behind the awesome open source Google Maps-replica, OpenLayers. He tagged about his experience with community “remapping”, that is when citizens create public domain maps using GPS tracks. He made great contributions to OpenStreetMap and more recently mapped streets of Mumbai, India. Mumbai is often referred to as a “Maximum city”, because of its incredibly densely sparsed population. Interestingly enough, this month’s issue of IEEE Spectrum also covers the topic of mega cities engineering. I can imagine that Schuyler’s work in Mumbai will be helpful to urban planners in this mega city that has big space allocation problems. Schuyler also discussed his idea that maps tell stories, that is to say that maps are great to use as a base layer for displaying data (example). (Read more on O’Reilly Radar)
Next up was Topix, a website that uses some sophisticated machine learning techniques to add locative metadata to blog posts, newspaper articles etc… Their categorization engine uses Tiger/Line data, lists of city mayors, park names, bodies of water, city demonyms etc… to identify locations, cities, places that the article is talking about and/or is from. For instance, you can choose to search for any blog posts, news stories or forum posts from or about Montreal.
Next up John Hankey, founder of Keyhole, now Google Earth, addressed Google’s contribution of KML as an open standard spec. through OpenGeoConsortium in 2006. He discussed their vision of the geoweb as they are working on Google Maps and Google Earth. They launched Google Street View on that day, which I think is pretty damn cool (look below on Immersive Media for more details on the technology used). He showed a cool demo of how Google Maps Mapplets can be used to create mashups of mashups (or meta-mashups), that is to combine many layers of data from various sources on the same Google Map (the key point here is that developers don’t need to coordinate, because they all use a common interface required by the Mapplets API).
Next up Quakr a website that displays geotagged Flickr photos on a 3d world map (kinda like Google Earth as a flash app in the browser). I didn’t think it was all that interesting (especially when there are KML feeds of Flickr photos that you can use to display the data on the map you prefer…). One thing that I remember though is that the guy said that a big problem with current use of tags / metadata is that it is often too simple to give proper semantic disambiguation, that is tell apart photos “taken FROM the Eiffel tower” and “OF the Eiffel tower”. Obviously it’s the fundamental idea behind all the work on Semantic Web standards (like RDF), but I still haven’t seen a fool-proof user interface to let users add this kind of metadata.
I’m skipping details on some less interesting talks…
Next up some rep. from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) gave an interesting talk on the privacy implications of all these location-based technologies on government surveillance… Poor U.S citizens :-p He showed a nice slide with a modified AT&T logo with their new slogan “AT&T. Your world. Delivered to the NSA”. 
I was glad to hear Christopher Schmidt from MetaCarta talk about OpenLayers. OpenLayers is an awesome open source project that aims to create a vendor neutral abstraction to all map API (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MS Virtual Earth) and all open standards feeds (KML, WMS, GeoRSS…). I have been following this project for over a year, so I was glad to actually talk to some of the developers.
It’s impossible for me to give a summary of everything that we saw, but I suggest you look at my Flickr photos for the trip and del.icio.us bookmarks.
On tuesday night Sonya and I set up our booth for the Where Fair, which was in the lobby next to the main conference room. O’Reilly had printed a very nice poster with the description of iFIND. We talked to so many people that night, it was awesome. 
I really enjoyed explaining what iFIND does and how it works to some amazing people. Everybody who came to our booth seemed genuinely interested. Among others, I showed it to people from Nokia Research, Intel Research, Google, uLocate, Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab and MetaCarta. I had prepared a modified version of the iFIND client to simulate how it works on campus. I also had prepared a screencast video so that Sonya could also demo the software to other people on her computer.
The Where Fair lasted for three hours, then we headed to the bar where Skyhook was organizing their “annual beer bash”, basically free beer for everybody :-). 
We mingled with a lot of people and had a great time (though the party ended pretty early… something like 1am… well there was still one day left). We spent most of our time with the cool guys of Poly9 from Quebec City.
Highlights from day two:
Giving more details on the technology behind Google Street View, Toronto-based Immersive Media showed their 11-cameras capturing device. 
They actually use standard high-def. video sensors and capture at 30fps then their algorithm stitch frames together. They offer a 3U type server that captures the massive amount of data and adds GPS metadata. 
The guy said that their latest version of the hardware is able to give 1-inch resolution at 50 feet !
Another exciting moment was when Google Earth’s CTO demoed his Apple iPhone with Google Maps ! 
Unfortunetaly, since then we learned that the iPhone does NOT contain a GPS unit, nor does it will have access to GSM-based triangulated position… 
I have to say that I have been pretty impressed with the venue where the conference was held, the professionalism of the crew, attention to details and the quality of the speakers. Sonya and I made some good PR work for the MIT SENSEable City Lab as we met so many people and told them about iFIND and what the kind of research the lab is doing.
So I ended up staying one more day to attend Google Developer Day at the San Jose Convention Center (one block from where the O’Reilly Where 2.0 venue). It was a geek paradise ! Everything was free (food, beer, conference, Google schwag etc…). Again, I mingled with tons of cool geeks… actually I ended running into a lot of the Where 2.0 attendees I had met. They launched Google Gears on that morning, which I was pretty excited about. I attended talks about Google Gears, the new additions to the Google Maps API and the Google system architecture. The day ended with a big party at the Google Campus. I was really impressed with the location. It sure looks like an amazing place to work ! I even had the chance to talk to Romain Guy, the guy who worked on Sun’s SwingX and SwingX-WS, that is the library I used to develop iFIND !
In a nutshell, this was an amazing trip to a geek paradise. I have to thank Brady Forrest, O’Reilly Where 2.0 organizer, for inviting me to present iFIND and Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab for letting me actually go there !
Posted by admin on Jun 13, 2007 in
Whatever via Michael (nice work by the way):
Today marks an important day in the net neutrality debate in Canada. With the launch of www.whatisnetneutrality.ca (WiNN), Canadians have a valuable resource with which to educate themselves about this emerging concept.
While it sounds like an issue for experts, net neutrality is a debate that will affect the future of communications in Canada for everyone. WiNN aims to help Canadians understand this debate, and why it should matter to them. We’re not advocating a specific solution to the debate. Our goal is to inform and educate Canadians about a poorly understood and sometimes intimidating issue. Our lives depend on communications, and the Internet is growing to encompass television, telephone, journalism and entertainment. Net neutrality is a principle that will shape this powerful communication tool.
Please visit the site and look around. The site touches on the business, technology, and policy aspects of this issue. Each section has short and detailed answers, depending on your interest. The dictionary gives simple explanations of many of the regulatory and technical terms in use. The blog will track any developments of the debate in Canada.
This web site is a project of the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN), a research network comprised of academics and community technology practitioners from across the country. CRACIN is dedicated to community-based research and innovation in the use of new information and communication technologies to empower local communities.
While only available in English for the moment, WiNN will be translated in coming weeks to be fully bilingual.
Thanks for your time,
Neil Barratt
Michael Lenczner
Alison Powell