DemoCamp4: A Hard Dose of Hardware

Last night was DemoCamp4, at MaRS (shades of Total Recall). Overall, it was an excellent time – the other demos were really cool.

• Semacode is really neat, though it probably won’t work on my phone (not that I have a workable ‘net plan at the moment anyways).
• Idée was AMAZING, especially the print side of the system.
• Questionville was also a pretty neat idea. I think that the CAPTCHA alternative that he used was creative, though as someone pointed out, it’s a 1 in 6 chance of getting it right
• Outmailer was a neat idea. I’d not heard much of these email campaign management systems – if I need to send an email to a bunch of people, it’s Mailman for me – but their interface was VERY clean, and apparently the whole system is about 1 KLoC in Ruby + Rails. The best part was, of course, that they wanted the participants to stress test it. To me, that’s an invitation to kill someone else’s work. I’m game.

  What was really interesting was that as they were talking about Rails and some deployment issue (’twas a bit over my head), a participant remarked that there was a new tool available – not sure if she said her business partner wrote it or not – that would simplify things for them. I think it’s just incredibly cool that there’s such a forum where these kinds of exchanges can take place.

• tagEngine seemed, to me, to be duplicating Smarty to a large extent. It was definitely impressive, but part of me thought, “why?”. Fortunately, the larger, Hacker part of me thought “Right on!”.

  Also, the debugger? KICKED ASS.

That brings me to my presentation, on disposable digital cameras. I thought I did fairly well for only having done the slides on the way in from Burlington. I certainly got a lot of positive feedback at the after event, and people seemed to be into it while I was presenting. I do wish I’d remembered what photos were going to show up in iPhoto, though…

Other regrets include:

• not having the drivers set up properly for the still camera on my Mac (with the right driver and device ID on the camera, it DOES work beautifully with iPhoto),
• not being able to show the Windows software (which is an entirely different package, and quite useful – right now you NEED to use windows for the initial hack on the still camera)
• evidently not being clear enough on the origins of the hack. I didn’t come up with the hacking methods myself – I only make use of them / understand them fairly well. I am trying to develop one of the hacks for the current generation of camcorders (unhackable as yet), but the disassembly of firmware and such is a bit over my head. Credit goes entirely to guys like morcheeba, Drmn4ea, corsicaria and others from the discussion boards. I’m sure a lot of people understood where I was coming from, but some of the questions at the after event led be to think I could have been clearer.

After the presentations, I headed over to the bar with Neil and Chris, where we got to talk to a few other participants, most notably the guys from Idée and from Nuvvo (who presented last time). Definitely enjoyed the remainder of the evening (and Chris’ Dalmeny stories went over rather well), and am definitely looking forward to the next DemoCamp.

The only thing I have to decide about the next one is, should I do another hardware presentation? This one was well appreciated, and I have a few others that might be interesting – some people seemed mighty impressed with our description of our trivia setups (both planned and existing). I might just wait until the May DemoCamp – let the software guys take over again before I come back with a vengeance.

(more links, pics to come later, when I’m less… at work)

Technorati Tags: DemoCamp, TorCamp