Sunday, October 21, 2007

Sunday at OOPSLA '07

We're getting close to the end of the real day here at OOPSLA '07. I've worked today as a flotter from 7h to 10h and then again from the 12h to 16h (I did 1 extra work hour than I was scheduled for to help people). Now, you must be wondering what a flotter does, right? Very simple: flotters float! Meaning we just stay in the Student Volunteers (S.V.) Room (a nice room with great wifi, power and free food) and wait for some work to show up. This could be anything: from replacing a missing SV to carrying stuff around and helping in registration. But most of the time, you just sit in the SV Room and chat, organize extra activities (such as Ice skating on Monday or Tuesday!) and have fun. This is how I managed to write the whole last post, read my feeds, check emails, etc...

I'm now off duties but I've already lost around 65% of any tutorials and around 80% of any workshop for today so I decided to stay here and write a bit about the conference itself. We got a lot of people here from all over the world. I've met Canadians, Polish, Americans, Mexican, German, Romenian and even Brazilian students. :) I'm not sure what we're doing tonight but Mariana promissed she would report on the tutorial she attended: "Pick up your pen!" from Steve Metsker. I will try to upload, classify and comment every picture we got from yesterday and today.

Tomorrow afternoon I will be hosting the tutorial: "Why users say 'Start with the Screen!': Effective Test-Driven Development, Presentation Layer-First" from Bobby Norton and Chris Stevenson and I will report about it. I'm not sure yet about which tutorial or workshop I will attend during the morning but I'm seriously thinking about Steven Fraser, Dennis Mancl and Bill Opdyke's "No silver bullet - a Retrospective on the Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" although I might attend to the beginning of the Mini-PLoP which would not be as good since I would have leave in the middle. I don't know. I will probably talk to Linda Rising about it (since she's responsible for the PLoP) and find about it tomorrow morning during breakfast.

So, activities here finish around 17h (which is in a couple mins) and then we will probably try to agenda something with other SVs and go out in the city and later on go to some pub maybe. Tomorrow's duties start later on (8:30h instead of 7h today) so we might have a couple more sleep hours (or writing). And, finally if anyone is wondering where will be next OOPSLA: Nashville, Tennessee. So get ready to subscribe as student volunteers because there are around 10 or 12 guys from Monterey University which means, there are not limits for a single university. You just need to show interest and be ready to work a little to get a lot of fun.

That's it for now guys, I'll get ready to go somewhere with Mariana before we meet with the rest of the SVs. Bye bye and see you guys later.

From Montreal after the first workday

Hello there,
I'm writting very early in the morning while Mariana takes her bath. It is sunday morning and the OOPSLA conference starts today. We've been in Montreal for 2 days already and the city is very friendly. Distances between things are quite big although it is not even nearly as crowded as Sao Paulo. Friday we walked a lot and saw the UQAM university and a very nice park filled with squirells. We spent the evening with our hosts chatting, eating and drinking. They cooked a very nice "Fondue chinoise" which has nothing from China from what they told us and we gave them their gifts. Yesterday (Saturday) they took us for a car ride in the city where we could see the Formula 1 circuit and quite some parts of the city.
In the afternoon, we had a very good vietnamese sandwich in the best vietnamese sandwich maker in town according to Vincent. And then, from 15h to 19h, we started our work at OOPSLA at the registration booth with Eduardo, a Brazilian that lives in Waterloo (since 1999), Diana, a local girl that studies at Mcgill university and Bernardo (I guess), a Mexican PhD student. It was pretty cool since there were not so many registration but we could register Dick Gabriel, Linda Rising and Martin Fowler. Dick took some very embarrasing photos of Mariana while she was eating our excelent vietnamese sandwich. I will have to ask for them later. :)
We left after that with a couple of Mexican students from Monterey University (Juan and Ramiro) and other Brazilians (friends of Eduardo, also known as Dudu) and a polish PhD student from Waterloo called Mihau (don't know if this is correctly spelled). We went to a nice classical bar called Saint Sulpice which is in Rue Saint-Denis. That's an amazing thing about the city, all bars areas are close to the biggest unversity. Rue Saint-Denis is close to UQAM (Université de Québec À Montréal) and there are other streets filled with bars close to the McGill university and another close to Columbia.
We left the bar around 23:30 and went to sleep just arriving at home. I'll continue for today later on. This is only for now but I'll update more later.

Bye bye

Monday, October 15, 2007

Quick news before the trip

Some very few news before the trip:

I will be arriving in Montreal the 19th, which means, 1 day before any activity from the OOPSLA. I'll be staying at a friend's house (which is great!) and the first two days I'll probably walk a lot around the city. I'll try to get some nice picture and upload them. From the 21th to the 25th, I'll be full time at the conference but I'll try to post (with the help of Mariana, my girlfriend) some reports about the conference, talks and chats we will have. This will only happen during the nights because we won't have any laptops in site.

We leave Montreal on Saturday 27th by night by bus to NYC. We should get there by 7am or 8am of Sunday 28th. We'll enjoy the day walking around the city and then get to a friend of a friend's house where we will be staying for the news. Our only plans will be to visit the museums and walk a lot. I'll try to post some pictures too.

If you have suggestions, please send them in.
Write back soon (hopefully).

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

News after almost 2 months

Well,
It is quite evident that I'm not a compulsive writter. Almost 2 months since my last post now but I've got some pretty good amount of news.

First and sad news: The paper was reject by the ETX comittee. The following reasons were the principal ones that got it rejected:
  • It was not clear enough in the sense that the english writting was not very good.
  • The paper had to focus mainly on either the project history and then be a paper about a success case of using Eclipse's RCP or on the technical side. This last one should bring to discussions the main CAD architecutres and discuss the impact eRCP could have on it.
  • The last reviewer said that the project and the article were pretty good but it lacked an implementation to prove itself usefull. I don't know if I didn't understood the comments or if the reviewer really (REALLY) didn't understand what we wrote.
So, as they say, better luck next time right? We will work more to get it accepted for next year's OOPSLA.

Other than that: Archimedes is currently almost completetly stalled. I haven't been finding time to code anything on the project with the master's work. It is sad to admit but I should only be able to refocus on the project in december or beginning of the next year. I surely hope next year I will have again another group of volunteers to work on the project on the XP course.

More personal matters and things that might interest this blog's readers. I will attend (with Mariana) at the OOPSLA '07 anyway. We were accepted as student volunteers so we will spend our whole week (from the 20th to the 25th) helping the people from the organization to make this amazing conference. I cannot promise much but I can assure everyone that me and Mariana are going to do our best to post everything we can on this blog about the OOPSLA. Maybe we even broadcast a couple talks if we manage to (and are allowed to). Once we find out what will be the infrastructure there, we will try to keep you guys up to date.
We leave São Paulo the 18th evening and reach Montreal the 19th morning. Works might start the 20th and we will stay in Montreal until the 27th (or 28th) depending on some details.

Last, but not least, I've classified with my team (Jeferson R. da Silva and Marcio Oshiro) to participate in the brazilian's finals (http://maratona.ime.usp.br/ in portuguese) for the ACM ICPC programming maraton contest (http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/). So I will be in Belo Horizonte from the 9th november to the 11th. We surely hope to manage to be in the top 10 this year and we are training a lot for it (which is the reason why Archimedes lost my coding time).

Well, that's about it. And remember, from the 20th to the 25th, stay tunned because news will be flowing quickly here. See you guys.